Log24

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Unthought Known

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:35 pm

(Pearl Jam song title)

Scholium for the Harvard Alcoholic Club

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Categorization Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:55 pm

"And then there’s the ultimate unknown known:
the 'enlightenment' (satori, kensho) of Zen practice.
If my sense of it from accounts I have read is accurate,
it involves seeing the world and realizing that you always
knew its true nature, but you just didn’t know you knew
because you were too busy putting it into boxes and
matrices and categories and words. Which reminds us
again that while logical deductions and categorizations
can lead us to discoveries, they can also lead us away
from them."

James Harbeck on Groundhog Day, 2023

This post was suggested by a Log24 image from All Saints' Day, 2018

Related verbiage: Unthought Known.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Out of What Chaos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:28 pm

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

Out of What Chaos, a novel by Lee Oser

"This book is more or less what one would expect if Walker Percy wrote about a cynical rock musician who converts to Catholicism, and then Nabokov added some of his verbal pyrotechnics, and then Buster Keaton and the Marquis de Sade and Lionel Trilling inserted a few extra passages. It is a loving and yet appalled description of the underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest. And it is a convincing representation of someone very, very smart."

Matt Greenfield in The Valve

"If Evelyn Waugh had lived amid the American Northwest rock music scene, he might have written a book like this."

–Anonymous Amazon.com reviewer

A possible source for Oser's title–

"…Lytton Strachey described Pope's theme as 'civilization illumined by animosity; such was the passionate and complicated material from which he wove his patterns of balanced precision and polished clarity.' But out of what chaos did that clarity and precision come!"

Authors at Work, by  Herman W. Liebert and Robert H. Taylor, New York, Grolier Club, 1957, p. 16

Related material:

Unthought Known

Pearl Jam 'Backspacer' album released Sept. 20, 2009

and the

Catholic Analyst's Couch, White Cube Gallery, 2002

White Cube Gallery, 2002

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Wednesday September 30, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 am

Midnight in the Garden, Autumn 2009

 

Review:

Der Einsatz
 
Motto of Plato's Academy: 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'
The Ninefold Square (a 3x3 grid)

The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009:
 
'The Holy Grail of the Unconscious' at The New York Times

From this journal on the following day, Sept. 21:

Pearl Jam 'Backspacer' album released Sept. 20, 2009

Happy birthday, Stephen King.

Today's previous entry is based on a song, "Unthought Known,"
from the above album; the cover of the album uses the 3×3 grid
shown in Sept. 20's midnight review. For related material
on the unconscious, see June 13-15, 2005.

I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.

Tom O'Bedlam's Song

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Thursday September 24, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:01 am

Who Knows
What Evil Lurks…

The brain-in-a-jar on the cover of the new Pearl Jam album "Backspacer" (previous two entries) is apparently there because of a song on the album, "Unthought Known"–

"All the thoughts you never see
You are always thinking
Brain is wide, the brain is deep
Oh, are you sinking?"

The song title is from a book, The Shadow of the Object (Columbia U. Press, 1987), by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas.

The "unthought known" phrase has been quoted widely by second-rate psychologizers and by some not so second-rate. Their lucubrations suggest that sinking brain-worshippers should seek a…

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep ('Doubt') as Catholic psychoanalysts, with their couch
The couch is from a 2002 exhibit
at London's White Cube gallery.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Wednesday September 30, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

Not So Second-Rate

From the above link in this journal on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009:

“… the unthought-known dispatches a steady stream of ‘notes’ from underground. If it cannot gain a full return to consciousness, it at least would like some recognition– even if disguised.”

— Randall Hoedeman, Sunnyhill Church, Pittsburgh

Randall Hoedeman

Randall Hoedeman

Another discovery reportedly also made last Thursday, Sept. 24:

“The Cullinan mine has again given the world a spectacularly beautiful and important diamond.”

Petra Diamonds Ltd. CEO Johan Dippenaar

Picture from Fox News:

507-carat diamond from the Cullinan mine reportedly found on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009

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