Log24

Monday, June 26, 2023

Date Link

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:49 pm

The YouTube upload date — Aug. 30, 2019 — of "Schism," by Tool,
suggests a review . . .

The Go Set link leads to Plan 9 material.

Friday, November 13, 2020

Promised?

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:15 pm

Raiders of the Lost Dorm Room

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:48 am

“That really is, really, I think, the Island of the Misfit Toys at that point.
You have crossed the Rubicon, you jumped on the crazy train and
you’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat earth at that time, brother,”
said Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman from Virginia,
in an interview."

— Jon Ward, political correspondent, Yahoo News , Nov. 12, 2020

The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.

— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

 

Related material for comedians

See as well Sallows in this  journal.

“There exists a considerable literature
devoted to the Lo shu , much of it infected
with the kind of crypto-mystic twaddle
met with in Feng Shui.”

— Lee C. F. Sallows, Geometric Magic Squares ,
Dover Publications, 2013, page 121

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:09 pm

Anthony Hopkins in 'The Human Stain'

Prof. Coleman Silk introducing  freshmen to academic values

“The communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Plan 9 From Yale…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:22 am

Continues.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

The Ghost

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:10 pm

Related material —

Sunday’s Plan 9 from Yale  as well as

http://www.arcadiainstitution.org/?page_id=16  and

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/4114751310/in/photolist-7gBbd7.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Metatextuality at Yale

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:37 pm

See also this  journal on the date — February 19, 2009
of the above Ibsen opening, as well as today’s previous post.

Plan 9 from Yale

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:48 pm

“Play ‘Stella by Starlight’ for Lady Macbeth” — Bob Dylan

Thursday, August 29, 2019

As Well

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:45 pm

For some backstory, see
http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=”I+Ching”+48+well .

See as well elegantly packaged” in this journal.

“Well” in written Chinese is the hashtag symbol,
i.e., the framework of a 3×3 array.

My own favorite 3×3 array is the ABC subsquare
at lower right in the figure below —

'Desargues via Rosenhain'- April 1, 2013- The large Desargues configuration mapped canonically to the 4x4 square

 

Sunday, June 16, 2019

Eliot’s Perpetual Motion Structure*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

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

Monday, June 3, 2019

Jar Story

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 3:41 pm

(Continued)

  “. . . Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

From Writing Chinese Characters:

“It is practical to think of a character centered
within an imaginary square grid . . . .
The grid can be subdivided, usually to
9 or 16 squares. . . .

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041119-ZhongGuo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

These “Chinese jars” (as opposed to their contents)
are as follows:

Grids, 3x3 and 4x4 .

See as well Eliot’s 1922 remarks on “extinction of personality”
and the phrase “ego-extinction” in Weyl’s Philosophy of Mathematics

Sunday, December 23, 2018

See!

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:40 pm

An exercise in bulk apperception.

IMAGE- Herbert John Ryser, 'Combinatorial Mathematics' (1963), page 1

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Plan 9 Continues

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

See also Holy Field in this journal.

Some related mathematics —

IMAGE- Herbert John Ryser, 'Combinatorial Mathematics' (1963), page 1

Analysis of the Lo Shu structure —

Structure of the 3×3 magic square:

4  9  2
3  5  7    decreased by 1 is
8  1  6

3  8  1
2  4  6
7  0  5

In base 3 —

10  22  01
02  11  20
21  00  12

As orthogonal Latin squares
(a well-known construction) —

1  2  0     0  2  1
0  1  2     2  1  0
2  0  1     1  0  2 .

— Steven H. Cullinane,
October 17, 2017

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Res Ipsa

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:00 pm

From The Poetic Quotidian, a journal of quotations—

See also, in this journal, New Haven + Grid.

The Ninefold Square

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Yale Architectural Figure

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:48 pm

Edwin Schlossberg, 'Still Changes Through Structure' text piece

See also Log24 posts related to "Go Set a Structure"
as well as "New Haven" + Grid.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Like the Horizon

(Continued from a remark by art critic Peter Schjeldahl quoted here
last  year on New Year's Day in the post "Art as Religion.")

"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."

— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015

This suggests some further material from the paper
that was quoted here yesterday on New Year's Eve —

"In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with 'straight' lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described."

— Derrick Breach (See his obituary from 1996.)

A related illustration of the 13-point projective plane
from the University of Western Australia:

Projective plane of order 3

(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity .)

The above image is from a post of August 7, 2012,
"The Space of Horizons."  A related image —

Click on the above image for further remarks.

Friday, September 9, 2016

Notation

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:00 pm

The New York Times  interviews Alan Moore

“A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016,
on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review ….”

“What genres do you prefer? And which do you avoid?”

“To be honest, having worked in genre for so long, I’m happiest
when I’m outside it altogether, or perhaps more accurately,
when I can conjure multiple genres all at once, in accordance
with my theory (now available, I believe, as a greeting card and
fridge magnet) that human life as we experience it is a
simultaneous multiplicity of genres. I put it much more elegantly
on the magnet.”

Friday, January 15, 2016

An Ordinary Morning in New Haven

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

Click the above image for a web page on the question
"Why was New Haven divided into nine squares?".

Friday, September 18, 2015

An Evening in New Haven

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Click images for related material.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Go Set a Structure

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 2:45 pm

Sunday, July 12, 2015

O Nine

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

( A sequel to Friday’s post O Seven, O Eight )

In memory of opera singer Jon Vickers, who reportedly
died Friday at 88 —

“His deep faith — he was once dubbed ‘God’s voice’ —
saw him refuse to perform some roles on moral grounds,
specifically, Tannhäuser.” — BBC News

From Wolfram’s song to the evening star in Tannhäuser —

The soul, that longs for the highest grounds,
is fearful of the darkness before it takes flight.
There you are, oh loveliest star,
your soft light you send into the distance.

Der Seele, die nach jenen Höhn verlangt,
vor ihrem Flug durch Nacht und Grausen bangt.
Da scheinest du, o lieblichster der Sterne,
dein Sanftes Licht entsendest du der Ferne.

— classicalmusic.about.com

See as well a related meditation:

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Writing Well*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

See Stevens + New Haven.

* The above figure may be viewed as
the Chinese “Holy Field” or as the
Chinese character for “Well
inscribed in a square.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Source

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"In ancient Greece, 9 was the number of
the Muses, patron goddesses of the arts.
They were the daughters of Mnemosyne ('memory'),
the source of imagination, which in turn is
the carrier of archetypal, elementary ideas to
artistic realization in the field of space-time."

— Joseph Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

In memoriam:

 See also Raiders of the Lost Well and…

 The Eliot Omen 


Ground plan for a game of Noughts and Crosses

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Goal

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

From "Why Was New Haven Divided into Nine Squares?"

"Of note on the Wadsworth Map of 1748 are…
the Grammar School, the 'Goal' or jail…."

Related material: Puritan in this journal.

Non-Puritans may prefer the following image—

Source: Yale English Department banner

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Structure and Character

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(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"

Warren Zevon

"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.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Night of Lunacy*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Structure vs. Character continued

   IMAGE- The 3x3 square

Structure

IMAGE- Chinese character for 'well' and I Ching Hexagram 48, 'The Well'


Character

Related vocabulary:

Nick Tosches on the German word “Quell 

and Heidegger on Hölderlin.

* The title is from Heidegger.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Wednesday August 26, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
A Puritan Settlement
in memory of
Sen. Edward Kennedy

“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year [2000] History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”

Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001

“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”

— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,” XXVIII

See also Art and Man at Yale.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Thursday February 19, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:07 am

A Sunrise
for Sunrise

“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.”

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”

Yesterday’s entry featured a rather simple-minded example from Krauss of how the ninefold square (said to be a symbol of Apollo)

The 3x3 grid

may be used to create a graphic design– a Greek cross, which appears also in crossword puzzles:

Crossword-puzzle design that includes Greek-cross elements

Illustration by
Paul Rand
(born Peretz Rosenbaum)

A more sophisticated example
of the ninefold square
in graphic design:

“That old Jew
gave me this here.”

— A Flag for Sunrise  

The 3x3 grid as an organizing frame for Chinese calligraphy. Example-- the character for 'sunrise'
From Paul-Rand.com

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Wednesday February 18, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:30 am

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.

Mira Sorvino in 'The Last Templar'
“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.”

The New York Times

Sorvino in “The Last Templar”
at the Church of the Lost Well:

Mira Sorvino at the Church of the Lost Well in 'The Last Templar'

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:

'Enlarge' symbol from USA Today

“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.

Chinese character for 'well' and I Ching Hexagram 48, 'The Well'

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.)

Rosalind Krauss

Krauss

Greek Cross, adapted from painting by Ad Reinhardt

The Krauss Cross

Monday, February 25, 2008

Monday February 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:00 pm
A System of SymbolsA book from
Yale University Press
discussed in Log24
four years ago today:

Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative

Click on image for details.

The book is titled
Inside Modernism:
Relativity Theory,
Cubism, Narrative
.

For a narrative about relativity
and cubes, see Knight Moves.

Related material:

Geek chic in
this week’s New Yorker

“… it takes a system of symbols
to make numbers precise–
to ‘crystallize’ them….”

— and a mnemonic for three
days in October 2006
following a memorial to
the Amish schoolchildren
slain that month:

Seven is Heaven,
Eight is a Gate,
Nine is a Vine.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Sunday December 16, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:09 pm
 
Mad Phaedrus
Meets Mad Ezra

"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

"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

"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.
 

Related material: St. Augustine's Day 2006

Friday, December 14, 2007

Friday December 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 am

“Well, it changes.”

Nicole Kidman at a press conference
for the London premiere of
“The Golden Compass” on November 27:

Nicole Kidman'-- kittens and tiger

A related Log24 link from
that same date, November 27:

Deep Beauty

See also Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance

“Plato hadn’t tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that 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.”

— as well as Cold Mountain

Page 48: “It’s claimed that if
you take a mirror and look
backwards into a well, you’ll
see your future down in the water.”

“So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance.  She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below.

Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well.

She shifted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror.  The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself.  The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror.  It cast back the shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones.

Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away.  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, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon.

Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well.  And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror.”

— and Log24 on December 3 —

I Ching Hexagram 48: The Well
The above Chinese character
stands for Hexagram 48, “The Well.”
For further details, click on the well.

Monday, October 9, 2006

Monday October 9, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus
(10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday
(01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
(10/05/03)
A Form
(05/22/04)
Ineluctable
(05/27/04)
A Form, continued
(06/05/04)
Parallelisms
(06/06/04)
Ado
(06/25/04)
Deep Game
(06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen
(06/27/04)
And So To Bed
(06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah
(09/15/04)
Derrida Dead
(10/09/04)
The Nine
(11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato
(11/19/04)
Art History
(05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone
(08/06/05)
High Concept
(8/23/05) 
High Concept, Continued
(8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought
(8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking
(10/09/05)
Balance
(10/31/05)
Matrix
(11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate
(11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine
(11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ
(12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig
(01/05/06)
Cross
(01/06/06)
On Beauty
(01/26/06)
Sunday Morning
(01/29/06)
Centre
(01/29/06)
New Haven
(01/29/06) 
Washington Ballet
(02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon
(02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo
(02/05/06)
Game Boy
(08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross
(09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box
(09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave
(09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays
(09/26/06)
Symbology 101
(09/26/06)

Monday, October 31, 2005

Monday October 31, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 2:00 am

Balance

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix03/030109-gridsmall.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"An asymmetrical balance is sought since it possesses more movement. This is achieved by the imaginary plotting of the character upon a nine-fold square, invented by some ingenious writer of the Tang dynasty. If the square were divided in half or in four, the result would be symmetrical, but the nine-fold square permits balanced asymmetry."

— Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, quoted in Aspen no. 10, item 8

"'Burnt Norton' opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus' fragments on flux and movement….  the chief contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both 'in and out of time,' how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the sad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden– a symbol he has previously used, in many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous, since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up an image he had used in 'Triumphal March': 'at the still point of the turning world.' This notion of 'a mathematically pure point' (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be Eliot's poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante's 'unmoved Mover,' another way of symbolising a timeless release from the 'outer compulsions' of the world. Still another variation is the passage on the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a conception comparable to Wallace Stevens' 'Anecdote of the Jar,' has suggested how art conquers time:

       Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

— F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,
Oxford University Press, 1958, as quoted in On "Burnt Norton"

 

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Saturday July 30, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:21 am

Born today: Laurence Fishburne

Matrix

“The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason, sheltered by the Gate from the turmoil of the Delta, with its endless cycles of erasure and reinscription. This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale….”– Architects John Outram Associates
on work at Rice University

Yale Daily News, Jan. 11, 2001:  

“When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony’s founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a ‘nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'”

“Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives….”

— Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ XXVIII

Related material:
Log24 entries on
St. Peter’s Day, 2004

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