Log24

In memory of a public intellectual who reportedly argued in favor of
"a universal identity system" and died at 94 on May 31 —

Detail from an illustration linked to here  on May 31 —

"Have you ever thought about
 the properties of numbers?"

 — "The Maiden" in Shaw's
 Back to Methuselah , quoted in
 the Fritz Leiber Changewar  story
“No Great Magic” (1963), Part V

Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:

“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”

Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber

(Leiber's "Changewar" is my
favorite mythology.)

From the Changewar story
"No Great Magic" (1963) Part V:

Even little things are
turning out to be great things
and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about
the properties of numbers?
— The Maiden

"I've had this idea– it's just a sort of fancy, remember– that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing-room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it…."

For the remainder of this section
of Leiber's story, see

Show Business.

Related material:
The previous entry,
The Eight, and
Now We See Wherein
Lies the Pleasure.

ART WARS for

Trotsky’s Birthday

Part I:
Symbols

From my entry of July 26, 2003, in memory
of Marathon Man director John Schlesinger:

For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Part II:
Sunday in the Park with Death

  To Leon from Diego —
Details of a mural,
A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park,
Fresco, 1947-48,
Alameda Hotel, Mexico City:

Three’s a Crowd:

Symbol:

Morning Flight

“I’m working on a morning flight to anywhere but here….

It’s not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again”

— Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM

Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.

See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure’s central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united.  For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry.  This is one interpretation of the eightfold “Spider” symbol

which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology).  This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents “Shiva and Kali united in love,” according to Leiber. (See my journal note “Biblical Proportions,” written on this date in 1997.)

For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.

For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see

You Don’t Look Buddhist,

Suzanne Takes You Down, and

Satori at Pearl Harbor.