Sunday, October 20, 2024
Monday, April 12, 2010
Weaveworld
"Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels
like a shell game." –R. B. Kitaj
as quoted by Marco Livingstone
Related material: Prime Designer,
Shell Game, and Evil Daemon.
See also remarks by root@matrix.net.
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Thursday, January 25, 2024
The Much-Needed Gap
|
Prospero's Children was first published by HarperCollins,
"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children |
"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —
Related material in this journal: Weaveworld.
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Saturday, July 8, 2023
Dead on the Third of July
Update at 9:06 PM ET . . .
Windows lockscreen this evening —
Related material in this journal: Weaveworld.
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Wednesday, May 4, 2022
For a Cartoon Graveyard . . . “Angels in the Architecture”
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Thursday, September 30, 2021
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Fire on the Water
Related literary remarks from The Crimson Abyss
(a Log24 post of March 29, 2017) —
|
Prospero's Children was first published by HarperCollins,
"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children |
Related imagery from The Crimson Abyss —
See as well posts of June 6, 2004, and May 22, 2004.
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Monday, April 2, 2018
The Steppenwolf Carpet
See posts tagged Steppenwolf Carpet in this journal.
Related fiction: Weaveworld .
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Friday, March 31, 2017
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
The Crimson Abyss
"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."
—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson , March 29
1984 —
2010 —
Logo design for Stack Exchange Math by Jin Yang
Recent posts now tagged Crimson Abyss suggest
the above logo be viewed in light of a certain page 29 —
"… as if into a crimson abyss …." —
Update of 9 PM ET March 29, 2017:
Prospero's Children was first published by HarperCollins,
London, in 1999. A statement by the publisher provides
an instance of the famous "much-needed gap." —
"This is English fantasy at its finest. Prospero’s Children
steps into the gap that exists between The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe and Clive Barker’s Weaveworld , and
is destined to become a modern classic."
Related imagery —
See also "Hexagram 64 in Context" (Log24, March 16, 2017).
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Saturday, March 5, 2016
The Looming
Material related to the title:
- Art as Religion (Jan. 1, 2016) —
- From the post Edifice (March 1, 2016) —
"Euclid's edifice loomed in my consciousness
as a marvel among sciences, unique in its clarity
and unquestionable validity."
—Richard J. Trudeau in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution (1986)
- Weaveworld in this journal.
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Saturday, October 17, 2015
Contrapuntal Interweaving
(Continued from day before yesterday.)
"Sondheim's story is a dense contrapuntal interweaving
of four main fairy-tale stories…."
— Vladimir V. Zelevinsky, 1998 review
in The Tech at MIT
Related material: "Weaver's Tale" last Sunday,
and the novel Weaveworld in this journal.
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Sunday, October 11, 2015
Weavers’ Tale
"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."
— The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar
See also Symplectic in this journal.
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Monday, September 14, 2015
Happy Birthday to…
The actor who portrayed the angel Uriel in the TV series
"Supernatural," Robert Wisdom.
See also the angel Uriel in the novel Weaveworld .
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Weaving World
(The title was suggested by the novel Weaveworld .)
Recent public selfie by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche —
Lyche's shirt honors the late Kurt Cobain.
Not-so-recent image of Hugo Weaving as
Agent Smith in "The Matrix" —
"Smells like teen spirit."
See also Weaving in the new film "Strangerland."
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Saturday, July 11, 2015
Midnight in the Garden of Allah
From Universals Revisited, Leap Day, 2012 —
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Friday, January 23, 2015
Complex Symplectic Fantasy
"We are not isolated free chosers,
monarchs of all we survey, but
benighted creatures sunk in a reality
whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform
by fantasy."
—Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"
in Encounter , p. 20 of issue 88
(vol. 16 no. 1, January 1961, pp. 16-20)
"We need to turn our attention away from the consoling
dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry
symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards
the real impenetrable human person."
— Iris Murdoch, 1961
"Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Universals Revisited
"Some philosophical pieces are like symphonies,
others like quartets."
— Gustav Bergmann, "Frege's Hidden Nominalism,"
The Philosophical Review ,
Vol. 67, No. 4 (Oct., 1958), pp. 437-459
See also Annals of Religion.
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Monday, February 27, 2012
Annals of Religion
"Allegorical pictures of contemporary events
have a way of weaving in and out
between the symbolic and the semi-psychotic."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker , issue dated March 5, 2012
See also Venue and Weaveworld .
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Dipolar God
|
"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
— Wallace Stevens, |
Yesterday's meditation ("Simon's Shema") on the interpenetration of opposites continues:
Part I: The Jewel in the Lotus
"The fundamental conception of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics, namely, yuganaddha, signifies the coincidence of opposites. It is symbolized by the conjugal embrace (maithuna or kama-kala) of a god and goddess or a Buddha and his consort (signifying karuna and sunyata or upaya and prajna, respectively), also commonly depicted in Tantric Buddhist iconography as the union of vajra (diamond sceptre) and padme (lotus flower). Thus, yuganaddha essentially means the interpenetration of opposites or dipolar fusion, and is a fundamental restatement of Hua-yen theoretic structures."
— p. 148 in "Part II: A Whiteheadian Process Critique of Hua-yen Buddhism," in Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy), by Steve Odin, State University of New York Press, 1982
Part II: The Dipolar God
And on p. 163 of Odin, op. cit., in "Part III: Theology of the Deep Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology," in the section titled "Whitehead's Dipolar God as the Collective Unconscious"–
"An effort is made to transpose Whitehead's theory of the dipolar God into the terms of the collective unconscious, so that now the dipolar God is to be comprehended not as a transcendent deity, but the deepest dimension and highest potentiality of one's own psyche."
Part III: Piled High and Deep
Odin obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1980. (See curriculum vitae (pdf).)
For an academic review of Odin's book, see David Applebaum, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 107-108.
It is perhaps worth noting, in light of the final footnote of Mark D. Brimblecombe's Ph.D. thesis "Dipolarity and God" quoted yesterday, that "tantra" is said to mean "loom." For some less-academic background on the Tantric iconography Odin describes, see the webpage "Love and Passion in Tantric Buddhist Art." For a fiction combining love and passion with the word "loom" in a religious context, see Clive Barker's Weaveworld. This fiction– which is, if not "supreme" in the Wallace Stevens sense, at least entertaining– may correspond to some aspects of the deep Jungian psychological reality discussed by Odin.
Actors portraying
Arendt and Heidegger
Arendt and Heidegger
Click on image for details.
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Tuesday August 22, 2006
Beginnings
“Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.”
— Clive Barker, Weaveworld
“No mathematical subject lies closer to intuition than the geometry of two and three dimensions.”
— Robert E. Greene, beginning an April 1998 review of Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology, by William P. Thurston
Thurston’s book provides some background for today’s opening lecture by Richard Hamilton, “The Poincare Conjecture,” at the beginning of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.
Hamilton is likely to discuss the Poincare conjecture in the wider context of Perelman‘s recent work on Thurston’s geometrization conjecture.
In “The Eight Model Geometries,” section 3.8 of his book, Thurston provides yet another beginning–
“What is a geometry?”
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Saturday, August 19, 2006
Saturday August 19, 2006
Metaphysical
Wonderlands
Wonderlands
"With no means to verify its truth, superstring theory, in the words of Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, may turn out to be 'a kind of metaphysical wonderland.' Yet it is being pursued as vigorously as ever, its critics complain, treated as the only game in town."
— "The Inelegant Universe," by George Johnson, in the Sept. 2006 Scientific American
Some may prefer metaphysics of a different sort:
"To enter Cervantes’s world, we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist’s imagination."
As wonderlands go, I personally prefer Clive Barker's Weaveworld.
Sunday, November 6, 2005
Sunday November 6, 2005
For Mike Nichols,
whose birthday is today:
Angels in Arabia
Yesterday’s entries discussed an angel and a fugue; this suggests Clive Barker’s classic tale Weaveworld, which in turn suggests the following links:
1. the Log24 archive,
Aug. 1-6, 2005, and
2. C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, and
the Corruption of Language,
an essay at the website of
St. Christopher’s Cathedral
in Bahrain, Arabia.
Nichols, who is Jewish, may of course prefer the following remark of comedian Sarah Silverman:
“I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because– I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic– it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”
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Saturday, August 6, 2005
Saturday August 6, 2005
The Fugue
"True joy is a profound remembering, and true grief is the same.
Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread out before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he'd tasted in his twenty-six years– tasted but always lost– were here redeemed and wed. He'd grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumour of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire.
It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die.
And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him."
Weaveworld,
Book Three:
Out of the
Empty Quarter
"The wheels of its body rolled,
the visible mathematics
of its essence turning on itself…."
From Friday:
For the meaning
of this picture, see
Geometry of the
4×4 Square.
For graphic designs
based on this geometry,
see Theme and Variations
and Diamond Theory.
For these designs in the
context of a Bach fugue,
see Timothy A. Smith's
essay (pdf) on
Fugue No. 21 in B-Flat Major
from Book II of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Smith also offers a
Shockwave movie
that uses diamond theory
to illustrate this fugue.
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Friday, August 5, 2005
Friday August 5, 2005
For Sir Alec
From Elegance:
"Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday…."
— Bernard Holland, page C12,
The New York Times,
Monday, May 20, 1996.
Holland was pondering the identity of the Juilliard String Quartet, which had just given a series of concerts celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.
"Elegant"
— Page one,
The New York Times,
Monday, August 7, 2000.
The Times was describing the work of Sir Alec Guinness, who died on 8/5/00.
An example of the Holland name problem:
Monday, August 1, 2005 — Visible Mathematics:
"Earlier, there had been mapping projects in Saudi Arabia's Rub' al-Khali, the Empty Quarter in the south and west of the country….
'"Empty" is a misnomer… the Rub' al-Khali contains many hidden riches.'"
Friday, August 5, 2005 —
Related material:
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Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Tuesday August 2, 2005
Final Arrangements, continued
Kismet
From yesterday's Log24 —
Clive Barker's Weaveworld:
From yesterday's Log24 —
Clive Barker's Weaveworld:
Another of the angel's attributes rose from memory now, and with it a sudden shock of comprehension. Uriel had been the angel left to stand guard at the gates of Eden.
Eden.
At the word, the creature blazed. Though the ages had driven it to grief and forgetfulness, it was still an angel: its fires unquenchable. The wheels of its body rolled, the visible mathematics of its essence turning on itself and preparing for new terrors.
There were others here, the Seraph said, that called this place Eden. But I never knew it by that name.
"What, then?" Shadwell asked.
Paradise, said the Angel, and at the word a new picture appeared in Shadwell's mind. It was the garden, in another age….
This was a place of making, the Angel said. Forever and ever. Where things came to be.
"To be?"
To find a form, and enter the world.
Eden.
At the word, the creature blazed. Though the ages had driven it to grief and forgetfulness, it was still an angel: its fires unquenchable. The wheels of its body rolled, the visible mathematics of its essence turning on itself and preparing for new terrors.
There were others here, the Seraph said, that called this place Eden. But I never knew it by that name.
"What, then?" Shadwell asked.
Paradise, said the Angel, and at the word a new picture appeared in Shadwell's mind. It was the garden, in another age….
This was a place of making, the Angel said. Forever and ever. Where things came to be.
"To be?"
To find a form, and enter the world.
If I stand starry-eyed
That's a danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside
An angel like you.
— Robert Wright and George Forrest
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Monday, August 1, 2005
Monday August 1, 2005
Visible Mathematics
"Earlier, there had been mapping projects in Saudi Arabia's Rub' al-Khali, the Empty Quarter in the south and west of the country….
'"Empty" is a misnomer… the Rub' al-Khali contains many hidden riches.'"
— Maps from the Sky,
Saudi Aramco World, March/April 1995
|
From Weaveworld
Book Three: |