Log24

"… the timeless / With time … ." — T. S. Eliot

Fritz Leiber ?

From the previous post —

From a Log24 post of February 28, 2023 —

— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school
and the University of Rome

This quote is from posts tagged The Positive.

A review of those posts was suggested by the date of a different quote,
from a "Timeless" episode that aired on January 16, 2017 —

Or maybe Lucy.

See as well Timeless  and Before Time Began .

"Over the years, she’s had key roles on
'Mad Men,' 'Rectify,' 'True Blood' and 'Timeless.'
Spencer is repped by Untitled Entertainment
and United Talent." — Kate Aurthur in Variety ,
Sept. 7, 2021, 11:15 am PT.

In the Variety  story, "True Blood" may be an error.
Spencer was  in "True Detective" (Season 2).

For Timeless  fans, a flashback to April 8, 2016 —

See as well the above Rittenhouse date — April 8, 2016 —
in posts tagged April 8-11 2016.

The title is from a post of July 27.

From earlier posts (Feb. 20, 2009) —

Midrash for LA —

See also a theater review of a Walpurgisnacht 2008
Brooklyn Academy of Music production —

The New York Times  on the Walpurgisnacht production —

"Specifically grim but never merely glum, the production fully taps
the self-conscious theatricality of the play ('I’m warming up for
my last soliloquy,' Hamm announces toward the end) without
letting us forget that its strange figures are appallingly real,
enacting a grotesque pantomime of humanity’s hungry need to
distract itself by wresting order, meaning and a sliver of satisfaction —
just one more sugarplum, please, or maybe a Vicodin — from
the formless, aimless, timeless nothingness of life."

— Charles Isherwood

Bogus religion from a bogus "research lab" —

This was quoted approvingly in a recent book by
Joseph Jaworski, Source  (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 
1st ed. Jan. 11, 2012, pp. 2-3).

Jaworski, a lawyer-turned-guru,
in 1980 founded a cult for executives
called the American Leadership Forum.

A synchronicity cult I prefer —
the Roman Catholic Church:

Introduction to a review of two books in
The American Interest , June 17, 2014:

“A believer and an atheist seek out their antitheses.
Do they meet somewhere in the middle,
or pass in the murk of half-baked pseudo-syntheses?”

Soundtrack:

“Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, passing in the murk.”

Related material:

This morning’s passage by Friedrich Gundolf.
For some backstory, see Gundolf in
Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle ,
by Robert E. Norton, Cornell University Press, 2002.

"These are odd facts…." — G. H. Hardy,
quoted in the previous post, "Centered"

Other odd facts:

If n  is odd, then the object at the center  
of the n×n  square is a square.
Similarly for the n×n×n  cube.

Related meditation:

“In a sense, we would see that change
arises from the structure of the object,” he said.
“But it’s not from the object changing.
The object is basically timeless.”

— Theoretical physicist quoted in a
Simons Foundation article of Sept. 17, 2013,
"A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics"

See also "My God, it's full of… everything."

On painter Karl Benjamin of Claremont, California,
who reportedly died on Thursday—

He played them music
and everything was concentrated and timeless
and all were artists 'til the bell rang.

Another remark from Claremont—

"'Once upon a time' used to be a gateway to
a land that was inviting precisely because
it was timeless, like the stories it introduced
and their ageless lessons about the human condition."

– Dorothea Israel Wolfson, 
   Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006

Benjamin was a professor emeritus at Pomona College.

A description in Pynchon's Against the Day  of William Rowan Hamilton's October 16th, 1843, discovery of quaterions—

"The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful scavengers of Epiphany."

New York Lottery yesterday, on Hermann Weyl's birthday— Midday 106, Evening 865.

Here 106 suggests 1/06, the date of Epiphany, and 865 turns out to be the title number of Weyl's Symmetry  at Princeton University Press—

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/865.html.

Symmetry and quaternions are, of course, closely related.

Godmother and Cinderella

Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in "Julie & Julia"

The image is from gossipsauce.com on August 2, 2009.

For a darker Godmother/Cinderella pair,
see the film discussed in this journal
on that same date (Lughnasa 2009).

A thought from Pynchon's Against the Day quoted here on Groundhog Day a year ago today—

“We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long ‘passes,’ with a linear velocity, but ‘returns,’ with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly.”

“Born again!” exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

The above text on Joyce’s theory of epiphanies:

“It emphasizes the radiance, the effulgence, of the thing itself revealed in a special moment, an unmoving moment, of time. The moment, as in the macrocosmic lyric of Finnegans Wake, may involve all other moments, but it still remains essentially static, and though it may have all time for its subject matter it is essentially timeless.”

— Page 17 of Stephen Hero, by James Joyce, Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon, Edition: 16, New Directions Publishing, 1963

Related epiphanies —

Detail from
the above text:

Cover of
a paperback novel
well worth reading:

Related material:

“Joyce knew no Greek.”
— Statement by the prototype
of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses,
Oliver St. John Gogarty,
quoted in the above
New Directions Stephen Hero

“Chrysostomos.”
— Statement in Ulysses
by the prototype
of Stephen Dedalus,
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

See also the link to
Mardi Gras, 2008,
in yesterday’s entry,
with its text from
the opening of Ulysses:

“He faced about and
blessed gravely thrice
the tower,
the surrounding country
 and the awaking mountains.”

Some context:

(Click on images for details.)

and

“In the process of absorbing
the rules of the institutions
we inhabit, we become
who we are.”

— David Brooks, Jewish columnist,
in today’s New York Times

The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
“I… I meant a larger map.”

The New York Times
November 6, 2007

More on the Career of
the Genius Who Boldly
Compared Himself to God

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

“Picasso… once said…

‘… No wonder his [Picasso’s] style is so ambiguous. It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor….’

The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course.”

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind
    in the act of finding
What will suffice ….
                            … It has
To construct a new stage.
    It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor,
    slowly and
With meditation, speak words
    that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear
    of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it
    wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible
    audience listens,
Not to the play, but to
    itself, expressed
In an emotion as of
    two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
   The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark….

— Wallace Stevens in
    Parts of a World, 1942

Of Modern Metaphysics

“For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity.”

— Concluding speech of St. Michael the Archangel in a 1937 play, “The Zeal of Thy House,” by Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker. That entire book was, she wrote, an expansion of St. Michael’s speech.

Related material:

• Dana Wilde, “An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit” (from The Antigonish Review, published by St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia; Issue 109, online version undated– perhaps Spring 1997)

• Trinities for Hollywood (Oct. 24) and Something Anonymous (Oct. 25– Picasso’s birthday)

• A 1990 note, The Maker’s Gift.

“‘Once upon a time’ used to be a gateway to a land that was inviting precisely because it was timeless, like the stories it introduced and their ageless lessons about the human condition.”

— Dorothea Israel Wolfson, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006

“It’s quarter to three…” –Sinatra

Classic Sixties

“And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked
   upon the water…”
— Leonard Cohen   

meets the timeless
Satori at Pearl Harbor:

“Mercilessly tasteful.”
 — Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega’s
“Songs in Red and Gray“

Related material:

Philosophy in
Blue and Green

Intersections

1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain,

2. Vertical meets horizontal in music,

3. The timeless meets time in religion.

Details:

1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain

“Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina…. The Black Mountain Campus is… three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain.”

Black Mountain College was “established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933.”

USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham:

“MONTREAT, N.C. — … It’s here at his… homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview.”

See also the following from June 24:

“No bridge reaches God, except one…
God’s Bridge: The Cross.”

— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
according to messiahpage.com

For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today’s earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker.

2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music

Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner’s
Grammars of Creation:

 “… the facts of the world are not and will never be ‘the end of the matter.’ Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.

‘The capacity of music to operate simultaneously along horizontal and vertical axes, to proceed simultaneously in opposite directions (as in inverse canons), may well constitute the nearest that men and women can come to absolute freedom.  Music does “keep time” for itself and for us.'”

3. Timeless, Time

A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot:

“… to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.”

See also The Diamond Project.

Shape Note

A variation on the theme of the previous entry, Quartet.

As in the previous entry, the illustration on the left is from a Log24 entry on the date of death of the person on the right.

Relevant quotations:

“It was rather like solving a crossword puzzle.”

— Derek Taunt, on breaking the Enigma Code

Four Quartets:

“… history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”

Cambridge News obituary:

“He [Dr. Taunt] and Angela [his wife] founded the Friends of Kettle’s Yard when the Arts Council cut its grant in 1984 and together organised countless fundraising activities for the museum and gallery.”

“How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment? Rear View Mirror sets out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses….”

— On a future Kettle’s Yard exhibition

Time past and time future
What might have been
      and what has been
Point to one end,
      which is always present.

— Four Quartets

 “The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough.”

See the Log24 remarks on Jesus College— Taunt’s college– in a web page for June Carter Cash, The Circle is Unbroken.

The Quality with No Name

And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
   Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:

“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….

Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”

See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.

String Theory

Phil Sweetland of the New York Times on Gospel singer St. Jake Hess, who died on Sunday, January 4, 2004 — also the feast day of saints T. S. Eliot, T.S. Matthews, and Joan Aiken —

“Mr. Hess was the string that tied together many of Christian music’s most famous quartets and ensembles, and he was an idol and later a colleague of [Elvis] Presley….

Mr. Hess sang at his funeral in 1977, as he had at the funeral of Hank Williams in 1953.”

“Go to other people’s funerals,
otherwise, they won’t go to yours.”

— Proverb attributed to St. Yogi Berra

“… to apprehend
 The point of intersection of the timeless
 With time, is an occupation for the saint…. “

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“You win again.”

— Keith Richards,
tribute to Hank Williams

ART WARS:
Time and the Grid

Art theorist Rosalind Krauss and poet T. S. Eliot on time, timelessness, and the grid.

The sequel to
“Every Boy Has a Daddy“:

Hepburn’s Mass
at Heaven’s Gate

Katharine Hepburn died at 2:50 PM EDT
on the Feast of St. Peter. 

“The Consecration and Sacrifice effected by the priest (standing in the place of Christ) is, then, the visible manifestation of an eternal and timeless act. After the Consecration, as Gueranger says in The Liturgical Year, ‘the divine Lamb is lying on our altar!’ Thus we see that the Mass is the visible reality, here and now, of the timeless eternal Mass of Heaven, described in the Apocalypse. Through it we participate in the Celestial Liturgy; through it the gates of Heaven are opened to us and the possibility of eternal life is made available to us.”

The Source:

The Church Militant recommends
Defense of the Inquisitions.

For a different viewpoint,
see my May 12 entries.

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

After the Dream:

  A sequel to the previous note,
“Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly”

From John Lahr’s recent review of “Our Town”:

“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.” 

The conclusion of Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

An apt setting for a realistic production of “Our Town” would be Randolph, N.Y., a rather timeless place that a few years ago even had a working soda fountain of the traditional sort.  Yesterday’s note was prompted in part by an obituary of a young girl who attended St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Randolph.

This is the reason for tonight’s site music, “After a Dream,” by Fauré.

See also Piper Laurie’s recent film, St. Patrick’s Day.

Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly

For Piper Laurie on Her Birthday

“He was part of my dream, of course —
but then I was part of his dream, too!”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter XII (“Which Dreamed It?”) quoted as epigraph to a script for the film Pleasantville, which features a soda fountain from the 1950’s.

“Scenes from yesteryear are revisited through the soda-fountain mirror, creating such a fluid pathway between the past and present that one often becomes lost along the way.”

— Caroline Palmer’s review of “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” 

The above quotations are related to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which James Dean makes a brief appearance at a 1920’s soda fountain. The film is chiefly notable for displaying the beauty of Piper Laurie, but a subplot is also of iterest.  Charles Coburn, a rich man visiting incognito a timeless town* rather like Pleasantville or Riverdale, takes up painting and is assisted by the young Gigi Perreau, who, as I recall, supplies him with the frame from a Circe Soap ad displayed in a shop window.

For more on a fictional rich character and Circe — indeed, enough for a soap — see my note of January 11, 2003, “The First Days of Disco,” and the sequel of January 12, 2003, “Ask Not.”  In the manner of magic realism, the adventures in the earlier entry of Scrooge McDuck and Circe are mirrored by those in the later entry of C. Douglas Dillon and Monique Wittig.

For a less pleasant trip back in time, see the later work of Gigi Perreau in Journey to the Center of Time (1967).  One viewer’s comment:

This is the worst movie ever made. I don’t want to hear about any of Ed Wood’s pictures. This is it, this is the one. Right here. The bottom of the deepest pit of cinema hell.

Happy birthday, Miss Laurie.

*Rather, in fact, like “Our Town.”  Here is John Lahr on a current production of that classic:

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!”

— The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

If Newman is God, then Miss Laurie played God’s girlfriend.  Nice going, Piper.