"The quotes create the illusion
that the dead are still speaking
to the reader. Faust writes about
the efforts of spiritualists to believe
in an afterlife for their slain kin, but
she’s the one summoning spirits."
— April Yee, Harvard Crimson
staff writer, February 7, 2008
"0! = 1"
See also yesterday's Into the Woods
and posts now tagged Willow and Mandorla.
The "I" of "I Am that I Am" has been described as a creation of
an "ur-unity" (see the Anderson passage below) and this ur-unity,
denoted by "O," has been described elsewhere as "a primary reality"
(see the Sullivan passage below). These descriptions are of course
much less clear than those usually given for the similar purely
mathematical * notations "0" and "1."
See also Quine's Shema in "Is Nothing Sacred?" —
0! = 1.
Quoted here on July 30, 2015 —
Linked to here on June 29, 2016 —
* Note for mathematicians: Here characteristic 0 is assumed .
Quine's Shema does not apply to Galois.
"I've got a brand-new pair of roller skates …"
Related material — Salinger in the Park and
Philosophy in a New Key.
"Throughout the years, weapons and targeting systems
were added to the aircraft without diminishing the F-16’s
agility, making it a true multirole aircraft."
— WCSC Television
Charleston, SC
* See yesterday's War Haiku.
* For the title, see a search for Inside Man .
Related material: The co-editor of The Architecture of Modern Mathematics —
In memory of a mathematician who
reportedly died on Dec. 16, 2014:
"Four dimensions is where things change a lot."
Backstory: Or Only Die.
Or: Shema, SXSW
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The doors open slowly. I step into a hangar. From the rafters high above, lights blaze down, illuminating a twelve-foot cube the color of gunmetal. My pulse rate kicks up. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. Leighton must sense my awe, because he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It is exquisitely beautiful. At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine. I drift toward the box, mesmerized.
— Crouch, Blake. Dark Matter: A Novel |
Related reading —
"Do you know there is a deliberate sinister conspiracy at work?"
"No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it."
A few bars —
* Not the Dark Tower of Stephen King, but that of the
University of Texas at Austin, back in time 50 years and a day.
Or: A Shema for Sacks.
"We’ve already seen the hexagon painted over a
propaganda poster. It’s obviously a mark of defiance,
or maybe a geometry lesson. It’s still not clear.
Hey, it’s that clown dictator again. Who’s his stylist?"
The Dark Fields Meet The Big Seal .
Recall the punchline of Tuesday afternoon's post
on the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman" —
"What am I, the farmer's daughter?"
For background from the dark fields of the republic,
see a speech last night by Iowa Senator Joni Ernst.
Related material:
At the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman,"
the main character holds up to the light a letter that has
at the top the presidential seal of the United States:
The camera pans down, and the character then
sees a watermark that echoes another famous seal,
from the U.S. one-dollar bill:
For related paranoia, see the novels of Dan Brown
as well as…
See also Shema and Clocks Striking 13.
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"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
— Wallace Stevens, |
Yesterday's meditation ("Simon's Shema") on the interpenetration of opposites continues:
"The fundamental conception of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics, namely, yuganaddha, signifies the coincidence of opposites. It is symbolized by the conjugal embrace (maithuna or kama-kala) of a god and goddess or a Buddha and his consort (signifying karuna and sunyata or upaya and prajna, respectively), also commonly depicted in Tantric Buddhist iconography as the union of vajra (diamond sceptre) and padme (lotus flower). Thus, yuganaddha essentially means the interpenetration of opposites or dipolar fusion, and is a fundamental restatement of Hua-yen theoretic structures."
— p. 148 in "Part II: A Whiteheadian Process Critique of Hua-yen Buddhism," in Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy), by Steve Odin, State University of New York Press, 1982
And on p. 163 of Odin, op. cit., in "Part III: Theology of the Deep Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology," in the section titled "Whitehead's Dipolar God as the Collective Unconscious"–
"An effort is made to transpose Whitehead's theory of the dipolar God into the terms of the collective unconscious, so that now the dipolar God is to be comprehended not as a transcendent deity, but the deepest dimension and highest potentiality of one's own psyche."
Odin obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1980. (See curriculum vitae (pdf).)
For an academic review of Odin's book, see David Applebaum, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 107-108.
It is perhaps worth noting, in light of the final footnote of Mark D. Brimblecombe's Ph.D. thesis "Dipolarity and God" quoted yesterday, that "tantra" is said to mean "loom." For some less-academic background on the Tantric iconography Odin describes, see the webpage "Love and Passion in Tantric Buddhist Art." For a fiction combining love and passion with the word "loom" in a religious context, see Clive Barker's Weaveworld. This fiction– which is, if not "supreme" in the Wallace Stevens sense, at least entertaining– may correspond to some aspects of the deep Jungian psychological reality discussed by Odin.
Click on image for details.
Simon’s Shema
| “When times are mysterious Serious numbers will always be heard And after all is said and done And the numbers all come home The four rolls into three The three turns into two And the two becomes a One” |
Related material:
“There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about ‘concrete steps,’ ‘contradictions,’ ‘the interpenetration of opposites,’ and the rest.”
— Doris Lessing, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature
The Times offers Lessing’s essay to counter Harold Bloom’s remark that this year’s award of a Nobel Prize to Lessing is “pure political correctness.” The following may serve as a further antidote to Bloom.
The Communist use of “interpenetration,” a term long used to describe the Holy Trinity, suggests– along with Simon’s hymn to the Unity, and the rhetorical advice of Norman Mailer quoted here yesterday— a search for the full phrase “interpenetration of opposites” in the context* of theology. Such a search yields a rhetorical gem from New Zealand:
* See the final footnote on the final page (249) of Brimblecombe’s thesis:
3 The Latin word contexo means to interweave, join, or braid together.
A check of the Online Eymology Dictionary supports this assertion:
See also Wittgenstein on “theology as grammar” and “context-sensitive” grammars as (unlike Simon’s reductive process) “noncontracting”– Log24, April 16, 2007: Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI.
Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.
In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.
First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary." An example was given illustrating this saying. Here is another example:
Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–
Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–
Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season
Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).
It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."
April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."
"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim
Happy birthday, George:
Sources:
Salute to Anthony Hopkins,
May 3, May 4, May 5
Today’s Wizard of Id
Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis
André Weil As I Knew Him,
by Goro Shimura (pdf)
Related material:
Expression
Expression is an impossible word.
If you want to use it
I think you have to
explain it further…
— Ad Reinhardt,
Art as Art
“… an equation is a very
abstract expression
of knowledge
about something.”
— The Hidden Side
of Visualization
Well, yes.
For example:
Abstract Expression,
pixels on screen, 12/30/05
|
The Scope and Limits
of Quotation (pdf), in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. L. E. Hahn, Open Court Publishers, 1999, pp. 691-714, by Dr. Ernest Lepore, Rutgers University: “… an assumption I wish to reject, namely, that in quotation an abstract expression (shape) is denoted…. Since Davidson, however, only says ‘we may take [an expression] to be an abstract shape’ [1979, p.85, my emphasis], his theory is compatible with expressions being something else. We need only find something that can be instantiated by radically differently shaped objects. Whatever it is must be such that written tokens, spoken tokens, signed tokens, Braille tokens, Semaphore tokens, finger language tokens, and any other way in which words can be produced, can be instantiated by it…. Such entities might
Reference: Davidson, D., 1979, “Quotation,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp.79-92. |
For more on zero and other entities,
see Is Nothing Sacred?
For more on Davidson,
see Shema .
White Christmas
Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past
“Birthday, death-day —
what day is not both?”
— John Updike
“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.”
Language Game
In memory of
Samuel Iwry, Hebrew scholar,
who died on May 8, 2004:
From a log24 entry of May 8, 2004,
on Wittgenstein’s “language games” —
“Let us imagine a language …”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
Okay…
Moral of the story:
If you must have a
religious language,
Elvish may,
in some situations,
do as well as Hebrew.
See also
The Unity of Mathematics,
or “Shema, Israel”
A conference to honor the 90th birthday (Sept. 2) of Israel Gelfand is currently underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The following note from 2001 gives one view of the conference’s title topic, “The Unity of Mathematics.”
Reciprocity in 2001by Steven H. Cullinane
|
For four different proofs of Euler’s result, see the inexpensive paperback classic by Konrad Knopp, Theory and Application of Infinite Series (Dover Publications).
Evaluating Zeta(2), by Robin Chapman (PDF article) Fourteen proofs!
Zeta Functions for Undergraduates
Reciprocity Laws
Reciprocity Laws II
Recent Progress on the Langlands Conjectures
For more on
the theme of unity,
see
Transcendental Meditation
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Transcendental Man |
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The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson was on May 25, 2003. For a commemoration of Emerson on that date, click on the picture below of Harvard University’s Room 305, Emerson Hall.
This will lead you to a discussion of the properties of a 5×5 array, or matrix, with a symbol of mystical unity at its center. Although this symbol of mystical unity, the number “1,” is not, pace the Shema, a transcendental number, the matrix is, as perhaps a sort of Emersonian compensation, what postmodernists would call phallologocentric. It is possible that Emerson is a saint; if so, his feast day (i.e., date of death), April 27, might reveal to us the sort of miraculous fact hoped for by Fritz Leiber
in my previous entry. A check of my April 27 notes shows us, lo and behold, another phallologocentric 5×5 array, this one starring Warren Beatty. This rather peculiar coincidence is, perhaps, the sort of miracle appropriate to a saint who is, as this week’s politically correct New Yorker calls him, a Big Dead White Male.
Leiber’s fiction furnishes “a behind-the-scenes view of the time change wars.”
“It’s quarter to three…” — St. Frank Sinatra
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exist; if they do, they might ultimately play some role in the metaphysics of language.”
