Log24

An artist mentioned in  a NY Times  obituary  this morning —

(Click for the source.)

I prefer some not-so-magic circles —

Click for related posts tagged root circle.

… Continues.

A post by Margaret Soltan this morning:

Links (in blue) from the above post:
Cane and Mondo Cane.

Bagger Vance — “Time for you to see the field.”

From Pictures for Kurosawa (Sept. 6, 2003) —

“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean,
when they have reached the ocean, sink into it,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the ocean only, exactly thus these sixteen parts
of the spectator that go towards the person (purusha),
when they have reached the person, sink into him,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the person only, and he becomes without parts and
immortal. On this there is this verse:

‘That person who is to be known, he in whom these parts
rest, like spokes in the nave of a wheel, you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’ “

— Prasna Upanishad

Related material — Heaven’s Gate  images from Xmas 2012:

“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” — Hotel California

Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may consult Root Circle.

A rhetorical question from this journal—

"Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"

A rhetorical answer from this journal (June 5, 2006)—

Material closely related to the above rhetorical answer—

(Click for clearer image.)

From a Telegraph  obituary about a death on July 8, 2013:

"The pilots’ tactic was to fly to within a certain distance of the target, and cut their engines. They would then glide in silently, release their bombs, then restart their engines and fly home. The Germans called them the 'Nachthexen' (the Night Witches) due to the whooshing sound they made— 'like a witch’s broomstick in the night'— as they flew past. There was, supposedly, a promise to award an Iron Cross to any Luftwaffe pilot who actually managed to bring down a Night Witch."

In memoriam:

This journal on June 24, 2006—

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , 1974:

"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of
conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle
the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings
of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people
in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes
and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason
to handle what they know are real experiences."

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University
is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've
never had  to understand it really. It's always been completely
bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of
the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it
because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not
the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it.
People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover
art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in  the
branches, they're at the roots."

See also an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that opened Dec. 23—

— and an exhibition in this journal of the image "Root Circle."

Today's New York Times—

Catch-22 in Doonesbury today—

From Log24 on Jan. 5, 2010—
   Artifice of Eternity—

A Medal

In memory of Byzantine scholar Ihor Sevcenko,
who died at 87 on St. Stephen's Day, 2009–

Thie above image results from a Byzantine
meditation based on a detail in the previous post—

"This might be a good time to
call it a day." –Today's Doonesbury

"TOMORROW ALWAYS BELONGS TO US"
Title of an exhibition by young Nordic artists
in Sweden during the summer of 2008.

The exhibition included, notably, Josefine Lyche.

Related material:

D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.

See also
the midnight entry
of June 23-24, 2006:

"Let the midnight special
shine her light on me."

Triumphs

Yesterday's link to a Log24 entry for the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross led to the following figure:
 

(Based on Weyl's Symmetry)

Today, an entry in the The New Criterion's weblog tells of Hilton Kramer's new collection of essays on art, The Triumph of Modernism.

From a Booklist review:

Kramer "celebrates the revelations of modern art, defining modernism as nothing less than 'the discipline of truthfulness, the rigor of honesty.'"

Further background: Kramer opposes

"willed frivolity and politicized vulgarization as fashionable enemies of high culture as represented in the recent past by the integrity of modernism."

 

— "25 Years of The New Criterion"

Perhaps Kramer would agree that such integrity is exemplified by "Two Giants" of modernism described by Roberta Smith in The New York Times recently (Nov. 3– birthdate of A. B. Coble, an artist of a different kind). She is reviewing an exhibit, ''Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World,'' that continues through Jan. 21 at the Whitney Museum of American Art,

 945
Madison Avenue.

This instance of the number 945 as an "artists' signature" is perhaps more impressive than the instances cited in yesterday's Log24 entry, Signature.
 

A Living Church,
continued…

Apology:
An Exercise in Rhetoric

Related material:

6/6/6 MOVIE RELEASED ON 6-6-6 — "Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick stars in a scene from the R-rated movie 'The Omen.' An official of the Australian bishops conference took on the superstition surrounding the movie's release date of June 6, 2006, noting that 'I take evil far too seriously to think "The Omen" is telling me anything realistic or important.'" (CNS/20th Century Fox)

and

The Golden Bull

"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. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a 'Christian atheist,' out of respect for Italy's Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for 'cultural achievement.'"
 

A Little Extra Reading

In memory of
Mary Martin McLaughlin,
a scholar of Heloise and Abelard.
McLaughlin died on June 8, 2006.

"Following the parade, a speech is given by Charles Williams, based on his book The Place of the Lion. Williams explains the true meaning of the word 'realism' in both philosophy and theology. His guard of honor, bayonets gleaming, is led by William of Ockham."

— Midsummer Eve's Dream

A review by John D. Burlinson of Charles Williams's novel The Place of the Lion:

"… a little extra reading regarding Abelard's take on 'universals' might add a little extra spice– since Abelard is the subject of the heroine's … doctoral dissertation. I'd suggest the article 'The Medieval Problem of Universals' in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy."

Michael L. Czapkay, a student of philosophical theology at Oxford:

"The development of logic in the schools and universities of western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries constituted a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. But no less significant was the influence of this development of logic on medieval theology. It provided the necessary conceptual apparatus for the systematization of theology. Abelard, Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas are paradigm cases of the extent to which logic played an active role in the systematic formulation of Christian theology. In fact, at certain points, for instance in modal logic, logical concepts were intimately related to theological problems, such as God's knowledge of future contingent truths."

The Medieval Problem of Universals, by Fordham's Gyula Klima, 2004:

"… for Abelard, a status is an object of the divine mind, whereby God preconceives the state of his creation from eternity."

Status Symbol

(based on Weyl's Symmetry):

"… for then we would know

"Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark."

— "Ancient Zen saying," according to "Today in History," June 24, by the Associated Press

"A man may be free to travel where he likes, but there is no place on earth where he can escape from his own Karma, and whether he lives on a mountain or in a city he may still be the victim of an uncontrolled mind. For man's Karma travels with him, like his shadow. Indeed, it is his shadow, for it has been said, 'Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.'"

— Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen, third edition, Grove Press, 1958, page 97

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974:

"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."
 

Related material:

D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.

See also
the previous entry.

Ursprache Revisited

"Rilke's poems operate at this balancing point between openness and closure, between centripedal and centrifugal motion, the poem being all symbol and being all object.  Rilke developed the inwardness of poetry begun in Baudelaire and refined in Mallarmé into new depths of self-referentiality.  Verinnerlichung was the term for this transmutation from outer to inner…."

— Rainer Maria Rilke: Life and Work,
    by Jeremy Robinson
 

(Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003)

Related material: Herbert Silberer on Verinnerlichung in Problems of Mysticism and the Log24 entry Figures of Speech of 10 AM Wednesday, June 7– the date of death of theatrical agent Howard Rosenstone.  See also the work of playwrights Donald Margulies and William Finn, clients of Rosenstone.

For Margulies, see a review of "Brooklyn Boy"—

"It's like stringing beads on a necklace. By the time the play ends, you have the whole necklace. But it's not like a typical play, where you know where you're going at the end of Act I. In this case, you'll learn something in one scene that will make you realize Eric was lying in a previous scene.  And the play is partly about the lies we tell each other, the lies we tell ourselves and the identity we project to other people." — Actor Robert Gomes