Monday, February 9, 2015
For Blacklist Fans
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Lesson No. One
| “Zhu Xi maintained that all things are brought into being by the union of two universal aspects of reality: qi, sometimes translated as vital (or physical, material) force; and li, sometimes translated as rational principle (or law).” —Wikipedia |
| “Drop off the key, Lee” — Paul Simon
Reference frame (Click for details.) According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],
“Li” is “the principle or coherence or order or pattern underlying the cosmos.” – Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt, Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching, Related material: Dynasty and |
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday October 24, 2007
An earlier entry today (“Hollywood Midrash continued“) on a father and son suggests we might look for an appropriate holy ghost. In that context…
A search for further background on Emmanuel Levinas, a favorite philosopher of the late R. B. Kitaj (previous two entries), led (somewhat indirectly) to the following figures of Descartes:
Compare and contrast:
The harmonic-analysis analogy suggests a review of an earlier entry’s
link today to 4/30– Structure and Logic— as well as
re-examination of Symmetry and a Trinity
(Dec. 4, 2002).
See also —
A Four-Color Theorem,
The Diamond Theorem, and
The Most Violent Poem,
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Wednesday July 5, 2006
from today’s
New York Times
From the obituary of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died at 52 on Monday, July 3, 2006, at her home in Santa Fe:
“If she rarely spoke of her private life, few artists have brought such emotional vulnerability to their work, whether it was her sultry portrayal of Myrtle Wilson, the mistress of wealthy Tom Buchanan in John Harbison’s ‘Great Gatsby,’ the role of her 1999 Metropolitan Opera debut, or her shattering performances several years ago in two Bach cantatas for solo voice and orchestra, staged by the director Peter Sellars, seen in Lincoln Center’s New Visions series, with the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, Craig Smith conducting.
In Cantata No. 82, ‘Ich Habe Genug’ (‘I Have Enough’), Ms. Hunt Lieberson, wearing a flimsy hospital gown and thick woolen socks, her face contorted with pain and yearning, portrayed a terminally ill patient who, no longer able to endure treatments, wants to let go and be comforted by Jesus. During one consoling aria, ‘Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen’ (‘Slumber now, weary eyes’), she yanked tubes from her arms and sang the spiraling melody with an uncanny blend of ennobling grace and unbearable sadness.”
Related Entertainment
from Nov. 6, 2003
Today’s birthday:
director Mike Nichols
Thursday, November 6, 2003
Thursday November 6, 2003
Legacy Codes:
The Most Violent Poem
Lore of the Manhattan Project:
From The Trinity Site —
“I imagined Oppenheimer saying aloud,
‘Batter my heart, three person’d God,”
unexpectedly recalling John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet [14],’
and then he knew, ‘ “Trinity” will do.’
Memory has its reasons.
‘Batter my heart’ — I remember these words.
I first heard them on a fall day at Duke University in 1963.
Inside a classroom twelve of us were
seated around a long seminar table
listening to Reynolds Price recite this holy sonnet….
I remember Reynolds saying, slowly, carefully,
‘This is the most violent poem in the English language.’ ”
Related Entertainment
Today’s birthday:
director Mike Nichols
From a dead Righteous Brother:
“If you believe in forever
Then life is just a one-night stand.”
— Bobby Hatfield, found dead
in his hotel room at
7 PM EST Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003,
before a concert scheduled at
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
From a review of The Matrix Revolutions:
“You’d have to be totally blind at the end
to miss the Christian symbolism….
Trinity gets a glimpse of heaven…. And in the end…
God Put A Rainbow In The Clouds.”
Moral of the
Entertainment:
According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],
“Li” is
“the principle or coherence
or order or pattern
underlying the cosmos.”
— Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt,
Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching,
Princeton University Press, 1990
Related Non-Entertainment
Symmetry and a Trinity
(for the dotting-the-eye symbol above)
Introduction to Harmonic Analysis
(for musical and historical background)
Mathematical Proofs
(for the spirit of Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo)
Moral of the
Non-Entertainment:
“Many kinds of entity
become easier to handle
by decomposing them into
components belonging to spaces
invariant under specified symmetries.”
— The importance of
mathematical conceptualisation
by David Corfield,
Department of History and
Philosophy of Science,
University of Cambridge
See, too,
Symmetry of Walsh Functions and
Geometry of the I Ching.