("Raiders of the Lost Spell" continues.)
The above flashback to a 2002 post was suggested by a search in
this journal for "Firebird" that yielded, as the only result . . .
http://www.amazon.com/
Witch-Seldom-Firebird-Nancy-Springer/dp/0142302201/.
That URL connects to The Hex Witch of Seldom at Amazon.com.
That book was reportedly published by Firebird on September 16, 2002,
the date of the above Log24 post.
In memory of an emeritus MIT professor who reportedly
died on October 8, 2021 —
"Thinking starts with a problem
Located somewhere between behaviorism and introspection,
the school of gestalt psychology teaches that thinking starts
with a problem, a difficulty, a contradiction. It sounds like a truism,
yet is widely ignored in practice. Teachers say their aim is to get
their students to think, yet in classroom after classroom they
violate this psychological principle by giving the solution before
there is any problem."
— Arthur Mattuck in . . .
Continues.
Lyrics from Bruce Springsteen and
the Pointer Sisters —
Well, Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah
Baby you can bet a love they couldn't deny
My words say split, but my words they lie
Cause when we kiss, ooh, fire
{Bridge}
Oh fire
Kisses like fire…
Burn me up with fire
I like what you're doin now, fire
Touchin' me, fire
Touchin' me, burnin me, fire
Take me home
Related remarks (suggested by Emma Stone's appearance
in the "Drop Me a Line" post of August 30, 2015) —
Image from a post of November 13, 2006.
See as well Schoolgirl Tetrahedron.
Related lyrics from Bruce Springsteen and
the Pointer Sisters —
Well, Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah
Baby you can bet a love they couldn't deny
My words say split, but my words they lie
Cause when we kiss, ooh, fire
{Bridge}
Oh fire
Kisses like fire…
Burn me up with fire
I like what you're doin now, fire
Touchin' me, fire
Touchin' me, burnin me, fire
Take me home
Continued from Nobel Note (Jan. 29, 2014).
From Tradition in Action , "The Missal Crisis of '62,"
remarks on the revision of the Catholic missal in that year—
"Neither can the claim that none of these changes
is heretical in content be used as an argument
in favor of its use, for neither is the employment of
hula girls, fireworks, and mariachis strictly speaking
heretical in itself, but they belong to that class of novel
and profane things that do not belong in the Mass."
— Fr. Patrick Perez, posted Sept. 11, 2007
See also this journal on November 22, 2014…
… and on Bruce Springsteen's birthday this year —
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
|
Heisenberg on Heraclitus
From Physics and Philosophy , by Werner Heisenberg, 1958, reprinted by Penguin Classics, 2003—
Page 28—
… In the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus the concept of Becoming occupies the foremost
place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. The difficulty, to reconcile
the idea of one fundamental principle with the infinite variety of phenomena, is solved for him by
recognizing that the strife of the opposites is really a kind of harmony. For Heraclitus the world is
at once one and many, it is just 'the opposite tension' of the opposites that constitutes the unity
of the One. He says: 'We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all
things come into being and pass away through strife.'
Looking back to the development of Greek philosophy up to this point one realizes that it has
been borne from the beginning to this
Page 29—
stage by the tension between the One and the Many. For our senses the world consists of an
infinite variety of things and events, colors and sounds. But in order to understand it we have to
introduce some kind of order, and order means to recognize what is equal, it means some sort
of unity. From this springs the belief that there is one fundamental principle, and at the same
time the difficulty to derive from it the infinite variety of things. That there should be a material
cause for all things was a natural starting point since the world consists of matter. But when one
carried the idea of fundamental unity to the extreme one came to that infinite and eternal
undifferentiated Being which, whether material or not, cannot in itself explain the infinite variety
of things. This leads to the antithesis of Being and Becoming and finally to the solution of
Heraclitus, that the change itself is the fundamental principle; the 'imperishable change, that
renovates the world,' as the poets have called it. But the change in itself is not a material cause
and therefore is represented in the philosophy of Heraclitus by the fire as the basic element,
which is both matter and a moving force.
We may remark at this point that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the
doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word 'fire' by the word 'energy' we can almost repeat
his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance
from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is
that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the
elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen in many experiments on
the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light
and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world. But this
comparison of Greek philosophy with the ideas of modern science will be discussed later.
* See earlier uses of the phrase in this journal. Further background— Hopkins and Heraclitus.
Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, on the way to the battle at Gettysburg, remembers his boyhood.
"Maine… is silent and cold.
Maine in the winter: air is darker, the sky is a deeper dark. A darkness comes with winter that these Southern people don't know. Snow falls so much earlier and in the winter you can walk in a snowfield among bushes, and visitors don't know that the bushes are the tops of tall pines, and you're standing in thirty feet of snow. Visitors. Once long ago visitors in the dead of winter: a preacher preaching hell-fire. Scared the fool out of me. And I resented it and Pa said I was right.
Pa.
When he thought of the old man he could see him suddenly in a field in the spring, trying to move a gray boulder. He always knew instinctively the ones you could move, even though the greater part was buried in the earth, and he expected you to move the rock and not discuss it. A hard and silent man, an honest man, a noble man. Little humor but sometimes the door opened and you saw the warmth within a long way off, a certain sadness, a slow, remote, unfathomable quality as if the man wanted to be closer to the world but did not know how. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still: 'What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it."
— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War
An online tribute to Tim Russert
this morning had a song by a
Russert favorite, Bruce Springsteen:
and the
five Log24 entries
ending on July 20, 2006,
which contain the following
example of what might be
caled "sacred order"
(see yesterday's entries)–
See also "Grave Matters" here
on November 8, 2006, and
the same date four years earlier,
as well as
"O Grave, Where Is Thy Victory?"
(pdf), a lecture by Jack Miles
at Clark Art Institute
(see Oct. 7-9, 2002)
on November 9, 2002.
The Miles lecture may be of
more comfort to Russert's
mourners than the
cross/wheel symbolism,
which has its dark side.
The cross, the wheel,
the Catholic faith, and
Russert's field of expertise,
politics, are of course
notably combined in the
crux gammata, discussed
here in a 2002 entry on
the Triumph of the Cross
and the Death of Grace
(Princess of Monaco).
Here is a rhetorical exercise
for Jesuits that James Joyce
might appreciate:
Discuss Bobbi’s “little squares”
of bread as the Body of Christ.
Formulate, using Santayana’s
criteria, a definition of beauty
that includes this sacrament.
Entries since Xanga’s
August 10 Failure:
Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:00 PM
A Thorny Crown of…
From the first episode of
the television series
“The West Wing“:
|
Original airdate: Sept. 22, 1999 MARY MARSH CALDWELL MARY MARSH JOSH TOBY [A stunned silence. Everyone stares at Toby.] TOBY (CONT.) JOSH |
Going There, Part I
|
Crown of Ideas Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003. From his New York Times obituary: ” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ ” For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe: “I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.” Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas“?
“Crown of Thorns” Varnedoe’s death coincided with “To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….” — Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
Going There, Part II
|
Simple, Bold, Clear Art historian Kirk Varnedoe was, of course, not the only one to die on the day of the Great Blackout. Claude Martel, 34, a senior art director of The New York Times Magazine, also died on Thursday, August 14, 2003. Janet Froelich, the magazine’s art director, describes below a sample of work that she and Martel did together: “A new world of ideas”
Froelich notes that “the elements are simple, bold, and clear.” For another example of elements with these qualities, see my journal entry The flag design in that entry
Note that the elements of the flag design have the qualities described so aptly by Froelich– simplicity, boldness, clarity:
They share these qualities with the Elements of Euclid, a treatise on geometrical ideas. For the manner in which such concepts might serve as, in Gopnik’s memorable phrase, a “thorny crown of ideas,” see “Geometry for Jews” in ART WARS: Geometry as Conceptual Art. See also the discussion of ideas in my journal entry on theology and art titled Understanding: On Death and Truth and the discussion of the word “idea” (as well as the word, and the concept, “Aryan”) in the following classic (introduced by poet W. H. Auden):
|
Saturday, August 16, 2003 6:00 AM
Varnedoe’s Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ “
For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see
Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe:
“I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.”
Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas”?
“Crown of Thorns”
Cathedral, Brasilia
Varnedoe’s death coincided with
the Great Blackout of 2003.
“To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….”
— Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, August 15, 2003 3:30 PM
ART WARS:
The Boys from Brazil
It turns out that the elementary half-square designs used in Diamond Theory
also appear in the work of artist Nicole Sigaud.
Sigaud’s website The ANACOM Project has a page that leads to the artist Athos Bulcão, famous for his work in Brasilia.
From the document
Conceptual Art in an
Authoritarian Political Context:
Brasilia, Brazil,
by Angélica Madeira:
“Athos created unique visual plans, tiles of high poetic significance, icons inseparable from the city.”
As Sigaud notes, two-color diagonally-divided squares play a large part in the art of Bulcão.
The title of Madeira’s article, and the remarks of Anna Chave on the relationship of conceptual/minimalist art to fascist rhetoric (see my May 9, 2003, entries), suggest possible illustrations for a more politicized version of Diamond Theory:
|
Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Is it safe?
These illustrations were suggested in part by the fact that today is the anniversary of the death of Macbeth, King of Scotland, and in part by the following illustrations from my journal entries of July 13, 2003 comparing a MOMA curator to Lady Macbeth:
|
Die Fahne Hoch, |
|
Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:45 AM
Famous Last Words
The ending of an Aug. 14 Salon.com article on Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion”:
” ‘The Passion’ will most likely offer up the familiar puerile, stereotypical view of the evil Jew calling for Jesus’ blood and the clueless Pilate begging him to reconsider. It is a view guaranteed to stir anew the passions of the rabid Christian, and one that will send the Jews scurrying back to the dark corners of history.”
— Christopher Orlet
“Scurrying”?! The ghost of Joseph Goebbels, who famously portrayed Jews as sewer rats doing just that, must be laughing — perhaps along with the ghost of Lady Diana Mosley (née Mitford), who died Monday.
This goes well with a story that Orlet tells at his website:
“… to me, the most genuine last words are those that arise naturally from the moment, such as
Joseph Goebbels |
Voltaire’s response to a request that he foreswear Satan: ‘This is no time to make new enemies.’ ”
For a view of Satan as an old, familiar, acquaintance, see the link to Prince Ombra in my entry last October 29 for Goebbels’s birthday.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:00 PM
Best Picture
For some reflections inspired in part by
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:44 PM
Atonement:
A sequel to my entry “Catholic Tastes” of July 27, 2003.
Some remarks of Wallace Stevens that seem appropriate on this date:
“It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.”
— Esthétique du Mal, Wallace Stevens
“Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? ….
Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s
Iciest core, a north star, central
In our oblivion, of summer’s
Imagination, the golden rescue:
The bread and wine of the mind….”
— Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Wallace Stevens
Etymology of “Atonement”:
“Middle English atonen, to be reconciled, from at one, in agreement“
At One
“… We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good….
… we and the diamond globe at last were one.”
— Asides on the Oboe, Wallace Stevens
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 1:52 PM
Franken & ‘Stein,
Attorneys at Law
“Tue August 12, 2003 04:10 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fox News Network is suing humor writer Al Franken for trademark infringement over the phrase ‘fair and balanced’ on the cover of his upcoming book, saying it has been ‘a signature slogan’ of the network since 1996.”
|
Franken: |
‘Stein: |
For answers, click on the pictures
of Franken and ‘Stein.
Mental Health Month:
Springtime for Wagner
“And now what you’ve all been waiting for…
— Colin Hay as Zac in the film “Cosi“
“When I sought those who would sympathize with my plans, I had only you, the friends of my particular art, my most personal work and creation, to turn to.”
— Wagner’s address at the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone of the Festival Theater in Bayreuth, May 22 (Wagner’s birthday), 1872
“The new computer package DISCRETA which was created in Bayreuth is in the process of permanent development.”
— “A Computer Approach to the Enumeration of Block Designs Which Are Invariant With Respect to a Prescribed Permutation Group”
The above is a preprint from Dresden.
See, too, the work of Bierbrauer, who received his doctorate at Mainz in 1977 and taught at Heidelberg from 1977 to 1994. Bierbrauer’s lecture notes give a particularly good background for the concepts involved in my Diamond Theory, in the tradition of Witt and Artin. See
Introduction to Group Theory
and Applications,
by Jürgen Bierbrauer, 138 pp., PostScript
|
“June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear.” “Socialism or Death” “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” For what it’s worth, both Bradbury and Benny are from Waukegan, Illinois. |
“Through the unknown, remembered gate….”
— T. S. Eliot, epigraph to
Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by
Miss Sauvé
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short story …. the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125]
….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.
— Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
— Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:
“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….
…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s. It’s gone now — like so many things.”
Ten thousand places
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”
Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:
… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”
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