The previous post suggests a phrase by George Mackey from a classic
1980 mathematics paper — "the exploitation of symmetry."
Another approach to exploitation, in a flashback to Sept. 9 last year . . .
See too the 2021 film "Last Night in Soho" and . . .
Friday, September 1, 2023
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A New York Times obituary today reports a death
from the Feast of St. Louis, 2022 —
"Dr. Gottfried said at the time that the world was
undergoing a transformative revolution driven by
'the relentless exploitation of scientific knowledge.'”
Also on that date . . .
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"
See other posts now tagged Structure Character.
From a date described by Peter Woit in his post
“Not So Spooky Action at a Distance” (June 11) —
See also The Lost Well.
* “As a Chinese jar….” — Four Quartets
The above October 7th screenshot is of a New York Times ad in the
"Business Day" section that accompanied a story with the headline
"Pret a Manager . . . ." [sic ].
The error was corrected:
"Four slashes of one size fits all.
It should not fit you."
— Alyssa Milano, "A Survivor's Prayer"
Milano's reference was to the hashtag symbol.
For another view of this symbol, see Pound Sign.
Some less popular "four slashes" art from Milan —
See posts tagged The Well.
Related material: Artist Joseph Kosuth, who pictured
the dictionary definition of "nothing" shown in the index of
today's LA Times obituaries, and a Chinese film director,
one of those portrayed in that index.
Also mentioned on the obituaries index page —
See as well The Church of the Holy Hubcap.
* Film title, translation of Chinese: 老井; pinyin: lǎo jǐng.
(Continued from May 4, 2013)
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"
"It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell."
— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today's previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.
Backstory— Recall, from history's nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second London Blitz.
For those who prefer Trudeau's
"Story Theory" of truth to his "Diamond Theory"
Related material: Click images below for the original posts.
See as well the novel "Lexicon" at Amazon.com
and the word "lexicon" in this journal.
From Night of Lunacy (Sunday, May 5, 2013):
Related posts: Rubric, Cuber, and Pound Sign.
Click image for some background.
See also Story Theory and Princeton Apocalypse.
"For further details,
click on the well."
"The kind of movement Olson urges is
an inward deepening of the image,
an in-sighting of the superimposed
levels of significance within it.
This is the very mode that Jung
suggested for grasping dreams–
not as a sequence in time,
but as revolving around
a nodal complex."
And from Feb. 29, 2008:
and the following day:
— Heraclitus
A Cartoon Graveyard
Click to enlarge.
From Fathers' Day Meditation:
For further details,
click on the well.
"Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." –Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry.
As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images—
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"To conceive images as static is to forget that they are numens that move. Charles Olson, a later poet in this tradition, said: 'One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception… always, always one perception must must must move instanter, on another.' 80 Remember Lavater and his insistence on instantaneity for reading the facial image. This is a kind of movement that is not narrational, and the Imagists had no place for narrative. 'Indeed the great poems to come after the Imagist period– Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets; Pound’s Cantos; Williams’s Paterson– contain no defining narrative.' 81 The kind of movement Olson urges is an inward deepening of the image, an in-sighting of the superimposed levels of significance within it. 82 This is the very mode that Jung suggested for grasping dreams– not as a sequence in time, but as revolving around a nodal complex. If dreams, then why not the dreamers. We too are not only a sequence in time, a process of individuation. We are also each an image of individuality."
80 The New American Poetry (D. M. Allen, ed.) N.Y.: Evergreen, Grove, 1960, pp. 387-88. from Jones, p. 42. 81 Jones,* p. 40. 82 H. D. later turned narration itself into image by writing a novel in which the stories were "compounded like faces seen one on top of another," or as she says "superimposed on one another like a stack of photographic negatives" (Jones, p. 42). Cf. Berry,** p. 63: "An image is simultaneous. No part precedes or causes another part, although all parts are involved with each other… We might imagine the dream as a series of superimpositions, each event adding texture and thickening to the rest." * Imagist Poetry (Peter Jones, ed.) London: Penguin, 1972 ** The contrast between image simultaneity and narrative succession, and the different psychological effects of the two modes, is developed by Patricia Berry, "An Approach to the Dream," Spring 1974 (N. Y./Zürich: Spring Publ.), pp. 63, 68-71 |
Hillman also says that
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"Jung’s 'complex' and Pound's definition of Image and Lavater's 'whole heap of images, thoughts, sensations, all at once' are all remarkably similar. Pound calls an Image, 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'… 'the Image is more than an Idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy'… 'a Vortex, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' 79 Thus the movement, the dynamics, are within the complex and not only between complexes, as tensions of opposites told about in narrational sequences, stories that require arbitrary syntactical connectives which are unnecessary for reading an image where all is given at once."
79 These definitions of Image by Pound come from his various writings and can all be found in Jones, pp. 32-41. Further on complex and image, see J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-17, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, pp. 164-68. |
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry):
"She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo…."
If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas… endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching.
— Father's Day
meditation of
June 12, 2005
Who is my father in this world,
in this house,
At the spirit's base?
— Wallace Stevens,
"The Irish Cliffs of Moher"
All Saints' Day:
The Song of Saint Ezra
Ezra Pound, imagist poet and fascist saint, died on this date in 1972.
"But you, newest song of the lot,
You are not old enough
to have done much mischief.
I will get you a green coat out of China
With dragons worked upon it."
— "Further Instructions," 1913
For more on China and Christian Fascism, see the memorial to the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in TIME magazine, issue dated Nov. 3, 2003.
From Image in Poetry:
"Ezra Pound made perhaps the most widely used definition of image in the 20th century:
An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. "
— Ezra Pound, "A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste," Poetry, March 1913
For an excellent essay by Jungian James Hillman on the political implications of imagism, see
Egalitarian Typologies versus
the Perception of the Unique.
A specific image that is a personal favorite of mine is found in the I Ching:
Note that in the West,
this Chinese character
is known as the "Pound sign."
"The Perception of the Unique," indeed.
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