Peter J. Cameron, from other Log24 posts now tagged ELF —
"Like many people, I wrote poetry in my youth.
Julian Jaynes says something like 'Poems are rafts
grasped at by men drowning in inadequate minds',
but I think I knew from early on that one of the
main reasons was to practise my writing, so that
when I had something to say I could say it clearly."
"Shawn’s characters ponder the preprogrammed compulsions
to fall in and out of love, to be overwhelmed by and then lose
all desire,
'to use the tiny, pitiful words that the creature uses
to point to invisible parts of itself, invisible parts
that grow so vast that they turn us inside out and
then swallow us up and eat us.' "
— www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/t-magazine/wallace-shawn.html
A less "tiny, pitiful" word . . . "inscape" in this journal.
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The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go—and what might we find? By Manvir Singh in The New Yorker
October 13, 2025 The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.” The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German).
Casaubon’s quest stands as both an indictment of overreach and a warning about the senselessness of such sweeping comparisons. But is this entirely fair? The patterns are out there. Floods, tricksters, battles with monsters, creation and apocalypse—sometimes the resemblances are uncanny. |
"Before time began . . ." — Optimus Prime
. . . and for Harlan Kane
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From “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (Padgett, 1943) —
…”Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in— |
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From City of Illusions (Le Guin, 1967) — All the top of the table, Falk now saw, was sunk several inches into a frame, and contained a network of gold and silver wires upon which beads were strung, so pierced that they could slip from wire to wire and, at certain points, from level to level. There were hundreds of beads, from the size of a baby’s fist to the size of an apple seed, made of clay and rock and wood and metal and bone and plastic and glass and amethyst, agate, topaz, turquoise, opal, amber, beryl, crystal, garnet, emerald, diamond. It was a patterning-frame, such as Zove and Buckeye and others of the House possessed. Thought to have come originally from the great culture of Davenant, though it was now very ancient on Earth, the thing was a fortune-teller, a computer, an implement of mystical discipline, a toy. In Falk’s short second life he had not had time to learn much about patterning-frames. Buckeye had once remarked that it took forty or fifty years to get handy with one; and hers, handed down from old in her family, had been only ten inches square, with twenty or thirty beads… . . . . A crystal prism struck an iron sphere with a clear, tiny clink. Turquoise shot to the left and a double link of polished bone set with garnets looped off to the right and down, while a fire-opal blazed for a moment in the dead center of the frame. Black, lean, strong hands flashed over the wires, playing with the jewels of life and death. “So,” said the Prince, “you want to go home. But look! Can you read the frame? Vastness. Ebony and diamond and crystal, all the jewels of fire: and the Opal-stone among them, going on, going out. |
From a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man :
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“It would have been a great disappointment to me |
"Particularly mathematics and music" . . .
See as well . . .
An illustration of a title by George Mackey —
The American Scholar date above — Nov. 9, 2015 — suggests
a review of posts now tagged Schicksalstag 2015.
From a search in this journal for alt+key —
Vide Klein himself.
* Phrase from a post of January 26, 2003.
In memory of composer Mark Snow, who reportedly died
on July 4, 2025 — Music he wrote for the 2020 film
"The New Mutants" … and metadata on the film itself:
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The title of this post, "Rift Designs," … is taken from Heidegger. From a 2010 New Yorker review of Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson— "Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms." Following this advice, we find— "Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying and unfolds it3 in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure4 of a manifold showing." — p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993 "Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens." — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" 2. "Christ descending into the abyss" 3. Barrancas of Cuernavaca 4. Combinatorics, Philosophy, Geometry |
* Vide April 10, 2017.
Click the above image to enlarge it.
Update of Monday morning, June 30 —
See as well in this journal the phrase"language animal," which
Taylor calls "George Steiner's phrase." Steiner himself attributed
the phrase to the ancient Greeks, but apparently never cited
an exact source, though he gave a transliterated Greek version,
"zoon phonanta" — again without citing a source.
From a search in this journal for Pediment —
Another architectural example —
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From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117: … in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer … A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
This post was suggested by the board game name Halma.
The game itself was suggested by the shape of its later
descendant, Chinese Checkers … which in turn was suggested
by a "magic" hexagram, in its turn suggested by the remarks
of one David Ritz Finkelstein on the "magic" square in Dürer's
Melencolia I.
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There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.
— Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian, |
Chrysler Building Niche Worlds:
See also Alec Baldwin in "The Aviator" . . .
" 'There is a game of puzzles,' he resumed,
'which is played upon a map. One party playing
requires another to find a given word — the name
of town, river, state, or empire —
any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed
surface of the chart.' " — Edgar Allan Poe
A passage from Lester del Rey (Pstalemate , 1971) —
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She caught herself, grabbing frantically for the slithery walls that were already dropping to the bottomless pit. She clawed and fought, until she found the ladder of the old verse-the one she'd had revealed to her after the Change. She felt a skittering memory of alienness and things ran ahead of her awareness, but then she had begun the words of the poem that summed her needs, and she was reciting it over and over, climbing back toward the stability between the pit and the illusion beyond her: Mating hating, waiting sating, Slip to sleep in sleuthy slumber; Humble fumble, mumble jumble- Kill the cub that cawls encumber. Sometimes now she could no longer understand it all, but it still served. Distilled from her frantically escaped mind, the words still drew her back, let her relax to some-thing that would be almost sleep in the living. She could no longer find the way out when her mind was tense. Once the whole world was open at all times, but now there was only the single tunnel to the Boy, and she could not reach that until everything else was blanked from her mind and she could draw help from the symbol she had planted. Such a tiny opening toward him- Henry! -grim, desperate urgency in her need to get back. But at last the murky thread appeared, and she could will her way into the tunnel it marked. She moved outward through infinities of distance, swimming toward the once-familiar goal. Slowly, a richness and width appeared in the tunnel. Then well-known pathways and perception scenery, a part-ing to let her in. For a second, the familiarity soothed her, until the horror of the developing patterns of what might be, must be, struck her again. Here, still, she could catch the faint wisps of what was to come, though the tainted power no longer operated through either her will or the awareness around her. |
Related reading for Stephen King . . .
A meditation suggested by yesterday's evening fashion news . . .
* A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in
Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes,
by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120 —
"For Stevens, the poem 'makes meanings of the rock.'
In the mind, 'its barrenness becomes a thousand things/
And so exists no more.' In fact, in a peculiar irony that
only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's
function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself,
shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it
encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life, The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho, The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ... The rock is the stern particular of the air, The mirror of the planets, one by one, But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist, Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams; The difficult rightness of half-risen day. The rock is the habitation of the whole, Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A In a perspective that begins again At B: the origin of the mango's rind. (Collected Poems, 528)"
Related reading: "Back in Action."
Koan:
"What was your original face before you were born?"
Hint from Wallace Stevens:
"That which was public green turned private gray."
— Wallace Stevens
Koan reply:
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ELF's Bounty
"Down under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, |
"… as Gombrich well knew, Warburg also
constantly regrets the 'loss' of this 'thought-space' …"
Echo from the Pasaje Bella Vista in Cuernavaca —
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
— Postcard from eBay
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From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —
Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table… he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel notepaper…. I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart. |
* "The room outside of time" is a recurring theme in "The Resort."
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The Ring and the Stone
From Many Dimensions, a novel "This Holy Thing has been kept in seclusion," Ibrahim answered, "through many centuries, and in all that time none of its keepers have approached or touched it. And since Giles Tumulty stole it men have grasped at it in their own wisdom. But this woman has put her will at its disposal, and between it and her the union may be achieved by which the other Hiddenness is made manifest." "What is the other Hiddenness?" Lord Arglay asked. The Hajji hesitated, then he turned his eyes back to Chloe and seemed to ask a question of her. What answer he saw on the forehead at which he gazed she could not guess, but he spoke then in a low and careful voice. "In the Crown of Suleiman the Wise-the Peace be upon him!-" he said, "there was a Stone, and this Stone was that which is the First Matter of Creation, holy and terrible. But on the hand of the King there was a Ring and in the Ring was another secret, more holy and terrible than the Stone. For within the Ring there was a point of that Light which is the Spirit of Creation, the Adornment of the Unity, the Knowledge of the Loveliness, the Divine Image in the mirror of the worlds just and true. This was the justice and the Wisdom of Suleiman, by which all souls were made manifest to him and all causes rightly determined. Also when within the Holy of Holies in the Temple that the King made he laid his crown upon the Ark and between the wings of the Cherubim, and held his hand over it, the Light of the Ring shone upon the Stone and all things had peace. But when the King erred, building altars to strange gods, he dared no longer let the Light fall upon the Stone; also he put aside the Ring and it is told that Asmodeus sat upon his throne seven years. But I think that perhaps the King himself had not all that time parted from his throne, how closely soever Asmodeus dwelt within his soul. And of the hiding place of the Ring I do not know, nor any of my house; if it is on earth it is very secret. But the Light of it is in the Stone and all the Types of the Stone-and the Power of it is in the soul and body of any who have sought the union with the Stone, so that whoever touches them in anger or hatred or evil desire is subjected to the Light and Power of the Adornment of the Unity. And this I think my nephew did, and this is the cause of his blasting and hurling out." He looked straight at Chloe. "But woe, woe, woe to you," he said, "if from this time forth for ever you forget that you gave your will to the Will of That which is behind the Stone." |
This post was suggested by a Friday the Thirteenth death.
Columnist Rex Huppke in USA Today this morning —
". . . presidential nominee Donald Trump . . .
seems otherwise preoccupied with posting
unhinged rants on social media . . . ."
Huppke's self-description —
The Hopkins mentioned above is not the noted Jesuit
Gerard Manley Hopkins, but rather Jasper Hopkins .
See that Hopkins in this journal on Twelfth Night, 2015.
See as well . . .
Flashback to April 12, 2011 —
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In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism…. “They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)…. His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)— “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss. |
Related (if only phonetically) drama . . . Detective Cruz at Planck's Café.
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"I am serious about my study. I am a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University, though I have not for decades concerned myself with arithmetic, calculus, matrices, theorems, Hausdorff spaces, finite lattice representations, or anything else that involves values or numbers or representations of values or numbers or any such somethings, whether they have substance or not. I have spent my career in my little office on George Street in Providence contemplating and searching for nothing. I have not found it."
Everett, Percival. Dr. No: A Novel (p. 6). |
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" '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)." C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61) This is from page 157 of . . .
Flight from Eden: The Origins of |
"Time for you to see the field." — Bagger Vance.
The previous post, and Wednesday's roommate, suggested the above title.
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From The Dreaming Jewels , by Theodore Sturgeon: "Oh. And the crystals make things — even complete things — like Tin Pan Alley makes songs." "Something like it." Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. "Sit down, honey; I'll bring the toast. Now — this is my guess — when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can't see the change going on in the thing they're replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day — I don't know how long it takes — it will be completely replaced, every bit of it." "Then what?" "Then it can change itself — if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be." Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, "Change how?" "Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape — thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it's hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can't even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?" "Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?" Zena sipped coffee. "Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that." |
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Harold Bloom "Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valéry's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:
Valéry's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valéry's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'" |
"…at the still point, there the dance is…." — T. S. Eliot
St. Bridget's Still Point … June 25, 2020 —
Roots!
More recently . . .
The "Reading" Part —
Example —
Background —
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
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