"If it's a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo."
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"Drop me a line" — Request attributed to Emma Stone
A space fan in Tomorrowland knocks on one door-panel of a 3×3 array —
Related image from Hereafter —
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"As a Chinese jar . . . ."
— Four Quartets
Rosalind Krauss "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. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, |
The "Katz" of the August 7 post Art Angles
is a product of Princeton's
Department of Art and Archaeology.
ART —
ARCHAEOLOGY —
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
Punch Line . . .
Wrap Party!
From this date five years ago in The Guardian—
Alice Munro: An Appreciation by Margaret Atwood—
"The central Christian tenet is that
two disparate and mutually exclusive elements—
divinity and humanity— got jammed together
in Christ, neither annihilating the other.
The result was not a demi-god, or a God
in disguise: God became totally a human being
while remaining at the same time totally divine.
To believe either that Christ was only a man or
that he was simply God was declared heretical
by the early Christian church. Christianity thus
depends on a denial of either/or classifying logic
and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery.
Logic says that A cannot be both itself and non-A
at the same time; Christianity says it can. The
formulation 'A but also non-A' is indispensable to it."
Related literary material— "Excluded Middle" and "Couple of Tots."
See also "The Divided Cube" and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."
"According to Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dalí
was 'really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother
kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.'
But actually there were triplets: the third one is
Stephen King."
— Margaret Atwood, "Shine On,"
online Sept. 19, 2013
"The metaphor for metamorphosis
no keys unlock."
Happy birthday to…
Today's sermon, by Marie-Louise von Franz—
For more on the modern physicist analyzed by von Franz,
see The Innermost Kernel , by Suzanne Gieser.
Another modern physicist, Niels Bohr, died
on this date in 1962…
The circle above is marked with a version For the square, see the diamond theorem. "Two things of opposite natures seem to depend — Wallace Stevens, |
Hermann Weyl's 1949 remarks in this morning's post
were made at an event on March 19 in honor of Einstein's
70th birthday five days earlier.
Somehow the conclusion of Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel
Cat's Eye seems appropriate:
See "Nine is a Vine" and "Hereafter" in this journal.
As quoted here last October 23—
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
Apollo and the Tricksters
From The Story of N (Oct. 15, 2010)—
Roberta Smith on what she calls "endgame art"—
"Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
Margaret Atwood on tricksters and art—
"If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo."
Here is some related material In memory of CIA officer Clare Edward Petty, who died at 90 on March 18—
A review of a sort of storyteller's MacGuffin — the 3×3 grid. This is, in Smith's terms, an "artistic focus" that appears to be visually comprehensible but is not as simple as it seems.
The Hesse configuration can serve as more than a sort of Dan Brown MacGuffin. As a post of January 14th notes, it can (rather fancifullly) illustrate the soul—
" … I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight…."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
See Margaret Atwood in this journal.
This link was suggested by the phrase "combinatorial* delight" in last night's quote from Nabokov, which also appears in Douglas Glover's review essay, "Her Life Entire," in Books in Canada , Volume 17, Number 7, October 1988—
Cat's Eye is Atwood's seventh novel. It is dense, intricate, and superb, as thematically diverse and complex as anything she has written. It is what you might expect from a writer at mid-career, mid-life: a portrait of the artist, a summation of what she knows about art and people. It is also an Atwoodian Under the Volcano , a vision of Toronto as Hell.
See also Under the Volcano and Toronto in this journal.
"Right through hell there is a path." –Under the Volcano
* Update: Corrected on Dec. 13, 2014, to "combinational delight."
A picture one might view as
related to the novel An Object of Beauty
and the film "The Object of Beauty" —
"If it's a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo." — Margaret Atwood
The follow-up to last year's runaway horror hit, "Paranormal Activity 2," kicked off its first weekend in theaters with a major haul. The creepy tale… pulled in $20.1 million on Friday.
Trailing behind "Paranormal" is last week's box-office busting debut "Jackass 3D. " The prank-fest, which landed about $50 million its first weekend in theaters, slipped to the second-place slot….
…
The Clint Eastwood-helmed ensemble drama "Hereafter" landed in fourth place. Exploring the lives of three people who are dealing with death and the afterlife in several ways, including the story of a psychic played by Matt Damon, the screen legend's latest turn in the director's chair made approximately $4.1 million on Friday.
Related material—
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner and the paranormal.
Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010
Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching and…
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Story of N
Roberta Smith in the New York Times of July 7, 2006—
Art Review
"… The show has an endgame, end-time mood, as if we are looking at the end of the end of the end of Pop, hyperrealism and appropriation art. The techniques of replication and copying have become so meticulous that they are beside the point. This is truly magic realism: the kind you can't see, that has to be explained. It is also a time when artists cultivate hybridism and multiplicity and disdain stylistic coherence, in keeping with the fashionable interest in collectivity, lack of ego, the fluidity of individual identity. But too often these avoidance tactics eliminate the thread of a personal sensibility or focus.
I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible. With a few exceptions, forms of collage and assemblage dominate this show: the putting together (or simply putting side by side) of existing images and objects prevails. The consistency of this technique in two and three dimensions should have been a red flag for the curators. Collage has driven much art since the late 1970's. Lately, and especially in this exhibition, it often seems to have become so distended and pulled apart that its components have become virtually autonomous and unrelated, which brings us back to square one. This is most obvious in the large installations of graphic works whose individual parts gain impact and meaning from juxtaposition but are in fact considered distinct artworks."
Margaret Atwood on art and the trickster—
"The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie— this line of thought leads Hyde* to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning 'to join,' 'to fit,' and 'to make.' If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart."
* Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 1998
Smith mentions "an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
Atwood mentions "a seamless whole."
For some related remarks, see "A Study in Art Education" and the central figure pictured above. (There "N" can stand for "number," "nine," or "narrative.")
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde’s
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art –
“Trickster,” says Hyde, “feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” (71) As Hyde says, “… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters,” (158), although the reverse is not the case. “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.” (159)
What is “the next world”? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
See also George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner, Trickster.
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
quoted here on
November 17, 2008
Related material:
A web page by
Nick Wedd at Oxford
with a neater version
of pictures I drew on
March 26, 1985
(Recall that Apollo is the god
of, among other things, reason.)
From the previous entry:
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye
Happy birthday
to the late
Eugene Wigner
… and a belated
Merry Christmas
to Paul Newman:
— Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize Lecture, December 12, 1963
From the previous entry:
“If it’s a seamless whole you want,
pray to Apollo, who sets the limits
within which such a work can exist.”
— Margaret Atwood,
author of Cat’s Eye
“The power of the dark is ascending.
The light retreats to security, so that
the dark cannot encroach upon it.”
Related material:
Darkness Visible
Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"– in today's New York Times Magazine:
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art —
"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Trickster
and the Paranormal
and
Martin Gardner on
a disappearing cube —
"What happened to that… cube?"
Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension." "Are you pulling my leg?" "I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?" — "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large |
this illustration in
Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.
On a novel by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature:
“In Snow, translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town’s newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka’s public performance of his poem ‘Snow.’ When Ka protests that he hasn’t written a poem called ‘Snow’ and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ‘Don’t be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens…. Quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.’ And sure enough….”
— Margaret Atwood in the New York Times Book Review of Aug. 15, 2004
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