(A title for Harlan Kane.)
Cartoon caption from The New Yorker issue dated Dec. 2, 2019 —
“Someday I’ll buy a little place in the country
and take my finger off the Zeitgeist.”
This (along with the previous post) suggests a Log24 search for Zeitgeist.
That search concludes, appropriately for today, with a meditation
on giving thanks.
— M. A. Foster, The Book of the Ler
"The Hulens themselves are closemouthed, secretive."
Above: Esther Dyson, pictures from Google's
2011 Zeitgeist conference at Paradise Valley, AZ.
See also "Everything's a story" (Feb. 19, 2004).
"OCT 14, 2019 • 8:00 PM"
"Culturally, code exists in a nether zone.
We can feel its gnostic effects [link added]
on our everyday reality, but we rarely see it,
and it’s quite inscrutable to non-initiates.
(The folks in Silicon Valley like it that way;
it helps them self-mythologize as wizards.)
We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV—
pieces of work that shape our souls.
But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s
most consequential bits of code, even though they
arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much."
— https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/
consequential-computer-code-software-history.html
( Sequel to the post of 12 AM Wednesday )
The following highlighted phrase was found, with a different spelling,
in The New Yorker issue dated Sept. 12, 2016.
The article in which the phrase was embedded is not recommended.
Neither is the book (which the foolhardy explorer may easily find)
from which the above snippet was taken.
* That of Fields of the Lord .
See George Steiner on Autistic Enchantment, as well as…
(Click images for further details.)
This year, Autism Awareness Day was April 2.
Click to enlarge.
See also March 9, 2007 and the film Queen to Play (NY-LA release: 2011, April 1).
The U.S. premiere of Queen to Play was on April 25, 2009 at the Tribeca Festival.
"Now, I'll open up a line of credit for you.
You'll be wantin' a few toys."
— A Robert De Niro character quoted in
Lines (St. Andrew's Day, 2011)
Update of 10:10 AM EDT April 8 (Easter Day)—
See an "old Brooklyn haunt" in The Easter Phantom.
The Abridgment of Hope
Part I: Framework
From Log24,
Here’s Your Sign,
Aug. 8, 2002–
“Paz also mentions the Christian concept of eternity as a realm outside time, and discusses what happened to modern thought after it abandoned the concept of eternity.
Naturally, many writers have dealt with the subject of time, but it seems particularly part of the Zeitgeist now, with a new Spielberg film about precognition. My own small experience, from last night until today, may or may not have been precognitive. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that many people often experience, a sort of ‘So that’s what that was about’ feeling. Traditionally, such experience has been expressed in terms of a theological framework.”
Part II: Context
From Ann Copeland,
“Faith and Fiction-Making:
The Catholic Context“–
“Each of us is living out a once-only story which, unlike those mentioned here, has yet to reveal its ending. We live that story largely in the dark. From time to time we may try to plumb its implications, to decipher its latent design, or at least get a glimmer of how parts go together. Occasionally, a backward glance may suddenly reveal implications, an evolving pattern we had not discerned, couldn’t have when we were ‘in’ it. Ah, now I see what I was about, what I was after.”
Part III: Context Sensitivity
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations:
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)
|
Another definition of context-sensitive grammars defines them as formal grammars where all productions are of the form
Such a grammar is also called a monotonic or noncontracting grammar because none of the rules decreases the size of the string that is being rewritten. If the possibility of adding the empty string to a language is added to the strings recognized by the noncontracting grammars (which can never include the empty string) then the languages in these two definitions are identical. |
Part IV: Abridgment
“Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439
Also from Stone’s novel, quoted by Ann Copeland in the above essay:
|
You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where? But why always so far? “Por qué?” she asked. There was a guy yelling. Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau. Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed. So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” (416) |
Here’s Your Sign
Last night, reading the 1990 Nobel Prize Lecture by Octavio Paz, I was struck by the fact that he was describing, in his own life and in the life of his culture, what might best be called a “fall from grace.”
I thought of putting this phrase in a journal entry, but decided that it sounded too hokey, in a faux-pious sort of way — as, indeed, does most Christian discourse.
I was brought up short when I read the morning paper, which, in a review of the new Mel Gibson movie “Signs,” described Gibson’s character’s “fall from grace” in those exact words.
The Paz lecture dealt with his childhood, which seemed to him to take place in a realm without time:
“All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours’ patio.”
Paz also mentions the Christian concept of eternity as a realm outside time, and discusses what happened to modern thought after it abandoned the concept of eternity.
Naturally, many writers have dealt with the subject of time, but it seems particularly part of the Zeitgeist now, with a new Spielberg film about precognition. My own small experience, from last night until today, may or may not have been precognitive. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that many people often experience, a sort of “So that’s what that was about” feeling. Traditionally, such experience has been expressed in terms of a theological framework.
For me, the appropriate framework is philological rather than theological. Paz begins his lecture with remarks on giving thanks… gracias, in Spanish. This is, of course, another word for graces, and is what prompted me to think of the phrase “fall from grace” when reading Paz. For a less academic approach to the graces, see the film “Some Girls,” also released under the title “Sisters.” This is the most profoundly Catholic film I have ever seen.
A still from “Some Girls“:
Powered by WordPress
