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From a Log24 search for "Strand" —

Related literary remarks —

From Didion’s Play It As It Lays :

Everything goes.  I am working very hard at
not thinking about how everything goes. 
I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching
but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8

From Joni Mitchell —

"Don't it always seem to go . . . ."

From Wallace Stevens:

"Let be be finale of seem."

"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville.
Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one." 

"A very short space of time through very short times of space….
Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"

— James Joyce, Ulysses , Proteus chapter

See also the previous post and Masks of the Illuminati .

* See that title in this journal.

From "A Piece of the Storm,"
by the late poet Mark Strand —

"A snowflake, a blizzard of one…."

“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”

— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama

Related material:

1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”–

2. Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and

3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”–

Today's birthdays: Mike Nichols and Sally Field.

From A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar:

Prologue

Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

John Forbes Nash, Jr. — mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine — had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you…?"

Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."

What I  take seriously:

Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis, by George F. Simmons, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963 

An Introduction to Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Lynn H. Loomis, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1953

"Harmonic Analysis as the Exploitation of Symmetry — A Historical Survey," by George W. Mackey, pp. 543-698, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1980

Walsh Functions and Their Applications, by K. G. Beauchamp, Academic Press, New York, 1975

Walsh Series: An Introduction to Dyadic Harmonic Analysis, by F. Schipp, P. Simon, W. R. Wade, and J. Pal, Adam Hilger Ltd., 1990

The review, by W. R. Wade, of Walsh Series and Transforms (Golubov, Efimov, and Skvortsov, publ. by Kluwer, Netherlands, 1991) in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, April 1992, pp. 348-359

Music courtesy of Franz Schubert.

What is Truth?

My state of mind before reading the New York Times

My state of mind after reading the New York Times

In light of the entry below (“Mass Confusion,” Oct. 19, 2002), some further literary reflections seem called for. Since this is, after all, a personal journal, allow me some personal details…

Yesterday I picked up some packages, delivered earlier, that included four books I had ordered. I opened these packages this morning before writing the entry below; their contents may indicate my frame of mind when I later read this morning’s New York Times story that prompted my remarks. The books are, in the order I encountered them as I opened packages,

• Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish (1982, reprinted in August 2002 as a Tom Doherty Associates Starscape paperback)
• Truth, edited by Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, from the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (Oxford University Press, 1999, reprinted as a paperback, 2000)
• The Savage and Beautiful Country, by Alan McGlashan (1967, reprinted in a revised and expanded edition in 1988 as a Daimon Verlag paperback)
• Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Lynn H. Loomis (Van Nostrand, 1953… a used copy)

Taken as a whole, this quartet of books supplies a rather powerful answer to the catechism question of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”…

The answer, which I pray will some day be delivered at heaven’s gate to all who have lied in the name of religion, is, in Jack Nicholson’s classic words,

You can’t handle the truth!  

Arrow in the Blue

A description by Arthur Koestler (born Sept. 5, 1905) of a

close encounter with the divine:

“…a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue.”

Koestler also mentions the “blue Andalusian sky.” 

Some thoughts suggested by the above and by the Sept. 5, 2002, New York Times story on the first anniversary of the murder of the Mexican lawyer

María de los Angeles Tames….

1. The blue of the Andalusian sky is essentially the same as the blue of the sky above Baja California.  See photographs of the last Jesuit mission in Mexico,

Santa María de los Angeles. 

2.  A Google search for “blue Andalusian sky” yielded two results: the Koestler page quoted above, and a page on the Gypsy film “Vengo.”  For a reasonable likeness of St. Sara, patron saint of the Gypsies, also known as The Dark Lady, also known as Kali, see the poster of dancer

Sara Baras at Flamenco-world.com. 

For the music Sara dances to, composed and played by Jesús de Rosario, listen to audio clips at

Juana la Loca: Vivir por Amor.

3. For an American version of The Dark Lady, see an homage from Catalonia to

Emmy Lou Harris. 

For a Harris song that seems appropriate to the blue-sky theme above, see

Thanks to You.

Miss Sauvé

Homily on Flannery O’Connor

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

Chapter 3 :

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

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

   — Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

American Literature Web Resources:

Flannery O’Connor

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.”

Encounter – 02/17/2002:

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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