"The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together"
— Wallace Stevens, "July Mountain"
For another view of reality in New Haven, see the
brief biography of Vermont poet Frances Frost
at the Yale University Library. From that biography:
"She was survived by her son, the poet Paul Blackburn,
and by her daughter, Sister Marguerite of the Order
of St. Joseph."
See also a figure from The New York Times published
online on Epiphany, 2013:
Related material —
And then there is Goddard College . . .
"Seeing the potential in an idea is everything."
— https://www.goddard.edu/person/darrah-cloud/
" Cloud’s father once asked her why he was paying tuition
if she was working at Goddard for free. Her reply?
'I can’t tell you — all I know is I can drive an ambulance now.' ”
The New York Times reports an April 14 death.
See as well Vermont as A Metaphysical State .
UPDATE:
THE SOURCE:
https://www.newyorker.com/gallery/
cartoons-from-the-april-17-2023-issue.
The date at the bottom, April 7, was Good Friday.
Sheehy reportedly died on Monday, August 24, 2020.
YouTube has the Vermont speech:
From this journal on that date —
Summary: “Turn on, tune in, drop dead.“
July Mountain
We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano and in speech,
As in a page of poetry—
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos.
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.
— Wallace Stevens, from
Opus Posthumous (1957)
Or Pennsylvania:
The corner being turned in the previous post
is formed by the south wall of a Christian Science
church at 1776 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.
For a related Christian Science meditation, see …
From an obituary of singer Patti Page, who died on New Year's Day—
"Clara Ann Fowler was born Nov. 8, 1927, in Claremore, Okla., and grew up in Tulsa. She was one of 11 children and was raised during the Great Depression by a father who worked for the railroad.
She told the Times that her family often did not have enough money to buy shoes. To save on electricity bills, the Fowlers listened to only a few select radio programs. Among them was 'Grand Ole Opry.'"
See also two poems by Wallace Stevens and some images related to yesterday's Log24 post.
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“That summer of ’68, I was in a vast crowd in London’s sunlit Hyde Park listening to Pink Floyd’s free concert: One inch of love is one inch of shadow Right on! Anything seemed possible….” — Roger Cohen, May 28, 2008, on 1968, “Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris.” |
“The Event of Truth,”
European Graduate School video:
Quoted by Badiou at
European Graduate School,
August 2002:
| We live in a constellation Of patches and of pitches, Not in a single world, In things said well in music, On the piano and in speech, As in a page of poetry— Thinkers without final thoughts In an always incipient cosmos. The way, when we climb a mountain, Vermont throws itself together. — Wallace Stevens, Or Pennsylvania:
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Prequel on
Saint Cecilia’s Day
“Death itself would start
working backward.”
— Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia
Celebrity Obits, Nov. 22, 2005 —
Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
(continued):
| Aldous Huxley & C.S. Lewis both died on Nov.22, 1963. For some reason, their deaths went largely unnoticed… | The doors of perception lead to Narnia | November 22, 08:51:20am |
| Shemp Howard died 50 years ago today | Moe | November 22, 09:17:18am |
See also the previous entry, and this follow-up:
“Shattuck’s death on Thursday… was reported by his nephew, John Shattuck, head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, The Boston Globe reported Saturday.”
Related material:
“The White Witch rules Narnia,
and has brought to it
the Hundred Years of Winter.”
— The Narnia Academy
and the foundation of the
David Morrell Counterintelligence Library:
Shemp
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LOS ANGELES, July 30 (AP) – Kayo Hatta, an independent filmmaker… died on July 20. She was 47. She accidentally drowned at a friend’s home in the San Diego area, her sister Julie Hatta said….
Ms. Hatta graduated from Stanford University with a degree in English and received a master’s degree in film from the University of California, Los Angeles. She recently completed a 30-minute coming-of-age film called “Fishbowl,” based on the writings of Hawaiian author Lois-Ann Yamanaka. |
Quote from an earlier entry:
Quote from July 20:
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| Blu’s Hanging
… Poppy still plays “Moon River” in the background. |
| Words that may or may not have been said on July 20, 1969:
“That’s one small step for |
One small step for me:
Sunday, November 03, 2002
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Music to Read By In honor of Roger Cooke’s review of Helson’s Harmonic Analysis, 2nd Edition, today’s site music is “Moonlight in Vermont.” |
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One giant leap for mankind:
For further details, see Crankbuster.
God is in…
The Details
From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at |
On Harvard and psychiatry: see
The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
(February 24, 2004)
This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I may have seen him in Cambridge at some point. Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine. At that time– the early 60's– little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans– exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.
From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Some traces of that culture:
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A web page
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A contemporary
Click on pictures for details. |
A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:
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Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that.
Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true. Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question? Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't. Armand Nicholi: Exactly. Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't. Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out? Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that — Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle. Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all. Doug Holladay: Some hours. Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere. Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that? Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God. |
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Gallagher seemed to be the only participant in the PBS discussion that came close to the Montessori ideals of conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity. Dr. Montessori intended these as ideals for teachers, but they seem also to be excellent religious values. Just as the willow-tombstone seems suited to Geoffrey Hill's style, the Pythagorean sangaku pictured above seems appropriate to the admirable Gallagher.
Music to Read By
In honor of Roger Cooke’s review of Helson’s Harmonic Analysis, 2nd Edition, today’s site music is “Moonlight in Vermont.”
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Plato's |
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From The Unknowable (1999), by Gregory J. Chaitin, who has written extensively about his constant, which he calls Omega:
"What is Omega? It's just the diamond-hard distilled and crystallized essence of mathematical truth! It's what you get when you compress tremendously the coal of redundant mathematical truth…"
Charles H. Bennett has written about Omega as a cabalistic number.
Here is another result with religious associations which, historically, has perhaps more claim to be called the "diamond-hard essence" of mathematical truth: The demonstration in Plato's Meno that a diamond inscribed in a square has half the area of the square (or that, vice-versa, the square has twice the area of the diamond).
From Ivars Peterson's discussion of Plato's diamond and the Pythagorean theorem:
"In his textbook The History of Mathematics, Roger Cooke of the University of Vermont describes how the Babylonians might have discovered the Pythagorean theorem more than 1,000 years before Pythagoras.
Basing his account on a passage in Plato's dialogue Meno, Cooke suggests that the discovery arose when someone, either for a practical purpose or perhaps just for fun, found it necessary to construct a square twice as large as a given square…."
From "Halving a Square," a presentation of Plato's diamond by Alexander Bogomolny, the moral of the story:
SOCRATES: And if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul must be immortal….
From "Renaissance Metaphysics and the History of Science," at The John Dee Society website:
Galileo on Plato's diamond:
"Cassirer, drawing attention to Galileo's frequent use of the Meno, particularly the incident of the slave's solving without instruction a problem in geometry by 'natural' reason stimulated by questioning, remarks, 'Galileo seems to accept all the consequences drawn by Plato from this fact…..'"
Roger Bacon on Plato's diamond:
"Fastening on the incident of the slave in the Meno, which he had found reproduced in Cicero, Bacon argued from it 'wherefore since this knowledge (of mathematics) is almost innate and as it were precedes discovery and learning or at least is less in need of them than other sciences, it will be first among sciences and will precede others disposing us towards them.'"
It is perhaps appropriate to close this entry, made on All Hallows' Eve, with a link to a page on Dr. John Dee himself.
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