Log24

Monday, July 18, 2011

Daimon Theory (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Press ReleaseLos Angeles, July 18, 2011

Former Two and a Half Men  star Charlie Sheen is planning his return to series television in Anger Management , a new sitcom loosely based on Revolution Studios’ 2003 hit comedy feature of the same name….

… in the series inspired by the film… a mild-mannered, non-confrontational man is ordered to attend group anger management sessions led by a therapist who could probably use some anger management himself.

“I chose Anger Management  because, while it might be a big stretch for me to play a guy with serious anger management issues, I think it is a great concept,” Sheen said.

See also Daimon in this journal.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110718-SheenPrayingHands.jpg

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Solomon’s Mental Health Month

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:21 pm

May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.

An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —

"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon

https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/
http://www.thespleen.com/otherorgans/otherorgans/
index.php?artID=724

James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized.

I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life.

I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette.

Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority.

Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor.

The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute.

So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil.

Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage.

What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain.

Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers.

September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't.

For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death."

I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self.

In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water."

This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable.

I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

– Stephen Mitchell, translating Rainer Marie Rilke.

by jessica kardon
iowa city, iowa
2002-09-23

See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

In Memory of Louise Fishman*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:22 pm

"One, two, three . . . but where is the fourth?"

Socrates

Click for Daimon Theory  posts.

* Fishman, an abstract expressionist painter,
reportedly died in Manhattan at 82 on July 26.

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Soul’s Code

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am

James Hillman, NYT obituary on Feast of St. Jude, 2011

James Hillman reportedly died on Thursday, October 27, 2011.

For some commentary, see Wednesday's link to 779

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111028-SoulsCode.JPG

Daimon
  Theory

Diamond Theory

Sunday, November 8, 2009

H is for Hogwarts, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 am

A Sequel to Koestler's
The Call Girls

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990,
Columbia University Press paperback, 1997, p. 137–

"Academics' lives are seldom interesting."

But then there is Matt Lee of the University of Greenwich.

See his weblog subtitled "notes and thoughts on philosophy"… particularly his post "Diamond time, daimon time," of August 20, 2009.

See also my own post of August 20, 2009– "Sophists"– and my earlier post "Daimon Theory" of March 12, 2003:


Daimon Theory


Diamond Theory

More about Lee:

"Chaos majik is a form of modern witchcraft."

More about magick:

Noetic Symbology
(Log24 on October 25, 2009)

Some Related Log24 Posts

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Thursday March 13, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:45 am

Birthday Song

Today is the birthday of the late Jewish media magnate and art collector Walter H. Annenberg, whose name appears on a website that includes the following text:

Shape and Space in Geometry

“Making quilt blocks is an excellent way to explore symmetry. A quilt block is made of 16 smaller squares. Each small square consists of two triangles. Study this example of a quilt block:

quilt

This block has a certain symmetry. The right half is a mirror image of the left, and the top half is a mirror of the bottom.”

© 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved.
Legal Policy

Symmetries of patterns such as the above are the subject of my 1976 monograph “ Diamond Theory,” which also deals with “shape and space in geometry,” but in a much more sophisticated way.  For more on Annenberg, see my previous entry, “Daimon Theory.”  For more on the historical significance of March 13, see Neil Sedaka, who also has a birthday today, in “ Jews in the News.”

Sedaka is, of course, noted for the hit tune “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” our site music for today.

See also Geometry for Jews and related entries.

For the phrase “diamond theory” in a religious and philosophical context, see

Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth.

“It’s quarter to three….” — Frank Sinatra

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Wednesday March 12, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:03 am

Daimon Theory

Today is allegedly the anniversary of the canonization, in 1622, of two rather important members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits):

Ignatius Loyola
  Click here for Loyola’s legacy of strategic intelligence.

Francis Xavier
  Click here for Xavier’s legacy of strategic stupidity.

We can thank (or blame) a Jesuit (Gerard Manley Hopkins) for the poetic phrase “immortal diamond.”  He may have been influenced by Plato, who has Socrates using a diamond figure in an argument for the immortality of the soul.  Confusingly, Socrates also talked about his “daimon” (pronounced dye-moan).  Combining these similar-sounding concepts, we have Doctor Stephen A. Diamond writing about daimons — a choice of author and topic that neatly combines the strategic intelligence of Loyola with the strategic stupidity of Xavier.

The cover illustration is perhaps not of Dr. Diamond himself.

A link between diamond theory and daimon theory is furnished by the charitable legacy of the non-practicing Jew Walter Annenberg.

For Annenberg and diamond theory, see this site on the elementary geometry of quilt blocks, which credits the Annenberg Foundation for support.

For Annenberg and daimon theory, see this site on Socrates, which has a similar Annenberg support credit.

Advanced disciples of Annenberg can learn much from the Perseus site about daimon theory. Let us pray that Abrahamic religious bigotry does not stand in their way.  Less advanced disciples of Annenberg may find fulfillment in teaching children the beauty of elementary 4×4 quilt-block symmetry.  Let us pray that academic bigotry does not prevent these same children, when they have grown older, from learning the deeper, and more difficult, beauties of diamond theory.

 
Daimon Theory

 
Diamond Theory

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Saturday October 19, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:47 am

What is Truth?

My state of mind
before reading the
New York Times

My state of mind
after reading the
New York Times

In light of the entry below (“Mass Confusion,” Oct. 19, 2002), some further literary reflections seem called for. Since this is, after all, a personal journal, allow me some personal details…

Yesterday I picked up some packages, delivered earlier, that included four books I had ordered. I opened these packages this morning before writing the entry below; their contents may indicate my frame of mind when I later read this morning’s New York Times story that prompted my remarks. The books are, in the order I encountered them as I opened packages,

  • Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish (1982, reprinted in August 2002 as a Tom Doherty Associates Starscape paperback)
  • Truth, edited by Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, from the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (Oxford University Press, 1999, reprinted as a paperback, 2000)
  • The Savage and Beautiful Country, by Alan McGlashan (1967, reprinted in a revised and expanded edition in 1988 as a Daimon Verlag paperback)
  • Abstract Harmonic Analysis, by Lynn H. Loomis (Van Nostrand, 1953… a used copy)

Taken as a whole, this quartet of books supplies a rather powerful answer to the catechism question of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”…

The answer, which I pray will some day be delivered at heaven’s gate to all who have lied in the name of religion, is, in Jack Nicholson’s classic words,

You can’t handle the truth!  

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