Log24

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Furious Fancies

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:41 pm

An image from “Force Field of Dreams” (Sept. 4, 2020)

Friday, November 8, 2019

Perspective at the End

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:50 am

This  journal on the last full day of Matthiessen's life —

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Sticks and Stones

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:29 am

The title is from this morning's previous post.

From a theater review in that post—

… "all flying edges and angles, a perpetually moving and hungry soul"

… "a formidably centered presence, the still counterpoint"

A more abstract perspective:

IMAGE- Concepts of Space

See also Desargues via Galois (August 6, 2013).

Friday, April 4, 2014

Dream of the Expanded Field

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

(Continued)

From today’s news:

“His daughter, the poet Jorie Graham, confirmed the death.”

From an artist on Oct. 3, 2013:

“‘This is St. Francis country,’ she says of Umbria.”

Eight Gate

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

From a Huffington Post  discussion of aesthetics by Colm Mulcahy
of Spelman College, Atlanta:

"The image below on the left… is… overly simplistic, and lacks reality:

IMAGE - Two eightfold cubes- axonometric view on left, perspective view on right

It's all a matter of perspective: the problem here is that opposite sides
of the cube, which are parallel in real life, actually look parallel in the
left image! The image on the right is better…."

A related discussion:  Eight is a Gate.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Abstraction

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 pm

(Continued from Dec. 6, 2012)

Context:
Chinese Field  and Modal Diamond .

(See also today’s previous post.)

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Gate

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:13 pm

"Eight is a Gate." — Mnemonic rhyme

Today's previous post, Window, showed a version
of the Chinese character for "field"—

This suggests a related image

The related image in turn suggests

Unlike linear perspective, axonometry has no vanishing point,
and hence it does not assume a fixed position by the viewer.
This makes axonometry 'scrollable'. Art historians often speak of
the 'moving' or 'shifting' perspective in Chinese paintings.

Axonometry was introduced to Europe in the 17th century by
Jesuits returning from China.

Jan Krikke

As was the I Ching.  A related structure:

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Literary Field

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

An image suggested by Google's observance today
of Mies van der Rohe's 126th birthday—

Related material:

See also yesterday's Chapter and Verse  by Stanley Fish,
and today's Arts & Letters Daily .

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Field Dream

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 10:23 am

In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist who died in Beijing on Friday

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

"Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  'Go ahead and try,' he exclaimed.  'You'll see how it turns out.  Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'"

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara Winston

"The Chinese painter Wu Tao-tzu was famous because he could paint nature in a unique realistic way that was able to deceive all who viewed the picture. At the end of his life he painted his last work and invited all his friends and admirers to its presentation. They saw a wonderful landscape with a romantic path, starting in the foreground between flowers and moving through meadows to high mountains in the background, where it disappeared in an evening fog. He explained that this picture summed up all his life’s work and at the end of his short talk he jumped into the painting and onto the path, walked to the background and disappeared forever."

Jürgen Teichmann. Teichmann notes that "the German poet Hermann Hesse tells a variation of this anecdote, according to his own personal view, as found in his 'Kurzgefasster Lebenslauf,' 1925."

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Field Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:29 pm

Parker’s Wake

A continuation of Wednesday’s “Field of Dreams” link

Internet Movie Database comment

“The Kid From Left Field” is a wonderful baseball film made in the early fifties and breathes the nostalgia of that time period. Child actor Billy Chapin becomes a batboy for the woeful Bisons (a copy of the old St. Louis Browns) and proceeds to inform the players of how they can correct their individual problems. Unbeknownst to the team, Chapin’s wisdom is from his father, a washed-up player who has become a peanut vendor and lacks confidence and courage– in spite of his obvious baseball knowledge. Pretty soon, Chapin becomes the nine year old manager of the team with dramatic results that bind father to son; you can’t help but root for the Bisons! A baseball fantasy– but filled with much innocence and charm.

“…dramatic results that bind father to son….”

Not to mention the Holy Ghost. See Fess Parker, who died Thursday, in the “Left Field” film and in an essay by Roger Cooke in the April Notices of the American Mathematical Society

Life on the Mathematical Frontier: Legendary Figures and Their Adventures

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100320-Field.jpg

Fess Parker in
“The Kid from Left Field,” 1953

Possible associative links between recent Log24 posts and the baseball theme of the April AMS Notices

  1. The film “Field of Dreams” mentioned above is a resurrection story.
  2. Wednesday’s link to simultaneous multiple-level associations leads to the Gameplayers of Zan cover that also appears in Thursday’s post. That cover deals with a resurrection myth in Gameplayers.
  3. The Finnegans Wake resurrection myth is mentioned in Wednesday’s post “Spring Training.”

Associative links, though entertaining, have of course their limitations in logical argument.

A notable recent example– Jon Stewart’s parody of Glenn Beck.

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Sunday September 22, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 8:02 pm

Force Field of Dreams

Metaphysics and chess in today’s New York Times Magazine:

  • From “Must-See Metaphysics,” by Emily Nussbaum:

    Joss Whedon, creator of a new TV series —

    “I’m a very hard-line, angry atheist” and
    “I want to invade people’s dreams.”

  • From “Check This,” by Wm. Ferguson:

    Garry Kasparov on chess —

    “When the computer sees forced lines,
    it plays like God.”

Putting these quotations together, one is tempted to imagine God having a little game of chess with Whedon, along the lines suggested by C. S. Lewis:

As Lewis tells it the time had come for his “Adversary [as he was wont to speak of the God he had so earnestly sought to avoid] to make His final moves.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1955, p. 216) Lewis called them “moves” because his life seemed like a chess match in which his pieces were spread all over the board in the most disadvantageous positions. The board was set for a checkmate….

For those who would like to imagine such a game (God vs. Whedon), the following may be helpful.

George Steiner has observed that

The common bond between chess, music, and mathematics may, finally, be the absence of language.

This quotation is apparently from

Fields of Force:
Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik
. by George Steiner, Viking hardcover, June 1974.

George Steiner as quoted in a review of his book Grammars of Creation:

“I put forward the intuition, provisional and qualified, that the ‘language-animal’ we have been since ancient Greece so designated us, is undergoing mutation.”

The phrase “language-animal” is telling.  A Google search reveals that it is by no means a common phrase, and that Steiner may have taken it from Heidegger.  From another review, by Roger Kimball:

In ”Grammars of Creation,” for example, he tells us that ”the classical and Judaic ideal of man as ‘language animal,’ as uniquely defined by the dignity of speech . . . came to an end in the antilanguage of the death camps.”

This use of the Holocaust not only gives the appearance of establishing one’s credentials as a person of great moral gravity; it also stymies criticism. Who wants to risk the charge of insensitivity by objecting that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the ”ideal of man as ‘language animal’ ”?

Steiner has about as clear an idea of the difference between “classical” and “Judaic” ideals of man as did Michael Dukakis. (See my notes of September 9, 2002.)

Clearly what music, mathematics, and chess have in common is that they are activities based on pure form, not on language. Steiner is correct to that extent. The Greeks had, of course, an extremely strong sense of form, and, indeed, the foremost philosopher of the West, Plato, based his teachings on the notion of Forms. Jews, on the other hand, have based their culture mainly on stories… that is, on language rather than on form. The phrase “language-animal” sounds much more Jewish than Greek. Steiner is himself rather adept at the manipulation of language (and of people by means of language), but, while admiring form-based disciplines, is not particularly adept at them.

I would argue that developing a strong sense of form — of the sort required to, as Lewis would have it, play chess with God — does not require any “mutation,” but merely learning two very powerful non-Jewish approaches to thought and life: the Forms of Plato and the “archetypes” of Jung as exemplified by the 64 hexagrams of the 3,000-year-old Chinese classic, the I Ching.

For a picture of how these 64 Forms, or Hexagrams, might function as a chessboard,

click here.

Other relevant links:

“As you read, watch for patterns. Pay special attention to imagery that is geometric…”

and


from Shakhmatnaia goriachka

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