A sequel to Friday afternoon's Diamond Star
Diamond Star —
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A doodle from this year's [2012’s] Feast of the Epiphany—
A doodle based on today's previous post and on
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Context — All posts tagged "Eden."
Saturday, February 1, 2014
ART WARS (continued)
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Friday, January 31, 2014
Diamond Star
From The Diamond and the Star , by John Warden*
(London, Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd., June 1, 2009) —
(The quotation is from Kipling's "The Conundrum of the Workshops.")
Answer — Some would say "Yes."
Part I: From a search for "Diamond Star" in this journal —
The Diamond Star
Part II: From the Facebook photos of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche—
* Obituary link, added at 10:45 PM ET Jan. 31 after reading a publisher's note
saying that "The author sadly died before the book was published."
Perhaps sadly, perhaps not.
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Sunday, May 1, 2011
Quarantine Story
A link in the previous post to Delos in this journal mentions physicist John Cramer.
His daughter Kathryn's weblog mentions the following story—
Graffiti in the Library of Babel • David Langford
—from her forthcoming anthology Year's Best SF 16 .
From the Langford story—
"'I suppose we have a sort of duty…' Out of the corner of her eye Ceri saw her notes window change. She hadn't touched the keyboard or mouse. Just before the flatscreen went black and flickered into a reboot sequence, she saw the coloured tags where no tags had been before. In her own notes. Surrounding the copied words 'quarantine regulations.'"
Related material from this journal last Jan. 9 —
"Show me all the blueprints."
– Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Aviator" (2004)
DiCaprio in "Inception"
In the "blueprints" link above, DiCaprio's spelling of "Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E" is of particular interest.
See also a search for Inception in this journal.
A post on a spelling bee at the end of that search quotes an essay on Walter Benjamin—
This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The “ignorance” introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God’s plan to the immediacy of the material world. What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from over-naming. “Things have no proper names except in God. . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed.” Overnaming becomes “the linguistic being of melancholy.”7
7 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man,” Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin , Selected Writings , Volume I: 1913-1926 , Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 73.
Compare and contrast with a remark by a translator mentioned here previously —
I fancy, myself, that this self-consciousness about translation dates approximately from the same time as man's self-consciousness about language itself. Genesis tells us that Adam named all the animals (just as in Indian tradition the monkey-god Hanuman invented grammar by naming all the plants in the Garden of Illo Tempore). No doubts, no self-consciousness: "Whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Genesis II, 19). But after the expulsion from Paradise I see Adam doubting the moment the possibility occurs that another name might be possible. And isn't that what all translators are? Proposers, in another language, of another name ?
— Helen Lane in Translation Review , Vol. 5, 1980
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Friday, January 14, 2011
Ironic Butterfly
David Brooks's column today quotes Niebuhr. From the same source—
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History—
Chapter 8: The Significance of Irony
Any interpretation of historical patterns and configurations raises the question whether the patterns, which the observer discerns, are "objectively" true or are imposed upon the vast stuff of history by his imagination. History might be likened to the confusion of spots on the cards used by psychiatrists in a Rorschach test. The patient is asked to report what he sees in these spots; and he may claim to find the outlines of an elephant, butterfly or frog. The psychiatrist draws conclusions from these judgments about the state of the patient’s imagination rather than about the actual configuration of spots on the card. Are historical patterns equally subjective?
….
The Biblical view of human nature and destiny moves within the framework of irony with remarkable consistency. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden because the first pair allowed "the serpent" to insinuate that, if only they would defy the limits which God had set even for his most unique creature, man, they would be like God. All subsequent human actions are infected with a pretentious denial of human limits. But the actions of those who are particularly wise or mighty or righteous fall under special condemnation. The builders of the Tower of Babel are scattered by a confusion of tongues because they sought to build a tower which would reach into the heavens.
Niebuhr's ironic butterfly may be seen in the context of last
Tuesday's post Shining and of last Saturday's noon post True Grid—
The "butterfly" in the above picture is a diagram showing the 12 lines* of the Hesse configuration from True Grid.
It is also a reference to James Hillman's classical image (see Shining) of the psyche, or soul, as a butterfly.
Fanciful, yes, but this is in exact accordance with Hillman's remarks on the soul (as opposed to the spirit— see Tuesday evening's post).
The 12-line butterfly figure may be viewed as related to the discussions of archetypes and universals in Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology and in Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion . It is a figure intended here to suggest philosophy, not entertainment.
Niebuhr and Williams, if not the more secular Hillman, might agree that those who value entertainment above all else may look forward to a future in Hell (or, if they are lucky, Purgatory). Perhaps such a future might include a medley of Bob Lind's "Elusive Butterfly" and Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida."
* Three horizontal, three vertical, two diagonal, and four arc-shaped.
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Sunday, November 14, 2010
Midnight in the Garden, continued
Detail from Google logo of Nov. 13, 2010
Related material: After Eden and Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
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Saturday, June 19, 2010
Imago Creationis
In the above view, four of the tesseract's 16
vertices are overlaid by other vertices.
For views that are more complete and
moveable, see Smith's tesseract page.
Four-Part Tesseract Divisions—
The above figure shows how four-part partitions
of the 16 vertices of a tesseract in an infinite
Euclidean space are related to four-part partitions
of the 16 points in a finite Galois space
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Euclidean spaces versus Galois spaces in a larger context— Infinite versus Finite The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
masculine and feminine,
life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy." |
Another picture related to philosophy and religion—
Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion—
This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self. Compare the
remarks of Paul Valéry on the Self—
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Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990, pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty— reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2:315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science… reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896). O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60) C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61) |
Note also the remarks of George David Birkhoff at Rice University
in 1940 (pdf) on Galois's theory of groups and the related
"theory of ambiguity" in Galois's testamentary letter—
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… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical “Theory of Groups.” If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally* whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency in this respect. * That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp. |
Related material:
A medal designed by Leibniz to show how
binary arithmetic mirrors the creation by God
of something (1) from nothing (0).
Another array of 16 strings of 0's and 1's, this time
regarded as coordinates rather than binary numbers—
Some context by a British mathematician —
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Imago by Wallace Stevens Who can pick up the weight of Britain, Who can move the German load Or say to the French here is France again? Imago. Imago. Imago. It is nothing, no great thing, nor man Of ten brilliancies of battered gold And fortunate stone. It moves its parade Of motions in the mind and heart, A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man In February hears the imagination's hymns And sees its images, its motions And multitudes of motions And feels the imagination's mercies, In a season more than sun and south wind, Something returning from a deeper quarter, A glacier running through delirium, Making this heavy rock a place, Which is not of our lives composed . . . Lightly and lightly, O my land, Move lightly through the air again. |
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Imago, Imago, Imago
Recommended— an online book—
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.
See in particular
Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.
Pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896).
O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)
C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)
Compare Jung's image in Aion of the Self as a four-diamond figure:
and Cullinane's purely geometric four-diamond figure:
For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.
What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem. This system was depicted by artist Josefine Lyche in her installation "Theme and Variations" in Oslo in 2009. Lyche titled this part of her installation "The Smallest Perfect Universe," a phrase used earlier by Burkard Polster to describe the projective 3-space PG(3,2) that contains these points (at right below) and hyperplanes (at left below).
Although the system of points (at right above) and hyperplanes (at left above) exemplifies Valéry's notion of invariant, it seems unlikely to be the sort of thing he had in mind as an image of the Self.
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Thursday, December 31, 2009
All About Eve
Genesis 3:24—
So he drove out the man; and he placed
at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims,
and a flaming sword which turned every way,
to keep the way of the tree of life.
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"The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that 'I am' which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That 'I am' has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes 'a dead letter.'" |
Carlene Hatcher Polite–
"Shall I help you?" asked a bass voice.
"If you can," answered a contralto.
"Trace down this tree. Let me show you
men in its stead. Leaf through this bush,
extinguish the burning fire…"
— The Flagellants, page 8
"How much story do you want?"
— George Balanchine
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Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Triptych
Related material:
"Harrowing cuteness,"* The Eden Express, and a search on "harrowing" in this journal
* Perhaps a typo, but still a memorable phrase.
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Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Tuesday September 1, 2009
Back to the Garden
The previous entry dealt with an artist who died last Wednesday (August 26).
Dominick Dunne, producer of the film version of "The Boys in the Band," also died last Wednesday.
In his memory, four readings:
1. "Pilot Fish," by Hemingway
2. Self-profile by Stephen Vider, author of "American Mystic" (see previous entry)
3. "Party Animal," Vider's essay on "The Boys in the Band" published on Sinatra's birthday, 2008
4. Back to the Garden of Forking Paths (also on Sinatra's birthday, 2008)
Related material
from last Sunday morning:
from last Sunday morning:
"'Soul' of a Party Is Memorialized"
—New York Times online front page
and
"In the Details."
The following illustration from
August 16th may also be relevant:
Click cover to enlarge.
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Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sunday August 16, 2009
Refugees
In memory of
Kenneth H. Bacon, dead at 64
on August 15th, 2009.
Bacon was an advocate for refugees.
"Even blue-blooded WASPs were refugees at one time; mine came over from England in 1630, fleeing debts for all I know," he said.
Bacon turned 64
last year on November 21.
From a story in the November 21
Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:
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"Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe…. A red apple made the rounds, |
________________________
"Do you like apples?"
— Good Will Hunting
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Thursday, April 2, 2009
Thursday April 2, 2009
In memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)
"… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool's paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost."
— No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994
New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:
"Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday, [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill."
Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).
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Related material:
"Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense."
— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure
"The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed 'retrograde analysis'…."
— Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense
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Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday December 19, 2008
Inside the
White Cube
White Cube
Part I: The White Cube
Part II: Inside
Part III: Outside
For remarks on religion
related to the above, see
Log24 on the Garden of Eden
and also Mark C. Taylor,
"What Derrida Really Meant"
(New York Times, Oct. 14, 2004).
For some background on Taylor,
see Wikipedia. Taylor, Chairman
of the Department of Religion at
Columbia University, has a
1973 doctorate in religion from
Harvard University. His opinion
of Derrida indicates that his
sympathies lie more with
the serpent than with the angel
in the Tansey picture above.
For some remarks by Taylor on
the art of Tansey relevant to the
structure of the white cube
(Part I above), see Taylor's
The Picture in Question:
Mark Tansey and the
Ends of Representation
(U. of Chicago Press, 1999):
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From Chapter 3,
"Sutures* of Structures," p. 58: "What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work? This question is deceptive in its simplicity. A frame is, of course, 'a basic skeletal structure designed to give shape or support' (American Heritage Dictionary)…. when the frame is in question, it is difficult to determine what is inside and what is outside. Rather than being on one side or the other, the frame is neither inside nor outside. Where, then, Derrida queries, 'does the frame take place….'" * P. 61:
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Monday, December 15, 2008
Monday December 15, 2008
Happy Birthday,
Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor
"Julie Taymor… will be directing Helen Mirren in a big-screen adaptation of The Tempest. Dame Helen, in a gender-switch from the original, will be playing Prospera, the usurped Duchess possessed of a vast library and magical powers."
— John Murphy at Bardolatry.com on November 21, 2008
A vast library…
On searching for Garden of Eden patterns (GEP's):
"The grid is a staircase to the Universal…."
— Rosalind Krauss, quoted here on Weyl's birthday, 2004
"I find the whole topic of GEPs a deeply interesting one, from many viewpoints: mathematical, philosophical, physical….
… the obvious problem is, that the required computational time is growing rapidly with the size of the grid, and even for a small grid, like 4×4 (=16 cells) there are 216=65536 possible patterns…."
— cateye at RichardDawkins.net
… and magical powers
The date of cateye's post was Sunday, October 21, 2007.
For related material see Log24 on Sunday, October 21, 2007.
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Wednesday July 2, 2008
Bull's-Eye
On this date in 1961,
Ernest Hemingway shot
himself.
The Talented Patricia Highsmith
"Yes, oh, God, Robin was beautiful. [….] A sort of first position in attention, a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire."
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Related material:
The Languages of Addiction,
Ch. 13: The Barnes Complex
See also
The Garden of Eden.
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Tuesday March 25, 2008
Dancers and
the Dance
the Dance
The previous entry was inspired (see the "In the Details" link) by the philosophical musings of Julie Taymor… specifically, her recollection of Balinese dancers–
"… they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail….
They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was… it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."— Julie Taymor,
"Skewed Mirrors" interview
Here is some further commentary on the words of that entry–
On the phrase "Within You Without You"– the title of a song by George Harrison:
"Bernard’s understanding of reality connects to this idea of 'flow': he sees reality as a product of consciousness. He rejects the idea of an 'outer' world of unchanging objects and an 'inner' world of the mind and ideas. Rather, our minds are part of the world, and vice versa."
— Adrien Ardoin, SparkNote on
Virginia Woolf's The Waves
On "Death and the Apple Tree"– the title of the previous entry— in The Waves:
"The apple tree Neville is looking at as he overhears the servants at the school discussing a local murder becomes inextricably linked to his knowledge of death. Neville finds himself unable to pass the tree, seeing it as glimmering and lovely, yet sinister and 'implacable.' When he learns that Percival is dead, he feels he is face to face once again with 'the tree which I cannot pass.' Eventually, Neville turns away from the natural world to art, which exists outside of time and can therefore transcend death. The fruit of the tree appears only in Neville’s room on his embroidered curtain, a symbol itself of nature turned into artifice. The apple tree image also echoes the apple tree from the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the fruit of which led Adam and Eve to knowledge and, therefore, expulsion from Eden."
— Adrien Ardoin, op. cit.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Wednesday February 27, 2008
The Plot
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men,
but rather of their folly"
— Four Quartets
"Dear friends, would those of you who know what this is all about please raise your hands? I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong– we never left the Garden. Look about you. This is paradise. It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot. We are all fools. Ha ha! Moriarty has made fools of all of us. But together– you and I, tonight– we'll bring him down."
— George C. Scott as Justin Playfair
The earth is shining
under the soot…
under the soot…
Ah! bright wings
"Whoever owns the Boeing 707
parked on La Brea Avenue,
your landing lights are on."
parked on La Brea Avenue,
your landing lights are on."
[John Travolta runs on stage
and rushes for the door.]
For a religious interpretation
of the number 707, see
To Announce a Faith
(All Hallows' Eve, 2006)
and the following link
to a Tom Stoppard line
from the previous entry:
"Heaven, how can I
believe in Heaven?"
she sings at the finale.
"Just a lying
rhyme for seven!"
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Sunday, June 17, 2007
Sunday June 17, 2007
No Place Like Home:
A Father's Day Special
for Stephen King
A Father's Day Special
for Stephen King
"… the poet's search
for the same exterior
made / Interior"
— Wallace Stevens
"Imago. Imago. Imago."
— Wallace Stevens
(See previous entry.)
Stevens's phrase was
the epigraph to
The Imago Sequence,
a novella published
in May 2005.
From a review
(containing a spoiler)
of the novella:
"The Imago Sequence are three notable photographs taken by an otherwise unnotable photographer. They are photographs taken underground, location a well kept secret, and show either a bizarre rock formation carved out over millenia, or perhaps the imprint of a fossiled hominid in an anguished pose.
The photographs can have an impact on the viewer, and have had a history of having a major impact on the owners. One has changed hands, and the new owner shows off his new prized objet d'art, and sets one of his employees the tasks [sic] of identifying the location of the third in the sequence…."
Greensburg, Kansas
prior to
May 4, 2007:
This may be taken
as a reference to
today's previous entry.
That entry, like
the novella
The Imago Sequence,
contains a sequence
of three photographs.
The sequence was made
a month or so after the
novella was published,
but I was unaware
until this afternoon
that the novella existed.
Besides
"Imago Imago Imago,"
two other phrases
come to mind…
The real estate motto
"Location, Location, Location"
and Stevens again—
"Adam in Eden was the
father of Descartes."
Happy Father's Day.
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Sunday, April 22, 2007
Sunday April 22, 2007
Built
continued from
March 25, 2006
continued from
March 25, 2006
In honor of Scarlett Johansson's recent London films "Match Point" and "Scoop," here is a link to an entry of Women's History Month, 2006, with a discussion of an exhibition of the works of artist Liza Lou at London's White Cube Gallery. That entry includes the following illustrations:
This work might aptly be
retitled "Brick Shithouse."
Related material:
See also this morning's entry —
"She's a brick… house…
The lady's stacked
and that's a fact,
Ain't holdin' nothin' back."
— and last year's entry
on this date:
"Her wall is filled with pictures,
She gets 'em one by one."
The bricks and "white cube"
above and in this morning's entry
may be contrasted with the
bricks of Diamonds and Whirls
and the cube of On Beauty.
Poetic allusions such as these
may help provide
entertainment in the afterlife
for Beavis, Butt-Head, and
other inmates of Plato's Cave:
"The Garden of Eden is behind us
and there is no road back to innocence;
we can only go forward."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Earth Shine, p. xii
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Friday, June 2, 2006
Friday June 2, 2006
'Ursprache' beats 'weltschmerz'
to win American spelling bee
Weltschmerz
and the
Ursprache
to win American spelling bee
Weltschmerz
and the
Ursprache
From eudaemonist.com,
a quotation from
Paul Zanker's
The Mask of Socrates:
"Zanker describes the photograph [above] as 'Walter Benjamin looking out at the viewer, his head propped on his hand, his face filled with loneliness and weltschmerz.'"
Benjamin was a Jewish Marxist. For a Jewish perspective on spelling, see Log24, Nov. 11, 2005. For a leftist perspective on Benjamin and last night's crucial spelling word "Ursprache," see "Ground Zero, an American Origin," by Mary Caputi (Poroi, 2, 1, August 2003):
The Baroque sensibility of ruin emphasizes a meaninglessness that too many possibilities deliver. Aimlessness and malaise make life into exhausting toil in the absence of coherence. In overdetermined realities, meaning appears arbitrary and erratic, as the world's connection to God seems lost or withheld. At the extreme, everyday life is as full of noise and commotion as it is devoid of intrinsic meaning. Connections among people wither with the onset of overabundance and despair. Recognition of this condition induces acedia, a weariness of life. Here the malaise of modernity and ruins ties to Benjamin's interest in Trauerspiel, German tragic drama, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. All respond to a plague of lost spiritual connections and a meaningless earthly existence where incessant toil and trouble — "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" — contribute to a chronic, wearing sense of pain.
Benjamin's interest in this form of melancholia, from suffering a sort of spiritual exile, is evident in his 1916 essay "On Language as Such and On the Language of Man." In this text, he explains that the Ursprache, our "original" language, is "blissful" precisely because it lacks the arbitrariness that results from overdetermination. Ur-speech is Adamic language, the linguistic power that God gives to Adam to confer identity on the material world. It contains no arbitrary component, but reveals the unity between God's divine plan and the world as it exists. Before ruins and fragments, there is no overdetermination to induce the melancholy of acedia. Instead the originary language implies a unity of transcendent and immanent realms. "With the creative omnipotence of language it begins, and at the end of language, as it were, assimilates the created, names it. Language is therefore both the creative and the finished creation; it is word and nature."6
This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The "ignorance" introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God's plan to the immediacy of the material world. What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from over-naming. "Things have no proper names except in God. . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed." Overnaming becomes "the linguistic being of melancholy."7
6 Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man," Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 68. 7 Ibid., p. 73.
For a Christian perspective on Adamic language, see Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion.
Float like a butterfly,
sting like a
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Saturday, April 8, 2006
Saturday April 8, 2006
Ideas and Art
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes…
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
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Saturday, November 12, 2005
Saturday November 12, 2005
Glory Season
"…his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection…."
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI
"… when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot help but feel that something momentous is about to happen. There is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of flesh and blood….
"Otzar Eden HaGanuz," Saul says. "The Hidden Eden. In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation…. Once you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa."
"In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."
— The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata
"Regarding cellular automata, I'm trying to think in what SF books I've seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to mind:
The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin"
— Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet
"If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
… Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden' configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation…. I didn't understand the need for this elaborate set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.'"
— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City
"Y'know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations."
— David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408
Related material:
|
Figure 2
"… matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of physics. This is shown in Figure 2. |
Figure 3
"This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract representation of God we are capable of comprehending…. — A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf) |
See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.
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Monday, August 29, 2005
Monday August 29, 2005
| Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 12:30:40 -0400 From: Alf van der Poorten AM Subject: Vale George Szekeres and Esther Klein Szekeres Members of the Number Theory List will be sad to learn that George and Esther Szekeres both died this morning. George, 94, had been quite ill for the last 2-3 days, barely conscious, and died first at 06:30. Esther, 95, died a half hour later. Both George Szekeres and Esther Klein will be recalled by number theorists as members of the group of young Hungarian mathematicians of the 1930s including Turan and Erdos. George and Esther's coming to Australia in the late 40s played an important role in the invigoration of Australian Mathematics. George was also an expert in group theory and relativity; he was my PhD supervisor. Emeritus Professor |
Related material:
AVE
| "Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. — James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter A very short space of time through very short times of space…. "It is demonstrated that space-time should possess a discrete structure on Planck scales." — Peter Szekeres, abstract of Discrete Space-Time |
Peter Szekeres is the son of George and Esther Szekeres.
ATQUE
"At present, such relationships can at best be heuristically described in terms that invoke some notion of an 'intelligent user standing outside the system.'"
— Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts, p. 152
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Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Tuesday August 2, 2005
Today's birthday:
Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
"What is it, Major Lawrence,
that attracts you personally
to the desert?"
"It's clean."
Visible Mathematics,
continued —
"The Garden of Eden is behind us
and there is no road
back to innocence;
we can only go forward."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Earth Shine, p. xii
"Beauty is the proper conformity
of the parts to one another
and to the whole."
of the parts to one another
and to the whole."
— Werner Heisenberg,
"Die Bedeutung des Schönen
in der exakten Naturwissenschaft,"
address delivered to the
Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts,
Munich, 9 Oct. 1970, reprinted in
Heisenberg's Across the Frontiers,
translated by Peter Heath,
Harper & Row, 1974
Related material:
(in Arabic, ka'b)
and
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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: |
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Wednesday May 18, 2005
"The Garden of Eden is behind us
and there is no road back to innocence;
we can only go forward."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Earth Shine, p. xii
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Thursday, May 27, 2004
Thursday May 27, 2004
Ineluctable
On the poetry of Geoffrey Hill:
"… why read him? Because of the things he writes about—war and peace and sacrifice, and the search for meaning and the truths of the heart, and for that haunting sense that, in spite of war and terror and the indifferences that make up our daily hells, there really is some grander reality, some ineluctable presence we keep touching. There remains in Hill the daunting possibility that it may actually all cohere in the end, or at least enough of it to keep us searching for more.
There is a hard edge to Hill, a strong Calvinist streak in him, and an intelligence that reminds one of Milton….."
— Paul Mariani, review in America of Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon
"Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
"A very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"
— James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter
"Time has been unfolded into space."
"Pattern and symmetry are closely related."
— James O. Coplien on Symmetry Breaking
"… as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, 'the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations'….
— Goldberg, S.L. 'Homer and the Nightmare of History.' Modern Critical Views: James Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38."
— from the Choate site of David M. Loeb
In summary:
 Joyce |
See also Time Fold.
(By the way, Jorn Barger seems
to have emerged from seclusion.)
Comments Off on Thursday May 27, 2004
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Tuesday April 6, 2004
Ideas and Art, Part III
The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes…
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"Quaedam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis proprie convenit ideae nomen: ut cùm hominem, vel Chimaeram, vel Coelum, vel Angelum, vel Deum cogito."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 5
"Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name idea; as when I think [represent to my mind] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 5
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
— Wallace Stevens, from
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
"… Quinimo in multis saepe magnum discrimen videor deprehendisse: ut, exempli causâ, duas diversas solis ideas apud me invenio, unam tanquam a sensibus haustam, & quae maxime inter illas quas adventitias existimo est recensenda, per quam mihi valde parvus apparet, aliam verò ex rationibus Astronomiae desumptam, hoc est ex notionibus quibusdam mihi innatis elicitam, vel quocumque alio modo a me factam, per quam aliquoties major quàm terra exhibetur; utraque profecto similis eidem soli extra me existenti esse non potest, & ratio persuadet illam ei maxime esse dissimilem, quae quàm proxime ab ipso videtur emanasse."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 11
"… I have observed, in a number of instances, that there was a great difference between the object and its idea. Thus, for example, I find in my mind two wholly diverse ideas of the sun; the one, by which it appears to me extremely small draws its origin from the senses, and should be placed in the class of adventitious ideas; the other, by which it seems to be many times larger than the whole earth, is taken up on astronomical grounds, that is, elicited from certain notions born with me, or is framed by myself in some other manner. These two ideas cannot certainly both resemble the same sun; and reason teaches me that the one which seems to have immediately emanated from it is the most unlike."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 11
"Et quamvis forte una idea ex aliâ nasci possit, non tamen hîc datur progressus in infinitum, sed tandem ad aliquam primam debet deveniri, cujus causa sit in star archetypi, in quo omnis realitas formaliter contineatur, quae est in ideâ tantùm objective."
— Descartes, Meditationes III, 15
"And although an idea may give rise to another idea, this regress cannot, nevertheless, be infinite; we must in the end reach a first idea, the cause of which is, as it were, the archetype in which all the reality [or perfection] that is found objectively [or by representation] in these ideas is contained formally [and in act]."
— Descartes, Meditations III, 15
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
The Quest for the Fiction of the Absolute:
"Canto nine considers the movement of the poem between the particular and the general, the immanent and the transcendent: "The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?" The poet, the creator-figure, the shadowy god-figure, is elided, evading us, "as in a senseless element." The poet seeks to find the transcendent in the immanent, the general in the particular, trying "by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general." In playing on the senses of "peculiar" as particular and strange or uncanny, these lines play on the mystical relation of one and many, of concrete and abstract."
Brian Cronin in Foundations of Philosophy:
"The insight is constituted precisely by 'seeing' the idea in the image, the intelligible in the sensible, the universal in the particular, the abstract in the concrete. We pivot back and forth between images and ideas as we search for the correct insight."
— From Ch. 2, Identifying Direct Insights
Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
"The fourth canto returns to the theme of opposites. 'Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another . . . . / This is the origin of change.' Change resulting from a meeting of opposities is at the root of Taoism: 'Tao produced the One. / The One produced the two. / The two produced the three. / And the three produced the ten thousand things' (Tao Te Ching 42) …."
|
From an entry of March 7, 2004:
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching– "He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi — in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin,
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites." The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line, See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
Logos Alogos, In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil. |
.
In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Wallace Stevens lists three criteria
for a work of the imagination:
It Must Be Abstract
The Line,
by S.H. Cullinane
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure
Related material:
Comments Off on Tuesday April 6, 2004