Text:
The Shining, 1977, page 162: “A new headline, this one “The item on the next page |
Exegesis:
April 10— Good Friday– See The Paradise of Childhood. Four months later– Aug. 10— “When he thought of the old man |
Text:
The Shining, 1977, page 162: “A new headline, this one “The item on the next page |
Exegesis:
April 10— Good Friday– See The Paradise of Childhood. Four months later– Aug. 10— “When he thought of the old man |
Related material from
this journal, July 30:
“In the room the women come and go“
— Stephen King, The Shining:
“The Wasps’ Nest“
Related material:
Actual Being
(Oct. 25, 2008)
and The Shining
(reissue, 1977 1st ed.),
page 162:
The Discreet Charm
of Suzanne Vega
We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns…. — Wallace Stevens |
"In the room the women come and go"
— Stephen King, The Shining:
"The Wasps' Nest"
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
Related material:
This morning’s
New York Times obituaries…
…and The Restaurant Quarré in Berlin,
“It’s going to be accomplished
in steps, this establishment of
the Talented in the
scheme of things.”
— Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe ’47
Click on images to enlarge.
Related material:
Project MUSE — … and interpretations, “any of the Zingari shoolerim [gypsy schoolchildren] may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne” (FW 112.4-8). … — Patrick McGee, “Reading Authority: |
“The ulterior motive behind this essay [“Reading Authority,” above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”
“[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”
Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”
A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–
“Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.
But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”
A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”
“Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”
At the Oscars, 2009
Related material:Frame Tales and Dickung
Part I: The Pagan View
From The Fire, Katherine Neville's sequel to her novel The Eight:
"'Cat…. realized that we all need some kind of a chariot driver to pull our forces together, like those horses of Socrates, one pulling toward heaven, one toward the earth….'
… I asked, 'Is that why you said my mother's and my birthdays are important? Because April 4 and October 4 are opposite in the calendar?'
Rodo beamed a smile…. He said, 'That's how the process takes place….'"
Part II: The Christian View
"The Calendar of saints is a traditional Christian method of organizing a liturgical year by associating each day with one or more saints and referring to the day as that saint's feast day. The system arose from the very early Christian custom of annual commemoration of martyrs on the dates of their deaths, or birth into heaven, and is thus referred to in Latin as dies natalis ('day of birth')." –Wikipedia
The October 4 date above, the birthday of Cat's daughter, Xie, in The Fire, is also the liturgical Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (said by some to be also the date of his death).
The April 4 date above is Neville's birthday and that of her alter ego Cat in The Eight and The Fire. Neville states that this is also the birth date of Charlemagne. It is, as well, the dies natalis (in the "birth into heaven" sense), of Dr. Martin Luther King.
For more about April 4, see Art Wars and 4/4/07.
For more about October 4, see "Revelation Game Continued: Short Story."
"et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam
non comprehenderunt"
The Shining
of Dec. 13
continued from
Dec. 13, 2003
“There is a place for a hint
somewhere of a big agent
to complete the picture.”
— Notes for an unfinished novel,
The Last Tycoon,
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Earth (1937)
casting: Chinese extras
(uncredited)
See also
yesterday’s entries
as well as…
Serpent’s Eyes Shine,
Alice’s Tea Party,
Janet’s Tea Party,
Hollywood Memory,
and
Hope of Heaven.
“… it’s going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment of
the Talented
in the scheme of things.”
“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”
— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”
“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”
— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.
“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”
— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.
— Good Will Hunting
Abstraction and Faith On Kirk Varnedoe’s National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003): “Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself.”
|
et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt
… the mirroring …
is to be conceived of as
a shining forth, a play of mirror flashes,
as it were…. The four “mirrors”
emerge into presence as light
at the same time that they converge….
The above image:
Axes of Reflection
and Annunciation,
the latter being a detail
of a fresco by Giotto
on the cover of
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.
Happy Feast of St. Nicholas.
A Penny for My Thoughts? by Maureen Dowd “If an online newspaper in Pasadena, Calif., can outsource coverage to India, I wonder how long can it be before some guy in Bangalore is writing my column….” — New York Times teaser for a column of Sunday, November 30, 2008 (St. Andrew’s Day) |
DH News Service, Bangalore, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008:
“Monday evening had a pleasant surprise in store for sky-watchers as the night sky sported a smiley, in the form of a crescent moon flanked by two bright planets Jupiter and Venus…” |
Meanwhile, at National Geographic:
Jupiter, Venus, Moon Make “Frown”
A Midrash for Maureen:
Related material on Pasadena:
Happy birthday, R. P. Dilworth.
Related material on India:
The Shining of May 29 (2002) and
A Well-Known Theorem (2005).
— Barry Mazur in 2000 as quoted today at the University of St. Andrews
Other approaches to the
eight-ray star figure
have been sketched in
various Log24 entries.
See, for instance, the
June 21 entries on
the Kyoto Prize for
arts and philosophy.
Quine won this prize
in 1996.
Quine’s figure, cited in an
argument against universals,
is also a classic symbol for
the morning or evening star.
This year’s winner
of the Kyoto Prize has
a more poetic approach
to philosophy:
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
For one such frame or space,
a Mexican cantina, see
Shining Forth.
See also Damnation Morning and
The Devil and Wallace Stevens.
Charles Taylor. See
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
Related material:
In the above screenshot of New York Times obituaries on the date of Brewster Beach's death, Tim Russert seems to be looking at the obituary of Air Force Academy chapel architect Walter Netsch. This suggests another chapel, more closely related to my own experience, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Some background… Walter Netsch in Oral History (pdf, 467 pp.):
"I also had a book that inspired me– this is 1947– called Communitas by Percival and Paul Goodman. Percival Goodman was the architect, and Paul Goodman was the writer and leftist. And this came out of the University of Chicago– part of the leftist bit of the University of Chicago…. I had sort of in the back of my mind, Communitas appeared from my subconscious of the new town out of town, and there were other people who knew of it…."
"God As Trauma" by Brewster Yale Beach:
"The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation."
"Si me de veras quieres, deja me en paz."
— Lucero Hernandez, Cuernavaca, 1962
A more impersonal approach to my own drunkard's walk (Cuernavaca, 1962,
after reading the above words): Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures
An approach from the culture (more precisely, the alternate religion) of Scientism–
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives— is sketched
in Today's Sermon: The Holy Trinity vs. The New York Times (Sunday, June 8, 2008).
The Times illustrated its review of The Drunkard's Walk with facetious drawings
by Jessica Hagy, who uses Venn diagrams to make cynical jokes.
A less cynical use of a Venn diagram:
On April 16, the Pope’s birthday, the evening lottery number in Pennsylvania was 441. The Log24 entries of April 17 and April 18 supplied commentaries based on 441’s incarnation as a page number in an edition of Heidegger’s writings. Here is a related commentary on a different incarnation of 441. (For a context that includes both today’s commentary and those of April 17 and 18, see Gian-Carlo Rota– a Heidegger scholar as well as a mathematician– on mathematical Lichtung.)
From R. D. Carmichael, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (Boston, Ginn and Co., 1937)– an exercise from the final page, 441, of the final chapter, “Tactical Configurations”–
“23. Let G be a multiply transitive group of degree n whose degree of transitivity is k; and let G have the property that a set S of m elements exists in G such that when k of the elements S are changed by a permutation of G into k of these elements, then all these m elements are permuted among themselves; moreover, let G have the property P, namely, that the identity is the only element in G which leaves fixed the n – m elements not in S. Then show that G permutes the m elements S into
m(m – 1) … (m – k + 1)
This exercise concerns an important mathematical structure said to have been discovered independently by the American Carmichael and by the German Ernst Witt.
For some perhaps more comprehensible material from the preceding page in Carmichael– 440– see Diamond Theory in 1937.
"Numbers go to heaven
who know no more
of God on earth than,
as it were,
of sun in forest gloom."
— Meister Eckhart,
In Principio Erat Verbum
Related material:
yesterday's entry, and
(at Google News):
In other words:
|
Revelation for
April 16, 2008 —
day of the Pennsylvania
Clinton-Obama debate and
of the Pope’s birthday —
The Pennsylvania Lottery:
Make of this revelation
what you will.
My own interpretations:
the Lichtung of 4/13 and
the Dickung of page 441
of Heidegger’s
Basic Writings, where
the terms Lichtung and
Dickung are described.
See also “The Shining of
May 29” (JFK’s birthday).
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls:
A Tragi-Comedy
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men,
but rather of their folly"
— Four Quartets
"Dear friends, would those of you who know what this is all about please raise your hands? I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong– we never left the Garden. Look about you. This is paradise. It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot. We are all fools. Ha ha! Moriarty has made fools of all of us. But together– you and I, tonight– we'll bring him down."
— George C. Scott as Justin Playfair
[John Travolta runs on stage
and rushes for the door.]
For a religious interpretation
of the number 707, see
To Announce a Faith
(All Hallows' Eve, 2006)
and the following link
to a Tom Stoppard line
from the previous entry:
"Heaven, how can I
believe in Heaven?"
she sings at the finale.
"Just a lying
rhyme for seven!"
"Our existence is
beyond understanding.
Nobody has an answer."
— Anthony Hopkins
"Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz."
Related material:
Part I:
Overview of Unix
at pangea.stanford.edu
Last revision August 2, 2004
“The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals. Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.
The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands, and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the public domain that can be installed.
The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program. The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special version of the program.” (My italics.)
Part II:
Programs
From my paper journal
on the date
“Good Will Hunting”
was released:
Friday, December 5, 1997 To: The executive editor, The New York Times Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday Match the speaker with the speech–
|
||||
The Speaker | Frame of Reference | |||
1. | rosebud | A. | J. Paul Getty | The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97 |
2. | clock | B. | Joel Silver | Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94 |
3. | act | C. | Blanche DuBois | The Elysian Fields |
4. | waltz | D. | Bob Geldof | People Weekly 12/8/97 |
5. | temple | E. | St. Michael | Heaven’s Gate |
6. | watch | F. | Susanna Moore | In the Cut (pbk., Dec. ’96) p. 261 |
7. | line | G. | Joseph Lelyveld | Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97 |
8. | chair | H. | Kylie Minogue | Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97 |
9. | religion | I. | Carol Gilligan | The Garden of Good and Evil |
10. | wife | J. | John Travolta | “Michael,” the movie |
11. | harp | K. | Shylock | Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97 |
12. | Oscar | L. | Stephen King | The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317 |
“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”
Part III:
The Bourne Shell
“The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations.” –Wikipedia
See also
the recent comments
of root@matrix.net in
Peter Woit’s weblog.
“Hey, Carrie-Anne,
what’s your game now….”
— The Hollies, 1967
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Restoring the Faith By SELENA ROBERTS What good is a nadir if it’s denied or ignored? What’s the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can’t buy a cheap epiphany? |
For further details, see
Reminder
Reuters News Agency, By Mauricio Savarese SAO PAULO (Reuters) – The flames from Brazil’s worst plane crash were contained around dawn on Wednesday, but the smell of smoke and death wafted over travelers at Sao Paulo’s airport as a reminder of disaster…. The airport resumed flights on an alternate runway. Despite the deterioration of Brazil’s air safety record over the past year, Guilherme Braghetto, 72, showed little concern for his son, whom he brought to the airport for a flight to Goiania. ‘I feel for those who lost loved ones, but I don’t think lightning so strong will hit twice,’ he said. On September 29, 2006, a Boeing 737 operated by Brazilian carrier Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes crashed after clipping wings with a Legacy business jet over the Amazon rainforest, killing 154 people. |
Elsewhere:
Log24, Sept. 28, 2006:
Click on picture for a midi.
“…consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
‘perceptual universals.’
Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:
Shining Forth….”
The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 42:
“While out-of-body experiences
have the character of
a perceptual illusion
(albeit a complex and
singular one), near-death
experiences have all the
hallmarks of mystical
experience, as William
James defines it….”
— Oliver Sacks,
“A Bolt from the Blue”
The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 70:
— Title of a novel
by Willard Motley
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
From The Shining, Chapter 18:
"In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had leased the Overlook and reopened it as a writers' school. That had lasted one year…. Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go…. (In the room the women come and go)" –Quoted in Shining Forth
Photo: jewishbookweek.com
Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous
Time of this entry:
Noon.
"… the poet's search
for the same exterior
made / Interior"
— Wallace Stevens
"Imago. Imago. Imago."
— Wallace Stevens
(See previous entry.)
Stevens's phrase was
the epigraph to
The Imago Sequence,
a novella published
in May 2005.
From a review
(containing a spoiler)
of the novella:
The photographs can have an impact on the viewer, and have had a history of having a major impact on the owners. One has changed hands, and the new owner shows off his new prized objet d'art, and sets one of his employees the tasks [sic] of identifying the location of the third in the sequence…."
Greensburg, Kansas
prior to
May 4, 2007:
This may be taken
as a reference to
today's previous entry.
That entry, like
the novella
The Imago Sequence,
contains a sequence
of three photographs.
The sequence was made
a month or so after the
novella was published,
but I was unaware
until this afternoon
that the novella existed.
Besides
"Imago Imago Imago,"
two other phrases
come to mind…
The real estate motto
"Location, Location, Location"
and Stevens again—
"Adam in Eden was the
father of Descartes."
Happy Father's Day.
May '68 Revisited
"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'
'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.
'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'
Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."
— Emma-Kate Symons, Paris, May 1, 2007, in The Australian
Related material:
From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —
"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."
This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.
Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–
"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….
Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….
Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."
— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980
Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination, from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):
"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."
For a correction of Sollers's Johnson's damned nonsense, click here.
Update of May 29, 2014:
The error, as noted above, was not Sollers's, but Johnson's.
See also the post of May 29, 2014 titled 'Lost in Translation.'
— Daisy May Erlewine of
Big Rapids, Michigan
Related material:
Shine On, Hermann Weyl
and
the five Log24 entries of
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Cafe Society Part I –
Jack Torrance at
the Overlook Hotel:
Cafe Society Part II –
Don Imus at The FanHouse,
Friday the 13th:
Cafe Society Part III –
The Bank Dick at
the Black Pussy Cafe:
“Which way to the egress?”
A rectangle in memory of
Harvard mathematician
George Mackey:
The five Log24 entries ending at
7:00 PM on March 14, 2006,
the last day of Mackey's life:
A rectangle in memory of
artist Mark Rothko:
Sotheby's
Rothko Painting
By CAROL VOGEL of
THE NEW YORK TIMES,
"David Rockefeller plans to sell
a seminal painting by Mark Rothko
for what Sotheby's hopes will be
more than $40 million. Above,
a detail from the painting."
From the story:
"Mr. Rockefeller has owned the
painting since 1960, when he
bought it for less than $10,000….
He said that in November, during a
periodic appraisal of his art collection,
he noticed to his surprise that of all
his paintings, the Rothko had
appreciated in value the most.
'That got me thinking,' he said."
Art appreciation:
When Crayolas worked, I dreamed an angel, a bar of light, your messenger, beckoning from a wallpaper corner, blushing in the porcelain gas glow.
When Crayolas worked and chariots swung low,
Then all that died in life's longer year.
Still you were there, shining and warm
in another fair spring to live again
— Excerpt from C. K. Latham's |
Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
“Pictures of Nothing“–
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”
Related material:
The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″
— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162
“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department
“Bang.”
“…Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal….”
For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.
For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star and Shining Forth.
the time of this entry.
An interpretation:
762 feet is the height
of Honolulu’s
Diamond Head.
2/06 is the date of
a Log24 entry quoting
Indiana Jones:
“Legend says that when the
stones are brought together
the diamonds inside of them
will glow.”
Hour of the Wolf
Today is Schicksalstag, the “day of fate” in German history.
This entry’s time slot, 3:00 AM ET– which some say is the beginning of “the hour of the wolf*”– was reserved earlier for some entry appropriate to the day. (Actual time of this entry: about 12:48 PM ET).
Markus Wolf, East German Spymaster, Dies at 83 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006 Filed at 11:16 a.m. ET BERLIN (AP) — Markus Wolf, the ”man without a face” who outwitted the West as communist East Germany’s long-serving spymaster, died Thursday [Nov. 9, 2006]. He was 83. Wolf died in his apartment in Berlin, his stepdaughter Claudia Wall said in a statement. The cause of his death, on the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, was not released. |
Game Boy
Click on picture for details.
“Nine is a very
powerful Nordic number.” — Katherine Neville
|
* “Wolf” — See the etymological notes
in The Shining of May 29.
“When he was taken to church
he amused himself by factorizing
the numbers of the hymns.”
— C. P. Snow, foreword to
A Mathematician’s Apology,
by G. H. Hardy
An application of
lottery hermeneutics:
420 –> 4/20 –>
Hall of Shame,
Easter Sunday,
April 20, 2003;
145 –> 5*29 –> 5/29 –>
The Rev. Wright may also
be interested in the following
Related material:
“Shem was a sham….”
(FW I.7, 170 and Log24 Oct. 13),
and The Hebrew Word Shem:
This word occurs, notably, in Psalm (or “hymn”) 145.
See http://scripturetext.com/psalms/145-1.htm:
thy name
shem (shame)
an appellation, as a mark or memorial of individuality; by implication honor, authority, character — + base, (in-)fame(-ous), named(-d), renown, report.
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
See also the discussion of
subjective and objective
by Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance,
Part III,
followed by this dialogue:
Are We There Yet?
Chris shouts, “When are we
going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet,”
I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky
between the trees. As long as we
can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet.
The light will come through the trees
when we round the top.”
Related material:
The Boys from Uruguay,
Lichtung!,
The Shining of May 29,
A Guiding Philosophy,
Ticket Home.
The philosophy of Heidegger
discussed and illustrated
in the above entries may
be regarded as honoring
today’s 100th anniversary
of the birth of Heidegger’s
girlfriend, Hannah Arendt.
See also
Yesterday’s Pennsylvania
Mid-day 266
Evening 529
Related material:
The 266-Day Method
and
The Shining of May 29
(Wednesday, May 29, 2002) Commentary on Hexagram 29: — Richard Wilhelm, “How do we explain — Rhetorical question |
(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1. —holidays.net)
"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.
She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:
"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.
"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."
"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."
Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.
Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.
For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):
Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).
Illustration (see also yesterday evening):
Notes and frequency ratios
The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."
Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:
Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.
The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:
The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:
Click on picture for further details.
The Grace of Accuracy
In this morning's New York Times:
The Times describes yesterday's
memorial to Cy Feuer,
producer, notably, of the 1972
film version of "Cabaret"–
"Joel Grey sang 'Willkommen….'"
Related material:
a Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002–
Our Judeo-Christian Heritage: Two Sides of the Same Coin
|
— and Echoes
(August 11, 2006).
The New York Times on Sven Nykvist,
a cinematographer who died on Wednesday:
"Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination…."
— "Epilogue," by Robert Lowell,
in Day by Day, 1977
For further remarks on light,
see Shining Forth as well as
Tombstone (from May 17,
the date of Feuer's death).
Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.
Readings for the hour of the wolf:
Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.
“By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
John Huston
was born
100 years ago
on this date.
Huston directed
the film versions of
The Night of the Iguana
and
Under the Volcano.
“Borges’ seminal short story
El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan
(The Garden of Forking Paths)
is an early example of
many worlds in fiction.”
“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
— Voltaire
Let Noon Be Fair
Comment at Peter Woit’s weblog today:
“Would this be a good time to bring up the social habits of ancient Greek mathematicial philosophers?”
Answer to this rhetorical question:
“De veras! It’s so romantic!”
— Let Noon Be Fair, by Willard Motley
Related material:
In memory of Wallace Stevens,
Presbyterian saint,
whose feast is today
The following are extracts from recent reviews of On Late Style, a book by Edward Said.
John Updike on Adorno and Said:
“‘The Tempest,’ like Beethoven’s late compositions, refuses, in Adorno’s phrase, to ‘reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.’ Said wrote, ‘What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities.'”
Edward Rothstein on late style:
“Late style, Said suggests, expresses a sense of being out of place and time: it is a rejection of what is being offered. But listen to Beethoven or Strauss or Gould: the music is more like a discovery of place. That place is different from where one started; it may not even be what was once expected or desired. But it is there, in resignation and fulfillment, that late works take their stand, where even exile meets its end.”
The Jew wins.
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
“Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
Related material on philosophy:
The death of Hollywood agent
Ingo Preminger, brother of
Otto Preminger, on June 7,
the Log24 entry of June 7,
Figures of Speech, and
Ingo Preminger was also
the producer of the 1970 film MASH.
Related material on brotherhood
and the Korean War:
For John F. Kennedy's birthday:
See The Shining of May 29
from 2002
and the references to
the marriage theorem
in Dharwadker's Alleged Proof
from 2005.
"By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us."
— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
For related material on
academic darkness, see
Mathematics and Narrative.
“In The Painted Word, a rumination on the state of American painting in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe described an epiphany….”
— Peter Berkowitz, “Literature in Theory”
“I had an epiphany.”
— Apostolos Doxiadis, organizer of last summer’s conference on mathematics and narrative. See the Log24 entry of 1:06 PM last August 23 and the four entries that preceded it.
“… das Durchleuchten des ewigen Glanzes des ‘Einen’ durch die materielle Erscheinung“
— A definition of beauty from Plotinus, via Werner Heisenberg
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, Random House, 1973, page 118, quoted in The Shining of May 29
“Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion….”
— Adam White Scoville, quoted in Cubist Crucifixion, on Iain Pears’s novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Epiphany
“A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: ‘Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class– for Joyce knew no Greek– that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
— William T. Noon, Society of Jesus,
Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas,
Yale University Press, 1957
Epigraphs to The Shining, by Stephen King:
For more about shining, click on the star.
“The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public life…. Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished eyes. St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est. The Synoptics explain the true meaning of the word by adding ‘his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow,’ according to the Vulgate, or ‘as light,’ according to the Greek text. This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity.”
— The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912
From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:
“He’d toyed with ‘psi’ himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand– for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….
Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after ‘hidden variables’ to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….
Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem– they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.”
1971:
1994:
Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo
"Some call them
'Emissaries from Heaven,'
others say the 'New Kids'
or even the
'Children of the New Earth.'
They are best known as
the Indigo Children…."
— Brood Indigo
Children of the Damned (1963)
(Set at
St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church,
London)
Related material:
Shining Through
on
May 19, 2005,
St. Dunstan's Day–
This was the opening date for
the final episode of Star Wars.
From Log24,
back in time
a year and a day:
On December 3…
In 1947,
“A Streetcar Named Desire“
opened on Broadway.
In 1953,
the musical “Kismet“
opened on Broadway.
In 1960,
the musical “Camelot“
opened on Broadway.
See also a review of recent poetry by Paul Mariani– “Vivid images sometimes shine and Epiphany 2005. |
Part I: The Light
The Shining of May 29
and
Diamond Theory
Part II: The Darkness
Shining Through
From Dogma —
“You see, Malloy, I’m writing a novel about Los Angeles…. It’s a fantastic place, you know, Malloy…. It has a Spanish name, with religious Roman Catholic connotations….”
From timesonline.co.uk, quotes of the day on May 19, 2005:
“My granddaughter once said I have a big imagination. And I said, ‘What’s a big imagination?,’ and she said, ‘You remember what never happened.'”
— Isabel Allende, novelist, whose new book is based on the life of Zorro
“You all know I love LA, but tonight I really love LA.”
— Antonio Villaraigosa, voted in as the city’s first Hispanic mayor in more than a century, thanks voters
See also
Log24 entries ending at midnight
August 28, 2003, and
Log24 entries ending at midnight
May 19, 2005,
as well as the following illustrations
from a Monday entry and
from the entry it links to:
In 1936, Gone with the Wind
was published.
In 1971, Monica Potter
was born.
Sources:
Amazon.com and
Tall Tall Trees
Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?
Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.
Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.
Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?
Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses:
There is one story and one story only.
Dwell on her graciousness,
dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.
— Robert Graves,
To Juan at the Winter Solstice
Evil
Some academics may feel that a denunciation of an essay by one of their fellow academics as "evil" (see this morning's entry The Last Word) goes too far.
Here is a followup to that entry.
From the Riviera Presbyterian Church, a sermon quoting Madeleine L’Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time:
For a moment there was the darkness of space, then another planet. The outlines of this planet were not clean and clear. It seemed to be covered with a smoky haze. Through the haze Meg thought she could make out the familiar outlines of continents like pictures in her Social Studies books. "Is it because of our atmosphere that we can't see properly?" she asked anxiously. "No, Meg, yyou know thattt itt iss nnott tthee attmosspheeere," Mrs. Which said. "Yyou mmusstt bee brrave." "It's the Thing!" Charles Wallace cried. "It's the Dark Thing we saw… when we were riding on Mrs. Whatsit's back!" "Did it just come?" Meg asked in agony, unable to take her eyes from the sickness of the shadow which darkened the beauty of the earth. Mrs. Whatsit sighed. "No, Meg. It hasn't just come. It has been there for a great many years. That is why your planet is such a troubled one." "I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!" Mrs. Whatsit nodded. "Yes, Charles dear. We all do." "But what is it?" Calvin demanded. "We know that it's evil, but what is it?" "Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!" Mrs. Which's voice rang out. "Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee Ppowers of Ddarrkknessss!" "But what's going to happen?" Meg's voice trembled. "Oh, please, Mrs. Which, tell us what's going to happen!" "We will continue tto ffight!" Something in Mrs. Which's voice made all three of the children stand straighter, throwing back their shoulders with determination, looking at the glimmer that was Mrs. Which with pride and confidence. "And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe it's being fought, all through the cosmos… and some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy." "Who have some of our fighters been?" Calvin asked. "Oh, you must know them dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why, of course, Jesus!" "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by." "Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?" "And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!" Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!" "Watch!" the Medium told them. The earth with its fearful covering of dark shadow swam out of view and they moved rapidly through the Milky Way. And there was the Thing again. Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. No shadows. No fear. Only the stars and the clear darkness of space, quite different from the fearful darkness of the Thing. "You see!" the Medium cried, smiling happily. "It can be overcome! It is being overcome all the time!" And it is. Lift up your hearts, lift up your heads, catch the ball, practice Advent, see in the dark. You are a city set on a hill, whose light cannot be hid. said Jesus, and he believed it. |
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
The Shining of Apollo
"Plato's most significant passage may be found in Phaedrus 265b: 'And we made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysos, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love […] by Aphrodite and Eros' (trans. by H.N. Fowler, in the Loeb Classical Library)."
— Saverio Marchignoli, note on section 20, paragraphs 115-119, of the Discourse on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate) (1486) by Pico della Mirandola, considered the "Manifesto of the Renaissance."
Related material:
A Mass for Lucero,
The Shining of May 29,
Shining Forth,
Sermon for St. Patrick's Day, and the phrase
Diamond Struck by the Sun.
It’s that translucence, that light shining through, that brings us to tears, wherever we find it…. As Sidney Bechet put it, ‘You’ve got to be in the sun to feel the sun.'”
— Matt Glaser, Satchmo, the Philosopher,
Village Voice Jazz Supplement,
June 6-12, 2001
From a goodbye letter
by a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:
“Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
(See Shining Forth.)
The Sprite and the Synergist Three drinks later he was suddenly inspired. “What I need right now is a girl to lose myself in. That’s the only way to wait for a pattern to show.”
One of his reciprocal Rogues (he had a dozen alternate selves) answered, “Feel free, but you left your big red book in the workshop.” “Why, for jigjeeze sake, can’t I have the little black book, famed in song and story?” “Why can’t you remember a phone number? Never mind. Shall we join the ladies?” He made three calls, all negative. He had three more drinks, all positive. He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk’s cell, thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed p a t t e r n s |
… y eres tú y soy yo
y es un caminarte en círculo
dar a tus hechos dimensión de arco
y a solas con tu impulso decirte la palabra.
Established in 1916,
Montreat College is a private, Christian college located in a beautiful valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. |
April 1 at Noon
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday.”
— Bernard Holland, C12, N.Y. Times, 5/20/96
From Nov. 24, 2002:
Searched the web for “Joyce and Aquinas” “William T. Noon“. Results 1-5 of about 15:
Dogma
… Dogma, theological” — entry in the index (paper, not marble) to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, SJ, Yale U. Press 1957, 2nd printing 1963, page 162. …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-20-dogma.html – 9k
The Matthias Defense
… Contemplatio: aesthetic joy of, 54-5″ — index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, SJ, Yale University Press, second printing, 1963, page 162. …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-22-matthias.html – 6kWag the Dogma
… One economy would be to teach the trivium using only one book — Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon (Yale, 1957), which ties together philology, logic, and …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-04-06-wag.html – 6kShining Forth
… Please go away, Paz begged silently…. “De veras! It’s so romantic!”. — Let Noon Be Fair William T. Noon, SJ, Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-15-shining.html – 10kMidsummer Eve’s Dream
… notions… The quidditas or essence of an angel is the same as its form. (See William T. Noon, SJ, Joyce and Aquinas, Yale, 1957). …
m759.freeservers.com/1995-06-23-midsummer.html – 12k
See also Monday’s entry.
Click on picture for details.
Added at 1:11 PM Saturday:
From a discussion of gnostic heresies in today’s Tennessean.com:
Gnostic way a backlash against
lackluster sermons, worship ”Jesus is not a teacher in the conventional sense, according to the Gospel of Thomas, because people must come to knowledge themselves,” writes Marvin Meyer in The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus, the latest book to collect these hidden gospels and secret sayings of Jesus. ”Jesus was more like a bartender, in that he serves the intoxicating drink of knowledge, but people must drink for themselves.” |
“It’s quarter to three…”
See also
The Twelve Steps of Christmas
from Sinatra’s birthday last year.
Make a Différance
From Frida Saal's
Lacan Derrida:
"Différance is that which all signs have, what constitutes them as signs, as signs are not that to which they refer: i) they differ, and hence open a space from that which they represent, and ii) they defer, and hence open up a temporal chain, or, participate in temporality. As well, following de Sassure's famous argument, signs 'mean' by differing from other signs. The coined word 'différance' refers to at once the differing and the deferring of signs. Taken to the ontological level†, the differing and deferring of signs from what they mean, means that every sign repeats the creation of space and time; and ultimately, that différance is the ultimate phenomenon in the universe, an operation that is not an operation, both active and passive, that which enables and results from Being itself."
22. Without using the Pythagorean Theorem prove that the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle will have the length if the equal legs have the length 1. Suggestion: Consider the similar triangles in Fig. 39. 23. The ancient Greeks regarded the Pythagorean Theorem as involving areas, and they proved it by means of areas. We cannot do so now because we have not yet considered the idea of area. Assuming for the moment, however, the idea of the area of a square, use this idea instead of similar triangles and proportion in Ex. 22 above to show that x = .
— Page 98 of Basic Geometry, by George David Birkhoff, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, and Ralph Beatley, Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University (Scott, Foresman 1941) |
The above is from October 1999.
See also Naturalized Epistemology,
from Women's History Month, 2001.
Readings for
St. Patrick's Day
Time of this entry: 12:00:36 PM.
Hence,
"Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration."
Narrativity: Theory and Practice, by Philip John Moore Sturgess
Sturgess's book deals with the narrative logic of the above novels by Koestler and Conrad, as well as some Irish material:
Narrativity: Theory and Practice | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
These readings are in opposition to the works of Barbara Johnson published by Harvard University Press.
For some background, see The Shining of May 29 (JFK's birthday).
Discussion question:
In the previous entry, who represents the
Hexagram 36 "dark power"
“Mr. Denker was of the romantic school
of chess – always looking to attack.”
Related material:
From Endgame:
Black the knight upon that ocean,
Bright the sun upon the king.
Dark the queen that stands beside him,
White his castle, threatening.
In the shadows’ see a bishop
Guards his queen of love and hate.
Another move, the game will be up;
Take the queen, her knight will mate.
The knight said “Move, be done. It’s over.”
“Love and resign,” the bishop cried.
“When it’s done you’ll stand forever
By the darkest beauty’s side.”
From Log24.net, Feb. 18, 2003:
Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted
as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla,
time, according to one website, as
“the force which governs and stops time.”
See also the novel The Fermata,
by Nicholson Baker.
From an entry of Sunday, Jan. 2,
the day Denker died:
“Time had been canceled.”
— Stephen King, The Shining
From Truth and Style, a tribute
to the late Amy Spindler, style editor
of the New York Times Magazine:
“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
— Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995
From a related page,
The Crimson Passion:
“He takes us to the central activity
of mathematics—which is imagining….”
— Harvard Magazine on
Harvard mathematician
and author Barry Mazur.
For related material on Mazur, see
“The teenagers aren’t all bad.
I love ’em if nobody else does.
There ain’t nothing wrong
with young people.
Jus’ quit lyin’ to ’em.”
“Time had been canceled….
And here he was again, in the ballroom.”
— Stephen King, The Shining
From a year ago today:
“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
“720 in |
“What’s funny, honey?”
— The Shining
Counting Crows
on the Feast of St. Luke
"In the fullness of time,
educated people will believe
there is no soul
independent of the body,
and hence no life after death."
— Francis Crick, who was awarded
a Nobel Prize on this date in 1962
"She went to the men on the ground and looked at them and then she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had a coldwater spring rising out of a rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream, the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn crops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say."
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Today’s birthday: Anne Rice.
Vampire Quality
To Jacques Levy, cont.
and
to Richard Avedon, cont.
Levy directed “Red Cross,”
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
“the vampire quality
of language.”
_____________________
From Under the Volcano,
Chapter II:
Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.
Jesse McKinley in today’s New York Times:
“In a surprise entry to the fall season, Sam Shepard – actor, playwright and sexagenarian heartthrob – has written a new, sharp-elbowed farce….
The play, ‘The God of Hell,’ was written over the summer by Mr. Shepard, 60, who wanted to stage it before the Nov. 2 election….
In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Shepard said that the play was ‘a takeoff on Republican fascism, in a way,’ and that he thought it would be more pertinent if seen during the presidential campaign.”
See The Script:
“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”
Summary:
Aug 31 2004 07:31:01 PM |
Early Evening, Shining Star |
|
Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM |
Words and Images |
|
Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM |
Whale Rider |
|
Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM |
Heaven and Earth |
|
Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM |
Whale Road |
|
Cinderella’s Slipper |
||
Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM |
Another September Morn |
|
Noon |
||
De Nada | ||
Ite, Missa Est |
Symmetry and Change, Part 1…
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Hexagram 01
The Creative:
The movement of heaven
is full of power.
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…
For the thoughts on time |
Symmetry and Change, Part 2…
Words and Images
Hexagram 35
Progress:
The Image
The sun rises over the earth.
“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words “This is the best toy train set “As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.” |
For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —
Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:
Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.
September morn…
We danced until the night
became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
from some romantic play.
September morning still can
make me feel this way.
Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…
— Neil Diamond
Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:
The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges
“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”
Related material:
and
Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.
Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.
I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s
“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!”
Symmetry and Change, Part 3…
Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:
The Image
The lake rises
above the trees.
“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”
For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and
Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)
Symmetry and Change, Part 4…
Heaven and Earth
Hexagram 42
Increase:
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”
|
|
“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”
— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson
“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”
For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.
It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:
(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)
For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
Symmetry and Change, Part 5…
Whale Road
Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:
The Image
The mountain rests
on the earth.
“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”
— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf
Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:
This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:
Symmetry and Change, Part 6…
Cinderella’s Slipper
Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:
Symmetry and Change, Part 7…
Another September Morn
Hexagram 56:
The Wanderer
Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run…
Devil’s in the House of
The Rising Sun!
Symmetry and Change, Part 8…
Hexagram 25
Innocence:
Symmetry and Change, Part 9…
Hexagram 49
Revolution:
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Symmetry and Change, conclusion…
Ite, Missa Est
Hexagram 13
Fellowship With Men:
“A pretty girl —
is like a melody —- !”
For details, see
A Mass for Lucero.
Symmetry and Change, Part 1…
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Hexagram 01
The Creative:
The movement of heaven
is full of power.
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…
“What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men… The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening…. smiles when I say I don’t know. And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world’s notions of time and space, once leaned down… to ask me… ragged freshman… at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed.” For the thoughts on time |
For student
Anthony Fonseca,
Harvard ’04-’05:
Michael (Studio della Robbia, ca. 1475)
For teacher
Margaret Casey:
The Green and
Burning Tree, by
Chesca Potter
For the Voice of Gollum,
Peter Woodthorpe:
For further details, click on
any of the pictures above.
… y eres tú y soy yo
y es un caminarte en círculo
dar a tus hechos dimensión de arco
y a solas con tu impulso decirte la palabra.
dimensión de arco
(This last picture, taken by
Andrew from London,
was added at
11:30 AM ET Aug. 31, 2004.
For the excellent story that
accompanies the picture, see
“Early Evening, the Light
Beginning to Fade.”)
Instantia Crucis
"Francis Bacon used the phrase instantia crucis, 'crucial instance,' to refer to something in an experiment that proves one of two hypotheses and disproves the other. Bacon's phrase was based on a sense of the Latin word crux, 'cross,' which had come to mean 'a guidepost that gives directions at a place where one road becomes two,' and hence was suitable for Bacon's metaphor."
— The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
The high notes hit by Harriet Wheeler, Jen Slocumb, and Alanis Morissette can, I am sorry to say, be excruciating. (See previous entry.) I greatly prefer the mellow tones of Mary Chapin Carpenter:
"I guess you're never really all alone, |
From an entry of 12/22/02:
|
A white horse comes as if on wings.
— I Ching, Hexagram 22: Grace
See also
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,
Shining Forth, and
Carpenter's song quoted above
is from the album
Between Here and Gone,
released April 27, 2004.
Shape Note
A variation on the theme of the previous entry, Quartet.
The first |
Derek Taunt |
As in the previous entry, the illustration on the left is from a Log24 entry on the date of death of the person on the right.
Relevant quotations:
“It was rather like solving a crossword puzzle.”
— Derek Taunt, on breaking the Enigma Code
“… history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
“He [Dr. Taunt] and Angela [his wife] founded the Friends of Kettle’s Yard when the Arts Council cut its grant in 1984 and together organised countless fundraising activities for the museum and gallery.”
“How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment? Rear View Mirror sets out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses….”
— On a future Kettle’s Yard exhibition
Time past and time future
What might have been
and what has been
Point to one end,
which is always present.
“The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough.”
See the Log24 remarks on Jesus College— Taunt’s college– in a web page for June Carter Cash, The Circle is Unbroken.
By Esther Dyson, Editor at Large
Special to ZDNet
July 12, 2004, 3:00 AM PT
On social-networking Web services:
“Perhaps people will revert to private social networks–ones they manage locally….
Perhaps the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links–would become more apparent, and perhaps that would be a good thing.
I’m not sure how good that is as a business model, but it works as a social model.”
The beautiful, brilliant, and charming Esther Dyson seems to have suffered a temporary lapse in brilliance with the above remark on the strength of ties in social networks….
“the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links….”
Here are some useful references encountered while fact-checking Ms. Dyson’s assertion about the “law of networks” —
Links on Graph Theory and Network Analysis
The Navigability of Strong Ties:
Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology (pdf)
Modeling Coleman’s Friendly Association Networks (pdf)
The Strength of Weak Ties:
A Network Theory Revisited (pdf)
Scientific Collaboration Networks, II (pdf)
(Deals specifically with tie-strength computation.)
Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks
and, finally, a diagram of social networks in Shakespeare that conclusively demonstrates that there is no simple relationship between strength of ties and number of ties:
Cleopatra’s Social Ties (png)
Perhaps what Ms. Dyson had in mind was the following (courtesy of The Motley Fool):
“Metcalfe’s Law of Networks states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. Translated, this means that a network that is twice as large as another network will actually be at least four times as valuable. Why? Because four times as many interconnections are possible between participants in the larger network.
When you add a fourth person to a group of three, you don’t add just one more networked relationship. You add several. The new individual can network with all three of the existing persons, and vice versa. The Internet is no different. It became more and more valuable as the numbers of computers using it grew.”
For another perspective on this alleged law, from science fiction author Orson Scott Card, see The Group, a Log24 entry of Sept. 24, 2002.
Elsewhere, in a discussion of social-networking software:
“Esther Dyson starts with a request that people turn to their left and ask the person next to them, ‘Will you be my friend?’ The room erupts in chatter, but, of course, the problem is we don’t have enough information about one another to make a snap decision about that question.”
Obviously, ties resulting from such a request will be weak, rather than strong. However, as study of the above network-theory links will reveal, weak ties can sometimes be more useful than strong ties. An example:
Compare and contrast with
Ms. Dyson’s request to turn and
ask the Mr. Rogers question,
“Will you be my friend?”
The best response to this question
that I know of was contained in
a good-bye letter from a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:
“Si me deveras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
(See Shining Forth.)
Scoop
This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:
At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection. Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental. My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.
A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos. Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito. Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.
I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is. Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:
Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):
"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."
Loren Eiseley,
Notes of an Alchemist:
I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"
This entry was inspired by the following…
1. A British blogger’s comment today. This man, feeling like a miserable failure himself, was cheered up by the following practical joke: “If really fed up you could try putting in, miserable failure, (no quote marks) into Google and pressing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.”
2. The page, excerpts from which are shown above, that you get if you put lucky (no quote marks) into Google and press the “I’m feeling lucky” button.
3. My own entries of May 31 on Language Games and of June 1 on language and history, Seize the Day and One Brief Shining Moment.
4. The related June 1 entry of Loren Webster, Carpe Diem, on the Marilyn Monroe rose. Images from Carpe and Shining are combined below:
7. Yesterday’s entry about the alignment of stars, combined with the alignment of Venus with Apollo (i. e., the sun) scheduled for June 8.
All of the above suggest the following readings from unholy scripture:
A. The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK
B. “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen. The pump turns on in ecstasy. I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information. The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437
C. “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady. Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it. Live burials beside slow rivers. A pile of ears for a pile of arms. The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299
William Manchester, author of the JFK book with the above title, died today at 82.
Fallen from Heaven
On today's stories:
Recall, gentle readers, the reference to Lucifer in last midnight's story, "The Devil and Wallace Stevens," and the reference in yesterday's story, "Notes," to the film "2010" (1984). Here is a quote from a review of the story behind that film:
"If the coming of Lucifer in this story doesn't set your pulse racing and your mind whirring, then I don't know what will."
For some of us — students of Stephen King and Malcolm Lowry — the coming of Lucifer is not such a surprising event. See
Literary Archaeology
“Mrs. Who’s spectacles shone out
at them triumphantly,
‘And the light shineth in darkness;
and the darkness
comprehended it not.’ ”
— A Wrinkle in Time
See, too,
Shining Forth and
HURRY UP PLEASE
IT’S TIME
— T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land, II
“A Game of Chess”
“Make the white Queen run so fast
|
Jan. 9 obituary of Brian Gibson —
“In 2002 he was executive producer of the film ‘Frida,’ about the artist Frida Kahlo….”
Captured for the Queen
Joan Aiken
Photo by Alex Gotfryd,
circa 1972
Jan. 9 obituary of Joan Aiken —
“Joan Aiken was born in Rye, England, a daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken….”
“Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano must be, for anyone who loves the English language, a sheer joy.”
“He was never inclined to small talk.”
— Jan. 9 obituary of Steven Edward Dorfman, writer of questions (i.e., answers) for the game show “Jeopardy!”
“What’s the Hellfire Club?”
— Joan Aiken, beginning of the final chapter of The Shadow Guests
Note that Dorfman, Gibson, and Aiken
all died on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2004.
For some related material, see
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
“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
|
Related recreational reading:
Labyrinth |
|
2:17
“… both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Speaking of horror, today’s noon entry has a link to a page that references Stephen King’s The Shining.
On a 1970’s edition of
Stephen King’s The Shining:
“The page where Danny actually enters room 217 for the first time (King builds to this moment for a long time, it’s one of the more frightening passages in the book), is precisely on page 217. Scared the crap out of me the first time I read it.”
In honor of St. Thomas Stearns Eliot, whose feast day is today, of St. Emil Artin (see entries for St. Emil’s day, 12/20/03), and of Room 217, a check of last year’s 2/17 entries leads to St. Andrea’s weblog, which today, recalling the “white and geometric” prewar Berlin of the 12/20/03 entries, has Andrea looking, with Euclid, on beauty bare.
See also my entry “The Boys from Uruguay” and the later entry “Lichtung!” on the Deutsche Schule Montevideo in Uruguay.
We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13
For James and Lucia Joyce
In the Orbit of Genius —
TIME, Dec. 1, 2003:
"Once, when her mother asked if Joyce should visit her in the sanatorium, Lucia said, 'Tell him I am a crossword puzzle, and if he does not mind seeing a crossword puzzle, he is to come out.' "
Compare and contrast
with Finnegans Wake
From Roger Zelazny's Eye of Cat:
"A massive, jaguarlike form with a single, gleaming eye landed on the vehicle's hood forward and to the front. It was visible for but an instant, and then it sprang away. The car tipped, its air cushion awry, and it was already turning onto its side before he left the trail. He fought with the wheel and the attitude control, already knowing that it was too late. There came a strong shock accompanied by a crunching noise, and he felt himself thrown forward.
DEADLY, DEADLY, DEADLY…
Kaleidoscope turning… Shifting pattern within unalterable structure… Was it a mistake? There is pain with the power… Time's friction at the edges… Center loosens, forms again elsewhere… Unalterable? But – Turn outward. Here songs of self erode the will till actions lie stillborn upon night's counterpane. But – Again the movement… Will it hold beyond a catch of moment? To fragment… Not kaleidoscope. No center. But again… To form it will. To will it form. Structure… Pain… Deadly, deadly… And lovely. Like a sleek, small dog… A plastic statue… The notes of an organ, the first slug of gin on an empty stomach… We settle again, farther than ever before… Center. The light!… It is difficult being a god. The pain. The beauty. The terror of selfless – Act! Yes. Center, center, center… Here? Deadly…
necess yet again from bridge of brainbow oyotecraven stare decesis on landaway necessity timeslast the arnings ent and tided turn yet beastfall nor mindstorms neither in their canceling sarved cut the line that binds ecessity towarn and findaway twill open pandorapack wishdearth amen amenusensis opend the mand of min apend the pain of durthwursht vernichtung desiree tolight and eadly dth cessity sesame
We are the key."
Happy Rohatsu
“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”
— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk
On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)
Commentary on poetry of Buson:
Poetry as an open space
for lightening of Being“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”
In other words,
From Here to Eternity.
For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.
For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.
For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.
For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.
Magic Hawaii
Today, the birthday of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, is also the feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
In honor of Lewis:
Killer Radio, an entry of July 31, 2003, that contains the following…
“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
In honor of the angels:
Mathematics as an Adequate Language,
by Israel Gelfand, Sept. 2, 2003, which contains the following…
“Many people consider mathematics to be a boring and formal science. However, any really good work in mathematics always has in it: beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas. This is a strange combination. I understood earlier that this combination is essential on the example of classical music and poetry. But it is also typical in mathematics. It is not by chance that many mathematicians enjoy serious music.
This combination of beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas is, I think, common to both mathematics and music.”
These qualities seem also to be sought by practitioners of religion and physics… for example, by the spiritually-minded physicist in Preuss’s Broken Symmetries. Skeptics might prefer, to the word “religion,” the word (pronounced with a sneer) “magic.”
What do we find if, following in the footsteps of Gelfand and Preuss, we do a Google search on the following words…
The search yields two results:
For a follow-up to the poem, see
The Shining of Lucero.
These two selections, both on the theme of light and darkness, offer a language that is perhaps more adequate than mathematics for dealing with the nature of the High Holy Days. For a more lighthearted approach to these concerns, also with a Hawaiian theme, see
The Shining of Park Place
Today is the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writer, dean of Harvard Medical School, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and author of at least seven hymns.
It is also the feast day of Saint Lewis Henry Redner, author of the tune now known as “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Redner was church organist for Phillips Brooks, who wrote the “Bethlehem” lyrics but then published the hymn under the facetious name “St. Louis,” a deliberate misspelling of Redner’s name.
Redner died on August 29, 1908, at the Marlborough Hotel in Atlantic City.
Since Holmes Sr. was both a poet and the father of a famous lawyer, a reference to poet-lawyer Wallace Stevens seems in order.
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
From Best Atlantic City Hotels:
Bally’s Park Place, located at Park Place and Boardwalk, partially stands on the site of the former Marlborough Hotel.
For some background on the theology of hotels, see Stephen King’s classic The Shining and my own note, Shining Forth.
Let us pray that any haunting at the current Park Place and Boardwalk location is done by the blessed spirit of Saint Lewis Redner.
Atlantic City |
Postscript of 7:11 PM —
From an old Dave Barry column:
“Beth thinks the casinos should offer more of what she described as ‘fun’ games, the type of entertainment-for-the-whole-family activities that people engage in to happily while away the hours. If Beth ran a casino, there would be a brightly lit table surrounded by high rollers in tuxedos and evening gowns, and the air would be charged with excitement as a player rolled the dice, and the crowd would lean forward, and the shout would ring out…
‘He landed on Park Place!’ “
Charles Lindbergh seems to have done
just that. See yesterday’s entry
and today’s New York Times story
Catholic Tastes
In memory of New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday, July 26, 2003:
Nous Voici Dans La Ville – A Christmas song from 15th century France (midi by John Philip Dimick).
In memory of my own youth:
Formaggio Address Paseo del Conquistador # 144 Food Type Italian Dress Casual Tel 777-313-0584 Comment Chef Lorenzo Villagra is formally trained in Italian Cuisine. Great food and views of the valley of Cuernavaca. |
In memory of love:
Volverán del amor en tus oídos
Las palabras ardientes a sonor;
Tu corazón de su profundo sueño
Tal vez despertará;
Pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,
Como se adora a Dios ante su altar,
Como yo te he querido…desengáñate,
¡Así no te querrán!
— from “Rima LIII“
by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
(1836-1870)
Translation by Young Allison, 1924:
Burning words of love will come
Again full oft within thine ears to sound;
Perchance thy heart will even be aroused
From its sleep profound;
But mute and prostrate and absorbed,
As God is worshipped in His holy fane,
As I have loved thee…undeceive thyself:
Thou wilt not be thus loved again!
The Robert Lowell version of
the complete poem by Bécquer:
Will Not Come Back
(Volverán)
Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak:
but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty
and my good fortune… as if they knew our names–
they’ll not come back. The thick lemony honeysuckle,
climbing from the earthroot to your window,
will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;
but these… like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,
the tears of day–they’ll not come back…
Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;
but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,
as men adore God at the altar, as I love you–
don’t blind yourself, you’ll not be loved like that.
“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.” — Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).
|
|
Lucero |
See also |
See, too, my entry for the feast day of
Saint Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,
which happens to be December 22.
Realism in Literature:
Under the Volcano
Mexican Volcano Blast
|
Here are 3 webcam views of the volcano. Nothing to see at the moment.
Literary background:
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,
and, as background for today’s earlier entry on Platonism and Derrida,
For more on Plato and Christian theology, consult the highly emotional site Further Into the Depths of Satan: “…in The Last Battle on page 170 [C. S.] Lewis has Digory saying, ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.’ Now, Lewis calls Plato ‘an overwhelming theological genius’ (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 80)….” The title “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” along with the volcano readings above, suggests a reading from a related site: Gollum and the Mystery of Evil: “Gollum here clearly represents Frodo’s hidden self. It is ‘as if we are witnessing the darkest night of the soul and one side attempting to master the other’ (Jane Chance 102). Then Frodo, whose finger has been bitten off, cries out, and Gollum holds the Ring aloft, shrieking: ‘Precious, precious, precious! My Precious! O my Precious!’ (RK, VI, 249). At this point, stepping too near the edge, he falls into the volcano, taking the Ring with him. With this, the mountain |
In the above two-step vignette, the part of Gollum is played by the author of “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” who called C. S. Lewis a fool† “that was and is extremely useful to his father the devil.”
† See Matthew 5:22: “…whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”
Wake
From my entry of Epiphany 2003,
Dead Poet in the City of Angels:
Certain themes recur in these entries. To describe such recurrent themes, in art and in life, those enamoured of metaphors from physics may ponder the phrase “implicate order.” For an illustration of at least part of the implicate order, click here . |
On this, the day when Orangemen parade in Northern Ireland, it seems appropriate to expand on the two links I cited last Epiphany.
For the implicate order and Finnegans Wake, see sections 33 and 34 of
The second link in the box above is to the Chi-Rho page in the Book of Kells. For a commentary on the structure of this page and the structure of Finnegans Wake, see
Regime Change
at the New York Times:
With Honors
Departing New York Times executive editor
Howell Raines:
"Remember, when a great story breaks out,
go like hell."
Returning |
Good Will's |
From the date "Good Will Hunting" was released:
Friday, December 5, 1997 "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday." To: The executive editor, The New York Times Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday Match the speaker with the speech — |
||||
The Speaker | Frame of Reference | |||
1. | rosebud | A. | J. Paul Getty | The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97 |
2. | clock | B. | Joel Silver | Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94 |
3. | act | C. | Blanche DuBois | The Elysian Fields |
4. | waltz | D. | Bob Geldof | People Weekly 12/8/97 |
5. | temple | E. | St. Michael | Heaven's Gate |
6. | watch | F. | Susanna Moore | In the Cut (pbk., Dec. '96) p. 261 |
7. | line | G. | Joseph Lelyveld | Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97 |
8. | chair | H. | Kylie Minogue | Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97 |
9. | religion | I. | Carol Gilligan | The Garden of Good and Evil |
10. | wife | J. | John Travolta | "Michael," the movie |
11. | harp | K. | Shylock | Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97 |
12. | Oscar | L. | Stephen King | The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317 |
Postscript of June 5, 2003:
"…while the scientist sees everything that happens
in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens
in one point of time … all forming an instantaneous
and transparent organism of events…."
Enough
Commentary on the May 15 death of
June Carter Cash, which I learned of
at the New York Times site
at about 2:10 AM today:
Jesus College
In light of yesterday's Jesus College entry
("The Only Pretty Ring Time," May 15),
the following song lyrics seem relevant.
While walking out one evening
not knowing where to go
Just to pass the time away
before we held our show
I heard a little mission band
playing with all their might
I gave my soul to Jesus
and left the show that night.
The day will soon be over
and evening will begun;
No more gems to be gathered
so let us all press on.
When Jesus comes to claim us
and says it is enough
The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough.
June Carter Cash sings this song
◊ an "old shape-note gospel song that A.P. Carter found |
To the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits):
Have a Good Friday, Traitors
†
Prompted by Pilate’s question “What is truth?” and by my March 24 attack on Noam Chomsky, I decided this afternoon to further investigate what various people have written about Chomsky’s posing of what he calls “Plato’s problem” and “Orwell’s problem.” The former concerns linguistics, the latter, politics. As my March 24 entry indicates, I have nothing but contempt for both Chomsky’s linguistics and Chomsky’s politics. What I discovered this afternoon is that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, in 2001 appointed a Chomskyite, David W. Lightfoot, as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions — Plato’s and Orwell’s problem — Chomsky again demonstrates his unequalled capacity to integrate vast amounts of material.” — David W. Lightfoot, review of Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language
What, indeed, is truth? I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown. For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.
See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”
Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day. See
“Examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Motto of Plato’s Academy
† The Exorcist, 1973
Palm Sunday, Part II:
Cold Mountain
From the notes to the CD of Songs From the Mountain (John Herrmann, Dirk Powell, Tim O’Brien):
“John [Herrmann, banjo player] would like to dedicate his work on this recording to Philip Kapleau Roshi, Kalu Rimpoche, and Harada Tangen Roshi, who all know the way to Cold Mountain….”
See Buddha’s Birthday (April 8) and The Diamond Project.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
— Tom Eliot, The Waste Land
“I am thinking…
… of the midnight picnic
Once upon a time….”
— Suzanne Vega, “Tom’s Diner“
Once upon a time… |
|
“De donde crece la palma” — Song lyric
From On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry, Princeton University Press, 1999, a quotation from Homer —
“in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”
See also A Mass for Lucero and The Shining of Lucero.
— George Balanchine
2:23 PM
Sequel
to the previous two entries
"This world is not conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond…."
— Emily Dickinson
Today's birthday: dancer/actress Ann Miller.
"In 1937, she was discovered by Lucille Ball…."
Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz,
and Ann Miller, cast photo
from Too Many Girls (1940)
"Just goes to show star quality shines through…."
— Website on Too Many Girls"It'll shine when it shines."
— Folk saying, epigraph to The Shining"Shine on, you crazy diamond."
— Pink Floyd"Well we all shine on…"
— John Lennon, "Instant Karma"
Bright Star
From a Spanish-English dictionary:
lucero m. morning or evening star: any bright star….
Today is Reba McEntire’s birthday.
” ‘I know what it is you last saw,’ she said; ‘for that is also in my mind. Do not be afraid! But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against the Enemy. I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!’
She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its ray glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood.
‘Yes’, she said, divining his thought, ‘it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-Bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper.’ “
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Related material on telepathy:
Shining Forth and Naturalized Epistemology
Related material on rings, and another musical Reba:
Leonard Gillman interview, Part I and Part II
Gillman, a pianist, is co-author of Rings of Continuous Functions.
Release Date
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar —
“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title
“I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.”
— Bob Dylan
“The theme of the film is heavily influenced by its release date….” — Jonathan L. Bowen, review of “Modern Times” At left:
|
5:10 AM Feb. 1
|
9:00 AM Feb. 1
TIME |
From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):
“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….
This is false, but suggestive.
Checked, corrected, and annotated
In the Labyrinth of Memory
Taking a cue from Danny in the labyrinth of Kubrick’s film “The Shining,” today I retraced my steps.
My Jan. 6 entry, “Dead Poet in the City of Angels,” links to a set of five December 21, 2002, entries. In the last of these, “Irish Lament,” is a link to a site appropriate for Maud Gonne’s birthday — a discussion of Yeats’s “Among School Children.”
Those who recall a young woman named Patricia Collinge (Radcliffe ’64) might agree that her image is aptly described by Yeats:
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat
This meditation leads in turn to a Sept. 20, 2002, entry, “Music for Patricias,” and a tune familiar to James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake,” the lyrics of which lead back to images in my entries of Dec. 20, 2002, “Last-Minute Shopping,” and of Dec. 28, 2002, “Solace from Hell’s Kitchen.” The latter entry is in memory of George Roy Hill, director of “The Sting,” who died Dec. 27, 2002.
The Dec. 28 image from “The Sting” leads us back to more recent events — in particular, to the death of a cinematographer who won an Oscar for picturing Newman and Redford in another film — Conrad L. Hall, who died Saturday, Jan. 4, 2003.
For a 3-minute documentary on Hall’s career, click here.
Hall won Oscars for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “American Beauty,” and may win a posthumous Oscar for “Road to Perdition,” last year’s Irish-American mob saga:
“Tom Hanks plays Angel of Death Michael Sullivan. An orphan ‘adopted’ by crime boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), Sullivan worships Rooney above his own family. Rooney gave Sullivan a home when he had none. Rooney is the father Sullivan never knew. Too bad Rooney is the
Rock Island
branch of Capone’s mob.”
In keeping with this Irish connection, here is a set of images.
American Beauty |
|
A Game of Chess |
I need a photo-opportunity. I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard. — Paul Simon |
“Like a chess player, he knows that to win a tournament, it is sometimes wise to offer a draw in a game even when you think you can win it.”
— Roger Ebert on Robert Duvall’s character in “A Civil Action”
Director Steven Zaillian will take part in a tribute to Conrad L. Hall at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards ceremony on Jan 11. Hall was the cinematographer for Zaillian’s films “A Civil Action” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”
“A Civil Action” was cast by the Boston firm Collinge/Pickman Casting, named in part for that same Patricia Collinge (“hollow of cheek”) mentioned above.
See also “Conrad Hall looks back and forward to a Work in Progress.” (“Work in Progress” was for a time the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)
What is the moral of all this remembrance?
An 8-page (paper) journal note I compiled on November 14, 1995 (feast day of St. Lawrence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin, allegedly born in 1132) supplies an answer in the Catholic tradition that might have satisfied Joyce (to whom 1132 was a rather significant number):
How can you tell there’s an Irishman present
at a cockfight?
He enters a duck.
How can you tell a Pole is present?
He bets on the duck.
How can you tell an Italian is present?
The duck wins.
Every picture tells a story. |
Doctorow’s Epiphany
E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.
The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.
Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”
William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:
A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:
Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.From a website on author Willard Motley:
“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”
See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”
Nightmare Alley
Tonight’s site music in the garden of good and evil is “Hooray for Hollywood,” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer:
Hooray for Hollywood.
You may be homely in your neighborhood,
But if you think you can be an actor,
see Mr. Factor,
he’d make a monkey look good.
Within a half an hour,
you look like Tyrone Power!
Hooray for Hollywood!
From Pif magazine:
Nightmare Alley (1947)
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Reviewed by Nick Burton
“Edmund Goulding’s film of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley may just be the great forgotten American film; it is certainly the darkest film that came from the Hollywood studio system in the ’40s….
A never better Tyrone Power stars as Stan Carlisle, a small-time carny shill…. Stan shills for mind reader Zeena…. The… pretty ‘electric girl’… tells Stan that Zeena… had a ‘code’ for the mind-reading act… Stan… decides to seduce… Zeena in hopes of luring the code from her.”
The rest of this review is well worth reading, though less relevant to my present theme — that of my
which points out that the article on “nothing” is on page 265 of The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. (This is also the theme of yesterday’s journal entry “Last-Minute Shopping.”) Here is another work that prominently features “nothing” on page 265… As it happens, this is a web page describing a mind-reading act, titled simply
“Imagine this: A spectator is invited to take a readable and 100% examinable, 400 page, 160,000 word novel, open it to any page and think of any word on that page. Without touching the book or approaching the spectator, you reveal the word in the simplest, most startlingly direct manner ever! It truly must be seen to be believed.
The ultimate any-word-on-any-page method that makes all other book tests obsolete….
All pages are different.
Nothing is written down.
There are no stooges of any kind. Everything may be examined….
‘Throw away your Key. This is direct mindreading at its best.'”
From Finnegans Wake, page 265: “…the winnerful wonnerful wanders off, with hedges of ivy and |
Hooray.
Mercer’s lyrics are from the 1937 film
From a Spanish-English dictionary:
lucero m. morning or evening star:
any bright star….
2. hole in a window panel for the
admission of light….
Sal a tu ventana,
que mi canto es para ti….
Lucero, lucero, lucero, lucero
See In Mexico City, a Quiet Revelation,
in the New York Times of December 5.
The photo, from a different website, is
of a room by the architect Luis Barragán.
From the Nobel Prize lecture of Octavio Paz
on December 8, 1990 — twelve years ago today:
"Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present."
Today's site music is courtesy of the Sinatra MIDI Files.
For Otto Preminger's birthday:
Lichtung!
Today's symbol-mongering (see my Sept. 7, 2002, note The Boys from Uruguay) involves two illustrations from the website of the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, in Uruguay. The first, a follow-up to Wallace Stevens's remarks on poetry and painting in my note "Sacerdotal Jargon" of earlier today, is a poem, "Lichtung," by Ernst Jandl, with an illustration by Lucia Spangenberg.
manche meinen |
|
by Ernst Jandl |
The second, from the same school, illustrates the meaning of "Lichtung" explained in my note The Shining of May 29:
"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty when we see how the theorem 'fits' in its place, how it sheds light around itself, like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, page 132 of Indiscrete Thoughts, Birkhauser Boston, 1997
From the Deutsche Schule Montevideo mathematics page, an illustration of the Pythagorean theorem:
Braucht´s noch Text? |
A Logocentric Archetype
Today we examine the relativist, nominalist, leftist, nihilist, despairing, depressing, absurd, and abominable work of Samuel Beckett, darling of the postmodernists.
One lens through which to view Beckett is an essay by Jennifer Martin, "Beckettian Drama as Protest: A Postmodern Examination of the 'Delogocentering' of Language." Martin begins her essay with two quotations: one from the contemptible French twerp Jacques Derrida, and one from Beckett's masterpiece of stupidity, Molloy. For a logocentric deconstruction of Derrida, see my note, "The Shining of May 29," which demonstrates how Derrida attempts to convert a rather important mathematical result to his brand of nauseating and pretentious nonsense, and of course gets it wrong. For a logocentric deconstruction of Molloy, consider the following passage:
"I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones…. I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones….But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four."
Beckett is describing, in great detail, how a damned moron might approach the extraordinarily beautiful mathematical discipline known as group theory, founded by the French anticleric and leftist Evariste Galois. Disciples of Derrida may play at mimicking the politics of Galois, but will never come close to imitating his genius. For a worthwhile discussion of permutation groups acting on a set of 16 elements, see R. D. Carmichael's masterly work, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, New York, 1956.
There are at least two ways of approaching permutations on 16 elements in what Pascal calls "l'esprit géométrique." My website Diamond Theory discusses the action of the affine group in a four-dimensional finite geometry of 16 points. For a four-dimensional euclidean hypercube, or tesseract, with 16 vertices, see the highly logocentric movable illustration by Harry J. Smith. The concept of a tesseract was made famous, though seen through a glass darkly, by the Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle in her novel for children and young adults, A Wrinkle in Tme.
This tesseract may serve as an archetype for what Pascal, Simone Weil (see my earlier notes), Harry J. Smith, and Madeleine L'Engle might, borrowing their enemies' language, call their "logocentric" philosophy.
For a more literary antidote to postmodernist nihilism, see Archetypal Theory and Criticism, by Glen R. Gill.
For a discussion of the full range of meaning of the word "logos," which has rational as well as religious connotations, click here.
In honor of
William F. Buckley’s birthday
Results of a Google search –
Searched the web for “Joyce and Aquinas” “William T. Noon“. Results 1-5 of about 15:
Dogma
… Dogma, theological” — entry in the index (paper, not marble) to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, SJ, Yale U. Press 1957, 2nd printing 1963, page 162. …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-20-dogma.html – 9k – Nov. 23, 2002 – Cached – Similar pages
The Matthias Defense
… Contemplatio: aesthetic joy of, 54-5″ — index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William
T. Noon, SJ, Yale University Press, second printing, 1963, page 162. …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-22-matthias.html – 6k – Nov. 23, 2002 – Cached – Similar pagesWag the Dogma
… One economy would be to teach the trivium using only one book — Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon (Yale, 1957), which ties together philology, logic, and …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-04-06-wag.html – 6k – Nov. 23, 2002 – Cached – Similar pagesShining Forth
… Please go away, Paz begged silently…. “De veras! It’s so romantic!”. — Let Noon
Be Fair William T. Noon, SJ, Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University …
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-15-shining.html – 10k – Nov. 23, 2002 – Cached – Similar pagesMidsummer Eve’s Dream
… notions… The quidditas or essence of an angel is the same as its
form. (See William T. Noon, SJ, Joyce and Aquinas, Yale, 1957). …
m759.freeservers.com/1995-06-23-midsummer.html – 12k – Nov. 23, 2002 – Cached – Similar pages
Birthdate of Hermann Weyl
Result of a Google search.
Category: Science > Math > Algebra > Group Theory
Weyl, H.: Symmetry. |
Sponsored Link Symmetry Puzzle |
Quotation from Weyl’s Symmetry:
“Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect.”
In honor of Princeton University, of Sylvia Nasar (see entries of Nov, 6), of the Presbyterian Church (see entry of Nov. 8), and of Professor Weyl (whose work partly inspired the website Diamond Theory), this site’s background music is now Pink Floyd’s
You Crazy Diamond.” |
Updates of Friday, November 15, 2002:
In order to clarify the meaning of “Shine” and “Crazy” in the above, consult the following —
To accompany this detailed exegesis of Pink Floyd, click here for a reading by Marlon Brando.
For a related educational experience, see pages 126-127 of The Book of Sequels, by Henry Beard, Christopher Cerf, Sarah Durkee, and Sean Kelly (Random House paperback, 1990).
Speaking of sequels, be on the lookout for Annie Dillard’s sequel to Teaching a Stone to Talk, titled Teaching a Brick to Sing.
Readings for the Oct. 18
Feast of St. Luke
A fellow Xangan is undergoing a spiritual crisis. Well-meaning friends are urging upon her all sorts of advice. The following is my best effort at religious counsel, meant more for the friends than for the woman in crisis.
Part I… Wallace Stevens
From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
Ox Emblematic of St. Luke. It is one of the four figures which made up Ezekiel’s cherub (i. 10). The ox is the emblem of the priesthood….
The dumb ox. St. Thomas Aquinas; so named by his fellow students at Cologne, on account of his dulness and taciturnity. (1224-1274.)
Albertus said, “We call him the dumb ox, but he will give one day such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other.” (Alban Butler.)
From Wallace Stevens, “The Latest Freed Man“:
It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.
Part II… The Rosy Cross
Readings:
“He recited from the anonymous Muses Threnody of 1648:
For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
We have the Mason Word and second sight
Things for to come we can see aright.”
Part III… Stevens Again
A major critical work on Wallace Stevens that is not unrelated to the above three works on the Rosicrucian tradition:
Leonora Woodman, Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1983
From the Department of English, Purdue University:
Leonora Woodman came to Purdue in 1976. In 1979, she became Director of Composition, a position she held until 1986…. At the time of her death in 1991, she was in the midst of an important work on modernist poetry, Literary Modernism and the Fourth Dimension: The Visionary Poetics of D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Hart Crane.
For more on Gnostic Christianity, see
The Shining of Lucero
From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:
The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”
The Eye of the Beholder:
When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.
— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“
From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:
He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….
Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.
……………… Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”
“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”
“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”
“Bohr’s words?”
“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”
……………… Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.” “We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”
To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in CuernavacaFrom On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….
I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”
“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”
…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”
……………… Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”
“No I’m not.”
……………… “Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.”
From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:
Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card….
For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.
For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”
Birthdate of film producer Darryl F. Zanuck
Among Zanuck’s films were “All about Eve” and “Viva Zapata!”
Bright Star
I do not have a photograph of Lucero Hernandez, the subject of my journal notes
Shining Forth and
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
In keeping with Zanuck’s commandment that “The kid stays in the picture!” —
The photo at left, of a very young actress, captures some of Lucero’s beauty. |
Center for Global Education,
Augsburg College
Semester-abroad Program in Mexico
“The program is based in Cuernavaca, a city known for its perennial springtime (70-80 degrees). Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, is about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Both the city and the state are important in Mexican history: the palace of the conqueror Hernan Cortez borders the central plaza in Cuernavaca and Morelos is known as “the cradle of the Mexican revolution” of 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata, who was born in a small town near Cuernavaca. A city of more than one million, Cuernavaca is also known for its innovative grass-roots education programs, economic cooperatives, and base Christian communities inspired by liberation theology.”
In honor of
Pope Callistus III, and
all of whom died on this date:
A lavender love butterfly vignette…
If you remember something there
That glided past you,
Followed close by heavy breathing,
Don't be concerned. It will not harm you;
It's only me, pursuing something
I'm not sure of.
and a
But seriously…
A few words in memory of a great mathematician, André Weil, who died on August 6, 1998:
"I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it?"
— Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Under the Volcano
There is a link on the Grand Finale site above to a site on British Columbia, which to Lowry symbolized heaven on earth. See also my website Shining Forth, the title of which is not unrelated to the August 6, 1993 encyclical of Pope John Paul II.
Powered by WordPress