Thursday, October 1, 2020
The Stevens Motive
Friday, July 2, 2021
The Motive for Metaphor
The above title is from Wallace Stevens.
Related meditations — This journal on March 9, 2021, and . . .
See as well recent posts in this journal
now tagged The Chinese Room Experiment.
For the source of the above Wallace Stevens phrase, see (for instance) . . .
The above weblog post on Stevens is dated November 17, 2010.
Posts in this weblog on that same date and its eve are now tagged . . .
Related Scholarly Remarks:
Friday, July 5, 2019
The Motive for Metaphor
"János Bolyai was a nineteenth-century mathematician who
set the stage for the field of non-Euclidean geometry."
— Transylvania Now , October 26, 2018
From Coxeter and the Relativity Problem —
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Motives for Metaphor
This post is a scholium for Joyce Carol Oates, who has
written a very readable essay in the current New York
Review of Books titled
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.
Oates mentions three times, without attributing it to the late poet
Wallace Stevens, the phrase "the motive for metaphor."
The following paragraphs are by Denis Donoghue, from
a piece titled "The Motive for Metaphor" in the Winter 2013
issue of The Hudson Review —
Related material in this journal: Copleston and a fellow Jesuit.
Friday, September 27, 2019
The Black List
"… Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out
how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with
algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have
been any algebra' …."
— Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962,
page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by
Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25
Metaphor —
Algebra —
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The 16 Dirac matrices form six anticommuting sets of five matrices each (Arfken 1985, p. 214):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. SEE ALSO: Pauli Matrices REFERENCES: Arfken, G. Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 3rd ed. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 211-217, 1985. Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshitz, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. "Algebra of Dirac Matrices." §22 in Quantum Electrodynamics, 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, pp. 80-84, 1982. Bethe, H. A. and Salpeter, E. Quantum Mechanics of One- and Two-Electron Atoms. New York: Plenum, pp. 47-48, 1977. Bjorken, J. D. and Drell, S. D. Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Dirac, P. A. M. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1982. Goldstein, H. Classical Mechanics, 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 580, 1980. Good, R. H. Jr. "Properties of Dirac Matrices." Rev. Mod. Phys. 27, 187-211, 1955. Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha: Dirac Matrices CITE THIS AS: Weisstein, Eric W. "Dirac Matrices."
From MathWorld— A Wolfram Web Resource. |
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Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
A Defense of Meaning
|
"In certain moods the horror of a word is the meaning it defends against all comers; so metaphor is the device by which one undermines that defense. In Stevens’ 'Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,' the someone contemplates 'A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.' If you put a pineapple together and see metaphors becoming more profuse, you release yourself from psychological determinations, you become a performative gesture and are happy to find yourself in that state. But then a scruple may assert itself:
Presumably a bad metaphor murders a good one: bad in the sense of telling lies, ignoring the truths that can’t honorably be ignored."
— Denis Donoghue, "The Motive for Metaphor," |
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Philosophy with a Hammer
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation— the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X."
— Wallace Stevens,
"The Motive for Metaphor" (1947)
See also a search in this journal for Philosophy Hammer.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
The XYZ of Being
From a recent Gitterkrieg post:
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also the cover of the February 2015
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .
"Omega is as real as we need it to be."
— Burt Lancaster in The Osterman Weekend
Thursday, January 8, 2015
ABC Verlag, Zurich
"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
See also Cube Trinity in this journal.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Saturday June 28, 2008
The Motive for Metaphor
You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.
In the same way, you were happy in spring
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon–
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound–
Steel against intimation– the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
— Wallace Stevens,
Transport to Summer (1947)
Friday, January 7, 2005
Friday January 7, 2005
“A corpse will be
transported by express!“
(Ideograms for Guy Davenport;
see also previous entry.)
“At the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot
Illustration from
Tuesday, April 22, 2003:
Temptation
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The Star |
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Related material:
The Devil and Wallace Stevens
Friday, September 27, 2002
Friday September 27, 2002
Modern Times
ART WARS September 27, 2002:
From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October 2002, p. 563:
"To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns. Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications. Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things. These explorations led to…. [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story)."
— David W. Henderson, Cornell University
From an earlier log24.net note:
|
ART WARS September 12, 2002
John Frankenheimer's film "The Train" —
Und was für ein Bild des Christentums |
From Today in Science History:
Locomotion No. 1
| [On September 27] 1825, the first locomotive to haul a passenger train was operated by George Stephenson's Stockton & Darlington's line in England. The engine "Locomotion No. 1" pulled 34 wagons and 1 solitary coach…. This epic journey was the launchpad for the development of the railways…. |
From Inventors World Magazine:
Some inventions enjoyed no single moment of birth. For the steam engine or the motion-picture, the birth-process was, on close examination, a gradual series of steps. To quote Robert Stevenson: 'The Locomotive is not the invention of one man, but a nation of mechanical engineers.' George Stevenson (no relation) probably built the first decent, workable steam engines… Likewise the motion camera developed into cinema through a line of inventors including Prince, Edison and the Lumière brothers, with others fighting for patents. No consensus exists that one of these was its inventor. The first public display was achieved by the Lumière brothers in Paris.
From my log24.net note of Friday, Sept. 13th:
"Dante compares their dance and song to God’s bride on earth, the Church, when she answers the morning bells to rise from bed and 'woo with matins song her Bridegroom's love.' Some critics consider this passage the most 'spiritually erotic' of all the one hundred cantos of the Comedy."
From my log24.net note of September 12:
Everybody's doin'
a brand new dance now…