Log24

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Antidote to Chaos?

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 3:57 pm

Some formal symmetry —

"… each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis may be constructed by folding  a 1×8 array
from Turyn's 1967 construction of the Golay code.

Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again  yields
the 2x2x2 eightfold cube ."

— Steven H. Cullinane on April 19, 2016 — The Folding.

Related art-historical remarks:

The Shape of Time  (Kubler, Yale U.P., 1962).

See yesterday's post The Thing 

Sunday, May 17, 2020

“The Ultimate Epistemological Fact”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:49 pm

"Let me say this about that." — Richard Nixon

Interpenetration in Weyl's epistemology —

Interpenetration in Mazzola's music theory —

Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —

IMAGE- The Trinity Cube (three interpenetrating planes that split the eightfold cube into its eight subcubes)

A deeper example of interpenetration:

Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

In Nuce

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:48 am
 

Excerpts from James C. Nohrnberg, "The Master of the Myth of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye," Comparative Literature  Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 58-82

From page 58 —
"… the posthumously revealed Notebooks. A major project of the latter was his 'Ogdoad': two groups of four books each. '[T]he second group of four […] were considered to be Blakean "emanations" or counterparts of the first four,' like 'the "double mirror" structure of The Great Code  and Words with Power : two inter-reflecting parts of four chapters apiece,' Michael Dolzani reports.* "

* P. 22 of Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works , ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, Frye Studies [series] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). [Abbreviated as RF .]


From page 62 —
"Visionaries like Blake and dramatists like Wagner seem to be working from some larger, mythic blueprint present in nuce  from very early on."

From page 63 —
"Frye's hypothetical books and will-to-totality were obviously fruitful; if the beckoning star was illusory, it nonetheless settled on a real birthplace. The sought-for constructs substituted their scaffolding for a backbone-like confidence in pre-given beliefs; possession of the latter is why Tories like Dr. Johnson and T.S. Eliot could do quite nicely without the constructs. Frye's largely imaginary eightfold roman  may have provided him a personal substitute— or alternative— for both ideology and myth."

From page 69 —
"For Frye the chief element of imaginative or expressive form is the myth, which functions structurally in literature like geometric shapes in painting."

From page 71 —
"The metaphysical skyhook lifting the artist free from unreflective social commitment is often a latent or manifest archetype that his work renews or reworks."

From page 77 —
"Frye's treatises— so little annotated themselves— are the notes writ large; the notes in the Notebooks are treatises writ small. They interpenetrate. Denham quotes 'the masters of the T'ien-tai school of Mahayana Buddhism' as saying '[t]he whole world is contained in a mustard seed' (RF  158, 160), and Frye quotes Keats: 'Every point of thought is the center of an intellectual world' (Study  159; cf. Great Code  167-68 and AC  61). …. [Frye’s] complex books were all generated out of the monadic obiter dicta . His kingdom 'is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden, and it grew' (Luke 13:18-19)."

Friday, April 8, 2016

Ogdoads by Curtis

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 12:25 pm

As was previously noted here, the construction of the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis in 1974 may have involved his "folding" the 1×8 octads constructed
in 1967 by Turyn into 2×4 form.

This results in a way of picturing a well-known correspondence (Conwell, 1910)
between partitions of an 8-set and lines of the projective 3-space PG(3,2).

For some background related to the "ogdoads" of the previous post, see
A Seventh Seal (Sept. 15, 2014).

Ogdoads: A Space Odyssey

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

"Like the Valentinian Ogdoad— a self-creating theogonic system
of eight Aeons in four begetting pairs— the projected eightfold work
had an esoteric, gnostic quality; much of Frye's formal interest lay in
the 'schematosis' and fearful symmetries of his own presentations." 

— From p. 61 of James C. Nohrnberg's "The Master of the Myth
of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye," 
Comparative Literature , Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 58-82, Duke University
Press (quarterly, January 2001)

See also Two by Four  in this  journal.

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