(The above title was suggested by the previous post.)
The New York Times today reports a Jan. 24* death —
Related material — This journal on January 24 and a post from
last year's New Year's Eve —
* According to The Washington Post , the death was on Jan. 23.
Let me say this about that . . . There were also color-related posts
in this journal on that date.
"Even though he’s not currently part of a Star Wars movie,
Lindelof seems open to working on the franchise down the line.
'Will I get back in line outside the club and try to get back in again?
Of course,' he added. '[Star Wars ] was the alpha and the omega.
It’s the first movie I saw in a movie theater. I love all of the storytelling
in that world. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Or again, again,
try, as Yoda would say.' ” — Jay Peters, The Verge , April 28, 2023
See also a Log24 search for "The Path."
Related material from a similar search
for "Nanavira Thera" —
"I am glad you have discovered that the situation is comical:
ever since studying Kummer I have been, with some difficulty,
refraining from making that remark."
— Nanavira Thera, Seeking the Path [Early Letters, 17 July 1958].
From the Aug. 30 post "A Brief Introduction to Ideas,"
an epigraph from Four Quartets —
Another view of the way up and the way down:
"Of course, presentation of the effect in the cause
is exactly what blending the Buddhist Monk's
two journeys provides. The cause is the dynamics
of the two input journeys; the effect is the existence
of a location on the path they occupy at the same time
of day. In the blend, the location and the encounter are
presented directly as part of the causal dynamics of motion."
— Page 78 in The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending ,
by Fauconnier and Turner, Basic Books, 2002.
The Source —
Continues. (In memory of a Music Master.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=
%22ihre+Achtel+und+Sechzehntel%22+Glasperlenspiel&tbm=bks
A post from January 21, 2003, now also tagged Big Sur,
suggested a search for the source of that post's
Shih Te poem. The result of the search —
Related Fredonia material, from posts tagged Church and Temple —
Update, from six minutes later, on related entertainment —
Update of 12:38 PM ET on the next day — July 20, 2021 —
**********************************************************************
Crystal Poem by Shide (Shih Te, etc.)
at https://terebess.hu/zen/chang/shide.html
from "Comparative List of Shide's Poems" —
Traditional Chinese:
無去無來本湛然，
不居內外及中間。
一顆水精絕瑕翳，
光明透滿出人天。
Simplified Chinese:
无去无来本湛然，
不居内外及中间。
一颗水精绝瑕翳，
光明透满出人天。
Romanization:
wú qù wú lái běn zhàn rán ，
bù jū nèi wài jí zhōng jiān 。
yī kē shuǐ jīng jué xiá yì ，
guāng míng tòu mǎn chū rén tiān 。
English Translation by Paul Rouzer:
No goings, no comings, originally tranquil;
No dwelling within or without, or at the point between.
A single crystal of purity without flaw or crack;
Its light penetrates and fills up the worlds of men and gods.
English Translation by Red Pine:
Not waxing or waning essentially still
not inside or outside and nowhere between
a single flawless crystal
whose light shines through to gods and men
*******************************************************************
RA Wilson —”[Submitted on 20 Apr 2021 (v1),
last revised 23 Apr 2021 (this version, v2)]”
SH Cullinane — See as well
box759.wordpress.com.
From the previous post —
Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom on Philip Roth's Exit Ghost ,
in an undated interview published in 2008:
"Philip Roth has got a new book out called Exit Ghost ,
which I find touching. He’s ageing and pursuing the
question of what ageing does to a writer’s skills. I’m
dealing with that myself so that book speaks for me
a great deal."
Related material from October 2, 2007 —
See as well this journal on the days before and after
the Kakutani review above:
October 1, 2007 — Bright as Magnesium
October 3, 2007 — Janitor Monitor .
"Let us consider the crux of Hopkins' sensibility…"
Seeking claritas :
From a "cube tales" post of June 21 —
The number "six" in the second tale above counts faces of the cube,
as shown in a post of June 23 —
.
". . . Then the universe exploded into existence . . . ."
"I need a photo opportunity . . ." — Paul Simon
A much earlier, much truer, obituary —
* A sequel to Resonant Clarity and Desperately Seeking Resonance.
Quantum electrodynamics is also known as QED.
"Eight strangers from cities around the globe
begin having experiences that defy explanation."
As do "Burnt Norton" and "Bird Box."
The title is that of an exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts
that opened on Sunday, September 24.
See the previous post and some Chinese background
from The Cornell Daily Sun today —
"John W. Lewis, the University’s first professor of Chinese government
and one of the first major China specialists who came out against the
Vietnam War, died on Sept. 4 in Stanford, California. He was 86."
Still enough for you?
"Emily Eden … a hardened New York City homicide detective,
goes undercover to investigate the murder of a Hasidic
diamond-cutter."
Midrash — See "Diamond + Dust + Glitter."
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, quoted in a webpage dated
October 7, 2014 (presumably according to Australian time):
"For the Athenians, kleos mattered more than anything,
according to Goldstein.
'Kleos is fame: it’s the deed that brings fame, it’s the poem
that sings your triumphs, it’s having your life replicated in
other minds, acquiring a kind of moreness, a kind of
secular immortality.' "
Related material:
A check of Goldstein's definition…
… and an image for Broomsday:
From Argument for the Existence of Rebecca (Feb. 6, 2010)
The New York Times this afternoon —
" William Beecher, who as a reporter for The New York Times
revealed President Richard M. Nixon’s secret bombing campaign
over Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and who later won a
Pulitzer Prize at The Boston Globe, died on Feb. 9 at his home
in Wilmington, N.C. He was 90." — Clay Risen, 2:28 PM
Also on Feb. 9 —
Another Beecher narrative —
Religious meditation from the Church of Synchronology . . .
The logo of MUSE, the band —
A logo I prefer . . .
Related material from a post of October 2020 —
Related material from a post on the above Reddit date —
|
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.
An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —
|
"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon
https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/ James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized. I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life. I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette. Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority. Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor. The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute. So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil. Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage. What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain. Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers. September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't. For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death." I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self. In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water." This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable. I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.
by jessica kardon |
See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."
Gell-Mann Meets Bosch . . .
At Hiroshima . . .
* The Bosch cuboctahedron is from an exhibition at Napoli in 2021.
See also, from that exhibition's starting date,
the Log24 post Desperately Seeking Symmetry.
"It's going to be accomplished in steps,
this establishment of the Talented
in the scheme of things."
— To Ride Pegasus ,
by Anne McCaffrey (Radcliffe '47)
"Having skipped me, the talent for math concentrated extravagantly
in one of my nieces, Amie Wilkinson, a professor at the University
of Chicago, and I figured she could teach me."
— Wilkinson, Alec. A Divine Language (p. 5).
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 12 July 2022, Kindle Edition.
Career Moves: Compare and Contrast —
"Amie Wilkinson is an explorer. Instead of seeking uncharted land,
she’s after undiscovered mathematical worlds — complex systems
of motion that unfold in unexpected ways. As a professor at the
University of Chicago, she’s known for discovering unique types
of these 'dynamical systems' that had been only conjectured to exist.
Wilkinson’s career has proceeded in a dynamical way, too. She now
approaches her roles as a researcher, teacher and mentor very
differently than she did when she was starting out."
— Kevin Hartnett in Quanta Magazine , June 13, 2019
|
The text of https://marcelanowak.com/home/ — About — We are a full-service creative agency based in LA.
Graphic and web design is our business. |
Like "La La Land" — A talent so nice they named it twice!
|
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
♫ "Will the record be unbroken . . . ?"
— Adapted song lyric
Details from yesterday's "Ities" image —
Some less abstract imagery —
* For James Joyce fans, a phrase suggested by the "ities" of the title —
Itty Bitty Titty Ditty.
Google reveals that this phrase was used as a poem title on
September 3, 2011 . . .
Some may enjoy seeking the significance of the poem's date .
"Remarkable in the collection–and indeed in contemporary short fiction–
is the title story, whose tequila-sodden and heart-heavy protagonist,
Bernard Corunna Coote, is a lapsed Ulster Protestant seeking traces of
a lost Celtic civilization in South America."
— Publishers Weekly on Death of a Chieftain by John Montague
See as well a related obituary.
From a book by Schultz, who reportedly died on Sept. 28:
Seeking continues (in this case, seeking the source) . . .
Prof. Coleman Silk introducing freshmen to academic values
“The communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly
the way out of the fly-bottle.”
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
“Philosophical Investigations”
Related philosophical investigations —
This morning’s post Gap Dance and a 2012 film . . .
“Three magazine employees head out on an assignment
to interview a guy who placed a classified advertisement
seeking a companion for time travel.” — IMDb
The finished film does not follow the script exactly. (The above
dialogue is rendered more in the spirit of Hunter Thompson.)
Metaphysical conceit | literature | Britannica.com
|
This post's title refers to a metaphysical conceit
in the previous post, Desperately Seeking Clarity.
Related material —
The source of the above mystical octahedron —
See also Jung's Imago Dei in this journal.
See too "Desperately Seeking Resonance"
and, for the Church of Synchronology, posts
on the above date — April 3, 2017.
From Nanavira Thera, "Early Letters," in Seeking the Path —
"nine possibilities arising quite naturally" —
Compare and contrast with Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square by means of 0 and the 15 2-subsets of a 6-set —
"Those seeking an understanding of the historical elements
of Jesus’ saga might find it profitable to engage the vast work
of David Friedrich Strauss, the German intellectual, whose
monumental 'The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined' was
translated into English in the 19th century by George Eliot.
(At times, the translation reads like a scholarly 'Middlemarch,'
much to its credit.)"
— Jon Meacham in the Easter Sunday print edition of
The New York Times. The above passage is
paragraph 10 of Meacham's article.
See also "Over the Mountains" (Log24, Feb. 21, 2018).
| Claude Lévi-Strauss
From his “Structure and Form: To maintain. as I have done. that the permutability of contents is not arbitrary amounts to saying that, if the analysis is carried to a sufficiently deep level, behind diversity we will discover constancy. And, of course. the avowed constancy of form must not hide from us that functions are also permutable. The structure of the folktale as it is illustrated by Propp presents a chronological succession of qualitatively distinct functions. each constituting an independent genre. One can wonder whether—as with dramatis personae and their attributes— Propp does not stop too soon, seeking the form too close to the level of empirical observation. Among the thirty-one functions that he distinguishes, several are reducible to the same function reappearing at different moments of the narrative but after undergoing one or a number of transformations . I have already suggested that this could be true of the false hero (a transformation of the villain), of assigning a difficult task (a transformation of the test), etc. (see p. 181 above), and that in this case the two parties constituting the fundamental tale would themselves be transformations of each other. Nothing prevents pushing this reduction even further and analyzing each separate partie into a small number of recurrent functions, so that several of Propp’s functions would constitute groups of transformations of one and the same function. We could treat the “violation” as the reverse of the “prohibition” and the latter as a negative transformation of the “injunction.” The “departure” of the hero and his “return” would appear as the negative and positive expressions of the same disjunctive function. The “quest” of the hero (hero pursues someone or something) would become the opposite of “pursuit” (hero is pursued by something or someone), etc.
In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both “in time” (it consists of a succession of events) and “beyond” (its value is permanent). With regard to Propp’s theories my analysis offers another advantage: I can reconcile much better than Propp himself his principle of a permanent order of wondertale elements with the fact that certain functions or groups of functions are shifted from one tale to the next (pp. 97-98. p. 108) If my view is accepted, the chronological succession will come to be absorbed into an atemporal matrix structure whose form is indeed constant. The shifting of functions is then no more than a mode of permutation (by vertical columns or fractions of columns). These critical remarks are certainly valid for the method used by Propp and for his conclusions. However. it cannot be stressed enough that Propp envisioned them and in several places formulated with perfect clarity the solutions I have just suggested. Let us take up again from this viewpoint the two essential themes of our discussion: constancy of the content (in spite of its permutability) and permutability of functions (in spite of their constancy). * Translated from a 1960 work in French. It appeared in English as Chapter VIII |
See also “Lévi-Strauss” + Formula in this journal.
Some background related to the previous post —
"Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill." — Wallace Stevens
|
"A 1991 PBS documentary called Dancing Outlaw introduced the world to the life and times of gas-huffing, vengeance-seeking, tap-dancin’ Jesco White. White Lightnin’ , which premiered recently at Sundance, is British director Dominic Murphy’s reportedly more surreal take on this fabled Appalachian anti-hero. While not locked in reform school, work camps, or the psych ward, the young Jesco White learned his special breed of clog dancing from his father, who was eventually killed in a random act of hillbilly violence. In White Lightnin' Jesco picks up his daddy’s tap shoes and hits the road, where he comes to grips with the art, addiction, and madness that have plagued his violent life story. And somewhere along the way he meets his wife, played by none other than Carrie Fisher. While David D’Arcy speaks almost fondly of White Lightnin' s redneck-exploitation (he was probably stretching for other ways to describe this “hillbilly slasher saga”), Dennis Harvey was less enchanted by the film’s 'pretentious glimpse of hillbilly hell.' Most early reviews are apprehensive about the film’s distribution chances unless its grotesque lyricism finds a niche market. But I can't imagine this, being the first film written by the co-founders of Vice Magazine , not generating more distribution steam in the near future. If anyone knows how to generate buzz it is those guys." — MLeary review, January 28, 2009, 12:58 AM |
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
The New York Times Magazine online today —
"As a former believer and now a nonbeliever, Carrère,
seeking answers, sets out, in The Kingdom , to tell
the story of the storytellers. He is trying to understand
what it takes to be able to tell a story, any story.
And what he finds, once again, is that you have to find
your role in it."
— Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine ,
online March 2, 2017
Like Tom Hanks?
Click image for related posts.
Related material — Posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.
For an example of what Eddington calls "an open mind,"
see the 1958 letters of Nanavira Thera.
(Among the "Early Letters" in Seeking the Path ).
See as well a note on "Joyce's Use of Kubla Khan"
and remarks from Jesus College, Oxford , on
"Seeking the Sirens' Song."
Today's guitar news suggests the following —
"… sometimes what we are seeking
is not that which reason can impose…."
For the source, see a Log24 search for Innocence + Experience.
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker , issue dated Sept. 22, 2014:
"The hero of 'The Zero Theorem' is a computer genius called Qohen Leth
(Christoph Waltz)…. He is the sole resident of a derelict church, where,
on a crucifix in front of the altar, the head of Christ has been replaced by
a security camera. No prayers are ever said, and none are answered.
In short, the place is deconsecrated, but to claim that it lacks any spark of
sacred yearning would be wrong, because Qohen devotes his days to seeking
the Zero Theorem, which—whatever it may be—lies at the fuzzy limit of
human powers. “We crunch entities,” he says, as if that explained anything.
His employer is Mancom, a large corporation that, in Orwellian fashion,
oversees ordinary lives, although it betrays more frantic desperation than
glowering threat."
One approach to the metaphysics of entities was indicated in the previous
post, 'Metaphysics for Gilliam." A different approach:
"Categories, Sets, and the Nature of Mathematical Entities,"
by Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ch. 13, pp. 181-192, in the 2006 book
The Age of Alternative Logics , ed. by van Benthem et al.
(Springer, Netherlands).
From pages 182-183 —
13.2 The nature of mathematical entities
Let us start with the nature of mathematical entities in general and with a
rough and classical distinction that will simply set the stage for the picture we
want to develop. We essentially follow Lowe 1998* for the basic distinctions. We
need to distinguish between abstract and concrete entities, on the one hand, and
universals and particulars on the other hand. For our purpose, it is not necessary
to specify a criterion of demarcation between abstract and concrete entities. We
simply assume that such a distinction can be made, e.g. concrete entities can
change whereas abstract entities cannot. We assume that a universal is an entity
that can be instantiated by entities which themselves are not instantiable, the
latter being of course particulars. Given these distinctions, an entity can be a
concrete particular, a concrete universal, an abstract particular or an abstract
universal.
Our focus here is between the last two possibilities. For we claim that the
current conception of sets makes them abstract particulars whereas for objects
defined within categories, mathematical entities are abstract universals. This,
we claim, is true of category theory as it is.
* Lowe, E.J., 1998, The Possibility of Metaphysics , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
The previous post told how user58512 at math.stackexchange.com
sought in 2013 a geometric representation of Q8 , the quaternion group.
He ended up displaying an illustration that very possibly was drawn,
without any acknowledgement of its source, from my own work.
On the date that user58512 published that illustration, he further
pursued his March 1, 2013, goal of a “twisty” quaternion model.
On March 12, 2013, he suggested that the quaternion group might be
the symmetry group of the following twisty-cube coloring:
Illustration by Jim Belk
Here is part of a reply by Jim Belk from Nov. 11, 2013, elaborating on
that suggestion:
Belk argues that the colored cube is preserved under the group
of actions he describes. It is, however, also preserved under a
larger group. (Consider, say, rotation of the entire cube by 180
degrees about the center of any one of its checkered faces.) The
group Belk describes seems therefore to be a symmetry group,
not the symmetry group, of the colored cube.
I do not know if any combination puzzle has a coloring with
precisely the quaternion group as its symmetry group.
(Updated at 12:15 AM June 6 to point out the larger symmetry group
and delete a comment about an arXiv paper on quaternion group models.)
“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high,
and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western
summit is called the Masai ‘Ngàje Ngài,’ the House of God.
Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcass
of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking
at that altitude.” — Ernest Hemingway, epigraph to a story
Some background —
Kristen Wiig and a mountain in the recent film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
and Wiig in a Log24 post of Sunday, March 6, 2011.
Maureen Dowd on "Downton Abbey"
(yesterday's online NY Times) —
"Watching the saga from the beginning this week,
I saw the extent of the subversive fantasy:
The servants rule the masters."
"I have only come here seeking knowledge."
— Sting, "Wrapped Around Your Finger"
(Continued from High White Noon,
Finishing Up at Noon, and A New York Jew.)
Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening"
Below: Frank Langella and Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate"
"Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin."
Above: Detail from a Wikipedia photo.
For the logo, see Lostpedia.
For some backstory, see Noether.
Those seeking an escape from the eightfold nightmare
represented by the Dharma logo above may consult
the remarks of Heisenberg (the real one, not the
Breaking Bad version) to the Bavarian Academy
of Fine Arts.
Those who prefer Plato's cave to his geometry are
free to continue their Morphean adventures.
"Hans Castorp is a searcher after the Holy Grail.
You would never have thought it when you read
his story—if I did myself, it was both more and
less than thinking. Perhaps you will read the
book again from this point of view. And perhaps
you will find out what the Grail is: the knowledge
and the wisdom, the consecration, the highest
reward, for which not only the foolish hero but
the book itself is seeking. You will find it in the
chapter called 'Snow'…."
— Thomas Mann, "The Making of
The Magic Mountain "
In related entertainment news…
Click image for some backstory.
Mann's tale is set in Davos, Switzerland.
See also Mayer at Davos.
On the author of a novel published August 14th,
"Where'd You Go, Bernadette"—
"Semple moved to the Pacific Northwest several years ago
seeking refuge from Los Angeles, but that doesn't mean
that the Emerald City gets a free pass from Semple's
sharp, satirical eye."
— Stewart Oksenhorn yesterday in The Aspen Times
See also a detail from Thursday's 1.3 MB image
"Search for the Lost Tesseract"—
Update of 9 PM EDT (6 PM LA time) the same day, Saturday, Aug. 18—
The New York Times online opinion today—
"Merit has been traditionally equated with intelligence, industriousness, educational attainment, creativity and competency. In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity, position is no longer ascribed by birth, and rewards flow to those who excel.
The rise of meritocratic competition as the preeminent means of social stratification in America has been hailed as a welcome advance because it replaced a society dominated by an upper class dependent on inherited wealth and status. The transition to meritocracy has, however, had unintended consequences. In the business sector, particularly, other less benign qualities emerge as essential to meritocratic success: aggressiveness, ruthlessness, dominance-seeking, victimizing behavior, acquisitiveness and the disciplined pursuit of self-interest."
— Journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall discussing remarks last December by Mitt Romney
Note the subtle shift here from "merit" to "meritocracy." Romney used the former word, not the latter.
Note also this sentence, aimed particularly at meritocratic New York Times readers—
"In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity… and rewards flow to those who excel."
Edsall lies. In a meritocracy, rewards flow to those who rubber-stamp "formal qualifications." See particularly Walter Kirn on meritocracy.
Edsall is pandering to Times readers. Romney was pandering to a different group—
A Story That Works
“There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe;
and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, – Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“ |
Christopher Hitchens on J. K. Rowling—
“We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot remarked in another connection, and the wish to have everything clarified is eventually self-defeating in its own terms. In her correct determination to bring down the curtain decisively, Rowling has gone further than she should, and given us not so much a happy ending as an ending which suggests that evil has actually been defeated (you should forgive the expression) for good.
Greater authors— Arthur Conan Doyle most notably— have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King’s Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind.
"A fictional bit of King's Cross Station"—
Throughout the series, Harry has traveled to King's Cross Station, either to depart for Hogwarts or return to London on the Hogwarts Express. The station has always symbolized the crossroad between the Muggle world and the Wizarding realm and Harry's constant shuffling between, and his conflict with, the two extremes. As Harry now finds himself at a transition point between life and death, it is purely to be expected that he would see it within his own mind as a simulacrum of that station. And though Dumbledore assures Harry that he (Harry) is not actually dead, it seems Harry can choose that option if he so wishes. Harry has literally and figuratively been stripped bare, and must decide either to board a train that will transport him to the "other side", or return to the living world…. — Wikibooks.org
"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."
This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .
Today's New York Lottery—
A quote suggested by the UD post—
"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."
— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut
Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—
(Click images to enlarge.)
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
As for the midday numbers—
For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).
For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.
Cocktail Party Physics yesterday— "Desperately Seeking Sonya"
Related material: Kovalevskaya's Top and Roger Cooke's
The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya.
See also "Math class is tough, Barbie."
| From April 28, 2008:
Religious Art
The black monolith of One artistic shortcoming The following One approach to "Transformations play See 4/28/08 for examples |
| From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, pp. 117-118:
"… his point of origin is external nature, the fount to which we come seeking inspiration for our fictions. We come, many of Stevens's poems suggest, as initiates, ritualistically celebrating the place through which we will travel to achieve fictive shape. Stevens's 'real' is a bountiful place, continually giving forth life, continually changing. It is fertile enough to meet any imagination, as florid and as multifaceted as the tropical flora about which the poet often writes. It therefore naturally lends itself to rituals of spring rebirth, summer fruition, and fall harvest. But in Stevens's fictive world, these rituals are symbols: they acknowledge the real and thereby enable the initiate to pass beyond it into the realms of his fictions. Two counter rituals help to explain the function of celebration as Stevens envisions it. The first occurs in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer. A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. For in 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' he tells us that ... the first idea was not to shape the clouds In imitation. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. We are the mimics. (Collected Poems, 383-84) Believing that they are the life and not the mimics thereof, the world and not its fiction-forming imitators, these young men cannot find the savage transparence for which they are looking. In its place they find the pediment, a scowling rock that, far from being life's source, is symbol of the human delusion that there exists a 'form alone,' apart from 'chains of circumstance.' A far more productive ritual occurs in 'Sunday Morning.'…." |
For transformations of a more
specifically religious nature,
see the remarks on
Richard Strauss,
"Death and Transfiguration,"
(Tod und Verklärung, Opus 24)
in Mathematics and Metaphor
on July 31, 2008, and the entries
of August 3, 2008, related to the
death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Among the varieties of Christian monotheism, none is more totalitarian, none lodges more radical claims for God's omnipotence, than Calvinism– and within America, the chief analogue of Calvinist theology, Puritanism. According to Calvin every particle of dust, every act, every thought, every creature is governed by the will of God, and yields clues to the divine plan."
On Doubt:
"a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders beyond the visible, also known as paranoia"
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), p. 188
On Art:
I suggest that faith and doubt are best reconciled by art– as in A Contrapuntal Theme and in the magazine's current online podcast of Mary Gaitskill reading a 1948 New Yorker story by Vladimir Nabokov.
For the text of the story, see "Signs and Symbols." For an excellent discussion of Nabokov's art, see "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's 'Signs and Symbols,'" by Alexander Dolinin.
Click image to enlarge.
The “Boy’s Life” illustration is of an Arthur C. Clarke story, “Against the Fall of Night.” This, according to the review quoted below, was Clarke’s first story, begun in 1936 and first published in 1948. The title is from a poem by
From a book review by Christopher B. Jones:
“Against the Fall of Night describes well how it often takes youth to bring forth change. The older mind becomes locked in a routine, or blocks out things because it has been told that it shouldn’t think or talk about them. But the young mind is ever the explorer, seeking out knowledge without the taboos placed on it by a rigid society. Alvin is a breath of fresh air in the don’t-look-over-the-wall society of Diaspar.
Myths play a big role, and an interesting religious overtone pervades the story with a long since departed being whose origins are unknown and who played an important part in Earth’s past. Parallels to Jesus can easily be drawn, and the forecast shown for the longevity of religions in general seems to me to be rather accurate….
Finally, when Alvin uncovers part of the truth he has been looking for, he learns of the dangers and stagnation that can befall a xenophobic society. There are still a few such societies in the world today, and this characteristic almost always comes with negative effects– even if it has been cultivated with the intention to protect.”
An example of such a xenophobic society is furnished by the Hadassah ad currently running in the New York Times obituaries section: “Who will say Kaddish in Israel?”
Another example:
Tom Stoppard, in the London Times of Sunday, March 16, 2008, on the social unrest of forty years ago in 1968–
“Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that ‘make love, not war’ is a more practical slogan than ‘workers of the world unite’ is as airy-fairy as the I Ching.”
Airy-fairy, Jewey-phooey.
Clarke’s 1948 story was the basis of his 1956 novel, The City and the Stars. In memory of the star Richard Widmark, here are two illustrations from St. Mark’s Day, 2003:
Housman asks the reader
to tell him of runes to grave
or bastions to design
“against the fall of night.”
Here, as examples, are
one rune and one bastion.
|
Represents |
|
Neither part of this memorial suits the xenophobic outlook of Israel. Both parts, together, along with his classic film “The Long Ships,” seem somehow suited to the non-xenophobic outlook of Richard Widmark. As for the I Ching… perhaps Widmark has further voyages to make.
Kernel
Mathematical Reviews citation:
MR2163497 (2006g:81002) 81-03 (81P05)
Gieser, Suzanne The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C. G. Jung. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. xiv+378 pp. ISBN: 3-540-20856-9
A quote from MR at Amazon.com:
"This revised translation of a Swedish Ph. D. thesis in philosophy offers far more than a discussion of Wolfgang Pauli's encounters with the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung…. Here the book explains very well how Pauli attempted to extend his understanding beyond superficial esotericism and spiritism…. To understand Pauli one needs books like this one, which… seems to open a path to a fuller understanding of Pauli, who was seeking to solve a quest even deeper than quantum physics." (Arne Schirrmacher, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006g)
The four-group is also known as the Vierergruppe or Klein group. It appears, notably, as the translation subgroup of A, the group of 24 automorphisms of the affine plane over the 2-element field, and therefore as the kernel of the homomorphism taking A to the group of 6 automorphisms of the projective line over the 2-element field. (See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.)
The "chessboard" of
Nov. 7, 2006
(as revised Nov. 7, 2012)–
(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
|
The Library of Congress “American sculptor Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire on April 20, 1850. His colossal seated figure of Abraham Lincoln presides over the Lincoln Memorial. Reared in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts, he was embraced by members of the Transcendentalist community including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Author and fellow Concord resident Louisa May Alcott encouraged young French to pursue a career as an artist. Louisa’s sister, artist May Alcott, was his early teacher. French studied in Boston and New York prior to receiving his first commission for the 1875 statue The Minute Man. Standing near the North Bridge in Concord, in the Minute Man National Historical Park, this work commemorates events at the North Bridge, the site of ‘the shot heard ’round the world.’ An American icon, images derivative of The Minute Man statue appeared on defense bonds, stamps, and posters during World War II.” |
 |
Log24 on the anniversary of
Lincoln’s assassination —
|
Saturday, April 14, 2007 4:30 AM The Sun Also Sets, or… This Way to
the Egress Continued from April 12: “I have only come here
— Robert Stone, |
Log24 entry of
November 7, 2003 —
 |
— and a
student play from
Virginia Tech:
Part V:
Symmetry
for Beavis and Butt-Head
and
The Rhetoric of Scientism:
It’s a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you’ll be taught.
— Oscar Hammerstein,
“Getting to Know You”
“I have only come here
seeking knowledge,
Things they would not
teach me of in college….”
— Synchronicity lyrics
|
Quoted in Log24,
Time’s Labyrinth continued: “The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before?”
— Katherine Neville,
The Eight, Ballantine reprint, 1990, |
“Know the one about
the Demiurge and the
Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981,
the final page:
Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas
Image of Lewis from |
“What on earth is a concrete universal?” — Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left. |
Update of 4:23 PM:
The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell. The emphasis is on Heaven. A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell. And so…
TIME OF DATE OF PAGE VISITED
VISIT PAGE VISITED
1217 040520 Parable
1218 060606 The Omen
1220 051205 Don’t Know Much About History
1225 030822 Mr. Holland’s Week (And in Three Days…)
1233 030114 Remarks on Day 14 (What is Truth?)
1238 040818 Train of Thought (Oh, My Lolita)
1244 020929 Angel Night (Ellis Larkins)
1249 040715 Identity Crisis (Bourne and Treadstone)
1252 050322 Make a Differance (Lacan, Derrida, Reba)
1255 050221 Quarter to Three on Night of HST’s death
1256 040408 Triple Crown on Holy Thursday
1258 040714 Welcome to Mr. Motley’s Neighborhood
1258 030221 All About Lilith
0103 040808 Quartet (for Alexander Hammid)
0104 030106 Dead Poet in the City of Angels
0109 030914 Skewed Mirrors (Readings on Aesthetics)
0110 050126 A Theorem in Musical Form
0125 021007 Music for R. D. Laing
0138 020806 Butterflies & Popes (Transfiguration)
0140 060606 The Omen (again)
0156 030313 ART WARS: Perennial Tutti-Frutti
0202 030112 Ask Not (A Bee Gees Requiem)
0202 050527 Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux
0202 060514 STAR WARS continued (Eclipse and Venus)
0207 030112 Ask Not (again… Victory of the Goddess)
0207 030221 All About Lilith (again… Roll credits.)
Today in History
(via The Associated Press)
|
On this date (Dec. 5): In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. In 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35. In 2006, author Joan Didion is 72. |
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
An Alternate History
(based on entries of
the past three days):
“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:
England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”
|
A Story That Works
|
Mathematics and Narrative
continued…
“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”
— Marc Cooper in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005, “Thinking of Jackasses: The Grand Delusions of the Democratic Party”
Cooper’s “now” is apparently still valid. In today’s New York Times, the leftist Stanley Fish reviews Talking Right, by leftist Geoffrey Nunberg:
“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview … woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”
Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:
“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”
For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.
Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
Tombstone
From today's New York Times:
"Jiri Frel, a mercurial and eccentric curator who helped build the J. Paul Getty Museum into a major center for Greek and Roman art but resigned after revelations about unscrupulous acquisition practices, died on April 29. He was 82…. a well-regarded expert in Greek tombstones…."
"ATHENS, May 16 — After four hours of talks here with the Greek culture minister, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles said Tuesday that he would press for the return of some of the Getty's most prized ancient artifacts to Greece…. Greece is seeking the repatriation of a… tombstone…."
From a photo accompanying the obituary:
To Aster, from Plato
Asteras eisathreis, Aster emos.
Eithe genoimen ouranos,
'os pollois ommasin eis se blepo.
You gaze at stars, my Star.
Would that I were born the starry sky,
that I with many eyes might gaze at you.
Related material:
“Some of America’s most promising youth are seeking an even higher education.”
— Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity
From James A. Michener‘s The Source:
“Trouble started in a quarter that neither Uriel nor Zadok could have foreseen. For many generations the wiser men of Zadok’s clan had worshipped El-Shaddai with the understanding that whereas Canaanites and Egyptians could see their gods directly, El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place. Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend. Such people were willing to agree with Zadok that their god did not live on this mountain– the one directly ahead– but they suspected that he did live on some mountain nearby, and when they said this they pictured an elderly man with a white beard who lived in a proper tent and whom they might one day see and touch. If questioned, they would have said that they expected El-Shaddai to look much like their father Zadok, but with a longer beard, a stronger voice, and more penetrating eyes.
Now, as these simpler-minded Hebrews settled down outside the walls of Makor, they began to see Canaanite processions leave the main gate and climb the mountain to the north, seeking the high place where Baal lived, and they witnessed the joy which men experienced when visiting their god, and the Hebrews began in subtle ways and easy steps to evolve the idea that Baal, who obviously lived in a mountain, and El-Shaddai, who was reported to do so, must have much in common. Furtively at first, and then openly, they began to climb the footpath to the place of Baal, where they found a monolith rising from the highest point of rock. Here was a tangible thing they could comprehend, and after much searching along the face of the mountain, a group of Hebrew men found a straight rock of size equal to the one accorded Baal, and with much effort they dragged it one starless night to the mountain top, where they installed it not far from the home of Baal….”
The above monolith is perhaps more
closely related to El-Shaddai than to
Madonna, Grammy Night, and Baal.
It reflects my own interests
(Mathematics and Narrative)
and those of Martin Buber
(Jews on Fiction):
|
For Loomis Dean
See also
For Rita Moreno
on Her Birthday
(Dec. 11, 2005)
|
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005
OBITUARIES 
LOOMIS DEAN Loomis Dean, 88; By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
Loomis Dean, a Life magazine photographer who made memorable pictures of the royalty of both Europe and Hollywood, has died. He was 88.
Dean died Wednesday [December 7, 2005] at Sonoma Valley Hospital in Sonoma, Calif., of complications from a stroke, according to his son, Christopher. In a photographic career spanning six decades, Dean's leading images included shirtless Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck trying a one-handed chin-up on a trapeze bar, the ocean liner Andrea Doria listing in the Atlantic and writer Ernest Hemingway in Spain the year before he committed suicide. One of his most memorable photographs for Life was of cosmopolitan British playwright and composer Noel Coward in the unlikely setting of the Nevada desert. Dean shot 52 covers for Life, either as a freelance photographer or during his two stretches as a staffer with the magazine, 1947-61 and 1966-69. After leaving the magazine, Dean found steady freelance work in magazines and as a still photographer on film sets, including several of the early James Bond movies starring Sean Connery. Born in Monticello, Fla., Dean was the son of a grocer and a schoolteacher. When the Dean family's business failed during the Depression, they moved to Sarasota, Fla., where Dean's father worked as a curator and guide at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Dean studied engineering at the University of Florida but became fascinated with photography after watching a friend develop film in a darkroom. He went off to what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was known for its photography school. After earning his degree, Dean went to work for the Ringling circus as a junior press agent and, according to his son, cultivated a side job photographing Ringling's vast array of performers and workers. He worked briefly as one of Parade magazine's first photographers but left after receiving an Army Air Forces commission during World War II. During the war, he worked in aerial reconnaissance in the Pacific and was along on a number of air raids over Japan. His first assignment for Life in 1946 took him back to the circus: His photograph of clown Lou Jacobs with a giraffe looking over his shoulder made the magazine's cover and earned Dean a staff job. In the era before television, Life magazine photographers had some of the most glamorous work in journalism. Life assigned him to cover Hollywood. In 1954, the magazine published one of his most memorable photos, the shot of Coward dressed for a night on the town in New York but standing alone in the stark Nevada desert. Dean had the idea of asking Coward, who was then doing a summer engagement at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, to pose in the desert to illustrate his song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun." As Dean recalled in an interview with John Loengard for the book "Life Photographers: What They Saw," Coward wasn't about to partake of the midday sun. "Oh, dear boy, I don't get up until 4 o'clock in the afternoon," Dean recalled him saying. But Dean pressed on anyway. As he related to Loengard, he rented a Cadillac limousine and filled the back seat with a tub loaded with liquor, tonic and ice cubes — and Coward. The temperature that day reached 119 as Coward relaxed in his underwear during the drive to a spot about 15 miles from Las Vegas. According to Dean, Coward's dresser helped him into his tuxedo, resulting in the image of the elegant Coward with a cigarette holder in his mouth against his shadow on the dry lake bed. "Splendid! Splendid! What an idea! If we only had a piano," Coward said of the shoot before hopping back in the car and stripping down to his underwear for the ride back to Las Vegas. In 1956, Life assigned Dean to Paris. While sailing to Europe on the Ile de France, he was awakened with the news that the Andrea Doria had collided with another liner, the Stockholm. The accident occurred close enough to Dean's liner that survivors were being brought aboard. His photographs of the shaken voyagers and the sinking Andrea Doria were some of the first on the accident published in a U.S. magazine. During his years in Europe, Dean photographed communist riots and fashion shows in Paris, royal weddings throughout Europe and noted authors including James Jones and William S. Burroughs. He spent three weeks with Hemingway in Spain in 1960 for an assignment on bullfighting. In 1989, Dean published "Hemingway's Spain," about his experiences with the great writer. In 1965, Dean won first prize in a Vatican photography contest for a picture of Pope Paul VI. The prize included an audience with the pope and $750. According to his son, it was Dean's favorite honor. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Deborah, and two grandsons. Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the American Child Photographer's Charity Guild (www.acpcg.com) or the Make-A-Wish Foundation. |
Related material:
The Big Time
(Log 24, July 29, 2003):
|
A Story That Works
|
(See also Time and
All the King’s Horses.)
LEAR:
Now you better do some thinkin’
then you’ll find
You got the only daddy
that’ll walk the line.
FOOL:
I’ve always been different
with one foot over the line….
I’ve always been crazy
but it’s kept me from going insane.
For related material, see
and last night’s winner of
the National Book Award
for nonfiction, i.e.,
“all hard facts, all reality, with
no illusions and no fantasy.”
|
A Story That Works
|
“… the Board of Education went as far as to redefine what science is: it’s no longer just a search for natural explanations for natural phenomena. Now it’s a search for… well, that’s a bit hard to say. Any sort of explanation, apparently. Pixies, ghosts, telekinesis, auras, ancient astronauts, excesses of choleric humor, they all seem to be fair game in the interest of ‘academic freedom.'”
| Kansas Definition of Science Adopted Feb. 14, 2001 “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us. Science does so through the use of observation, experimentation, and logical argument while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses |
Kansas Definition of Science Approved Nov. 8, 2005 “Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. Science does so while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses. |
| Scientific explanations must meet certain criteria. Scientific explanations are consistent with experimental and/or observational data and testable by scientists through additional experimentation and/or observation. Scientific explanation must meet criteria that govern the repeatability of observations and experiments. The effect of these criteria is to insure that scientific explanations about the world are open to criticism and that they will be modified or abandoned in favor of new explanations if empirical evidence so warrants. Because all scientific explanations depend on observational and experimental confirmation, all scientific knowledge is, in principle, subject to change as new evidence becomes available. The core theories of science have been subjected to a wide variety of confirmations and have a high degree of reliability within the limits to which they have been tested. In areas where data or understanding are incomplete, new data may lead to changes in current theories or resolve current conflicts. In situations where information is still fragmentary, it is normal for scientific ideas to be incomplete, but this is also where the opportunity for making advances may be greatest. Science has flourished in different regions during different time periods, and in history, diverse cultures have contributed scientific knowledge and technological inventions. Changes in scientific knowledge usually occur as gradual modifications, but the scientific enterprise also experiences periods of rapid advancement. The daily work of science and technology results in incremental advances in our understanding of the world about us.” | Scientific explanations must meet certain criteria. Scientific explanations are consistent with experimental and/or observational data and testable by scientists through additional experimentation and/or observation. Scientific explanation must meet criteria that govern the repeatability of observations and experiments. The effect of these criteria is to insure that scientific explanations about the world are open to criticism and that they will be modified or abandoned in favor of new explanations if empirical evidence so warrants. Because all scientific explanations depend on observational and experimental confirmation, all scientific knowledge is, in principle, subject to change as new evidence becomes available. The core theories of science have been subjected to a wide variety of confirmations and have a high degree of reliability within the limits to which they have been tested. In areas where data or understanding is incomplete, new data may lead to changes in current theories or resolve current conflicts. In situations where information is still fragmentary, it is normal for scientific ideas to be incomplete, but this is also where the opportunity for making advances may be greatest. Science has flourished in different regions during different time periods, and in history, diverse cultures have contributed scientific knowledge and technological inventions. Changes in scientific knowledge usually occur as gradual modifications, but the scientific enterprise also experiences periods of rapid advancement. The daily work of science and technology results in incremental advances in understanding the world.” |
“A teacher is an important role model for demonstrating respect, sensitivity, and civility. Teachers should not ridicule, belittle or embarrass a student for expressing an alternative view or belief.”
— Oscar Hammerstein,
“Getting to Know You”
Scientism and Civility:
A Google blog search for
fucking kansas evolution standards -fuck
yields “about 47” entries.
A search for
fuck kansas evolution standards -fucking
yields “about 34” entries.
A search for
fuck fucking kansas evolution standards
yields “about 42” entries.
Kaleidoscope, continued:
In Derrida’s Defense
The previous entry quoted an attack on Jacques Derrida for ignoring the “kaleidoscope” metaphor of Claude Levi-Strauss. Here is a quote by Derrida himself:
“The time for reflection is also the chance for turning back on the very conditions of reflection, in all the senses of that word, as if with the help of an optical device one could finally see sight, could not only view the natural landscape, the city, the bridge and the abyss, but could view viewing. (1983:19)
— Derrida, J. (1983) ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics 13.3: 3-20.”
The above quotation comes from Simon Wortham, who thinks the “optical device” of Derrida is a mirror. The same quotation appears in Desiring Dualisms at thispublicaddress.com, where the “optical device” is interpreted as a kaleidoscope.
Derrida’s “optical device” may (for university pupils desperately seeking an essay topic) be compared with Joyce’s “collideorscape.” For a different connection with Derrida, see The ‘Collideorscape’ as Différance.
From Margalit Fox in today’s New York Times:
“Eddie Barclay, who for three decades after World War II was arguably the most powerful music mogul in Europe and inarguably the most flamboyant, died on [Friday] May 13 in Paris. He was 84….
… Mr. Barclay was best known for three things: popularizing American jazz in France in the postwar years; keeping the traditional French chanson alive into the age of rock ‘n’ roll; and presiding over parties so lavish that they were considered just the tiniest bit excessive even by the standards of the French Riviera….
Among the guests at some of his glittering parties… Jack Nicholson….”
Related material:
— quoted by Bruce Graham from The Creators by Daniel Boorstin
“We’ll always have Paris.”
— An Invariant Feast, Log24, Sept. 6, 2004
Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis
The meditation below was suggested by this passage:
“… the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a ‘logical construction of the world’….”
“Deeply Vulgar”
— Epithet applied in 2003 to
Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
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In today’s Crimson:
Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it should be
Frankfurter Professor of Law.
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Those seeking relief from
Judeo-Christian vulgarity may enjoy
the Buddhist Suzanne Vega’s
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“Mercilessly tasteful”
— Andrew Mueller
Ideas, Stories, Values:
Literati in Deep Confusion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas‘ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
Interview with Joseph Epstein:
“You can do in stories things that are above those in essays,” says Epstein. “In essays and piecework, you are trying to make a point, whereas in stories you are not quite sure what the point is. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,’ which, I think, is the ultimate compliment for an author. Stories are above ideas.”
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Sept. 12, 2004:
“You are entering a remarkable community, the Harvard community. It is a community built on the idea of searching for truth… on the idea of respect for others….
… we practice the values we venerate. The values of seeking truth, the values of respecting others….”
“… Hegel discusses ‘culture’ as the ‘world of self-alienated spirit.’ The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected.”
The “phantasmagoria” of Didion seems related to the “phenomenology” of Hegel…
From Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit:
“This whole system is conceived, on one level at least, as a defense or rational reworking of the Christian conception of God. In particular, its three parts are an attempt to make sense of the Christian idea of a God who is three in one — the Logic depicting God as he is in himself, the Philosophy of Nature God the Son, and the Philosophy of Spirit God the Holy Spirit.”
and, indeed, to the phenomenology of narrative itself….
From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:
“There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage…
… a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century….
… thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism….
Truly, ‘immediate experience is [or becomes] the phantasmagoria of the idler’ [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Page 801.]….
Thought as phantasm is a consequence of the Cartesian split, and… a further consequence to this is the broad take-over of perceptual faculty…. What better example than that of the American railway? As a case-study it offers explanation to the ‘phantasmagoria of the idler’….
This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….”
For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of
November 5, 2002, 2:56 AM,
November 5, 2002, 6:29 AM,
January 3, 2003, 11:59 PM,
August 17, 2004, 7:29 PM,
August 18, 2004, 2:18 AM,
August 18, 2004, 3:00 AM, and
November 24, 2004, 10:00 AM.
Ineluctable
On the poetry of Geoffrey Hill:
"… why read him? Because of the things he writes about—war and peace and sacrifice, and the search for meaning and the truths of the heart, and for that haunting sense that, in spite of war and terror and the indifferences that make up our daily hells, there really is some grander reality, some ineluctable presence we keep touching. There remains in Hill the daunting possibility that it may actually all cohere in the end, or at least enough of it to keep us searching for more.
There is a hard edge to Hill, a strong Calvinist streak in him, and an intelligence that reminds one of Milton….."
— Paul Mariani, review in America of Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon
"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
— James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter
"Time has been unfolded into space."
"Pattern and symmetry are closely related."
— James O. Coplien on Symmetry Breaking
"… as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, 'the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations'….
— Goldberg, S.L. 'Homer and the Nightmare of History.' Modern Critical Views: James Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38."
— from the Choate site of David M. Loeb
 Joyce |
(By the way, Jorn Barger seems
to have emerged from seclusion.)
Real Enemies, Part I
“Even paranoids have real enemies.”
— Saying attributed to Delmore Schwartz
According to the Washington Post and Newsday today, the President’s persecutors now include
Paul O’Neill,
formerly Bush’s Treasury Secretary
Richard A. Clarke,
formerly Bush’s counterterrorism chief
Rand Beers,
Bush’s counterterrorism chief after Clarke
Flynt Leverett,
former member of the Bush national security staff
Richard Foster,
Bush Medicare accountant
John DiIulio,
former director of Bush’s faith-based initiatives
“Others who have fallen out of favor over Iraq include former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. All voiced concerns about either the expense or number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. All were treated dismissively by the White House. All are gone, but their estimates proved accurate….
Not every White House attempt at damage-control works. Last summer, White House officials tried to pin the blame on CIA Director George Tenet for not waving Bush off his State of the Union claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
Political analysts rushed to proclaim Tenet a goner, but those obituaries proved premature.”
— Tom Raum in Newsday today
Truth and Style
From today’s New York Times obituary for Amy M. Spindler, former fashion critic of The New York Times and style editor of its magazine, who died yesterday at 40:
“Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, whom Ms. Spindler regarded as a competitor when she became style editor of The Times Magazine, in 1998, said: ‘She took criticism in a new direction. She wasn’t afraid to tell the
“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
— Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995
Again from Spindler’s obituary:
“In a front-page article on Sept. 5, 1995, she [Spindler] noted a new piety on parade, marked by store windows and catalogs full of monastic robes, pilgrim’s boots and dangling crosses. Perhaps, she wrote, ‘the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from
Perhaps.
Amy M. Spindler
See also
Strike That Pose (August 1995)
and the two previous log24.net entries
on art and religion at Harvard.
For even more context, see
Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard.
Deeply Deep
“Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?”
— James Joyce, Ulysses, “Proteus”
James Joyce may or may not have been a saint. Today is, accordingly, either his feast day or his secular day of remembrance.
With Joyce in mind, I surfed the Heckler & Coch weblog archives this afternoon and found a link to a page that credits
“Jørn Barger, an amateur
James Joyce scholar….”
with the first use of the term “weblog” in its current sense.
Seeking more on Barger and Joyce, I found that Barger has gone into seclusion and that his Joyce website is no longer online.
Google has a cache of his Joyce portal, however, and the portal and its sub-pages are also available at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/2003*/
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/*
These pages from Barger’s labor of love, though neither green nor oval, may serve as this year’s Joyce memorial.
720 in the Book
Searching for an epiphany on this January 6 (the Feast of the Epiphany), I started with Harvard Magazine, the current issue of January-February 2004.
An article titled On Mathematical Imagination concludes by looking forward to
“a New Instauration that will bring mathematics, at last, into its rightful place in our lives: a source of elation….”
Seeking the source of the phrase “new instauration,” I found it was due to Francis Bacon, who “conceived his New Instauration as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy and a rediscovery of ‘the seal of God on things,’ ” according to a web page by Nieves Mathews.
Hmm.
The Mathews essay leads to Peter Pesic, who, it turns out, has written a book that brings us back to the subject of mathematics:
Abel’s Proof: An Essay
on the Sources and Meaning
of Mathematical Unsolvability
by Peter Pesic,
MIT Press, 2003
From a review:
“… the book is about the idea that polynomial equations in general cannot be solved exactly in radicals….
Pesic concludes his account after Abel and Galois… and notes briefly (p. 146) that following Abel, Jacobi, Hermite, Kronecker, and Brioschi, in 1870 Jordan proved that elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations. The reader is left with little clarity on this sequel to the story….”
— Roger B. Eggleton, corrected version of a review in Gazette Aust. Math. Soc., Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 242-244
Here, it seems, is my epiphany:
“Elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.”
Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part I
Those who seek a star
on this Feast of the Epiphany
may click here.
Most mathematicians are (or should be) familiar with the work of Abel and Galois on the insolvability by radicals of quintic and higher-degree equations.
Just how such equations can be solved is a less familiar story. I knew that elliptic functions were involved in the general solution of a quintic (fifth degree) equation, but I was not aware that similar functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.
The topic is of interest to me because, as my recent web page The Proof and the Lie indicates, I was deeply irritated by the way recent attempts to popularize mathematics have sown confusion about modular functions, and I therefore became interested in learning more about such functions. Modular functions are also distantly related, via the topic of “moonshine” and via the “Happy Family” of the Monster group and the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, to my own work on symmetries of 4×4 matrices.
Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part II
There is no Log24 entry for
December 30, 2003,
the day John Gregory Dunne died,
but see this web page for that date.
Here is what I was able to find on the Web about Pesic’s claim:
From Wolfram Research:
From Solving the Quintic —
“Some of the ideas described here can be generalized to equations of higher degree. The basic ideas for solving the sextic using Klein’s approach to the quintic were worked out around 1900. For algebraic equations beyond the sextic, the roots can be expressed in terms of hypergeometric functions in several variables or in terms of Siegel modular functions.”
From Siegel Theta Function —
“Umemura has expressed the roots of an arbitrary polynomial in terms of Siegel theta functions. (Mumford, D. Part C in Tata Lectures on Theta. II. Jacobian Theta Functions and Differential Equations. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1984.)”
From Polynomial —
“… the general quintic equation may be given in terms of the Jacobi theta functions, or hypergeometric functions in one variable. Hermite and Kronecker proved that higher order polynomials are not soluble in the same manner. Klein showed that the work of Hermite was implicit in the group properties of the icosahedron. Klein’s method of solving the quintic in terms of hypergeometric functions in one variable can be extended to the sextic, but for higher order polynomials, either hypergeometric functions in several variables or ‘Siegel functions’ must be used (Belardinelli 1960, King 1996, Chow 1999). In the 1880s, Poincaré created functions which give the solution to the nth order polynomial equation in finite form. These functions turned out to be ‘natural’ generalizations of the elliptic functions.”
Belardinelli, G. “Fonctions hypergéométriques de plusieurs variables er résolution analytique des équations algébrique générales.” Mémoral des Sci. Math. 145, 1960.
King, R. B. Beyond the Quartic Equation. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1996.
Chow, T. Y. “What is a Closed-Form Number.” Amer. Math. Monthly 106, 440-448, 1999.
From Angel Zhivkov,
Preprint series,
Institut für Mathematik,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:
“… discoveries of Abel and Galois had been followed by the also remarkable theorems of Hermite and Kronecker: in 1858 they independently proved that we can solve the algebraic equations of degree five by using an elliptic modular function…. Kronecker thought that the resolution of the equation of degree five would be a special case of a more general theorem which might exist. This hypothesis was realized in [a] few cases by F. Klein… Jordan… showed that any algebraic equation is solvable by modular functions. In 1984 Umemura realized the Kronecker idea in his appendix to Mumford’s book… deducing from a formula of Thomae… a root of [an] arbitrary algebraic equation by Siegel modular forms.”
— “Resolution of Degree Less-than-or-equal-to Six Algebraic Equations by Genus Two Theta Constants“
Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part III
From Music for Dunne’s Wake:
“Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe,
a lid that kept everything underneath it
where it belonged.”
— Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge
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“720 in |
“The group Sp4(F2) has order 720,”
as does S6. — Angel Zhivkov, op. cit.
Those seeking
“a rediscovery of
‘the seal of God on things,’ “
as quoted by Mathews above,
should see
The Unity of Mathematics
and the related note
Sacerdotal Jargon.
For more remarks on synchronicity
that may or may not be relevant
to Harvard Magazine and to
the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings
that start tomorrow in Phoenix, see
For the relevance of the time
of this entry, 10:10, see
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Related recreational reading:
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Labyrinth |
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Personal Jesus
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Columnist Cal Thomas What exactly does Dean believe about Jesus, and how is it relevant to his presidential candidacy? “Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised,” he told the Globe, “people who were left behind.” Dean makes it sound as if He might have been a Democrat. “He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything,” the candidate continued. “He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.” Not really. If that is all Jesus was (or is), then he is just another entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to be read or not, according to one’s inspirational need. C.S. Lewis brilliantly dealt with this watered-down view of Jesus and what He did in the book “Mere Christianity.” Said Lewis, who thought about such things at a far deeper level than Howard Dean, “I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I can’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God – or else a madman or something worse.” |
For an excellent dramatic portrayal of C. S. Lewis, see the film “Shadowlands,” starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.
For Sir Anthony Hopkins
on his birthday —
Your Own Personal Jesus:
Mark Vonnegut in
British Columbia, 1970
The Jesus figure above is,
if not the Son of God,
the son of novelist Kurt Vonnegut —
not a bad alternative.
As for “the sort of things Jesus said,”
consider this from a summary of
the younger Vonnegut’s
The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity —
“At one point, he decides that
his thoughts are responsible for
an earthquake in California….”
See the rather similar remarks of Jesus
in Mark 11:23.
For further notes on
theology, lunacy, and earthquakes,
see the previous entries, starting with
The Longest Night, Dec. 21, 2003,
and ending with the two Dec. 28 entries
below, both related to the recent Iran
earthquake (and, by implication, to the
quote from Robert Stone in the entries
Stone, not Wood, and Riddle).
Sunday, December 28, 2003 7:29 PM
Season’s Greetings from the
Institute for Advanced Study,
in keeping with the theme of
the previous entry.
“Warren Ellis’ Die Puny Humans….
Worth looking at.”
DPH leads to Sohma G. Dawling
who in turn leads,
via r. sakamoto, to
Oppenheimer’s Aria.
For the aria, after you click on
the above link, click on the
picture at the resulting site
Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:00 PM
The Associated Press,
December 28, 2003, 11:46 AM EST
TEHRAN, Iran — Three European hostages seized in southeastern Iran earlier this month have been released, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Sunday.
The $6 million ransom demand was not paid, another Iranian official said.
Drug smugglers seized the hostages — two from Germany and one from Ireland — Dec. 2… as they bicycled to the city of Zahedan from
Bam….
 |
Detail:
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Thank you, Ma’am.
(See The Magdalene Code, 12/26.
For the “Wham,” see Rosebud, 12/22,
and later entries.)
Another entry not without relevance
is that of 3/07.
Skewed Mirrors
Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
Part I —
Bill Moyers and Julie Taymor
Director Taymor on her own passion play (see previous entry), “Frida“:
“We always write stories of tragedies because that’s how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way.”
— 10/25/02 interview with Bill Moyers
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From transcript MOYERS: What happened to you in Indonesia. TAYMOR: This is probably it for me. This is the story that moves me the most…. I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain on the lake. They were having a ceremony that only happens only every 10 years for the young men. I wanted to be alone. I was listening to this music and all of a sudden out of the darkness I could see glints of mirrors and 30 or 40 old men in full warrior costume– there was nobody in this village square. I was alone. They couldn’t see me in the shadows. They came out with these spears and they started to dance. They did, I don’t know, it felt like an eternity but probably a half hour dance. With these voices coming out of them. And they danced to nobody. Right after that, they and I went oh, my God. The first man came out and they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail on the costumes. They didn’t care if someone was paying tickets, writing reviews. They didn’t care if an audience was watching. They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. MOYERS: How did you see the world differently after you were in Indonesia? |
From transcript ….They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced. … ………………….. MOYERS: Now that you are so popular, now that your work is… TAYMOR: [INAUDIBLE]. MOYERS: No, I’m serious. Now that you’re popular, now that your work is celebrated and people are seeking you, do you feel your creativity is threatened by that popularity or liberated by it? TAYMOR: No, I think it’s neither one. I don’t do things any differently now than I would before. And you think that sometimes perhaps if I get a bigger budget for a movie, then it will just be the same thing… MOYERS: Ruination. Ruination. TAYMOR: No, because LION KING is a combination of high tech and low tech. There are things up on that stage that cost 30 cents, like a little shadow puppet and a lamp, and it couldn’t be any better than that. It just couldn’t. Sometimes you are forced to become more creative because you have limitations. …. |
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TAYMOR: Well I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation become the main word in my life. Transformation because you don’t want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn’t know you could see the back of your head. You didn’t know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
It’s not about the technology. It’s about the power of art to transform. I think transformation becomes the main word in my life, transformation. Because you don’t want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says, you didn’t know you could see the back of your head. You didn’t know that you could…almost cubistic, see all aspects at the same time. And what that does for human beings is it allows them to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
Part II —
Inside and Outside: Transformation
(Research note, July 11, 1986)
 |
Click on the above typewritten note to enlarge.
Summary of
Parts I and II:
See also
Geometry for Jews.
“We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction.”
— Julie Taymor on “Frida” (AP, 10/22/02)
“She made ‘real’ an oxymoron,
she made mirrors, she made smoke.
She had a curve ball
that wouldn’t quit,
a girlfriend for a joke.”
— “Arizona Star,” Guy Clark / Rich Alves
Killer Radio
"See the girl with the diamond ring?
She knows how to shake that thing."
— Jerry Lee "Killer" Lewis on
KHYI 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas,
at about 5:12 PM EDT 7/31/03,
introduced by DJ Allen Peck Sr.
"And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, De l'Esprit Géométrique
"When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings. She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone."
— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
scene at Diamond Head, Oahu, Hawaii
Now playing (6:41 PM EDT) on Killer Radio:
"Jack of Diamonds, that's
a hard card to find."
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond…."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Perhaps Sam Phillips was twanged by a Hawaiian guitar. (See previous two entries.)
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The Big Time
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See also "Top Ten Most Overheard Comments by new KHYI listeners" at Miss Lana's Anything Page, entry for
The Big Time
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“The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer….” — The Big Time, |
A Story That Works
— Fritz Leiber in “The Button Molder“
Happy Trails
Today is the birthday of Texans Nanci Griffith and George W. Bush. It is also the feast day of Saint Roy Rogers and the alleged saint Thomas More.
Seeking spiritual guidance from the life of Paulist "jazz priest" Norman J. O'Connor (see previous entry), who worked at a rehab called "Straight and Narrow," I did a Google search on "Nanci Griffith" + "Straight and Narrow." At the top of the resulting list was a website that might have pleased Saint Roy:
Welcome to the Wild West Show!
Happy trails, indeed.
Self-Evident
Today many Americans celebrate a declaration of certain “self-evident” truths. Others feel that these alleged “truths” are misleading. Seeking a worthy opponent for the authors of the Declaration on this secular holy day, I settled on the following recently published book, a sort of Declaration of Dependence of government on God (an imaginary entity who speaks only through politicians, clergymen, and other liars):
Christian Faith
and Modern Democracy:
God and Politics in the Fallen World
By Robert P. Kraynak
Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 304p
$49.95 (cloth) $24.95 (paper)
From a review in the Dec. 24, 2001, issue of America, a Jesuit publication:
“The author, who identifies himself as a practicing Catholic, asserts that Christianity is weakened by its close alliance with the contemporary version of democracy and human rights….
The author states that ‘modern liberal democracy…subverts in practice the dignity of man.’ He defends his thesis relentlessly and persuasively….
Some readers of this well-organized volume will be disappointed that the author makes no mention of the four billion non-Christians among the world’s 6.1 billion inhabitants. The four billion Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists must be included in any attempt to make the modern state responsive to traditional and generally accepted norms of morality.”
— Robert F. Drinan, S.J.
Jefferson would probably appreciate Drinan’s remark on catholic (i.e., universal, or “generally accepted”) norms.
The “traditional and generally accepted norms of morality” Drinan mentions are discussed ably by Christian apologist C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man, which argues for the existence of a universal moral code that I am pleased to note he calls, rightly, the Tao. As an Amazon.com reviewer notes, Lewis uses this term in the manner of Confucius rather than that of Lao Tsu. I prefer the latter.
For details, see the Tao Te Ching, (The Way and Its Power). This is a far more holy scripture than the collections of lies called sacred by most other religions. Both the leftist Jefferson and the rightist Kraynak wrongly assume that talk of a “Creator” means something. It does not. Classical Chinese thought is free from this absurd Western error. Lewis at least had the grace to acknowledge the importance of non-Western thought, though he himself was unable to escape the lies of Christianity.
Three Coins in the Fountain
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Mars |
Victory |
Sol Invictus |
The reverse of three bronze coins
minted during Constantine’s early years
"Constantine like many of his predecessors had worshipped the Greek and Roman gods, particularly Apollo, Mars and Victory. This fact is evident in the portrayal of these gods on the earliest of Constantine’s coins. Yet surprisingly, even after his dream experience, and subsequent victory over Maxentius, it is recorded that he continued to worship these gods. Although the images of Apollo, Mars and Victory quickly disappeared from his coinage, later coins minted under Constantine shows that he likely continued to worship the sol invicta [sic] or ‘Unconquered Sun’ for 10 years or more after his dream experience. Yet, over a period of years, the experience of the sign, and the victory at the Milvian bridge, eventually led Constantine to favour and later to convert to the Christian faith."
— Ross Nightingale, "The 'Sign' that Changed the Course of History," in Ancient Coin Forum
"Three coins in the fountain,
Each one seeking happiness.
Thrown by three hopeful lovers,
Which one will the fountain bless?
Three hearts in the fountain,
Each heart longing for its home.
There they lie in the fountain
Somewhere in the heart of Rome."
— Sinatra's version of the 1954 song
(Lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Jule Styne)
Which one will the fountain bless?
In order to answer this theological conundrum, we need to know more about the unfamiliar god Sol Invictus.
A quick web search reveals that some fanatical Protestants believe that the Roman deities Sol Invictus and Mithra were virtually the same. Of course, it is unwise to take the paranoid ravings of Protestants too seriously, but in this case they may be on to something.
The Catholic Church itself seems to identify Sol Invictus with Mithra:
"Sunday was kept holy in honour of Mithra…. The 25 December was observed as his birthday, the natalis invicti, the rebirth of the winter-sun, unconquered by the rigours of the season. A Mithraic community was not merely a religious congregation…"
— The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition.
Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
It would seem, therefore, that as December 25 approaches we are preparing to celebrate the festival of Sol Invictus. This perhaps answers the theological riddle posed by Sammy Cahn.
From "Things Change," starring Don Ameche:
"A big man knows the value of a small coin."
Today's site music celebrates
Cahn, Styne, Sinatra, and the spirit of the 1950's.
Many thanks to Loyd's Piano Music Page
for this excellent rendition of a Styne classic.
Waiting for Logos
Searching for background on the phrase "logos and logic" in yesterday's "Notes toward a Supreme Fact," I found this passage:
"…a theory of psychology based on the idea of the soul as the dialectical, self-contradictory syzygy of a) soul as anima and b) soul as animus. Jungian and archetypal psychology appear to have taken heed more or less of only one half of the whole syzygy, predominantly serving an anima cut loose from her own Other, the animus as logos and logic (whose first and most extreme phenomenological image is the killer of the anima, Bluebeard). Thus psychology tends to defend the virginal innocence of the anima and her imagination…"
— Wolfgang Giegerich, "Once More the Reality/Irreality Issue: A Reply to Hillman's Reply," website
The anima and other Jungian concepts are used to analyze Wallace Stevens in an excellent essay by Michael Bryson, "The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute." Part of Bryson's motivation in this essay is the conflict between the trendy leftist nominalism of postmodern critics and the conservative realism of more traditional critics:
"David Jarraway, in his Stevens and the Question of Belief, writes about a Stevens figured as a proto-deconstructionist, insisting on 'Steven's insistence on dismantling the logocentric models of belief' (311) in 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.' In opposition to these readings comes a work like Janet McCann's Wallace Stevens Revisited: 'The Celestial Possible', in which the claim is made (speaking of the post-1940 period of Stevens' life) that 'God preoccupied him for the rest of his career.'"
Here "logocentric" is a buzz word for "Christian." Stevens, unlike the postmodernists, was not anti-Christian. He did, however, see that the old structures of belief could not be maintained indefinitely, and pondered what could be found to replace them. "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" deals with this problem. In his essay on Stevens' "Notes," Bryson emphasizes the "negative capability" of Keats as a contemplative technique:
"The willingness to exist in a state of negative capability, to accept that sometimes what we are seeking is not that which reason can impose…."
For some related material, see Simone Weil's remarks on Electra waiting for her brother Orestes. Simone Weil's brother was one of the greatest mathematicians of the past century, André Weil.
"Electra did not seek Orestes, she waited for him…"
— Simone Weil
"…at the end, she pulls it all together brilliantly in the story of Electra and Orestes, where the importance of waiting on God rather than seeking is brought home forcefully."
— Tom Hinkle, review of Waiting for God
Compare her remarks on waiting for Orestes with the following passage from Waiting for God:
"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern falsity.
The solution of a geometry problem does not in itself constitute a precious gift, but the same law applies to it because it is the image of something precious. Being a little fragment of particular truth, it is a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth, the very Truth that once in a human voice declared: "I am the Truth."
Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.
In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution…."
— Simone Weil, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"
Weil concludes the preceding essay with the following passage:
"Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all of our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it."
This biblical metaphor is also echoed in the work of Pascal, who combined in one person the theological talent of Simone Weil and the mathematical talent of her brother. After discussing how proofs should be written, Pascal says
"The method of not erring is sought by all the world. The logicians profess to guide to it, the geometricians alone attain it, and apart from their science, and the imitations of it, there are no true demonstrations. The whole art is included in the simple precepts that we have given; they alone are sufficient, they alone afford proofs; all other rules are useless or injurious. This I know by long experience of all kinds of books and persons.
And on this point I pass the same judgment as those who say that geometricians give them nothing new by these rules, because they possessed them in reality, but confounded with a multitude of others, either useless or false, from which they could not discriminate them, as those who, seeking a diamond of great price amidst a number of false ones, but from which they know not how to distinguish it, should boast, in holding them all together, of possessing the true one equally with him who without pausing at this mass of rubbish lays his hand upon the costly stone which they are seeking and for which they do not throw away the rest."
— Blaise Pascal, The Art of Persuasion
Birthdays for a Small Planet
Today's birthdays:
The entry below, "Theology for a Small Planet," sketches an issue that society has failed to address since the fall of 1989, when it was first raised by the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
In honor mainly of Ursula K. Le Guin, but also of her fellow authors above, I offer Le Guin's solution. It is not new. It has been ignored mainly because of the sort of hateful and contemptible arrogance shown by
Here is an introduction to the theology that should replace the ridiculous and outdated Semitic religions.
"Scholarly translators of the Tao Te Ching, as a manual for rulers, use a vocabulary that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Taoist 'sage,' his masculinity, his authority. This language is perpetuated, and degraded, in most popular versions. I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps unmale reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul. I would like that reader to see why people have loved the book for 2500 years.
It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me it is also the deepest spring."
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 6
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
The valley spirit never dies
Call it the mystery, the woman.
The mystery,
the Door of the Woman,
is the root
of earth and heaven.
Forever this endures, forever.
And all its uses are easy.
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