From Devil's Night 2019 —
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Physics for the Vatican
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Friday, January 10, 2020
Jan. 9 Review
“Work as if you were in the
early days of a better nation.”
— God, according to the author of
1982 Janine
|
From Carole A. Holdsworth, Tanner may have stated it best:
“V. is whatever lights you to
(Tony Tanner, page 36,
She’s a mystery |
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Thursday, January 9, 2020
Universal History (Adapted)
"One of the more fortuitous encounters of late-20th-century popular culture —
almost up there with Lennon meets McCartney and Taylor meets Burton —
took place on Labor Day 1965, at Jane Fonda’s Malibu beach house. The
actress was hosting a daylong bash at which her father, Henry’s,
generation mingled uneasily with her Hollywood hippie friends. The Byrds
played in the backyard. A young comedian-turned-film director named Mike
Nichols was approached by an improv comic-turned-itinerant writer named
Buck Henry, who asked how he was doing. Nichols dourly looked around
at all the proto-Summer of Love vibes and said, 'Here, under the shadow
of the great tree, I have found peace.'
Henry immediately recognized a sardonic East Coast kindred spirit trapped
in Lotusland . . . ."
— Ty Burr, Boston Globe staff, January 9, 2020, 10:34 AM
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Adapt or Die
For Hollywood —
For Emily Yahr (see second item above) —
Buck Henry reportedly died yesterday, January 8, 2020.
This journal on that date a year earlier —
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Monday, December 30, 2019
Death on Becket’s Day
Author Alasdair Gray reportedly died yesterday,
on the feast of St. Thomas à Becket.
"His Collected Verse (2010) was followed by
Every Short Story 1951-2012 . Hell and Purgatory ,
the first two parts of his version of Dante’s
Divine Comedy , “decorated and Englished in
prosaic verse”, appeared in 2018 and 2019.
In November Gray received the inaugural
Saltire Society Scottish Lifetime Achievement award."
— https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/
alasdair-gray-obituary
See some related remarks from May 15, 1998.
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Number and Time
(Hat tip for the title to Marie-Louise von Franz.)
Remarks by Metod Saniga from the previous post —
Remarks by Wolfgang Pauli, a friend of von Franz —
"This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian.
[Empty frame with jagged sides]. Only technical details
are missing." — As quoted at Derevianko Group.
Related material (see Oct. 11, 2010) —
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Sunday, December 29, 2019
Springer Link
Related reading —
"I closed my eyes and saw the number 137—
so very close to the reciprocal of alpha—
on the chest of the runner in Van Cortlandt Park.
Should I start the story there? "
— Alpert, Mark. Saint Joan of New York
(Science and Fiction) (p. 103).
Springer International Publishing. Kindle edition.
Cover detail:
See as well St. Joan in this journal.
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Morning of the Iguana
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker this morning —
" … mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction,
which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and,
for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes,
it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to
humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite
that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is,
for the first time, a startup.
… one of the human figures, we’re told, has
'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base
of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out
to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles
the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. …' "
Related art —
Logo by Saul Bass.
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Friday, December 27, 2019
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Scenes from…
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Friday, November 30, 2012
Point
"….mirando il punto 
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti"
— Dante, Paradiso , XVII, 17-18
For instance…
Click image for higher quality.
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Monday, March 7, 2011
Punto
"Time it goes so fast
When you're having fun"
"….mirando il punto
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti"
– Dante, Paradiso , XVII, 17-18
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Sunday, July 11, 2010
Philosophers’ Keystone
(Background— Yesterday's Quarter to Three,
A Manifold Showing, Class of 64, and Child's Play.)
Hermeneutics
Fans of Gregory Chaitin and Harry Potter
may consult Writings for Yom Kippur
for the meaning of yesterday's evening 673.
(See also Lowry and Cabbala.)
Fans of Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner,
and the Dark Lady may consult Prime Suspect
for the meaning of yesterday's midday 17.
For some more serious background, see Dante—
"….mirando il punto
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti "
– Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 17-18
“The symbol 
is used throughout the entire book
in place of such phrases as ‘Q.E.D.’ or
‘This completes the proof of the theorem’
to signal the end of a proof.”
— Measure Theory, by Paul R. Halmos, Van Nostrand, 1950
Halmos died on the date of Yom Kippur —
October 2, 2006.
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Saturday, July 10, 2010
Class of 64
Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:
"Another point of comparison is the preoccupation
with the significance of numbers."
"If I'd been out 'til quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?"
Happy birthday to Sue Lyon (Night of the Iguana, 1964)
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Monday, October 31, 2005
Monday October 31, 2005
Balance
"An asymmetrical balance is sought since it possesses more movement. This is achieved by the imaginary plotting of the character upon a nine-fold square, invented by some ingenious writer of the Tang dynasty. If the square were divided in half or in four, the result would be symmetrical, but the nine-fold square permits balanced asymmetry."
— Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, quoted in Aspen no. 10, item 8
"'Burnt Norton' opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus' fragments on flux and movement…. the chief contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both 'in and out of time,' how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the sad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden– a symbol he has previously used, in many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous, since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in 'Triumphal March': 'at the still point of the turning world.' This notion of 'a mathematically pure point' (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be Eliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante's 'unmoved Mover,' another way of symbolising a timeless release from the 'outer compulsions' of the world. Still another variation is the passage on the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar,' has suggested how art conquers time:
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
— F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,
Oxford University Press, 1958, as quoted in On "Burnt Norton"
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Tuesday September 28, 2004
3:33:33 PM
Romantic Interaction, continued…
The Rhyme of Time
From American Dante Bibliography for 1983:
|
Freccero, John. "Paradiso X: The Dance of the Stars" (1968). Reprinted in Dante in America … (q.v.), pp. 345-371. [1983] Freccero, John. "The Significance of terza rima." In Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento … (q.v.), pp. 3-17. [1983] Interprets the meaning of terza rima in terms of a temporal pattern of past, present, and future, with which the formal structure and the thematics of the whole poem coordinate homologically: "both the verse pattern and the theme proceed by a forward motion which is at the same time recapitulary." Following the same pattern in the three conceptual orders of the formal, thematical, and logical, the autobiographical narrative too is seen "as forward motion that moves towards its own beginning, or as a form of advance and recovery, leading toward a final recapitulation." And the same pattern is found especially to obtain theologically and biblically (i.e., historically). By way of recapitulation, the author concludes with a passage from Augustine's Confessions on the nature of time, which "conforms exactly to the movement of terza rima." Comes with six diagrams illustrating the various patterns elaborated in the text. |
From Rachel Jacoff's review of Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno:
"John Freccero's Introduction to the translation distills a compelling reading of the Inferno into a few powerful and immediately intelligible pages that make it clear why Freccero is not only a great Dante scholar, but a legendary teacher of the poem as well."
From The Undivine Comedy, Ch. 2, by Teodolinda Barolini (Princeton University Press, 1992):
|
"… we exist in time which, according to Aristotle, "is a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time."* It is further to say that we exist in history, a middleness that, according to Kermode, men try to mitigate by making "fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems." Time and history are the media Dante invokes to begin a text whose narrative journey will strive to imitate– not escape– the journey it undertakes to represent, "il cammin di nostra vita." * Aristotle is actually referring to the moment, which he considers indistinguishable from time: "Now since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the moment, and the moment is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time: for the extremity of the last period of time that we take must be found in some moment, since time contains no point of contact for us except in the moment. Therefore, since the moment is both a beginning and an end there must always be time on both sides of it" (Physics 8.1.251b18-26; in the translation of R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941]). |
From Four Quartets:
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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Sunday, November 2, 2003
Sunday November 2, 2003
All Souls' Day
at the Still Point
From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:
"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along. 'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "
From The Bakhtin Circle:
"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space….
Dostoevskii… sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. "
Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined. For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold. For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.
From Four Quartets:
"At the still point, there the dance is."
From an essay by William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
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Monday, March 10, 2003
Monday March 10, 2003
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
Two readings from The New York Times Book Review of Sunday,
2003 are relevant to our recurring "art wars" theme. The essay on Dante by Judith Shulevitz on page 31 recalls his "point at which all times are present." (See my March 7 entry.) On page 12 there is a review of a novel about the alleged "high culture" of the New York art world. The novel is centered on Leo Hertzberg, a fictional Columbia University art historian. From Janet Burroway's review of What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt:
"…the 'zeros' who inhabit the book… dramatize its speculations about the self…. the spectator who is 'the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas.'''
Here is a canvas by Richard McGuire for April Fools' Day 1995, illustrating such a spectator.
For more on the "vanishing point," or "point at infinity," see
Connoisseurs of ArtSpeak may appreciate Burroway's summary of Hustvedt's prose: "…her real canvas is philosophical, and here she explores the nature of identity in a structure of crystalline complexity."
For another "structure of crystalline
complexity," see my March 6 entry,
For a more honest account of the
New York art scene, see Tom Wolfe's
The Painted Word.
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Friday, March 7, 2003
Friday March 7, 2003
Lovely, Dark and Deep
On this date in 1923, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, was published. On this date in 1999, director Stanley Kubrick died. On this date in 1872, Piet Mondrian was born.
"….mirando il punto
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti"
— Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 17-18
Chez Mondrian
Kertész, Paris, 1926
6:23 PM Friday, March 7:
From Measure Theory, by Paul R. Halmos, Van Nostrand, 1950:
"The symbol is used throughout the entire book in place of such phrases as 'Q.E.D.' or 'This completes the proof of the theorem' to signal the end of a proof."