Sunday, July 1, 2018
The Perpetual Motion of T. S. Eliot
Friday, June 29, 2018
For St. Stanley
The phrase "Blue Dream" in the previous post
suggests a Web search for Traumnovelle .
That search yields an interesting weblog post
from 2014 commemorating the 1999 dies natalis
(birth into heaven) of St. Stanley Kubrick.
Related material from March 7, 2014,
in this journal —
That 2014 post was titled "Kummer Varieties." It is now tagged
"Kummerhenge." For some backstory, see other posts so tagged.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
“But Back to the Action…”
The title is from this morning's online New York Times review
of a new Jackie Chan film.
Click the image below for some related posts.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Annals of Critical Epistemology
"But unlike many who left the Communist Party, I turned left
rather than right, and returned—or rather turned for the first time—
to a critical examination of Marx's work. I found—and still find—
that his analysis of capitalism, which for me is the heart of his work,
provides the best starting point, the best critical tools, with which—
suitably developed—to understand contemporary capitalism.
I remind you that this year is also the sesquicentennial of the
Communist Manifesto , a document that still haunts the capitalist world."
— From "Autobiographical Reflections," a talk given on June 5, 1998, by
John Stachel at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
on the occasion of a workshop honoring his 70th birthday,
"Space-Time, Quantum Entanglement and Critical Epistemology."
From a passage by Stachel quoted in the previous post —
From the source for Stachel's remarks on Weyl and coordinatization —
Note that Stachel distorted Weyl's text by replacing Weyl's word
"symbols" with the word "quantities." —
This replacement makes no sense if the coordinates in question
are drawn from a Galois field — a field not of quantities , but rather
of algebraic symbols .
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Art Space, Continued
"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."
—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson today
From Log24 posts tagged Art Space —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
“The Universal Kummer Threefold,” by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and
Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
Monday, March 7, 2016
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Joyce’s Wake
This post is thanks to Nicole Kidman …
E! Online today reminds us that "Bowie's song 'Nature Boy'
was ... featured in Kidman's 2001 film Moulin Rouge ."
A YouTube video of the Moulin Rouge "Nature Boy"
was uploaded on April 1, 2011. That date in this journal —
The last New York Lottery number
"…every answer involves as much of history
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: |
James Joyce reportedly died on today's date in 1941.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Progressive Matrix
Yesterday's post and recent Hollywood news suggest
a meditation on a Progressive Matrix —
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
Structurally related images —
A sample Raven's Progressive Matrices test item
(such items share the 3×3 structure of the hash symbol above):
Structural background —
Monday, October 20, 2014
The Library
The online Harvard Crimson today:
“ ‘I don’t like how they check your bags
when you leave the library
even though you have to swipe your
student ID to get in.’
But what else would I be carrying in this
Gutenberg Bible-sized backpack? ”
Nicole Kidman at the end of “Hemingway & Gellhorn” (2012)
Saturday, May 31, 2014
For the Black Widow Club*
… and for Anthony Hopkins and a Black Widow,
as well as for a filmmaker who reportedly died on May 19.
Update of 4:48 PM ET: See also Philip Roth on an ambiguity.
* The title was suggested in part by a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries.
Friday, March 7, 2014
Kummer Varieties
The Dream of the Expanded Field continues…
From Klein's 1893 Lectures on Mathematics —
"The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called Kummer varieties…."
— E. Spanier, 1956
From this journal on March 10, 2013 —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
"The Universal Kummer Threefold," by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
Update of 10 PM ET March 7, 2014 —
The following slides by one of the "Kummer Threefold" authors give
some background related to the above 64-point vector space and
to the Weyl group of type E7, W (E7):
The Cayley reference is to "Algorithm for the characteristics of the
triple ϑ-functions," Journal für die Reine und Angewandte
Mathematik 87 (1879): 165-169. <http://eudml.org/doc/148412>.
To read this in the context of Cayley's other work, see pp. 441-445
of Volume 10 of his Collected Mathematical Papers .
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Sweet Home Alabama…
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Plan 9 Continued…
Or: Chinny-Chin-Chin .
This post will be meaningless unless you
have seen the recent film "R.I.P.D.," starring
James Hong and Jeff Bridges.
(In that film, two deceased lawmen appear to
the living in disguised form— as Hong, and
as Bridges in the guise of a major babe.)
From the AP Today in History page
for October 29, 2013 —
On this date in:
1967 The musical "Hair" opened off-Broadway.
This, together with the Halloween season and
"R.I.P.D.," suggests a bizarre show:
"And there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space…"
– Don McLean, "American Pie"
The show would star Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges
as, respectively, Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman in…
V.I.P.D.
See also some related posts with Jeff Bridges.
Backstory: Sermon (Nov. 18, 2012) and
Eternal Recreation (Dec. 24, 2012).
"We've lost the plot!" — "Slipstream." Small wonder.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Dream of the Expanded Field
Friday, August 2, 2013
Duende for St. Wallace
(The final quote above is bogus. Stevens did write "Death is the mother
of beauty," but the "perishable" part is from a lesser poet, Billy Collins.)
For the duende of this post's title, see a dance.
The dance suggests a 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—
"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.
And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond.
I felt my legs go limp. She was growing larger, coming closer,
holding out her arms, beckoning, calling—
She seemed to fill the room. The diamond grew to gigantic size,
and my brain whirled and bobbed in dizzy circles.
I sensed the overpowering, wordless call."
— "Guardian of the Crystal Gate," August 1956
For similar gestures, see Nicole Kidman's dance in "The Human Stain."
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Stitch
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of our language." — Wittgenstein
"You've got to pick up every stitch…
Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
Today's morning post, Rubric, suggests a check
of Alexander Bogomolny's tweets:
Clicking the hint leads to Bogomolny's Ambiguities in Plain Language:
See also, in this journal, alea (which appears within the derived word "aleatory").
Saturday, October 20, 2012
’Round Midnight
Update of 1 AM Saturday—
On the late Frank Moore Cross, biblical scholar—
"When you walked into his classes, you felt
you were on the frontier of knowledge in the field,"
said Peter Machinist, who studied under Dr. Cross
as an undergraduate at Harvard and now holds
the endowed professorship† there that Dr. Cross
had held until his retirement in 1992.
For religious remarks from a different Machinist,
see a post of July 24, 2012…
† Click link for a condition on the professorship that was
apparently met by Cross, but that has perhaps not
been met by Machinist, a rather rabbinical figure.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Conjure
In the catacomb of my mind
Where the dead endure—a kingdom
I conjure by love to rise
— Samuel Menashe, as quoted by
Stephen Spender in a review of four
different poets, "The Last Ditch,"
The New York Review of Books , July 22, 1971
"…the ghost reveals that the beggar
is in fact a sorcerer, a necromancer
who is preparing the mandala in order
to achieve an evil end. The ascetic
intends to bind the ghost to the corpse,
place it in the center of the circle,
and worship it as a deity."
— The King and the Corpse (from synopsis in
"How Many Facets Can a Non-Existent Jewel Have?")
Menashe died on Monday, August 22, 2011.
Related material by and for two other poets
who also died on Monday:
- By Jerry Leiber— "Love Potion #9"
-
For Nick Ashford— Nicole Kidman in
Sermon (from Jan. 9) and
Conjure Wife, a 1943 tale by Fritz Leiber
See also an excerpt from Kerouac I cached on Monday, and
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail .
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Problem
Wednesday's Marginal Remarks pictured Robert De Niro
and Sean Penn in "We're No Angels." De Niro appeared
again in a Saturday Night Live sketch linked to
in last night's 9:29 post.
Here are some remarks featuring Penn related to
Peter J. Cameron's description yesterday of Sudoku
as an example of mathematics.
(Recall that the symbol #, known as 'hash,"
can stand for checkmate.)
"Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics."
|
For a sample chess problem, see a post from Oct. 10, 2005,
the day that the Sudoku remark Cameron describes was
in the news.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Plato’s Pheedo
But seriously—
Degreeless Noon—
Related material:
"Start the new year off with a new job at Pheedo."
Saturday, June 11, 2011
But Seriously–
"Mr. Messina is no ordinary Twitter user. The self-described
'hash godfather,' he officially invented the Twitter hashtag
in August 2007…."
— Ashley Parker (page ST1 of tomorrow's
NY Times National Edition)
But seriously—
Degreeless Noon—
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Sermon
Another topic from today's newspaper —
Commentary —
"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film that opened Friday
See also —
This morning's post Inception and the following site:
Note the ninefold favicon at the above site. Some background—
The Ninth Gate in yesterday's post and this image from last September—
Friday, January 7, 2011
Ayn Sof
(A continuation of this morning's Coxeter and the Aleph)
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated | |
![]() |
![]() Narrative |
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show
that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's
Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of transfinite numbers,
of which any part is as great as the whole."
— Borges, "The Aleph"
From WorldLingo.com —
|
"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film opening tonight
See also, with respect to David Foster Wallace, infinity, nihilism,
and the above reading of "Ayn Sof" as "nothingness,"
the quotations compiled as "Is Nothing Sacred?"
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
The Ending That Fell Off a Truck
"…the ending arrives as if dropped from a passing truck."
— Stephen Hunter, Washington Post review of the 2007 film
"The Invasion" (starring Nicole Kidman)
![]()
"The Invasion" |
![]()
Leiber's Big Time |

Related material— "The reviews are in!"— Wall Street Journal today
See also this journal on October First, the date of the above death.
"We've lost the plot!" — "Slipstream"
"Big time." — Dick Cheney
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Saturday March 21, 2009
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."
|
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday February 17, 2008
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"…. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … "Here is how it stacks up: You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…." "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me. "Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees." "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name." "Which is?" I asked. "The Spiders," she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that. She watched me. "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better." |
Related material:
the previous entry.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Friday December 14, 2007
“Well, it changes.”
A related Log24 link from
that same date, November 27:
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 —
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 —
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Saturday September 15, 2007
Professors: Post Your Syllabi
Professors should post their course syllabi before move-in, not after class has started The Harvard Crimson
Published On Friday, September 14, 2007 12:54 AM
"Classes start in three days, and that means it’s time to… examine course syllabi– that is if you can find them…." More >> |
Classics 101:
The Holy Spook

Prof. Coleman Silk introducing
freshmen to academic values
The Course Begins:
Larry Summers, former president
of Harvard, was recently invited,
then disinvited, to speak at a
politically correct UC campus.
A Guest Lecturer Speaks:
Illustration of the Theme:
Clarinetist Ken Peplowski
plays "Cry Me a River"
as Nicole Kidman focuses
the students' attention.
A sample Holy Spook,
Kurt Vonnegut, was introduced
by Peplowski on the birthday
this year of Pope Benedict XVI.
"Deeply vulgar"
— Academic characterization
of Harvard president Summers
"Do they still call it
the licorice stick?"
— Kurt Vonnegut
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Tuesday May 15, 2007
The Rev. Jerry Falwell speaks at a rally
on the steps of the Alabama Capitol
in Montgomery in this Saturday,
Aug. 16, 2003, file photo.
(AP Photo/Dave Martin)
The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2004:
"The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University [at Lynchburg, Virginia] is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law."
Religious perspective:
See the five Log24 entries ending with "Dinner Theater?" (Nov. 26, 2004). Note Charles Williams's discussion of the Salem witchcraft trials.
See also yesterday's "Seven Bridges." In light of that entry's picture of Nicole Kidman in "To Die For," and of Charles Williams's remarks, a discussion of Kidman's "Practical Magic" may also interest some.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Monday May 14, 2007
Seven Bridges
"Make me young…"
— Kilgore Trout
For the old at heart:
The Mathematical Association of America in this
Euler Tercentenary Year honors the seven bridges of
Königsberg, Prussia (birthplace of David Hilbert).
For Kilgore Trout:
A song about the road to (and from)
Hank Williams's memorial marker:
"There are stars in the Southern sky
and if ever you decide you should go
there is a taste of time-sweetened honey
down the Seven Bridges Road
Now I have loved you like a baby
like some lonesome child
and I have loved you in a tame way
and I have loved you wild"
Nicole Kidman dances
"Sweet Home Alabama"
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Sunday September 10, 2006
ART WARS
continued:
Sources:
This morning’s Log24 entry,
today’s New York Times Magazine,
and today’s Doonesbury.
Related material:
My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag’s ex-husband.
See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Saturday December 10, 2005
Roger Shattuck, Scholar, Is Dead at 82
In his honor, some excerpts from previous entries:
I just subscribed to The New York Review of Books online for another year,
prompted by my desire to read Roger Shattuck on Rimbaud….
"How did this poetic sensibility come to burn so bright?"
The Shattuck piece is from 1967, the year of The Doors' first album.
(See Death and the Spirit, Part II.)
![]() |
The photo of Nicole Kidman
is from Globe Song
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2005).
The Times says Shattuck died
on Thursday (Dec. 8, 2005).
Here, from 4:00 AM on the
morning of Shattuck's death,
is a brief companion-piece
to Eight is a Gate:
From Carole A. Holdsworth, Tanner may have stated it best:
“V. is whatever lights you to
(Tony Tanner, page 36,
She's a mystery |
She's in midnight blue,
still the words ring true;
woman in blue
got a hold on you.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Wednesday October 12, 2005
Today’s online New York Times
and Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in “The Interpreter”
“Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question ‘Who is the protagonist?’ is a meaningless one.”
|
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
“The Storyteller in Chance“
Log24 entries for those dates contain allusions
to games of chance and games of skill.
See also yesterday’s entry.
Monday, December 30, 2002
Monday December 30, 2002
Three in One
This evening’s earlier entry, “Homer,” is meant in part as a tribute to three goddess-figures from the world of film. But there is one actress who combines the intelligence of Judy Davis with the glamour of Nicole Kidman and the goodness of Kate Winslet– Perhaps the only actress who could have made me cry Stella! as if I were Brando…. Piper Laurie.
From the Robert A. Heinlein novel “I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ “ ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” “I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?” I thought about it…. The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.” ” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,”and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name. Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice. “No, no! Not ‘Oscar’– ‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’ For this.” “Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster. Scar and Star.” |
The Hustler |
|
Monday December 30, 2002
Homer
“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila
“The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948
Judy Davis as Harriet Bird
Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132
“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris
“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural
Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch
From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:
HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while. Maybe have a drink or somethin’.
LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.
HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.
LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.
HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.
Loretta looks at him carefully. She knows it’s not a line.
LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.
HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me. I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.
The two just stand there in silence a second. There’s nothing more to say. She stands back and lets him in.
Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:
“For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is
the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).
Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,
Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.
As she understands Plato:
The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.
Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:
She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.
Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”
*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.
**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus.
From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:
“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”