Thursday, December 22, 2022
For “Dark Materials” Fans: The Monkey Trial
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Friday, May 14, 2021
In Memory of Ernst Eduard Kummer
(29 January 1810 – 14 May 1893)
See as well some earlier references to diamond signs here .
The proper context for some diamond figures that I am interested in
is the 4×4 array that appears, notably, in Hudson's 1905 classic
Kummer's Quartic Surface . Hence this post's "Kummerhenge" tag,
suggested also by some monumental stonework at Tufte's site.
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Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Ink
From this journal on Nov. 9-12, 2004:
|
Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi “‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital  Ad Reinhardt An Ad Reinhardt painting described in the entry of
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66. The viewer may need to tilt the screen to see that “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — “Grids,” by Rosalind Krauss, |
Related material from The New York Times today —
Comments Off on Ink
Friday, April 19, 2019
Pleasantly Discursive Day
” There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question
‘What is truth?’ ”
— Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau’s
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
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Thursday, April 13, 2017
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Both Hands and an Ass Map
Remarks by University Diaries this morning suggested a search for
Rutgers in this journal. That search yields a post from Dec. 30, 2005,
that is closely related to both this morning's previous post and to recent
Log24 remarks on entities and concrete universals .
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Saturday, July 21, 2012
Saturday Morning Cartoon
"A Saturday morning cartoon is the colloquial term
for the animated television programming that has
typically been scheduled on Saturday mornings
on the major American television networks from
the 1960s to the present…." —Wikipedia
Martin Gardner in the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society ,
June/July 2005:
“I did a column in Scientific American
on minimal art, and I reproduced one of
Ed Rinehart’s [sic ] black paintings.
Of course, it was just a solid square of
pure black.”
Click on picture for details.
For a cartoon graveyard—
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Friday, September 17, 2010
Fade to Blacker
From Peter J. Cameron's web journal today—
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… Eliot’s Four Quartets has been one of my favourite works of poetry since I was a student…. Of course, a poem doesn’t have a single meaning, especially one as long and complex as Four Quartets. But to me the primary meaning of the poem is about the relationship between time and eternity, which is something maybe of interest to mathematicians as well as to mystics. Curiously, the clearest explanation of what Eliot is saying that I have found is in a completely different work, Pilgrimage of Dreams by the artist Thetis Blacker, in which she describes a series of dreams she had which stood out as being completely different from the confusion of normal dreaming. In one of these dreams, “Mr Goad and the Cathedral”, we find the statements
and
In other words, eternity is not the same as infinity; it is not the time line stretched out to infinity. Rather, it is an intimation of a different dimension, which we obtain only because we are aware of the point at which that dimension intersects the familiar dimension of time. In a recurring motif in the second Quartet, “East Coker”, Eliot says,
and, in “Little Gidding”,
|
From this journal on the date of Blacker's death—
what would, if she were a Catholic saint, be called her dies natalis—
Monday December 18, 2006
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Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Veritas
Some historians consider today's date, April 7, to be the date of the Crucifixion in the Roman calendar (a solar calendar, as opposed to the Jewish lunar scheme).
Since the ninefold square has been called both a symbol of Apollo and the matrix of a cross, it will serve as an icon for today–
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt
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Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday February 20, 2009
Emblematizing
the Modern
the Modern
|
The following meditation was inspired by the recent fictional recovery, by Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar," of a Greek Cross — "the Cross of Constantine"– and by the discovery, by art historian Rosalind Krauss, of a Greek Cross in the art of Ad Reinhardt. |
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Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time. T.S. Eliot:
"Men’s curiosity searches past and future |
There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:
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"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
[1] Success here refers to
three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able– in a work of whatever quality– to emblematize the Modern." — Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979) |
Related material:
Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.
See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.
Comments Off on Friday February 20, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Wednesday February 18, 2009
Raiders of
the Lost Well
| “The challenge is to keep high standards of scholarship while maintaining showmanship as well.” |
— Olga Raggio, a graduate of the Vatican library school and the University of Rome who, at one point in her almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized “The Vatican Collections,” a blockbuster show. Dr. Raggio died on January 24.
The next day, “The Last Templar,” starring Mira Sorvino, debuted on NBC.
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure, the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:
at the Church of the Lost Well:
“One highlight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first overseas trip will be a stop in China. Her main mission in Beijing will be to ensure that US-China relations under the new Obama administration get off to a positive start.”
— Stephanie Ho, Voice of America Beijing bureau chief, today
Symbol of The Positive,
from this journal
on Valentine’s Day:
“Stephanie started at the Voice of America as an intern in 1991. She left briefly to attend film school in London in 2000. Although she didn’t finish, she has always wanted to be a film school dropout, so now she’s living one of her dreams.
Stephanie was born in Ohio and grew up in California. She has a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies with an emphasis on Chinese history and economics, from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“She is fluent in
Mandrin Chinese.”
—VOA
As is Mira Sorvino.
Those who, like Clinton, Raggio, and
Sorvino’s fictional archaeologist in
“The Last Templar,” prefer Judeo-
Christian myths to Asian myths,
may convert the above Chinese
“well” symbol to a cross
(or a thick “+” sign)
by filling in five of
the nine spaces outlined
by the well symbol.
In so doing, they of course
run the risk, so dramatically
portrayed by Angelina Jolie
as Lara Croft, of opening
Pandora’s Box.
(See Rosalind Krauss, Professor
of Art and Theory at Columbia,
for scholarly details.)
Krauss
Comments Off on Wednesday February 18, 2009
Friday, December 12, 2008
Friday December 12, 2008
On the Symmetric Group S8
Wikipedia on Rubik's 2×2×2 "Pocket Cube"–
"Any permutation of the 8 corner cubies is possible (8! positions)."
Some pages related to this claim–
Analyzing Rubik's Cube with GAP
Online JavaScript Pocket Cube.
The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of Froebel's Third Gift:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
See also:
MoMA Goes to Kindergarten,
Tea Privileges,
and
"Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith:
A Dialogue,"
an exhibition opening today
at Pace Wildenstein.
For a different sort
of dialogue, click on the
artists' names above.
For a different
approach to S8,
see Symmetries.
"With humor, my dear Zilkov.
Always with a little humor."
-- The Manchurian Candidate
Comments Off on Friday December 12, 2008
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Saturday December 23, 2006
Black Mark
Bernard Holland in The New York Times on Monday, May 20, 1996:
“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
|
Log24 on Monday,
Dec. 18, 2006: “I did a column in — Martin Gardner (pdf) “… the entire profession — Joan S. Birman (pdf)
Lottery on Friday,
Dec. 22, 2006:
 |
5/04, 2005:
Analysis of the structure
of a 2x2x2 cube
via trinities of
projective points
in a Fano plane.
projective points
in a Fano plane.
7/15, 2005:
“Art history was very personal
through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives
of American Art
Also on 7/15, 2005,
a quotation on Usenet:
a quotation on Usenet:
“A set having three members is a
single thing wholly constituted by
its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine
of the Trinity as ‘three in one’
should be child’s play.”
— Max Black,
Caveats and Critiques:
Philosophical Essays in
Language, Logic, and Art
Comments Off on Saturday December 23, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Monday December 18, 2006
Fade to Black:
Mathematics and Narrative
continued
continued
Martin Gardner in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, June/July 2005 (pdf):
“I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s [sic] black paintings. Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black.”
Click on picture
for details.
The Notices of the American Mathematical Society, January 2007 (pdf):
“This was just one of the many moments in this sad tale when there were no whistle-blowers. As a result the entire profession has received a very public and very bad black mark.”
— Joan S. Birman
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Barnard College and
Columbia University
Comments Off on Monday December 18, 2006
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Sunday October 22, 2006
Ad for "The Prestige":
"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called 'The Pledge.' The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn.' The magician makes his ordinary 'some thing' do something extraordinary. Now if you're looking for the secret… you won't find it. That's why there's a third act, called 'The Prestige.' This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."
The Associated Press
Thought for Today,
Oct. 22, 2006:
Thought for Today,
Oct. 22, 2006:
"You can fool
too many of the people
too much of the time."
— James Thurber,
American humorist
(1894-1961)
For more detail,
click on the above
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Saturday September 16, 2006
Pandora's Box
Part I:
The Pandora Cross
"There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"
Part II:
The Opening
Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:
Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections
For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:
Click to enlarge the screenshot.
Part III:
Hope
The New Yorker (issue of June 5, 2006) on the late Oriana Fallaci:
"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."
For further details, see yesterday's Log24.
Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song
— From The Magic Circle,
a spiritual narrative
by Katherine Neville
For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.
Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:
Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:
"… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."
and a related
Christian symbol,
the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).
Moral of the Pandora Cross:
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…
quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
Comments Off on Saturday September 16, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Wednesday September 13, 2006
The Krauss Cross
"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."
Rebecca Goldstein on
Mathematics and Narrative:
"I don't write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters. My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors, contained nine pieces, five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer) to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer."
Jacques Maritain,
October 1941:
"The passion of Israel
today is taking on
more and more distinctly
the form of the Cross."
E. L. Doctorow,
City of God:
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd."
Comments Off on Wednesday September 13, 2006
Friday, August 4, 2006
Friday August 4, 2006
ART WARS
continued from
previous entry
In memory of
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:
"Who is the fairest of them all?"
This question might
well be posed by…
Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969).
"The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
'Art is art,'
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt
There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora's box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it."
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight
Related material:
Comments Off on Friday August 4, 2006
Friday, January 6, 2006
Friday January 6, 2006
Cross
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd"
— City of God
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt
"… I don't write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters. My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors, contained nine pieces, five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer) to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer."
For related remarks,
click on the cross.
click on the cross.
Comments Off on Friday January 6, 2006
Friday, December 30, 2005
Friday December 30, 2005
Expression
Expression is an impossible word.
If you want to use it
I think you have to
explain it further…
— Ad Reinhardt,
Art as Art
“… an equation is a very
abstract expression
of knowledge
about something.”
— The Hidden Side
of Visualization
Well, yes.
For example:
Abstract Expression,
pixels on screen, 12/30/05
|
The Scope and Limits
of Quotation (pdf), in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. L. E. Hahn, Open Court Publishers, 1999, pp. 691-714, by Dr. Ernest Lepore, Rutgers University: “… an assumption I wish to reject, namely, that in quotation an abstract expression (shape) is denoted…. Since Davidson, however, only says ‘we may take [an expression] to be an abstract shape’ [1979, p.85, my emphasis], his theory is compatible with expressions being something else. We need only find something that can be instantiated by radically differently shaped objects. Whatever it is must be such that written tokens, spoken tokens, signed tokens, Braille tokens, Semaphore tokens, finger language tokens, and any other way in which words can be produced, can be instantiated by it…. Such entities might
Reference: Davidson, D., 1979, “Quotation,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp.79-92. |
exist; if they do, they might ultimately play some role in the metaphysics of language.”For more on zero and other entities,
see Is Nothing Sacred?
For more on Davidson,
see Shema .
Comments Off on Friday December 30, 2005
Friday, July 15, 2005
Friday July 15, 2005
From Darkness Visible:
"Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue."
— Martin Gardner interview in AMS Notices, June/July 2005
From Art History:
"Art history was very personal through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt."
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
From The Edge of Eternity:
Christopher Fry's obituary
in The New York Times—
"His plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking, in his words, 'a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a sleeping partner.' He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that was 'the language in which man expresses his own amazement' at the complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface, was 'wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'"
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
Comments Off on Friday July 15, 2005
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Tuesday June 21, 2005
Art History
“I studied with Reinhardt and I found that a fantastic course. I think he was really very stimulating….
Art history was very personal through the eyes of Ad Reinhardt.”
— Robert Morris,
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Related material:
“The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Robert Lax” in The Merton Annual 13 (2000) 245-256, by Paul J. Spaeth, library director at St. Bonaventure University
The Merton here is Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Here is Merton in a letter to poet Robert Lax on the death of their friend Ad Reinhardt, sometimes called the “black monk” of abstract art:
“Make Mass beautiful silence like big black picture speaking requiem. Tears in the shadows of hermit hatch requiems blue black tone. Sorrows for Ad in the oblation quiet peace request rest. Tomorrow is solemns in the hermit hatch for old lutheran reinhardt commie paintblack… Tomorrow is the eternal solemns and the barefoots and the ashes and the masses, oldstyle liturgy masses without the colonels… Just old black quiet requiems in hermit hatch with decent sorrows good by college chum.”
— from J. S. Porter, “Farewell to a Monk,”
Antigonish Review, Winter 1997
Comments Off on Tuesday June 21, 2005
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Sunday June 19, 2005
ART WARS:
Darkness Visible
Darkness Visible
“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
“Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue. He was exhibited in top shows in New York, and his pictures wound up in museums. I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s black paintings. Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black. The publisher insisted on getting permission from the gallery to reproduce it.”
|
Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi
“‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt, The viewer may need to tilt “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — Rosalind Krauss,
|
In memory of
St. William Golding
(Sept. 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993)
Comments Off on Sunday June 19, 2005
Friday, November 12, 2004
Friday November 12, 2004
The above link is in memory of
Iris Chang,
who ended her life at 36
on Nov. 9, 2004.
A central concept of Zen
is satori, or “awakening.”
For a rude awakening, see
Satori at Pearl Harbor.
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Fade to Black See, too, my entries of “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi
” ‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.’ “ — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt,
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Tuesday, November 9, 2004
Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Nine
(Readings for
Weyl’s birthday)
“The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
‘Art is art,’
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.
Greek Cross
There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora’s box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it.”
— Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”
“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,
in The Magic Circle,
Ballantine paperback,
1999, p. 339
“To live is to defend a form.”
(“Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen“)
— attributed to Hölderlin
For details on the above picture,
which deals with properties of the
nine-square grid, see
For more on the defense
of this form,
see the Log24.net entry of
June 5, 2004, A Form,
and the Art Wars entries
for St. Peter’s Day, 2004.
Comments Off on Tuesday November 9, 2004
Sunday, October 5, 2003
Sunday October 5, 2003
At Mount Sinai:
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
From the New York Times of Sunday, October 5, 2003 (the day that Yom Kippur begins at sunset):
“Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, whose interpretations of religious law helped sustain Lithuanian Jews during Nazi occupation…. died on Sept. 28 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 89.”
For a fictional portrait of Lithuanian Jews during Nazi occupation, see the E. L. Doctorow novel City of God.
For meditations on the spiritual in art, see the Rosalind Krauss essay “Grids.” As a memorial to Rabbi Oshry, here is a grid-based version of the Hebrew letter aleph:
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|
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Click on the aleph for details.
“In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….”
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow
Here are two meditations
on Even and Odd for Yom Kippur:
Meditation I
From Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”:
“If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.”
Meditation II
Here, for reference, is a Greek cross
within a nine-square grid:
Related religious meditation for
Doctorow’s “Garden of Adding”…
Comments Off on Sunday October 5, 2003
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Wednesday June 11, 2003
From yesterday’s New York Times:
As Spinoza noted, “If a triangle could speak, it would say… that God is eminently triangular.”
— “Giving God a Break” by Nicholas D. Kristof
The figure above is by
Robert Anton Wilson.
“The film’s personal, impious God embodies some central premises of black theology.”
— Samuel G. Freedman on Morgan Freeman as God in “Bruce Almighty”
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Okay, okay,
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Comments Off on Wednesday June 11, 2003
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Wednesday April 2, 2003
Symmetries…. May 15, 1998
The following journal note, from the day after Sinatra died, was written before I heard of his death. Note particularly the quote from Rilke. Other material was suggested, in part, by Alasdair Gray's Glasgow novel 1982 Janine. The "Sein Feld" heading is a reference to the Seinfeld final episode, which aired May 14, 1998. The first column contains a reference to angels — apparently Hell's Angels — and the second column provides a somewhat more serious look at this theological topic.
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Sein Feld
1984 Janine
"But Angels love their own
"Logos means above all relation."
"Gesang ist Dasein…. |
Geometry and Theology
PA lottery May 14, 1998: |
|
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Tape purchased 12/23/97:
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"In the middle of 1982 Janine there are pages in which Jock McLeish is fighting with drugs and alcohol, attempting to either die or come through and get free of his fantasies. In his delirium, he hears the voice of God, which enters in small print, pushing against the larger type of his ravings. Something God says is repeated on the first and last pages of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, complete with illustration and the words 'Scotland 1984' beside it. God's statement is 'Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.' It is the inherent optimism in that statement that perhaps best captures the strength of Aladair Gray's fiction, its straightforwardness and exuberance." |
The group of all projectivities and correlations of For another look at angels, see "Winging It," by Christopher R. Miller, The New York Times Book Review Bookend page for Sunday, May 24, 1998. May 24 is the feast day of Sara (also known by the Hindu name Kali), patron saint of Gypsies.
For another, later (July 16, 1998) reply to Dyson, from a source better known than myself, see Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith, Harper Collins, 2001, page 66.
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