Log24

"The 'one' with whom the reader has identified himself
has now become 'the listener, who listens in the snow';
he has become the snow man, and he knows winter
with a mind of winter, knows it in its strictest reality,
stripped of all imagination and human feeling.
But at that point when he sees the winter scene
reduced to absolute fact, as the object not of the mind,
but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees
'nothing that is not there,' then the scene,
devoid of  its imaginative correspondences,
has become 'the nothing that is.'"

—Robert Pack, Wallace Stevens:
An Approach to His Poetry and Thought.
New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958.

… Continues.

"Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

— Wallace Stevens

Excerpt from a poem by Johanna Skibsrud
(Toronto Quarterly , April 2, 2011)—

Related material: Into the Bereshit.

See also the remarks on space in Skibsrud's
January 2012 doctoral thesis at the University
of Montreal—

" 'The nothing that is': An Ethics of Absence
    Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens."

— as well as Bull Run I and Bull Run II.

"… the primal ground of this 'one' is 'nothing.'
The elucidation of the generative matrix of the
myth-work is thus completed…." — Jadran Mimica

Related material— The Nothing That Is.

“Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.

In Mahlburg’s work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.

Mahlburg’s work ‘has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,’ Ono says.

‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'”

— Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005

This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for “a story that works.” (See previous entry.)  Whether the muse of dance (played in “Xanadu” by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born– see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.

Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany. Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, West Germany.

Max Born

Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.

Related material:

“The valley spirit never dies. It’s named the mystic woman.”

— Tao Te Ching

For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.

“Down in the valley,
 valley so low,
 hang your head over,
 hear the wind blow.”

— Folk song

“Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
    the same bare place

For the listener,
    who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
    and the nothing that is.”

— Wallace Stevens

Types of Ambiguity

1.  Oscar: military phonetic for the letter 'O'

2.  "… this symbol among the Greeks was more circle than dot, but among those in India, more dot than circle."

— Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero

3.  A bindi is an auspicious mark worn by young girls and women. Bindi is derived from bindu, the Sanskrit word for dot.  It is usually a red dot made with vermilion powder which is worn by women between their eyebrows on their forehead.  Considered a symbol of Goddess Parvati, a bindi signifies female energy….

— Indian Customs & Traditions

4.  Sometimes I feel so reckless and wild
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
I gave nobody life, I am nobody's wife
And I seem to be nobody's daughter
So red is the color that I like the best
It's your Indian skin and the badge
On my chest
The heat of my pride
The lips of a bride
The sad heart of the truth
And the flag of youth
And blood that is thicker than water

— Shawn Colvin of Vermillion, SD,
    "The Story" lyrics

5.  Hamlet  Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia  I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet  That's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs.
Ophelia  What is, my lord?
Hamlet   Nothing.

6.  Macbeth  "…. a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

7.  Enter a Messenger.