Log24

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Dance and the Soul (for St. Bridget’s Eve)

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:47 pm
 

Harold Bloom
on Wallace Stevens

and Paul Valéry's
   Dance and the Soul

"Stevens may be playful, yet seriously so, in describing desire, at winter's end, observing not only the emergence of the blue woman of early spring, but seeing also the myosotis, whose other name is 'forget-me-not.' Desire, hearing the calendar hymn, repudiates the negativity of the mind of winter, unable to bear what Valéry's Eryximachus had called 'this cold, exact, reasonable, and moderate consideration of human life as it is.' The final form of this realization in Stevens comes in 1950, in The Course of a Particular, in the great monosyllabic line 'One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.' But even Stevens cannot bear that feeling for long. As Eryximachus goes on to say in Dance and the Soul:

A cold and perfect clarity is a poison impossible to combat. The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously….[…] To a handful of ashes is the past reduced, and the future to a tiny icicle. The soul appears to itself as an empty and measurable form. — Here, then, things as they are come together, limit one another, and are thus chained together in the most rigorous and mortal fashion…. O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is.

Valéry's formula for reimagining the First Idea is, 'The idea introduces into what is, the leaven of what is not.' This 'murderous lucidity' can be cured only by what Valéry's Socrates calls 'the intoxication due to act,' particularly Nietzschean or Dionysiac dance, for this will rescue us from the state of the Snow Man, 'the motionless and lucid observer.'"

Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

"…at the still point, there the dance is…." — T. S. Eliot

St. Bridget's Still Point … June 25, 2020 —

Roots!

More recently . . .

Monday, February 1, 2010

For St. Bridget’s Day

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:25 pm

"But wait, there's more!"
Stanley Fish, NY Times Jan. 28

From the editors at The New York Times who, left to their own devices, would produce yet another generation of leftist morons who don't know the difference between education and entertainment–

A new Times column starts today–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100201-Strogatz.jpg

The quality of the column's logo speaks for itself. It pictures a cone with dashed lines indicating height and base radius, but unlabeled except for a large italic x to the right of the cone. This enigmatic variable may indicate the cone's height or slant height– or, possibly, its surface area or volume.

Instead of the column's opening load of crap about numbers and Sesame Street, a discussion of its logo might be helpful.

The cone plays a major role in the historical development of mathematics.

Some background from an online edition of Euclid

"Euclid proved in proposition XII.10 that the cone with the same base and height as a cylinder was one third of the cylinder, but he could not find the ratio of a sphere to the circumscribed cylinder. In the century after Euclid, Archimedes solved this problem as well as the much more difficult problem of the surface area of a sphere."

For Archimedes and the surface area of a sphere, see (for instance) a discussion by Kevin Brown. For more material on Archimedes, see "Archimedes: Volume of a Sphere," by Doug Faires (2001)– Archimedes' heuristic argument from mechanics that involves the volume of a cone– and Archimedes' more rigorous approach in The Works of Archimedes, edited by T. L. Heath (1897).

The work of Euclid and Archimedes on volumes was, of course, long before the discovery of calculus.  For a helpful discussion of cone volumes involving high-school-level calculus, see, for instance,  the following–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100201-VolCalc.gif

The Times editors apparently feel that
few of their readers are capable of
such high-school-level sophistication.

For some other geometric illustrations
perhaps more appealing than the Times's

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100201-StrogatzLogo.png

dunce cap, see the symbol of
  today's saint– a Bridget Cross
and a web page on
visualized quaternions.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Debriefing Ava

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 8:24 pm

Her lips are pips
I call her hips
“Twirly” and “Whirly.” 

Song lyric

(Pips are the dots on dice. The above "choose us" image in the form of a
St. Bridget's cross is from Twirly Industries, a sportswear maker in Pakistan.)

See as well a Polish poet's meditation
quoted here on St. Bridget's Day, 2012:

Friday, June 17, 2022

Just 17 : Circle in the Square

See as well other posts tagged Hillbilly Geometry.

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Ornaments for Valéry*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:27 am

* See Valéry Ornament in this journal.

Thursday, June 25, 2020

After Gauss

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:44 pm

St. Bridget's Cross

(Modulo Bridget)

"Well, she was just seventeen . . ."

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Art and Space…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 am

Continues, in memory of chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi,
who reportedly died at 85 yesterday in Switzerland —

IMAGE- Spielfeld (1982-83), by Wolf Barth

The coloring of the 4×4 "base" in the above image
suggests St. Bridget's cross.

From this journal on St. Bridget's Day this year —

"Possible title: 

A new graphic approach 
to an old geometric approach
to a new combinatorial approach
to an old algebraic approach
to M24
"

The narrative leap from image to date may be regarded as
an example of "knight's move" thinking.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Ninth Year

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

A passage from the Benjamin Jowett translation of Plato's Meno

" 'For in the ninth year* Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages  .' The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."

* See this journal nine years ago, in August 2003.
 Jowett's note— "Pindar, Frag. 98 (Boeckh)"

Wikipedia authors like Protious, an alleged resident of Egypt and 
creator of The Socrates Swastika , may enjoy a less scholarly account:

From Babylon A. D.  (a 2008 film)— Toorop with Egyptian Sacred Scarab tattoo—           

— and Toorop with Aurora (who may be regarded as "the soul" in the Meno  passage above)—

Toorop's neck tattoo in the second image above is from a fictional book
described in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.

As swastika-like sacred symbols go, I prefer St. Bridget's Cross.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Minimalist Whirl

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:29 pm

See St. Bridget's Cross

on the Web and in this journal.

Related material—

(Click images to enlarge.)

From Tablet  magazine on St. Bridget's Day, 2012—

From Tablet  magazine today—

Of greater secular  interest—

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Sunday February 1, 2009

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

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow

Quaternion in finite geometry

Quaternion

Happy St. Bridget's Day.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thursday May 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art

I Ching hexagram 54: The Marrying Maiden

Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT

Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080522-Irelandslide1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
New York Times, May 22, 2008    

THE IMAGE

Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.

Another version of
the image:

Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo
See 2/22/08
and  4/19/08.


Related material:

Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times

“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”

Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:

“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”

An archetypal image

THE SPACE:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

A non-archetypal image

THE ART:

Jack in the Box, by Natasha Wescoat

Natasha Wescoat, 2004
See also Epiphany 2008:

How the eightfold cube works

“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54

Lear’s fool:

 …. Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better
than thou art, now. I am a fool;
thou art nothing….

“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

* For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and “Outside the Box,” a New York Times review of O’Doherty’s art (featuring a St. Bridget’s Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Wednesday February 20, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:48 am
 About Five Years Ago:

M. V. Ramana on a famous quotation–
 
"Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so as to read the Gita in the original; he always kept a worn pink copy on the bookshelf closest to his desk. It is therefore likely that he may have actually thought of the original, Sanskrit, verse rather than the English translation. The closest that fits this meaning is in the 32nd verse from the 11th chapter of the Gita.

 kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho

This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time."

"KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time."  See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.

The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.

 See 1132 A. D. & Saint Brighid, and my weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Bridget's Eve), and February 1 (St. Bridget's Day), 2003

The custom-made asterisk
above may be regarded
as a version of
the "Spider" symbol
of Fritz Leiber.

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte
.

Rubén Darío

Related material:

The previous five entries
and the entries of
this date three years ago.

Time of this entry:

11:48:17 AM.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Sunday February 11, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:56 am
George Sadek, 78,
Graphic Design Educator,
Dies

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070211-GeorgeSadek.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sadek died on Feb. 5.

Related material:

“Harvard Design” (Feb. 6),

“Geometry and Death”
(entries of December 2006)
,

“Release Date”
in “Immortal Diamond”
(Feb. 5 four years ago).

The design over Sadek’s
head is a St. Bridget’s cross.

(See the “Release Date”
link above.)

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Saturday July 16, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 pm
Tribute

to the Dance of Kali:

  From Feb. 18, 2003

Fat Man and Dancing Girl

Dance of
Shiva and Kali

Paul Newman as
General Groves

From "The Bomb of the Blue God," by M. V. Ramana

Gita 11:32 —

kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho

"This literally means: I am kala, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kala by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kala, a more common one is time."

 See 1132 AD & Saint Brighid, and my 2003 weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Bridget's Eve), and February 1 (St. Bridget's Day).

The fact that Oppenheimer thought, on this date in 1945, of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.

Related material for
Michael Flatley on his
July 16 birthday:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050716-nataraj2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Shiva as Lord of the Dance

Michael and other Irish persons
may benefit from the film
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"
as an introduction to
the Dance of Shiva and Kali.

On a more personal level:
Log24 entries of July 12 and July 13.

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Tuesday February 18, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Fat Man and Dancing Girl

Dance of
Shiva and Kali

Paul Newman as
General Groves

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed in the film "Fat Man and Little Boy," died on this date in 1967.

He is sometimes called the "father of the A-bomb."  He said that at the time of the first nuclear test he thought of a line from the Sanskrit holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  The following gives more details.

The Bomb of the Blue God

M. V. Ramana

Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University

Published in SAMAR: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, Issue 13

Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so as to read the Gita in the original; he always kept a worn pink copy on the bookshelf closest to his desk. It is therefore likely that he may have actually thought of the original, Sanskrit, verse rather than the English translation. The closest that fits this meaning is in the 32nd verse from the 11th chapter of the Gita.

 kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho

This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time.  Indeed, the translations of the Gita by S. Radhakrishnan, A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Nataraja Guru and Eliot Deutsch say precisely that. One exception to this, however, is the 1929 translation by Arthur Ryder. And, indeed, in a 1933 letter to his brother, Robert Oppenheimer does mention that he has "been reading the Bhagavad Gita with Ryder and two other Sanskritists." The misinterpretation, therefore, may not have been the fault of Oppenheimer or Jungk. Nevertheless, the verse does not have anything to do with an apocalyptic or catastrophic destruction, as most people have interpreted it in connection with nuclear weapons. When kAla is understood as time, the meaning is drastically changed to being a reminder of our mortality and finite lifetimes ­ as also the lifetimes of everything else in this world (including plutonium and uranium, despite their long, long, half-lives!). It then becomes more akin to western notions of the "slow march of time" and thus having little to do with the immense destruction caused by a nuclear explosion. While the very first images that arose in the father of the atomic bomb are a somewhat wrong application of Hindu mythology, his recollection of the Bhagavad Gita may have been quite pertinent. As is well known, the Bhagavad Gita was supposedly intended to persuade Arjuna to participate in the Kurukshetra battle that resulted in the killing of thousands. Thus, Oppenheimer may well have been trying to rationalize his involvement in the development of a terrible weapon.

Source: Google cache of
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/5409/samar_bluegod.pdf

See also
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=36.
 
"KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time."  See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.

The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.

 See 1132 A. D. & Saint Brighid, and my weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Bridget's Eve), and February 1 (St. Bridget's Day), 2003.

Friday, January 31, 2003

Friday January 31, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 6:20 pm

Irish Fourplay

"…something I once heard Charles M. Schulz say, 'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'"

 — William F. House

"Forewarned is four-armed."

— Folk saying

The painting at left is by Mary B. Kelly, a 1958 graduate of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College.

Kelly is an expert on portrayals of Goddess figures in art

Today in Australia is February First, the feast of St. Bridget.  As several websites note, St. Bridget is a combination of Christian saint and Goddess figure… rather like St. Sara (patron saint of Gypsies, also known as Kali) or like Sara Pezzini in the classic TV series "Witchblade."

"Aww… Irish foreplay."

— Sara Pezzini in Witchblade, Episode 6

"Mighty in the gift of purity
She was pleasing unto the Bridegroom on high."

Song of St. Bridget

"Brace yourself, Bridget."

— Definition of Irish foreplay

Saint Bridget's Cross:

Four people can form this cross by joining hands as shown.  Of course, a Goddess like Kali (shown above) or Sara Pezzini could do it all by herself.

 

For futher details, see The Swastika Goddess,  the history of Jews and the Roman Catholic Church, and the history of Irish neutrality in World War II.

Postscript  of 11 PM

The Goddess Bridget in Literature

The Goddess Bridget (or Brigid) is incarnated in two classic works of American literature —

  • The American patriot and Communist Party supporter Dashiell Hammett gave an unflattering portrayal of Brigid (O'Shaughnessy) in The Maltese Falcon.  For a Jungian analysis of the relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid, see the perceptive remarks of Ryan Benedetti:

"In Jungian terms, Brigid becomes a projection of Spade's anima, a contrasexual replica of his own face as expressed in someone of the opposite sex.

Spade wears a variety of masks in his work. Masking allows him to get underneath the scam most clients lay on him. He is closer to the darker side of his unconscious than any of the other characters in the book, and he is so, because of his role as shamus. His function in his society is to expose all of the underlying darkness of the human psyche."

One way of looking at animus and anima is through the following archetypes:

A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure —
or a "jewel-box and its mate"

  • Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, describes the way Goddess Bridget (again, O'Shaughnessy) arranged the conveyance of her late husband to the next world:

 "D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"

"Yes, madam."

"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise!"

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