Log24

(A sequel to the previous post, Marbles)

Click the book cover for some related posts.

From The Abacus Conundrum —

See also Web Audio Resources at GitHub.

According to René Guitart in May 2008 —

"In fact, in concrete terms, the Mathematical Pulsation  is
nothing else but the thing that everyone does when doing
mathematics, even the most elementary ones. It is a very
special gesture in understanding ('geste de pensée'), well
known by each mathematician. The mind have to go to
and fro between to antinomical postures: to have the
situation under control, to leave the door open. To master
and to fix (a clear unique meaning) or to neglect and to
change (toward other possible meanings). Because of the
similarity of the pulsation of inspiration and expiration in
breath with the pulsation of closing and opening phases
in mathematical thinking, at the end of [Guitart (2003/a)]
I suggested to consider the famous book 'Zen in the Art
of Archery' [Herrigel (1997)] as a true treatise in didactic
of mathematics: just you have to replace everywhere the
words 'archery' by 'mathematical proof'."

Related material: Heisenberg on Beauty and the previous post.

Update of 6:20 AM Oct. 19, 2015 —

„Ich begriff plötzlich, daß in der Sprache oder doch
mindestens im Geist des Glasperlenspiels tatsächlich
alles allbedeutend sei, daß jedes Symbol und jede
Kombination von Symbolen nicht hierhin oder dorthin,
nicht zu einzelnen Beispielen, Experimenten und
Beweisen führe, sondern ins Zentrum, ins Geheimnis
und Innerste der Welt, in das Urwissen. Jeder Übergang
von Dur zu Moll in einer Sonate, jede Wandlung eines
Mythos oder eines Kultes, jede klassische, künstlerische
Formulierung sei, so erkannte ich im Blitz jenes
Augenblicks, bei echter meditativer Betrachtung,
nichts andres als ein unmittelbarer Weg ins Innere
des Weltgeheimnisses, wo im Hin und Wider zwischen
Ein- und Ausatmen, zwischen Himmel und Erde,
zwischen Yin und Yang sich ewig das Heilige vollzieht.“

— Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel.
Berlin:  Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2012. p. 172,
as quoted in a weblog.

For a version in English, see Summa Mythologica (Nov. 3, 2009).

Or: The Confessions of Nat Tate

“A convincing lie is, in its own way, a tiny, perfect narrative.”
— William Boyd, “A Short History of the Short Story” (2006)

“A novel written in the first-person singular has certain powerful
narrative advantages, especially when it takes the form of a ‘confession.'”
— William Boyd, “Memoir of a Plagiarist” (1994)

From a Log24 post yesterday —

For Little Man Tate —

Related material — Wechsler in this journal and an earlier Siri Hustvedt
art novel, from 2003 —

Mark and Lucille, Bill and Violet, Al and Regina, etc., etc., etc. —

Yesterday's post Devil's Gate provided a dark view of life and culture.

A more cheerful view is provided by the late Gail Levin,
a maker of PBS "American Masters" documentaries
that included, notably, Jeff Bridges and Marilyn Monroe.

Levin reportedly died at 67 on July 31, 2013.*

An image from an interview with Levin —

The date in the image, July 19th, 2006, is the broadcast
date of the PBS "American Masters" program on Monroe.
A check for synchronicity shows there was no Log24 post
on that date.

See, however, posts for the day before— "Sacred Order"—
and the day after— "Bead Game."

A related quote from an article linked to in the latter—

"First world culture, which is 'pagan and in the majority
everywhere,' has as its defining characteristic
a 'primacy of possibility,' or pop— a broadly inclusive
concept that covers everything from the Aboriginal
dreamtime to Plato’s Forms."

— Review by Jess Castle of Philip Rieff’s 
Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. 1: My Life among the
Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority,
University of Virginia Press, 2006. 256 pages, $34.95.

This quote may serve as the missing July 19, 2006, post.

Related material:  Dreamtime,  Possibility,  and Plato's Forms.

* See that date in this journal for two less famous American
  masters, artist Edward Valigursky and writer Robert Silverberg.

The New York Times Magazine for next Sunday:

The New York Times today:

Mailer and Cohen, taken together, suggest I should review two authors– Picard and Hesse– I encountered as a Harvard freshman in 1960.

Max Picard:

Goethe:

Online Etymology Dictionary:

Further background on the word “Knecht”–

Epigraph to Magister Ludi
(Joseph Knecht’s translation):

“… For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”

Characters

Two items from a Wikipedia watchlist today:

1. User Loyola added a list of central characters to the article on The Glass Bead Game.

2. A dialogue between the Wikipedia characters Prof02 and Charles Matthews continues.

Item 2 seems almost to echo item 1.

The Bead Game, a classic novel by Hermann Hesse, is, in part, a commentary on German cultural history, and the Prof02-Matthews dialogue concerns the Wikipedia article on Erich Heller, a noted scholar of German cultural history.

Matthews is an expert on the game of Go. The Bead Game article says that

“The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go….

Although invented after Hesse’s death, Conway’s Game of Life can be seen as an example of a Go-like glass bead game with surprisingly deep properties; since it can encode Turing machines, it contains in some sense everything.”

For some related thoughts on cellular automata (i.e., Conway’s game) and Go, see The Field of Reason with its links Deep Game, And So To Bed.

For some related thoughts on Turing, see the November 2006 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (special issue on Turing).

For some related religious reflections, see Wolfram’s Theory of Everything and the Gameplayers of Zan, as well as the Log24 entries of last Halloween.

    “The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians.
     The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw… found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among the ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach….
     Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors….”

— Hermann Hesse at The Glass Bead Game Defined

For Saint Cecilia’s Day

“Bastian Perrot… constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes, and so on. … What later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, the Glass Bead Game.”

— Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel

Compare and contrast:

Fearful Symmetry

I just Googled this phrase and found the following site, which turns out to be related to my previous entry on the Bead Game and the death of John P. Thompson.

Fearful Symmetry:
The Music Master’s Lecture,

by Daniel d’Quincy.

This in turn links to an excerpt from The Glass Bead Game that includes this passage: 

“I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

It is very easy to get dangerously confused about holiness, but here are some relevant quotes:

“You will have to allow me to digress a bit in order to bring ourselves to a sufficiently elevated perspective… I warn you, it will require an attitude of playfulness on your part. Our approach will aim more at sincerity than seriousness. The attitude I’m aiming at is best expressed, I suppose, in the playing of a unique game, known by its German name as Das Glasperlenspiel, and which we may translate as the Glass Bead Game.”

— Daniel d’Quincy, Fearful Symmetry 

“7:11”

— God himself said this, at least according to the previous entry and to my Jan. 28 entry, State of the Communion.

“Seven is heaven.”

— See my web page Eight is a Gate.

“An excellent example of a ‘universal’ in the sense of Charles Williams, Jung, or Plato is Hexagram 11 in China’s 3,000-year-old classic, the I Ching:

‘Heaven and earth unite:  the image of PEACE.’   (Wilhelm/Baynes translation,  Princeton University Press, 1967)”

— S. H. Cullinane, Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star

Thus we may associate the numbers 7 and 11 with the notions of heaven and peace; for a somewhat darker association of the time 7:11 with Kali as Time the Destroyer, see my last entry and also my previous entries

Fat Man and Dancing Girl (Feb. 18, 2003), and 

Time and Eternity (Feb. 1, 2003).

7:20 PM CALI Time

The Bus and the Bead Game:
 
The Communion of Saints as
 the Association of Ideas

On this date in 1955, “Bus Stop,” a play by William Inge, opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City.

“I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, opening sentence

Today’s birthdays:

Sam Houston
Dr. Seuss
Kurt Weill
Mikhail Gorbachev
Tom Wolfe
Desi Arnaz
Jennifer Jones
Karen Carpenter

and many others.

Today is the feast day of  

St. Randolph Scott, 
St. Sandy Dennis, 
St. D. H. Lawrence, and
St. Charlie Christian.

“Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear…”

— Karen Carpenter singing “Superstar“

“And if I find me a good man,
 I won’t be back at all.”

— C. C. Rider lyrics

See (and hear) also “Seven Come Eleven,” played by St. Charlie Christian.

One might (disregarding separation in time and space — never major hindrances to the saints) imagine C. S. Lewis in Heaven listening to a conversation among the four saints listed above.  For more on the communion of saints, see my entry “State of the Communion” of Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003.  This entry, quoting an old spiritual, concluded with “Now hear the word of the Lord”  — followed by this notation: 

 7:11 PM.

See also the N.Y. Times obituary of John P. Thompson of Dallas, former 7-Eleven chairman, who died, as it happened, on that very day (Jan. 28).  See also Karen Carpenter’s “first take luck.”

The sort of association of ideas described in the “Communion” entry is not unrelated to the Glasperlenspiel, or Glass Bead Game, of Hermann Hesse.  For a somewhat different approach to the Game, see

“The Glass Bead Game,”

by John S. Wilson, group theorist and head of the Pure Mathematics Group at the University of Birmingham in England. Wilson is “not convinced that Hesse’s… game is only a metaphor.” Neither am I.

For the association-of-ideas approach, see the page cited in my “Communion” entry,

“A Game Designer’s Holy Grail,”

and (if you can find a copy) one of the greatest forgotten books of the twentieth century,

The Third Word War,

by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978).  As Lee remarks concerning the communion of saints and the association of ideas,

“The association is the idea.”