Interspaces
Friday, January 12, 2024
From Sources of the Self , by Charles Taylor
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Saturday, August 13, 2011
Taylor Made
The Montreal Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has been reviewed
online recently in The New Yorker and The Nation .
Here is some background from this journal and from a 1989 book.
Update of 5:01 AM August 14— See also Valéry and the Self in this journal.
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Friday, May 15, 2020
Review
Charles Taylor,
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
Related material for comedians —
Literature ad absurdum —
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Sunday, February 11, 2018
Visions of Hell
In memory of a Manhattan art figure
who reportedly died on
Wednesday, February Seventh, 2018 —
ABOUT 'ASCENSION VARIATIONS'
“Ascension Variations is a magical adventure
woven from grand and pedestrian touches, and
in the end the space itself is the star —
or Ms. Monk's transformation of it.
For an hour, we've lived in a spiral,
where up is down and down is up.
It's a sacred place.”
— Gia Kourlas, The New York Times , March 6, 2009
See also the previous post — yesterday's Into the Upside Down —
and two posts of February Seventh:
Conceptual Art and Conceptual Minimalism.
For some related artistic remarks, see this journal on March 6-7, 2009.
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Saturday, January 14, 2017
1984: A Space Odyssey
See Eightfold 1984 in this journal.
Related material —
"… the object sets up a kind of
frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany."
"… Instead of an epiphany of being,
we have something like
an epiphany of interspaces."
— Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self ,
Cambridge University Press, 1989
"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 University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1962
Click to enlarge:
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Friday, January 13, 2017
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Eightfold Epiphany
The reported death today at 105 of an admirable war correspondent,
"a perennial fixture at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong,"
suggested a search in this journal for that city.
The search recalled to mind a notable quotation from
a Montreal philosopher —
“… the object sets up a kind of
frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
For some context, see St. Lucia's Day, 2012.
See also Epiphany 2017 —
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Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Style News
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The Argument
The title of a review of Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age
was quoted here at noon last Saturday —
"The Place of the Sacred
in the Absence of God."
My comment from last Saturday —
"The place of the sacred is not, perhaps,
Davos, but a more abstract location."
A sequel —
"Religious Experience and the Modern Self,"
by Ross Douthat in The New York Times
today at 4:25 PM ET —
"The argument comes from the Canadian
philosopher Charles Taylor and his
doorstop-thick magnum opus A Secular Age …."
Related material:
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Thursday, February 13, 2014
Plan 9
The final link in today's previous post leads to
a post whose own final link leads to…
Thursday, December 13, 2012
|
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
Space
… The sequel to Vibrations
Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —
“… the object sets up a kind of
frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
Or place.
See A Prince of Darkness
and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Chromatic Plenitude
(Continued from 2 PM ET Tuesday)
“… the object sets up a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
— Charles Taylor, "Epiphanies of Modernism,"
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
"The absolute consonance is a state of chromatic plenitude."
"… the nearest precedent might be found in Becky Sharp .
The opening of the Duchess of Richmond's ball,
with its organization of strong contrasts and
display of chromatic plenitude, presents a schema…."
— Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow:
Color Design in The 1930s , University of Texas Press,
2007, page 142
Note the pattern on the dance floor.
(Click for wider image.)
"At the still point…" — Four Quartets
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Thursday, July 5, 2012
Claves Regni Caelorum
Or: Night of Lunacy
From 9 PM Monday —
Note that the last line, together with the page number, forms
a sort of key—
The rest of the story—
For one reinterpretation of the page number 304, see a link—
Sermon— from Tuesday's post Diamond Speech.
The linked-to sermon itself has a link, based on a rereading
of 304 as 3/04, to a post of March 4, 2004, with…
WW and ZZ
as rendered by figures from the Kaleidoscope Puzzle—
.
Yesterday morning the same letter-combinations occurred
in a presentation at CERN of a newly discovered particle—
(Click for context.)
Since the particle under discussion may turn out to be the
God particle, it seems fitting to interpret WW and ZZ as part
of an imagined requiem High Mass.
Ron Howard, director of a film about CERN and the God particle,
may regard this imaginary Mass as performed for the late
Andy Griffith, who played Howard's father in a television series.
Others may prefer to regard the imaginary Mass as performed
for the late John E. Brooks, S. J., who served as president of
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., for 24 years.
Griffith died Tuesday. Brooks died Monday.
For some background on the Holy Cross, see posts of
Sept. 14 (Holy Cross Day) and Sept. 15, 2010—
For more lunacy, see…
Continue a search for thirty-three and three
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
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Saturday, April 7, 2012
The Void
(Continued from March 10, 2012)
An inaccuracy in a passage linked to yesterday—
“The created universe, the whole of things, is,
in words from Joyce’s Ulysses , ‘predicated on the void.'”
The “predicated” phrase seems to be absent from Ulysses .
Joyce does, however, have the following (from ricorso.net)—
| “William Blake” (March 1912) – cont.: ‘Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michaelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimising space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. [See note, infra.]To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. Not with the eye, then, but beyond the eye, the soul and the supreme move must look, because the eye, which was born in the night while the soul was sleeping in rays of light, will also die in the night. […] The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of th dark ocean of God. And althought he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, this sons of God with the sons of [MS ends here].’ (Critical Writings, 1959, 1966 Edn., pp.221-22; quoted [in part] in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.330.) [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, via index, or direct.] Note – for “void” [supra] , cf. Stephen in “Scylla & Charybdis”: ‘Fatherhood […] is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void.’ (Ulysses, Penguin Edn. 1967, p.207; [my itals.].) |
Some academics may prefer a more leftist version of
“predicated on the void”—
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Tuesday, April 5, 2011
ART WARS continued
Escape from Kitsch Mountain
"Why you gotta be so mean?" — Taylor Swift (see last night)
This song includes, as part of the hook, the recurring phrase
"Someday I'll be livin' in a big ol' city."
From a big ol' city—
Rituals
A Return to Kitsch Mountain
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE
Published in The New York Times on January 16, 2009
As my girlfriend, Larissa, and I approached Gatlinburg, Tenn., this fall, I did my best to prepare her. She hadn’t been to Gatlinburg before, but I had. I understood the town’s complicated reputation both as a gateway to some of the most beautiful country in the United States— the Great Smoky Mountains National Park— and as a flamboyant capital of kitsch….
… It turned out that by 8 or 9 p.m., it was way too late to find a dinner show. The next morning, we had the opposite problem. By the time we woke up and wandered into Gatlinburg, it was noon. All the pancake houses were closed, and I was desolate. I had been thinking about those pancakes since the night before. So we did a little more sightseeing on foot.
Looking at Gatlinburg’s strip with adult eyes, I wondered how much self-awareness was at work there. It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines. In truth, I decided, it merely embraces that special brand of conscious kitsch that forms its own American kind of authenticity. With all its absurdities, Gatlinburg knows what it is and proclaims it loudly, from one flashing signboard to the next….
From Gatlinburg—
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Friday, May 22, 2009
Friday May 22, 2009
Steiner System
New York Times
banner this morning:
Related material from
July 11, 2008:
|
The HSBC Logo Designer — Henry Steiner
Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club. His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995). |
He is an internationally recognized corporate identity consultant. Based in Hong Kong, his work for clients such as HongkongBank, IBM and Unilever is a major influence in Pacific Rim design.
|
Charles Taylor,
"Epiphanies of Modernism," Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self (Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477):
"… the object sets up
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
|
Related material suggested by
an ad last night on
ABC's Ugly Betty season finale:
Diamond from last night's
Log24 entry, with
four colored pencils from
Diane Robertson Design:
See also
A Four-Color Theorem.
Comments Off on Friday May 22, 2009
Friday, July 11, 2008
Friday July 11, 2008
|
The HSBC Logo Designer — Henry Steiner
Born in Austria and raised in New York, Steiner was educated at Yale under Paul Rand and attended the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Fellow. He is a past President of Alliance Graphique Internationale. Other professional affiliations include the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Chartered Society of Designers, Design Austria, and the New York Art Directors' Club. His Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace was published by Thames and Hudson (1995). |
Related material
from the past —
from the past —
Charles Taylor,
"… the object sets up
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
|
Related material
from today —
Escape from a
cartoon graveyard:
Comments Off on Friday July 11, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday June 25, 2008
Born 100 years ago today:
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)
Comments Off on Wednesday June 25, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Saturday June 21, 2008
for lifetime achievement
in arts and philosophy
this year goes to
Charles Taylor,
Montreal philosophy professor.
“The Kyoto Prize has been given in three domains since 1984:
advanced technology, basic sciences, and the arts and philosophy.
It is administered by the Inamori Foundation, whose president,
Kazuo Inamori, is founder and chairman emeritus of Kyocera and
KDDI Corporation, two Japanese telecommunications giants.”
 |
|
“The Kyocera brand symbol is composed of a corporate mark |
Related material —
Charles Taylor,
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477) —
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
See also Talking of Michelangelo.
Comments Off on Saturday June 21, 2008
Monday, January 29, 2007
Monday January 29, 2007
By Indirections
(Hamlet, II, i)
“Michael Taylor (1971)…. contends that the central conflict in Hamlet is between ‘man as victim of fate and as controller of his own destiny.'”– The Gale Group, Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 71, at eNotes
Doonesbury today:
“Personality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity.”– Soren Kierkegaard
On Fate (Necessity),
Freedom (Possibility),
and Machine Personality–
Part I: Google as Skynet
George Dyson–
The Godel-to-Google Net [March 8, 2005]
A Cathedral for Turing [October 24, 2005]
Dyson: “The correspondence between Google and biology is not an analogy, it’s a fact of life.”
Part II: The Galois Connection
David Ellerman–
“A Theory of Adjoint Functors– with some Thoughts about their Philosophical Significance” (pdf) [November 15, 2005]
Ellerman: “Such a mechanism seems key to understanding how an organism can perceive and learn from its environment without being under the direct stimulus control of the environment– thus resolving the ancient conundrum of receiving an external determination while exercising self-determination.”
For a less technical version, see Ellerman’s “Adjoints and Emergence: Applications of a New Theory of Adjoint Functors” (pdf).
Ellerman was apparently a friend of, and a co-author with, Gian-Carlo Rota. His “theory of adjoint functors” is related to the standard mathematical concepts known as profunctors, distributors, and bimodules. The applications of his theory, however, seem to be less to mathematics itself than to a kind of philosophical poetry that seems rather closely related to the above metaphors of George Dyson. For a less poetic approach to related purely mathematical concepts, see, for instance, the survey Practical Foundations of Mathematics by Paul Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1999). For less poetically appealing, but perhaps more perspicuous, extramathematical applications of category theory, see the work of, for instance, Joseph Goguen: Algebraic Semiotics and Information Integration, Databases, and Ontologies.
Comments Off on Monday January 29, 2007
Friday, August 11, 2006
Friday August 11, 2006
Under God
Adapted from August 7:
“Saomai, the Vietnamese name
for the planet Venus, was the
eighth major storm to hit China
during an unusually violent
typhoon season.”
— AP online tonight
|
Lieutenant Daniel Taylor: |
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
Thus the superior man:
If he sees good,
he imitates it;
If he has faults,
he rids himself of them.
For further details,
see recent entries
(August 7-11)
and also
Symmetry and Change
In the Dreamtime.
|
Update of 1:06 AM ET Mercy Now My father could use a little mercy now My brother could use a little mercy now My church and my country could use a little mercy now Every living thing could use a little mercy now Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now |
Comments Off on Friday August 11, 2006
Sunday, May 8, 2005
Monday, April 4, 2005
Monday April 4, 2005
Fourth Day of the Fourth Month,
4:04:04
4:04:04
“My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel…. The date (discernible in the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player….”
— Vladimir Nabokov, note to photograph following page 256 in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vintage International paperback, August 1989
— Quoted in The Matthias Defense
From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —
“Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called ‘Innovation in Physics,’ he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.’ To that Freeman added: ‘When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!’ “
— Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147
It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.
— Log24.net, Feast of St. Mark, 2003
See also The Black Queen and The Eight.
In accordance with the theology of the previous entry, based on Zein’s list of the most common Chinese characters, here are some meanings of
character 162:
[si4] {sì} /to watch/to wait/to examine/to spy/
[si4] {sì} /to seem/to appear/similar/like/to resemble/
[si4] {sì} /until/wait for/
[si4] {sì} /rhinoceros indicus/
[si4] {sì} /four/
[si4] {sì} /(surname)/wife of older brother/
[si4] {sì} /Buddhist temple/
[si4] {sì} /6th earthly branch/9-11 a.m./
[si4] {sì} /stream which returns after branching/
[si4] {sì} /place name/snivel/
[si4] {sì} /offer sacrifice to/
[si4] {sì} /hamper/trunk/
[si4] {sì} /plough/ploughshare/
[si4] {sì} /four (fraud-proof)/market/
[si4] {sì} /to feed/
[si4] {sì} /to raise/to rear/to feed/
[si4] {sì} /team of 4 horses/
[si4 bai3 wan4] {sì bǎi wàn} /four million/
[si4 bai3 yi4] {sì bǎi yì} /40 billion/
[si4 cao2] {sì cáo} /feeding trough/
[si4 cao3] {sì cǎo} /forage grass/
[si4 chu4] {sì chù} /all over the place/everywhere and all directions/
[si4 chuan1] {sì chuān} /Sichuan province, China/
[si4 chuan1 sheng3] {sì chuān shěng} /(N) Sichuan, a south west China province/
[si4 de5] {sì de} /seem as if/rather like/
[si4 fang1] {sì fāng} /four-way/four-sided/
[si4 fen1 zhi1 yi1] {sì fēn zhī yī} /one-quarter/
[si4 fu2] {sì fú} /servo/
[si4 fu2 qi4] {sì fú qì} /server (computer)/
[si4 ge4 xiao3 shi2] {sì gè xiǎo shí} /four hours/
[si4 hu5] {sì hu} /apparently/to seem/to appear/as if/seemingly/
[si4 hu5 hen3 an1 quan2] {sì hu hěn ān quán} /to appear (to be) very safe/
[si4 ji1] {sì jī} /to watch for one's chance/
[si4 ji4] {sì jì} /(n) the four seasons/
[si4 liao4] {sì liào} /feed/fodder/
[si4 lun2 ma3 che1] {sì lún mǎ chē} /chariot/
[si4 men2 jiao4 che1] {sì mén jiào chē} /sedan (motor car)/
[si4 mian4 ba1 fang1] {sì miàn bā fāng} /in all directions/all around/far and near/
[si4 mian4 ti3] {sì miàn tǐ} /tetrahedron/
[si4 miao4] {sì miào} /temple/monastery/shrine/
[si4 nian2] {sì nián} /four years/
[si4 nian2 qian2] {sì nián qián} /four years previously/
[si4 nian2 zhi4 de5 da4 xue2] {sì nián zhì de dà xué} /four-year university/
[si4 qian1] {sì qiān} /four thousand/4 000/
[si4 shi2] {sì shí} /forty/40/
[si4 shi2 duo1] {sì shí duō} /more than 40/
[si4 shi2 liu4] {sì shí liù} /forty six/46/
[si4 shi2 san1] {sì shí sān} /43/forty three/
[si4 shi4 er2 fei1] {sì shì ér fēi} /(saying) appeared right but actually was wrong/
[si4 tian1] {sì tiān} /four days/
[si4 xiao4 fei1 xiao4] {sì xiào fēi xiào} /(saying) resemble a smile yet not smile/
[si4 xue3] {sì xuě} /snowy/
[si4 yang3] {sì yǎng} /to raise/to rear/
[si4 yang3 zhe3] {sì yǎng zhě} /feeder/
[si4 yuan4] {sì yuàn} /cloister/
[si4 yue4] {sì yuè} /April/fourth month/
[si4 yue4 shi2 qi1 hao4] {sì yuè shí qī hào} /April 17/
[si4 zhi1] {sì zhī} /(n) the four limbs of the body/
[si4 zhou1] {sì zhōu} /all around/
Comments Off on Monday April 4, 2005
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Thursday September 11, 2003
Particularity
|
|
|
Upon learning of the recent death of Walter J. Ong, S. J., philosopher of language, I ordered a copy of his book
Hopkins, the Self, and God
University of Toronto Press, 1986.
As the reader of my previous entry will discover, I have a very low opinion of the literary skills of the first Christians. This sect’s writing has, however, improved in the past two millennia.
Despite my low opinion of the early Christians, I am still not convinced their religion is totally unfounded. Hence my ordering of the Ong book. Since then, I have also ordered two other books, reflecting my interests in philosophical fiction (see previous entry) and in philosophy itself:
Philosophical fiction —
The Hex Witch of Seldom,
by Nancy Springer,
Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002
(See 1 Corinthians 1:26-29)
Philosophy —
Definition,
by Richard Robinson,
Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford,
Oxford U. Press, 1954, reprinted 1962.
Following the scientific advice of Niels Bohr and Freeman Dyson, I articulated on April 25, 2003, a mad theory of the mystical significance of the number 162.
Here is that theory applied to the three works named above, all three of which I received, synchronistically, today.
Page 162 of Hopkins, the Self, and God is part of the long list of references at the back of the book. Undiscouraged by the seeming insignificance (vide my note Dogma) of this page, I looked more closely. Behold, there was Christ… Carol T. Christ, that is, author of The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry, Yale University Press, 1975. “Particularity” seemed an apt description of my “162” approach to literature, so I consulted Christ’s remarks as described in the main body of Ong’s book.
Particularity according to Christ —
“Victorian particularist aesthetics has prospered to the present time, and not only in novels. The isolated, particularized, unique ‘good moment’ [Christ, 105], the flash of awareness at one particular instant in just the right setting, which Hopkins celebrates….”
— Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God, p. 14
I highly recommend the rest of Ong’s remarks on particularity.
Turning to the other two of the literary trinity of books I received today….
Page 162 of The Hex Witch of Seldom has the following:
“There was a loaf of Stroehmann’s Sunbeam Bread in the grocery sack also; she and Witchie each had several slices. Bobbi folded and compressed hers into little squares and popped each slice into her mouth all at once.”
The religious significance of this passage seems, in Ong’s Jesuit context, quite clear.
Page 162 of Definition has the following:
“Real Definition as the Search for a Key. Mr. Santayana, in his book on The Sense of Beauty, made the following extremely large demands on real definition:
‘A definition <of beauty> that should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when, and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our sensibility. Nothing less will really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic appreciation is. The definition of beauty in this sense will be the task of this whole book, a task that can be only very imperfectly accomplished within its limits.’ ”
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.
Refer, if necessary, to
the log24.net entries
Mr. Holland’s Week and Elegance.
Refrain from using the phrase
“scandal of particularity”
unless you can use it as well as
Annie Dillard.
Friday, July 25, 2003
Friday July 25, 2003
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.”
Comments Off on Friday July 25, 2003
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Thursday July 24, 2003
Intelligence Test
On July 17, my entry “British Intelligence” linked to a Guardian story about a bumbling amateur spy organization set up by the Bush administration. The headline of that entry, together with Tony Blair’s remark quoted there, implied that The Guardian was a much better example of real British intelligence than Blair’s minions.
On July 21, my entry “Meet D. B. Norton” attacked Blair as a puppet of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Now The Guardian has come through with a story confirming the picture of puppetmaster Murdoch. See
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This BBC row is not about Jackie Ashley
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For background on Rupert Murdoch, see
Murdoch’s Mean Machine
How Rupert uses his vast media power
to help himself and hammer his foes
in the Columbia Journalism Review
Edward Arnold portrays Rupert Murdoch
as he hears of
Wednesday’s 400-21 House vote
against media tycoons.
For more details, see
Comments Off on Thursday July 24, 2003
Friday, April 25, 2003
Friday April 25, 2003
Mark
Today is the feast of Saint Mark. It seems an appropriate day to thank Dr. Gerald McDaniel for his online cultural calendar, which is invaluable for suggesting blog topics.
Yesterday's entry "Cross-Referenced" referred to a bizarre meditation of mine titled "The Matthias Defense," which combines some thoughts of Nabokov on lunacy with some of my own thoughts on the Judeo-Christian tradition (i.e., also on lunacy). In this connection, the following is of interest:
From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —
"Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called 'Innovation in Physics,' he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: 'We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.' To that Freeman added: 'When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!' "
— Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147
It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson. It is no less crazy than Christianity, and has a certain mad simplicity that perhaps improves on some of that religion's lunatic doctrines.
Some fruits of the "162 theory" —
Searching on Google for muses 162, we find the following Orphic Hymn to Apollo and a footnote of interest:
27 Tis thine all Nature's music to inspire,
28 With various-sounding, harmonising lyre;
29 Now the last string thou tun'ft to sweet accord,
30 Divinely warbling now the highest chord….
"Page 162 Verse 29…. Now the last string…. Gesner well observes, in his notes to this Hymn, that the comparison and conjunction of the musical and astronomical elements are most ancient; being derived from Orpheus and Pythagoras, to Plato. Now, according to the Orphic and Pythagoric doctrine, the lyre of Apollo is an image of the celestial harmony…."
For the "highest chord" in a metaphorical sense, see selection 162 of the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse (whose editor apparently had a strong religious belief in the Muses (led by Apollo)). This selection contains the phrase "an ever-fixèd mark" — appropriately enough for this saint's day. The word "mark," in turn, suggests a Google search for the phrase "runes to grave" Hardy, after a poem quoted in G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology.
Such a search yields a website that quotes Housman as the source of the "runes" phrase, and a further search yields what is apparently the entire poem:
Smooth Between Sea and Land
by A. E. Housman
Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.Here the child comes to found
His unremaining mound,
And the grown lad to score
Two names upon the shore.Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.Shall it be Troy or Rome
I fence against the foam
Or my own name, to stay
When I depart for aye?Nothing: too near at hand
Planing the figured sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main.(Said to be from More Poems (Knopf, 1936), p. 64)
Housman asks the reader to tell him of runes to grave or bastions to design. Here, as examples, are one rune and one bastion.
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Represents |
Dagaz: (Pronounced thaw-gauze, but with the "th" voiced as in "the," not unvoiced as in "thick") (Day or dawn.)
From Rune Meanings:
Dagaz means "breakthrough, awakening, awareness. Daylight clarity as opposed to nighttime uncertainty. A time to plan or embark upon an enterprise. The power of change directed by your own will, transformation. Hope/happiness, the ideal. Security and certainty. Growth and release. Balance point, the place where opposites meet."
Also known as "the rune of transformation."
For the Dagaz rune in another context, see Geometry of the I Ching. The geometry discussed there does, in a sense, "hold the bursting wave," through its connection with Walsh functions, hence with harmonic analysis.
Temple of Athena Nike on the Nike Bastion, the Acropolis, Athens. Here is a relevant passage from Paul Valéry's Eupalinos ou L'Architecte about another temple of four columns:
Et puis… Écoute, Phèdre (me disait-il encore), ce petit temple que j'ai bâti pour Hermès, à quelques pas d'ici, si tu savais ce qu'il est pour moi ! — Où le passant ne voit qu'une élégante chapelle, — c'est peu de chose: quatre colonnes, un style très simple, — j'ai mis le souvenir d'un clair jour de ma vie. Ô douce métamorphose ! Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l'image mathématique d'une fille de Corinthe que j'ai heureusement aimée. Il en reproduit fidèlement les proportions particulières. Il vit pour moi !
Four columns, in a sense more suited to Hardy's interests, are also a recurrent theme in The Diamond 16 Puzzle and Diamond Theory.
Apart from the word "mark" in The Oxford Book of English Verse, as noted above, neither the rune nor the bastion discussed has any apparent connection with the number 162… but seek and ye shall find.
Comments Off on Friday April 25, 2003
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Thursday January 30, 2003
Poetic Justice:
The Peacock Throne
Yesterday was the death day of two proponents of Empire: George III (in 1820) and Robert Frost (in 1963). Lord Byron argued that the King slipped through heaven's gate unobserved while a friend distracted St. Peter with bad poetry. We may imagine, on this dark night of the soul, Frost performing a similar service.
Though poets of the traditional sort may still perform such services in Heaven, here on earth they have been superseded by writers of song lyrics. An example, Roddy Frame (formerly of the group "Aztec Camera"), was born on yesterday's date in 1964. A Frame lyric:
Transformed by some strange alchemy,*
You stand apart and point to me
And point to something I can't see….
Namely:
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The Back Door to Heaven
For poetic purposes, we may think of surreptitious entry into Heaven as being conveniently accomplished through a portal like the above back door, which is that of a small hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
This is not your average Motel 6 back door. As a former New York Times correspondent has written,
"Over the years, the guest list has drawn the likes of Prince Philip and the Shah of Iran, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But informality still reigns."
This small hotel (or its heavenly equivalent), whose gardens are inhabited by various exotic birds, including peacocks, may still be haunted by the late Shah, who apparently styled himself "King of Kings and Emperor of the Peacock Throne." Of course, the ghost of the King of Kings, after entering the garden of Paradise, may not be able to resume his former human shape. He might still, however, be among those greeted by his fellow Emperor, George III, with the famous words
*For more on alchemy and Cuernavaca, see
my journal note "The Black Queen."
Comments Off on Thursday January 30, 2003