Last Sunday:
A week later:
From a recent Instagram story —
A related ghost writer —
Update of 11:22 PM ET the same day (Sept. 19, 2021) —
"The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock." — Cullinane, 1986
See as well a different Franz.
… who reportedly "died at home in London on Thursday morning" —
From a Log24 post of May 25, 2005 —
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
"… during that spell between the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany
when ghosts and specters are supposed to be abroad . . . ."
Heinrich Zimmer on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Times Literary Supplement , January 3, 2020
Sciences | Book Review
The world is not enough:
Guessing at the game God is playing
By Samuel Graydon
See as well …
On a way of seeing— superimposition—
that "seems insanity" (cf. C. S. Lewis's remarks below)
Combining last night's post Spectrum with
the August 14 post Valhalla Is Down…
From An Experiment in Criticism
by C.S. Lewis, 1961–
"If we go steadily through all the myths of any people
we shall be appalled by much of what we read.
Most of them, whatever they may have meant to
ancient or savage man, are to us meaningless and
shocking; shocking not only by their cruelty and
obscenity but by their apparent silliness— almost
what seems insanity. Out of this rank and squalid
undergrowth the great myths— Orpheus, Demeter
and Persephone, the Hesperides, Balder, Ragnarok,
or Ilmarinen's forging of the Sampo– rise like elms."
Voilà —
The Aug. 14 post Valhalla Is Down referred to a New York Times blackout.
(Jill Abramson, on earlier being named executive editor at the Times, had
said it was like "ascending into Valhalla.")
Another Times blackout occurred today.
Lewis's term Ragnarok refers to the twilight of the gods of Valhalla.
A more conventional illustration from the gamer website Ragnarok/Valhalla Wiki —
From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :
C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.
We venture now upon that territory where words fail ….
Related material :
C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —
Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."
A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —
C. S. Lewis on myth —
"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."
Conceptual Art
For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
The Turning
Readers who have an Amazon.com account may view book pages relevant to the previous entry. See page 77 of The Way We Think, by Fauconnier and Turner (Amazon search term = Meno). This page discusses both the Pythagorean theorem and Plato's diamond figure in the Meno, but fails to "blend" these two topics. See also page 53 of The History of Mathematics, by Roger Cooke (first edition), where these two topics are in fact blended (Amazon search term = Pythagorean). The illustration below is drawn from the Cooke book.
Cooke demonstrates how the Pythagorean theorem might have been derived by "blending" Plato's diamond (left) with the idea of moving the diamond's corners (right).
The previous entry dealt with a conference on mathematics and narrative. Above is an example I like of mathematics…. Here is an example I like of narrative:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that
it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything
shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
And here is a blend of the concepts "Asgard" and "conference":
"Asgard
During the Interuniverse Society conference,
a bridge was opened to Valhalla…."
Bifrost
In Norse myth, the rainbow bridge
that connected Earth to Asgard,
home of the gods. It was extended
to Tellus Tertius during the
Interuniverse Society conference"
— From A Heinlein Concordance
— Front page picture from a
local morning newspaper published
today, Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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