From a web page quoted here on the
Feast of St. Louis, 2003 —
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Case 9 of Hekiganroku:
A monk asked Joshu,
Joshu said, Setcho's Verse:
Its intention concealed,
Setcho (980-1052), |
The epigraph to Lefebvre's
The Production of Space (1974, translated in 1991) —
(Adapted from a prose poem, "La Higuera ,"
in ¿Águila o Sol? (1951).)
Words Are Events
August 12 was the date of death of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., and the date I entered some theological remarks in a new Harvard weblog. It turns out that August 12 was also the feast day of a new saint… Walter Jackson Ong, of St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, a Jesuit institution.
Today, August 25, is the feast day of St. Louis himself, for whom the aforementioned city and university are named.
The New York Times states that Ong was "considered an outstanding postmodern theorist, whose ideas spawned college courses…."
There is, of course, no such thing as a postmodern Jesuit, although James Joyce came close.
From The Walter J. Ong Project:
"Ong's work is often presented alongside the postmodern and deconstruction theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and others. His own work in orality and literacy shows deconstruction to be unnecessary: if you consider language to be fundamentally spoken, as language originally is, it does not consist of signs, but of events. Sound, including the spoken word, is an event. It takes time. The concept of 'sign,' by contrast, derives primarily not from the world of events, but from the world of vision. A sign can be physically carried around, an event cannot: it simply happens. Words are events."
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From a commonplace book
"We keep coming back and coming back
The poem of pure reality, untouched
At the exactest point at which
The eye made clear of uncertainty,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
The solid, but the movable,
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
The web page where I found the Stevens quote also has the following:
|
Case 9 of Hekiganroku:
A monk asked Joshu,
Joshu said, Setcho's Verse:
Its intention concealed,
Setcho (980-1052), |
See also my previous entry for today,
"Gates to the City."
Gates to the City
Today’s birthday:
On August 25, 1918, composer Leonard Bernstein was born.
From Winter’s Tale, Harcourt Brace (1983):
Four Gates to the CityBy MARK HELPRIN Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls. In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery. To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever. |
See also
Lenny’s Gate:
Fred Stein,
Central Park,
1945
Thanks to Sonja Klein Fine Art
for pointing out the Stein photo.
Eleven Years Ago Today…
On October 23, 1991, I placed in my (paper) journal various entries that would remind me of the past… of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and a girl I knew there in 1962. One of the entries dealt with a book by Arthur Koestler, The Challenge of Chance. A search for links related to that book led to the following site, which I find very interesting:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2740/.
This is a commonplace-book site, apparently a collection of readings for the end of the century and millennium. No site title or owner is indicated, but the readings are excellent. Accepting the challenge of chance, I reproduce one of the readings… The author was not writing about Cuernavaca, but may as well have been.
From Winter’s Tale, Harcourt Brace (1983):
Four Gates to the CityBy MARK HELPRIN Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls. In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery. To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever. |
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