(Oneworld Publications, Jan. 3, 2011)

Compare and contrast with an illustration
from "Time Fold," a webpage of Oct. 10, 2003 —

See also the Squarespace logo:

A New York Times  theater review from 2002
is now accompanied by an ad for a current film,
"At Eternity's Gate." (Click to enlarge.)

"At Eternity's Gate" opened November 16th, 2018.

From this  journal on that date —

"Right through hell there is a path." — Malcolm  Lowry

The two symbols on the monolith

may, if one likes, be interpreted 
as standing for Damnation Morning 
and for the Windmill of Time.

* "Award-winning fashion icon."
— Harvard Graduate School of Design

"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 .

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction,
the reason why the artist works and lives
and has his being — the reward he seeks —
the only reward he really cares about,
without which there is nothing. It is to snare
the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation,
to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves
the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
   See also Blazon in this journal.

See also May 9, 2008.

Update of 12:25 AM ET —

"And they were singin' . . ."

Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :

The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut  must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”

The literary  art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.

Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.

A non-literary illustration:

  Time as "a moving
   image of eternity.”
       — Plato   

From this journal nine years ago today, on the
anniversary of Stanley finding Livingstone —

Click on the image for the Princeton connection.

Related art — Search Log24 for Time + Eternity.

See as well the theater producer pictured in last night's post
and a Princeton-related* review of one of his productions.

Footnote of November 11, 2015:

* Related, that is, only by the "Princeton connection" mentioned above.
For another Princeton connection of interest, see a symposium at
Princeton University on May Day, 2015 —

THE PEDAGOGY OF IMAGES:  
 DEPICTING  COMMUNISM  FOR  CHILDREN

A sample symposium participant:

"Little emblems of eternity " 

— Oliver Sacks, contemplating his own impending death,
in The New York Times  Sunday Review section today.  

Sacks's phrase refers to elements of the periodic table —

Another approach to "emblems of eternity" — The I Ching .

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

MÉXICO D.F., 10 Abr. 08 / 10:01 am (ACI).- El Arzobispo Emérito de México, Cardenal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, falleció esta mañana a las 05:30 a.m., en su domicilio….

“Ya la ronda
  llega aquí“

I Have a
Dreamtime
 

Noting today that the time was 11:32 (AM ET),  a portentous number in Finnegans Wake, I decided to practice a bit of chronomancy (use of time for augury).  My weblog's server infomed me when I pressed "enter" that it thought the exact time was 11:32:39.  Consulting (as in Symmetry and Change in the Dreamtime) the I Ching for the meaning of (hexagram) 39, I found the following:

The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us…. One must join forces with friends of like mind and put himself under the leadership of a man equal to the situation: then one will succeed in removing the obstacles.

For the abyss and the mountain, see the five log24 entries ending on July 5, 2005, with "The Edge of Eternity." As for "friends of like mind," see the previous entry's references to July 2005.  "The leadership of a man equal to the situation" is more difficult to interpret.  Perhaps it refers, as a politician recently noted, to "a king who took us to the mountain-top and pointed the way to the promised land." Or perhaps to a different king.

Click on image for details.
Note the time: 11:32 (of 13:09).
The moment is that of the syllable
"mount" in the quotation above.

Related material:

Faust in Copenhagen

and

Kernel of Eternity

“Mr. Stuart was named Lionel Simon when he was born in Manhattan, the son of a salesman and a secretary.  His father committed suicide when the boy was 6.”

For Christopher Fry
and the White Goddess:

The Edge of Eternity

Christian humanist playwright Christopher Fry, author of The Lady’s Not for Burning, died at 97 on June 30, 2005.

From Log24 on June 30:

Robert Graves, author of
The White Goddess:
A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth—

How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights…

From Cold Mountain:

“He sat awhile on a rock, and then got up and walked all morning through the dim woods. The track was ill used, so coiled and knotted he could not say what its general tendency was. It aimed nowhere certain but up. The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way would not even remain as scar. For several miles it mostly wound its way through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog lay among them so thick that their green boughs were hidden. Only the black trunks were visible, rising into the low sky like old menhirs stood up by a forgotten race to memorialize the darkest events of their history….

They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness….

Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back…. The country around was high, broken. Inman looked about and was startled to see a great knobby mountain forming up out of the fog to the west, looming into the sky.  The sun broke through a slot in the clouds, and a great band of Jacob’s ladder suddenly hung in the air like a gauze curtain between Inman and the blue mountain….

Inman looked at the big grandfather mountain and then he looked beyond it to the lesser mountains as they faded off into the southwest horizon, bathed in faint smoky haze. Waves of mountains. For all the evidence the eye told, they were endless. The grey overlapping humps of the farthest peaks distinguished themselves only as slightly darker values of the pale grey air. The shapes and their ghostly appearance spoke to Inman in a way he could not clearly interpret. They graded off like the tapering of pain from the neck wound as it healed.”

See also the entries of July 3.

The crone figure in this section of Cold Mountain is not entirely unrelated to the girl accused of being a witch in Fry’s play and to Graves’s White Goddess.

From Fry’s obituary in The Guardian:

“Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine Adam: ‘In prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of relationship between them: a belief that all things express the same identity and are all contained in one discipline of revelation.'”

From Fry’s obituary in today’s New York Times:

“His plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking, in his words, ‘a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a sleeping partner.’ He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that was ‘the language in which man expresses his own amazement’ at the complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface, was ‘wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'”

11:59 PM: The Last Minute

For the benefit of Grace (Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), here are the September 15 lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the State of Grace (Kelly):

Midday: 053 Evening: 373.

For the significance of the evening number, 373, see Directions Out and Outside the World (both of 4/26/04).  In both of these entries, and others to which they are linked, the number 373 signifies eternity.

The two most obvious interpretations of the midday number, 53, are as follows:

• As a famous number of tones in musical harmonic analysis (i.e., tuning theory), as opposed to mathematical harmonic analysis ( The Square Wheel, 9/14/04), and
• as a reference to the year 1953– a good year for Grace Kelly and the year of the classic film From Here to Eternity (the latter being signified, as noted above, by yesterday’s evening lottery number in the State of Grace).

“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”
Ecclesiastes 9-11

Dyer, Part II:

From Here to Eternity

“Dying, at its best, might be something like this.  Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come.”

— Geoff Dyer, quoted (in part of an entry, Dyer, for yesterday– the day mathematician Shizuo Kakutani died) by Ruth Franklin in

Journey Without Maps. 

A Koan for Kakutani–
on a random walk, a bird, death, time, and eternity–

In a comment on the previous entry, a Xangan asks,

“How many drunk men could migrate to Argentina without a map?”

My answer:  At least one.

X

Tonight on PBS:
The Jesus Factor

From Good Friday:

From Eternity:

From Holy Saturday:

“…a ‘dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse’ “

(p. 227, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
— Wallace Stevens
    as quoted by Michael Bryson

See also the entries of 5/12.

Happy Rohatsu

“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”

— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk

A poem for Rohatsu:

On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.

~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)

Commentary on poetry of Buson:

Poetry as an open space
 for lightening of Being

“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”

— Hiroo Saga

In other words,
From Here to Eternity.

For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.

For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.

For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.

For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 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.

Of Time and the River

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town“ 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Being and Time

Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.

Einstein’s birthday: March 14.

Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:

Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.

In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore in “Xanadu”^◊ and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement. Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.†

Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,

September 26, 1905.

^◊ Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.

† Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.

Moulins Rouges

Today is the birthday of composer Michel Legrand (“The Windmills of Your Mind”) and of philologist Wilhelm Grimm (Grimms’ Fairy Tales).

See the following past entries:

October 6, 2002: “Twenty-first Century Fox”

November 7, 2002: “Endgame”

November 8, 2002: “Religious Symbolism at Princeton”

January 5, 2003: “Whirligig”

January 5, 2003: “Culinary Theology”

January 6, 2003: “Dead Poet in the City of Angels”

January 31, 2003: “Irish Fourplay”

February 1, 2003; “Time and Eternity”

February 5, 2003: “Release Date”

Center of Time

“The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity’— presumably into ‘monuments of unageing intellect,’ immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.”

— Karl Parker, Yeats’ Two Byzantiums 

“I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album ‘99.9° F.’  It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i’m not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.”

— Nicholson Baker, interview

For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see “Geometrie” in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.

The Recruit, Part Deux

Walter L. Pforzheimer, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Agency, and its “institutional memory,” died on Monday, February 10, 2003.

From my notes of February 10, 2003:

“… gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity.”

— W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

This poem has a sequel, titled simply “Byzantium” —

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds….

Dying into a dance,  
An agony of trance,  
An agony of flame….

The Emperor’s Pavement

See also yesterday’s note “The Recruit,”
on the CIA and what Vonnegut called
“A Duty-Dance with Death.”

Singing-Masters

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
— William Butler Yeats

One wonders whether Yeats will spend at least some small part of eternity in the pleasant company of Jimmy Durante and Shari Lewis, whom I would want to have among my singing-masters.  One also hopes that tonight they are celebrating Durante’s birthday in that very pleasant part of heaven called Shariland.  Hence tonight’s site music, “The Song That Never Ends.”  This could, of course, easily become more hellish than heavenly if Durante were not himself present to yell, at an appropriate time, “Stop the music!”

Rainbow’s End

For Ernst Kitzinger, professor of Byzantine art at Harvard, who died at 90 on January 22, 2003. 

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poet W. B. Yeats wrote of Ireland,

That is no country for old men….
….
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
….
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Don’t ever tell me the gods have no sense of humor.  After writing the phrase “rainbow’s-end gold” in yesterday’s entry, “Messe,” I came across an obituary of Professor Kitzinger, which naturally prompted me to look for a good web page on “Sailing to Byzantium.”

The poem concludes with images of “gold mosaic,” “Grecian goldsmiths,” “hammered gold,” “gold enamelling,” and “a golden bough.”  I had forgotten that Yeats’s poem begins to sound rather like the curse of King Midas.  And then the touch of divinity: the perfect deflation of Yeatsian and Byzantine pretentiousness, on the following web page:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atlantis/3260/sailing.html,

at “The Lonesome Surf-In Poetry Cafe.”  With lovely faux-gold borders, this page has as background music a gloriously cheesy rendition of “Moon River.”  (Rainbow’s end… Waitin’ ’round the bend….) So much for the Tiffany’s approach to poetry.

I still admire Yeats’ respect
For monuments of intellect
But even though I’m getting old
Can’t share his appetite for gold.

For a rather different “artifice of eternity,”
see my entry of February 1, 2003,

Time and Eternity.

Release Date

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar —

• Novelist William S. Burroughs [of the Burroughs adding machine family], author of Naked Lunch, was born on this day in 1914.
• The Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times“ was released on this day in 1936.
• The adding machine employing depressible keys was patented on this day in 1850.

“It all adds up.” — Saul Bellow, book title

“I see my light come shining
 From the west unto the east.
 Any day now, any day now,
 I shall be released.”
     — Bob Dylan

From Robert Morris’s page on Hopkins (see note of Sunday, February 2 (Candlemas)):

“Inscape” was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for a special connection between the world of natural events and processes and one’s internal landscape–a frame of mind conveyed in his radical and singular poetry….

This is false, but suggestive.

Checked, corrected, and annotated

Steering a Space-Plane

Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:

“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins.  Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162

Yesterday’s note, “Time and Eternity,” supplies the “immortal diamond” part of this meditation.  For the “matchwood” part, see the cover of The New York Times Book Review of February 2 (Candlemas), 2003:

See also the Times’s excerpt from Baker‘s first chapter,
about “steering a space-plane.”

For the relationship of Hopkins to Eastern religions,
see “Out of Inscape,” by Robert Morris.

Great Dream of Heaven

The title is that of Sam Shepard’s new book of short stories.  It is relevant to several of my recent journal entries.

This author’s own title also seems relevant.  Here is an excerpt from a web page on The Church of the Good Shepherd:

“This is the oldest church in Beverly Hills, and over the years, this small house of worship has been the local parish church for most of the Catholic movie stars who live in Beverly Hills…. It has seen numerous celebrity weddings and funerals. Although the church’s interior is modest (it seats just 600), and its decor surprisingly simple, the Church of the Good Shepherd has been featured in several Hollywood films: most notably, it was the location for the funeral scene in the 1954 version of ‘A Star is Born.'”

Today’s Birthday: Emily Dickinson

Complete Poems, 1924 

Part Four: Time and Eternity

LXXXIII

This world is not conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond….

Born Yesterday: Kirk Douglas 

From Douglas’s Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning (Simon & Schuster, 1997) —

“Selling artwork, devoting time to charitable causes, writing novels, are all worthwhile means of occupying your time when good scripts aren’t coming your way.  But then, in the spring of 1993, one did.

It was called Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, a story of a growing friendship betwen two old men dealing with the twilight of their lives…. It was brilliant….

I called my agent… “So make the deal.”

A long pause.  “But the director wants to meet you.” ….

…. My agent called the next day. “She really likes you, Kirk… but… ah,” he started to stutter.

“What?”

“She wants Richard Harris.”

In the film of
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway 
as finally made,
Richard Harris dies on
Hemingway’s birthday.

Dead on October 25, 2002,
Picasso’s Birthday:

Actor Richard Harris  

A journal entry of October 25, 2002:

Wrestling Pablo Picasso

The old men know when an old man dies.
— Ogden Nash

A description of the title story
in Sam Shepard’s Great Dream of Heaven:

“Two old men who share a house are as close as a married couple until a competition to wake up first in the morning and a mutual fascination with a Denny’s waitress drive them apart.”