Log24

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Appeasing Epstein

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:14 pm

… On Holy Saturday

"'If only they could send us something grown-up… a sign or something.' 
And a sign does come from the outside. That night, unknown to the children,
a plane is shot down and its pilot parachutes dead to earth and is caught
in the rocks on the mountain. It requires no more than the darkness of night
together with the shadows of the forest vibrating in the signal fire to distort
the tangled corpse with its expanding silk 'chute into a demon that must
be appeased."

— Claire Rosenfield, 1961 essay about Lord of the Flies

Flies-related death from April 1

Edmund L. Epstein, Scholar Who Saved ‘Lord of the Flies,’ Dies at 80

See also Holy Saturday, 2004.

Background

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

From Joyce's 1912 Trieste lecture on Blake:

"Michelangelo's influence is felt in all of Blake's work, and especially in some passages of prose collected in the fragments, in which he always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void."

For a related thought from Michelangelo, see Marmo Solo .

For pure, clean lines, see Galois Geometry.

As for "the uncreated void," see the Ernst Gombrich link in Marmo Solo  for "an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void."

For some related religious remarks suited to the Harrowing of Hell on this Holy Saturday, see August 16, 2003

The Void

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 am

(Continued from March 10, 2012)

An inaccuracy in a passage linked to yesterday

“The created universe, the whole of things, is,
in words from Joyce’s Ulysses , ‘predicated on the void.'”

The “predicated” phrase seems to be absent from Ulysses .

Joyce does, however, have the following (from ricorso.net)—

William Blake” (March 1912) – cont.: ‘Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michaelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimising space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom. [See note, infra.]To him, each moment shorter than a pulse-beat was equivalent in its duration to six thousand years, because in such an infinitely short instant the work of the poet is conceived and born. To him, all space larger than a red globule of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in a space smaller than a globule of blood we approach eternity, of which our vegetable world is but a shadow. Not with the eye, then, but beyond the eye, the soul and the supreme move must look, because the eye, which was born in the night while the soul was sleeping in rays of light, will also die in the night. […] The mental process by which Blake arrives at the threshold of the infinite is a similar process. Flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, his soul is consumed by the rapidity of flight, and finds itself renewed and winged and immortal on the edge of th dark ocean of God. And althought he based his art on such idealist premises, convinced that eternity was in love with the products of time, this sons of God with the sons of [MS ends here].’ (Critical Writings, 1959, 1966 Edn., pp.221-22; quoted [in part] in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.330.) [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, via index, or direct.] Note – for “void” [supra] , cf. Stephen in “Scylla & Charybdis”: ‘Fatherhood […] is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void.’ (Ulysses, Penguin Edn. 1967, p.207; [my itals.].)

Some academics may prefer a more leftist version of
“predicated on the void”—

Knowing Brooklyn

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:59 am

For St. Dismas,  a Holy Saturday story

"Mr. Rosensaft told another story to illustrate his friend's mix of grit and wit. Mr. Steinberg was negotiating one day with the French culture minister to recover paintings stolen from Jews during the Holocaust. The minister huffed that Mr. Steinberg knew nothing about art.

'You're right,' Mr. Steinberg said. 'I don't know anything about art. I'm from Brooklyn. I know about stolen goods.'"

New York Times  this morning

See also yesterday afternoon's Good Friday post
and the passage on Aquinas that it links to.

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