For Elvis's Wrap Party
( image, 1.3 MB )
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Raiders of the Lost Tesseract
(Continued from August 13. See also Coxeter Graveyard.)
Here the tombstone says
"GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.
An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno—
Jowett's picture is nonetheless of interest for
its resemblance to a figure drawn some decades later
by the Toronto geometer H. S. M. Coxeter.
A similar 1950 figure by Coxeter illustrating a tesseract—
For a less scholarly, but equally confusing, view of the number 8,
see The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville.
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The Ninth Year
A passage from the Benjamin Jowett translation of Plato's Meno—
" 'For in the ninth year* Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages ⋄ .' The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."
* See this journal nine years ago, in August 2003.
⋄ Jowett's note— "Pindar, Frag. 98 (Boeckh)"
Wikipedia authors like Protious, an alleged resident of Egypt and
creator of The Socrates Swastika , may enjoy a less scholarly account:
From Babylon A. D. (a 2008 film)— Toorop with Egyptian Sacred Scarab tattoo—
— and Toorop with Aurora (who may be regarded as "the soul" in the Meno passage above)—
Toorop's neck tattoo in the second image above is from a fictional book
described in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.
As swastika-like sacred symbols go, I prefer St. Bridget's Cross.
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Semiotics
"Two clichés make us laugh, but
a hundred clichés move us
because we sense dimly that the clichés
are talking among themselves and
celebrating a reunion."
"'Casablanca': Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,"
by Umberto Eco in SubStance , Vol. 14, No. 2, Issue 47:
In Search of Eco's Roses (1985), pp. 3-12.
(This paper was presented at a symposium,
"Semiotics of the Cinema: The State of the Art,"
in Toronto on June 18, 1984.)
Journal article published by U. of Wisconsin Press.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685047.
Click image for some related material.
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