Related material:
Click on the “spider“
symbol below.
Questions or comments on the sermon:
webweaver@genetics.med.harvard.edu
For the religious significance of the
logo on the left, see Why Me?
For the religious significance of the
logo on the right, see Palgrave.com.
Related material:
previous entry and Style.
3/16 Continued
The New Yorker, issue dated March 7, 2005, on Hunter S. Thompson:
“… his true model and hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He used to type out pages from ‘The Great Gatsby,’ just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ which was published, after a prolonged and agonizing compositional nightmare, in 1972. That book was supposed to be called ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ a portentous age-of-Aquarius cliché that won Thompson a nice advance but that he naturally came to consider, as he sat wretchedly before his typewriter night after night, a millstone around his neck.”
by Steven H. Cullinane
on March 16, 2001
“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I of The Great Gatsby
“Thanks for the tip, American Dream.”
— Spider-Girl, in Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001
Spider is THE journalist of the future. He smokes, he does drugs, and he kicks ass. The drugs are going to eventually kill him but not before he gets his way. And his way is the demise of the failed American dream. Although full of hate, he cares about his city. All he wants to bring the world is truth. Spider Jerusalem, conscience of the City. Frightening thought, but he's the only one we've got."
— What Gritty No Nonsense Comic Book Character are You? brought to you by Quizilla
The following references to the Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" seem relevant:
Star Wars,
continued
The Eight
Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:
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Aristotle: |
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Less impressive, but not
completely without interest,
is the six-pointed star:
This symbol consists of
two triangles
representing
male and female,
fire and water,
up and down,
etc., etc., etc.
For some deeper properties
of the number eight, see a
Log24.net entry of 4/4/03.
Dirty Trick
Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.
From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:
|
I He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardising the lives of Resistance fighters? “If you’re in a war,” said Hampshire, “you can’t start thinking, ‘Well I can’t lie to a man who’s going to be shot tomorrow and tell him that he isn’t.’ ” But what the whole anecdote, and its incessant retelling, revealed was that Hampshire had, in fact, thought precisely what he said was unthinkable, and that whichever of the two decisions he finally took lay heavy on his conscience ever afterwards. Indicatively, too, it was especially loathsome to him because, although he did not say this in so many words, the traitor was almost a mirror image of himself – a cultivated young intellectual, looking like a film star, much influenced by elegant literary stylists – except that, in the traitor’s case, his literary mentors were fascist. II It is hard to know how Hampshire’s academic career was vitiated by the scandal over his affair with Ayer’s wife Renee, whom he married in 1961 after a divorce in which he was named as co-respondent. Even if less a matter of the dons’ moral conviction than their concern over how All Souls would appear, the affair caused a massive furore…. |
From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire’s death:
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I “Hemingway called it a dirty trick. It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space…. the dirty Ordeal by — Jack Kerouac in Desolation Angels II The New Yorker of June 14 & 21, 2004: …in ‘The Devil’s Eye,’ Bergman’s little-known comedy of 1960. Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated, falling to his knees, he addresses her thus: ‘First, I’ll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch I saw. Then I’ll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel wonderfully cool. And I’ll breakfast on one of those sour apples down by the gate. After that, I shall go back to |
Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise. Some evidence in Hampshire’s favor:
His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999. Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire’s death.
As for the day of death itself, consider the following remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry’s book:
“But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty.”
In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell — Holy Saturday,
“He was trained by the British MI6
intelligence agency for an operation
known as X2 – or ‘double cross.’ “
|
From Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” |
Star Wars
In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:
“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”
Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004. From a journal entry of my own on that date:
This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.
Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star. Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:
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Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?” Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that. She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” — Fritz Leiber, |
From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:
|
From Borges’s “The Aleph“:
From The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
Lena Olin and Harrison Ford |
Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:
|
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. — “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality |
Harrowing
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)
Comment by Stephen Spender:
“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”
— Introduction to Under the Volcano
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
William Golding:
“Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.
‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’
Simon shook.
‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’
Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
‘Pig’s head on a stick.’
‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “
“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”
— Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004
Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:
“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”
— Under the Volcano
From the official
Anne Francis Web Site:
Come into my parlor….
For some background,
see the use of the word
“spider” in Under the Volcano:
by Patrick A. McCarthy.
See, too, Why Me?
Just Say NO
 |
 |
For more on the above “spider” symbol, see
ART WARS for Trotsky’s Birthday
(Oct. 26, 2003), Parts I and II
and the site from which
the above figure is taken,
For some Chinese poetic justice, see
Library of Paradise, and
See, too, the Chinese character for “end”
used to sell the work of Ian Fleming:
Note, in Endings and Beginnings, the strong resemblance between this character and the name of the Chinese-American architect of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. Then meditate on the following passage by Amherst graduate Stephen Mitchell:
“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
and knows,”
Robert Frost wrote,
looking in from the outside.
Looking out from the inside,
Chuang-tzu wrote,
“When we understand, we are at
the center of the circle,
and there we sit while Yes and No
chase each other
around the circumference.”
A view of the Robert Frost Library
from the inside is available in the entry
mentioned above.
See, too, my entry
of July 28, 2002.
For the Man in Black
Lyrics: Arizona Star
“Shinin’ like a diamond
she had tombstones in her eyes.”
A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor
A book: Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber
This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:
“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days. In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around. Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such. I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God. Bright light would always wipe them out.”
— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies
Related entries:
The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and
Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”
For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.
Morning Flight
“I’m working on a morning flight to anywhere but here….
It’s not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again”
— Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM
Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.
See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure’s central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united. For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry. This is one interpretation of the eightfold “Spider” symbol
which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology). This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents “Shiva and Kali united in love,” according to Leiber. (See my journal note “Biblical Proportions,” written on this date in 1997.)
For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.
For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see
Plain Hunt Maximus
This midnight’s site music is in honor of Sinatra’s first recording session for Reprise on December 19, 1960 (which included “Ring-a-Ding-Ding”).
See also The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, and this applet for devising your own peal of changes.
Those who prefer Disney may go to this web page and click on the title “The Bells of Notre Dame” for a different midi. For Mary Gaitskill‘s more mature approach to Victor Hugo’s classic, click here.
For the feast day of
St. Ingrid Bergman:
Like Shakespeare, Ingrid Bergman was born and died on the same date… In her case, August 29.
To honor her performance in “Spellbound,” here is a copy of the first crossword puzzle ever published.
“This puzzle appeared in the November 1874 number of ‘St. Nicholas.’
ACROSS, from top to bottom:
1. A consonant. 2. A number. 3. Measures of distance. 4. An abyss. 5. A consonant.
DOWN, from right to left:
1. A consonant. 2. A snare. 3. A name. 4. The point of anything small. 5. A consonant.
S
T E N
M I L E S
P I T
MThe across words are different from the down words, but there is a direct relation between them: one is the reversible form of the other.”
One might also compare an eerie sound clip from the Oscar-winning score of “Spellbound” with a weird clip from “Selim,” by the World Saxophone Quartet. The latter is from the album “Selim Sivad” (Miles Davis backwards). One reviewer claims that this album displays “astonishing, telepathic group interplay.” This may or may not be true; if the services of a psychiatrist are required to help decide the issue, let us hope she is as attractive as Saint Ingrid.
The above remarks are, of course, intended as a partial antidote to the music inevitably associated with Bergman… “As Time Goes By.” (Please do not play it again, Sam.) Of course, the World Saxophone Quartet may be too powerful an antidote… It reminds one, as does the greatly superior weird music from the “Forbidden Planet” soundtrack, of Monsters from the Id. From such monsters, let us pray to Saint Ingrid for deliverance.
Keats and the Web
From a letter of John Keats on the Web:
“There is the passage in a famous letter of John Keats, 19th February, 1818:
Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel — the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury.”
This seems not unrelated to the observations below on commonplace books and Web logs.
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