Log24

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Glory Road (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 am

"In ancient Greece, 9 was the number of the Muses,
patron goddesses of the arts. They were the daughters
of Mnemosyne ('memory'), the source
of imagination, which in turn is the carrier of archetypal,
elementary ideas to artistic realization in the field
of space-time. The number 9, that is to say, relates
traditionally to the Great Goddess of Many Names
(Devi, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Artemis, Venus, etc.),
as matrix of the cosmic process, whether in the
macrocosm or in a microcosmic field of manifestation."

— Joseph Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space ,
      first published in 1986

From Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road  (1963):

Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent.  Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely.  Or ‘Aster.’  Or even ‘Estrellita.’ “

” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Stolen Glory

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 am

From University Diaries  yesterday

"A writer for The Atlantic  applauds Santorum's attack on universities
as secular, amoral indoctrination machines.

What can UD  say to this?…."

Below is a screenshot of the new home page for
Columbia University Department of Mathematics.

The impressive building in the photo is not  the math department.

(Click to enlarge.)

 

The building is actually Columbia's Butler Library.

"Along the front and sides of the library are inscribed the names of
Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Desmosthenes,
Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Dante,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe." Wikipedia

The inscribed names outline a defense of liberal education
perhaps more robust than the Feb. 26 effort of Andrew Delbanco,
which University Diaries  calls "tepid." (See the previous Log24 post.)

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Glory Road (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110401-NYTobits0330AM.jpg

Related material: Object Lesson.

See also For the Pope in Scotland.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Glory Road continued…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am

Thanks to Critical Mass for a July 24, 2009, discussion of the word "glory."

Related material: The glorious illustrations by Arnold Roth in the City Journal  of November 13, 2009.

Friday, August 4, 2023

The Roc’s Egg

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:46 am
 

James Joyce, Ulysses  —

"Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler."

 

Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road  —

“What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur – I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, 'The game’s afoot!' I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance – for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be – and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.”

Thursday, November 10, 2022

For Students of the Forked Tongue

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:42 am

Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube

The above 1975 book by Robert Greer Cohn, Modes of Art, is
Volume I of a planned three-volume work.

The passage below is from a review of Cohn's Vol. II, Ways of Art — 

Franklin, Ursula (1987) "Book Review: A Critical Work II.
Ways of Art: Literature. Music, Painting in France 
,"
Grand Valley Review : Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 19. Available at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvr/vol3/iss1/19 .

. . . .

Those not familiar with the author's epistemology should begin with Appendix A of Ways of Art , a schematic demonstration of his tetrapolar-polypolar-dialectic, especially as it concerns the development of the French novel within the European tradition. But this dialectic, which has antecedents in Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Joyce, underlies all art, because: "this dimensional pulsation, or tetrapolar (and polypolar) higher vibrancy is, in short, the stuff of life: life is vibrant in this more complex way as well as in the more bipolar sense" (7). Cohn shows that "far out enough" the male or linear and the female or circular, the male vertical and the female horizontal dimensions "tend to merge as in relativity theory" (19). Ways of Art  shows us the way through a historical becoming of art in its complex dialectic in which the metonymic (horizontal) axis constantly interrelates with the metaphoric (vertical). "Life is the mother, art the father" (vii); hence Cohn's quarrel with most contemporary Feminism, which is pronounced throughout the volume. Firmly grounded in its author's tetra-polypolar epistemology, this beautiful book becomes, however, at no point dryly abstract; it is the mature work of a true humanist who stands in clear and open opposition to the dehumanizing trend of "the quasi-scientific reductionism and abstract gimmickry of a great deal of current academic literary study, bellwethered by the structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists" (vi). Abundant footnotes constitute a substantial part of Ways of Art , on occasion developing insights almost into essays demonstrating crucial points along the general flow of the tradition from "Obscure Beginnings;' the opening chapter, to our "Contemporaries;' the last.

Cohn reminds us that "In the Beginning was the Word;' for the Judaeo-Christian tradition at least, which his study fervently embraces; thus, for example, in Appendix 0 on "The Dance of the Sexes;' he censures "those who live by slogans, camps, and peer-opinion, the countless little bastard cults which characterize an era which has massively veered away from our free and beautiful Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition" (332). Cohn traces man's way and that of his myths and rituals culminating in his art from that beginning along the lines of Freud, Neumann and Cassirer, and many others, always demonstrating the underlying polypolar dialectical rhythm. Thus in "From Barbarism to Young Culture;' we follow the Celts to Druidic ritual, Hebrew beginnings to the Psalms, Dionysian ritual to Greek tragedy, and thence to the beginnings of French dramatic literature originating in the Quem quaeritis sequence of the medieval Mass. Along the way arises artistic symbolism, for Cohn synonymous with "effective poetry;' to finally "ripen in France as never before" (99). Table I (134) graphs this development from the twelfth to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author traces the rise of the artistic vocation from its antecedents in the double function of bard and priest, with the figure of Ronsard at the crossroads of that dying institution and the nascent concept of personal glory. "The Enlightenment Vocation" is exemplified in Montaigne, who humanizes the French cultural elite and points the way to French classicism and, farther down the road, after the moral collapse with the outgoing reign of Louis XIV, toward the Age of Reason. Clearly the most significant figure of the French Enlightenment for all of Western civilization is Rousseau, and Cohn beautifully shows us why this is so. Subsequently, "the nineteenth-century stage of the writer's journey will lead, starting from the crossroads of Rousseau, primarily in these two directions: the imperialistic and visionary prose of Balzac, the equally ambitious poetry of Mallarme", brothers under the skin" (199). And these two paths will then be reconciled in Proust's monumental A la recherche du temps perdu .

. . . .

Saturday, April 9, 2022

Readings for Remembrance

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

The author of the above title is featured in
a New York Times  obituary today. Another 
book by the same author, On Glory Roads,
appears in some related readings here .

Monday, October 11, 2021

The Dropped Line

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:41 am

"Drop me a line" — Imagined request by Emma Stone.

Here Ec   refers not to the line it interrupts, but rather to
the area (equal to areas  Eplus E) of the large triangle.

The notation is in service of an elaborate joke by Schroeder
that need not be repeated here.

I prefer the E-C humor of Robert A. Heinlein —

Saturday, July 4, 2020

Plan 9 from Oz

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:13 am

Image from a film review of “Eureka” (a 1983 film by Nicolas Roeg).
Note the date of the review — January 09, 2015.

Also on January 09, 2015 —

Related cinematic philosophy —

Final scene from 'Paths of Glory'

Note the number, 701, on the colonel’s collar.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Roads

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:29 pm

See Glory Road in this journal.

See also Road to Hell.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Shifts and Pivots

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:13 pm

In a New Yorker  "Cultural Comment" column today,
Richard Brody describes a 2004 novel that he says

"… dramatizes the American character as
vast, manifold, and inchoate;
it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy
for good or for evil, and it shifts
under the sudden force of unforeseeable events.
The shifts and pivots of the American nation
at large are also those of each individual American.
The grand political stage and the intimate life
are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable
from the currents of history. The novel’s
mighty psychological weight rests upon
a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances
that depend on whims of chance." 

I prefer the shifts and pivots in earlier fictions; for example,
those of Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988.

Some backstory :  Glory Road  in this journal.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Slouching Towards Christmas (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box

Katherine Neville, 'The Magic Circle' excerpt

See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).

Update of 11:22 AM —

Today in History —

"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."

Related material:  The Red Book.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

The Esthetic Question

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 am

From James Joyce's  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man —

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience, back upon themselves: and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis baculushe was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

— When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? — he asked.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Schau der Gestalt

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:01 am

(Continued from Aug. 19, 2014)

“Christian contemplation is the opposite
of distanced consideration of an image:
as Paul says, it is the metamorphosis of
the beholder into the image he beholds
(2 Cor 3.18), the ‘realisation’ of what the
image expresses (Newman). This is
possible only by giving up one’s own
standards and being assimilated to the
dimensions of the image.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar,
The Glory of the Lord:
A Theological Aesthetics,

Vol. I: Seeing the Form
[ Schau der Gestalt ],
Ignatius Press, 1982, p. 485

A Bauhaus approach to Schau der Gestalt :

I prefer the I Ching ‘s approach to the laws of cubical space.

Friday, April 25, 2014

To El Farolito*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:01 am

See also “Six Cuban Families Celebrate Kids’ Law Degrees.”
Feliz Cumpleaños  to Al Pacino.

* “The Lighthouse,” in Spanish.  See Under the Volcano .

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A Riddle for Davos

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

Hexagonale Unwesen

Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938


IMAGE- Redefining the cube's symmetry planes: 13 planes, not 9.


See also the life of Diogenes Allen, a professor at Princeton
Theological Seminary, a life that reportedly ended on the date—
January 13, 2013— of the above Log24 post.

January 13 was also the dies natalis  of St. James Joyce.

Some related reflections —

"Praeterit figura huius mundi  " — I Corinthians 7:31 —

Conclusion of of "The Dead," by James Joyce—

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Boxing Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

See "Glory Road" + "Black Box."

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Lincoln Porn

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Tablet  magazine, November 9th, 2012,
on Spielberg's Lincoln :

"… the movie’s lone Rocky moment
of ecstatic self-congratulation
is reserved for the amendment’s climactic
passage with the victorious congressmen
spontaneously bursting into
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "

IMAGE- From Wikipedia, Venn diagram for NAND operator (cf. 'Mandorla')

"Mine eyes have seen the glory…"

IMAGE- Chris Pirillo, T-Mobile ad, 'Life Without Limits'

Both images above refer to this morning's post
 Professor Lavery's Sunday School.

For other porn from Tablet  magazine, see
Minimalist Whirl.

For other porn from Lincoln's seat of government, see
Physical Poetry and All In .

For further blasphemy, see The Apotheosis of Washington:

IMAGE- Blasphemous interior of the U.S. Capitol Dome

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Malfunctioning TARDIS

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:01 am

(Continued from previous TARDIS posts)

Summary: A review of some  posts from last August is suggested by the death,
reportedly during the dark hours early on October 30, of artist Lebbeus Woods.

An (initially unauthorized) appearance of his work in the 1995 film
Twelve Monkeys 

 … suggests a review of three posts from last August.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Defining Form

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:01 AM 

Continued from July 29 in memory of filmmaker Chris Marker,
who reportedly* died on that date at 91 at his home in Paris.

See Slides and Chantingand Where Madness Lies.

See also Sherrill Grace on Malcolm Lowry.

Washington PostOther sources say Marker died on July 30.

 These notably occur in Marker's masterpiece
     La Jetée  (review with spoilers).

 

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Triple Feature

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 11:11 PM

IMAGE- Triple Feature: 'Twelve Monkeys,' Reagan National Airport on July 31, 2012, and 'Die Hard 2'

For related material, see this morning's post Defining Form.

 

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Doctor Who

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:00 PM

On Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road

"Glory Road  (1963) included the foldbox , a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside. It is unclear if Glory Road  was influenced by the debut of the science fiction television series Doctor Who  on the BBC that same year. In Doctor Who , the main character pilots a time machine called a TARDIS, which is built with technology which makes it 'dimensionally transcendental,' that is, bigger inside than out."

— Todd, Tesseract article at exampleproblems.com

From the same exampleproblems.com article—

"The connection pattern of the tesseract's vertices is the same as that of a 4×4 square array drawn on a torus; each cell (representing a vertex of the tesseract) is adjacent to exactly four other cells. See geometry of the 4×4 square."

For further details, see today's new page on vertex adjacency at finitegeometry.org.

 

"It was a dark and stormy night."— A Wrinkle in Time

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Doctor Who

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:00 pm

On Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road

"Glory Road  (1963) included the foldbox , a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside. It is unclear if Glory Road  was influenced by the debut of the science fiction television series Doctor Who  on the BBC that same year. In Doctor Who , the main character pilots a time machine called a TARDIS, which is built with technology which makes it 'dimensionally transcendental,' that is, bigger inside than out."

— Todd, Tesseract article at exampleproblems.com

From the same exampleproblems.com article—

"The connection pattern of the tesseract's vertices is the same as that of a 4×4 square array drawn on a torus; each cell (representing a vertex of the tesseract) is adjacent to exactly four other cells. See geometry of the 4×4 square."

For further details, see today's new page on vertex adjacency at finitegeometry.org.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

The Purloined Diamond

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

(Continued)

The diamond from the Chi-rho page
of the Book of Kells —

The diamond at the center of Euclid's
Proposition I, according to James Joyce
(i.e., the Diamond in the Mandorla) —

Geometry lesson: the vesica piscis in Finnegans Wake

The Diamond in the Football

Football-mandorla

“He pointed at the football
  on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
         – Glory Road
   

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Page

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:06 pm

A followup to this morning's post Stolen Glory— 

Columbia's Butler Library "plays a role in
Paul Auster's 2009 novel Invisible ,
where the novel's main protagonist, Adam Walker,
takes a job as a 'page' in the library's stacks." —Wikipedia

Part I (from Feb. 24)—

IMAGE- 'Wild nights are my glory'- Peter Woit, Mrs. Whatsit, and the tesseract

Part II— (Click to enlarge)

IMAGE- Page quoting Mrs. Whatsit: 'There IS such a thing as a tesseract.'

For the page's source, see Butler Library.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

For All Souls Day

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 am

"It's still the same old story…"

See Glory in this journal.

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I  use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can  make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master— that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest— adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs— however, can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I  say!'

'Would you tell me please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'

'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'

'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'

See also Interpenetration in this journal… and in Northrop Frye.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Synergy

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:48 am

"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." —Nabokov

Suggested by yesterday's evening NY lottery

Post 4248: The Hunt for Exemplary October, and
Post   942: Links for St. Benedict

Related material—

three-point landing n

1. (Engineering / Aeronautics) an aircraft landing
in which the two main wheels and the nose or tail wheel
all touch the ground simultaneously

— Collins English Dictionary

See also…

     Tiffany Case and…

 The Diamond
in the Mandorla

Football-mandorla with link to 'Heaven Can<br />
Wait'

“He pointed at the football
  on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
     – Glory Road
    

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Product Placement

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:10 pm

And the Irving Thalberg Award goes to…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-DeNiro-LastTycoon.jpg

Robert De Niro as Irving Thalberg in "The Last Tycoon"

Text and Context—

Text:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-JerkyTreats.jpg

Jerky Treats  for dogs

Context:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-MadDogAndGlory.jpg

"Mad Dog and Glory" (March 5, 1993)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-NewDayNina-300w.jpg

"Point of No Return" (March 19, 1993) —
Note Jerky Treats  in background.

A possible acceptance speech for the Thalberg Award—

"Let me put you in this unit." — John Calley, via Buck Henry

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Happy Bastille Day…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

To the leftist philosophers of Villanova

From "Make a Différance"
(Women's History Month, 2005)—

Frida Saal's 

Lacan The image 
“http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Diamond.gif” cannot be displayed,
 because it contains errors. Derrida:

"Our proposal includes the lozenge (diamond) in between the names, because in the relationship / non-relationship that is established among them, a tension is created that implies simultaneously a union and a disjunction, in the perspective of a theoretical encounter that is at the same time necessary and impossible. That is the meaning of the lozenge that joins and separates the two proper names….  What prevails between both of them is the différance, the Derridean signifier that will become one of the main issues in this presentation."

Football-mandorla (vesica piscis) with link to 'Heaven Can 
Wait'

“He pointed at the football
  on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
Glory Road
    

Quodlibet* 

Compare and contrast
the diamond in the football
with the jewel in the lotus.

* "A scholastic argumentation upon a subject chosen at will, but almost always theological. These are generally the most elaborate and subtle of the works of the scholastic doctors." —Century Dictionary

Friday, June 4, 2010

A Better Story

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 am

Continued from May 8
(Feast of Saint Robert Heinlein)

“Wells and trees were dedicated to saints.  But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden.  Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.”

— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941

Why "Saint" Robert? See his accurate depiction of evil– the Eater of Souls in Glory Road.

For more on Williams's "other capacities," see Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy."

A related story– Fritz Leiber's "The Mind Spider." An excerpt:

The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.

"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,"
Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the
trivia of the past twenty-four hours.

The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather
Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain
waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was
too much danger of complete loss of individual personality

—once Grandfather Horn had "become" his infant daughter
as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged
mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own
subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall be-
– hind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar
to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently
always enclosed.

In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and
emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness
was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as
thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud
dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference
was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family
gathering in one actual room around one actual table.
Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness
that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for
comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that
pervades the cosmos.

Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of
course, so I couldn't get your thoughts—just the blurs of
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider
Crawling down my—Grayl! Don't feel so wildly! What
Is it?”

Then… just as Grayl started to think her answer…
something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite
cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the
Horns
.

Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had
ttie curling too-keen edge of hysteria. "There are six of
us now! There should only be five, but there are six.
Count! Count, I tell you! Six!"

To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing
across the web of their thoughts….

See also this journal on May 30– "720 in the Book"– and on May 31– "Memorial for Galois."

("Obnoxious nerds"— a phrase Martin Gardner recently applied to Galois— will note that 720 (= 6!) is one possible result of obeying Leiber's command "Count! Count, I tell you! Six!")

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Song of the Minotaur

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

"I was visited by a minotaur."
— Harvard student, Fall 2009.

(For the visit, see yesterday's posts
Glory Road continuedAnd continued….)

Song of the Minotaur– Part I, Part II, Part III

Friday, December 4, 2009

And continued…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Glory Road postgraduate curriculum–

"Learning has always been a major part of Catholic tradition."

Related material:

The Labyrinth of Solitude
entry in this journal,
The Harvard Crimson on the
Harvard FML Video Contest,
and the winning video

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091204-HUTV.jpg

Another view of Harvard–

St. Paul's RC Church and the Harvard Lampoon building, photo from MSPdude at Flickr

Photo from MSPdude at Flickr

"Let Noon Be Fair."
— Novel title, Willard Motley.

See also Soul at Harvard.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Sunday August 16, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Return to Paradise

(Title of a New Yorker
essay dated June 2, 2008)

Kenneth Bacon, an advocate for refugees, died yesterday at 64 on the Feast of the Assumption.

In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume."

From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption:

"On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."

For other such reconciliations, see

  • The New Yorker on Milton meeting Galileo: "Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
  • This journal on Milton's world system: the four qualities "hot, cold, moist, and dry" and the four elements "Sea, Shore, Air, and Fire."

    But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
    Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
    Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
    His dark materials to create more Worlds….

  • This journal's "For Galois on Bastille Day" reconciles, if only in a literary way, physical and non-physical worlds. The work of Evariste Galois allows us to depict an analogue of Milton's (and Philip Pullman's) physical world of dark materials within the purely mathematical world of finite groups. (For a less literary connection between physical and mathematical worlds, see this journal on Bastille Eve.)

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Sunday July 5, 2009

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

Sermon

Football-mandorla with link to 'Heaven Can Wait'

7/01 

“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.'”
Glory Road   

See also
Hieron Grammaton
and
Epiphany 2007.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Saturday June 27, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

From the weblog of David Lavery, literature, film, and television scholar/critic, now teaching at Middle Tennessee State University–

Lavery’s quote of the day (6/27/09)-

“Art is based on second love, not first love. In it we make a return to something which we had willfully alienated. The child is occupied mostly with things, but it is because he is still unfurnished with systematic ideas, not because he is a ripe citizen by nature and comes already trailing clouds of glory. Images are clouds of glory for the man who has discovered that ideas are a sort of darkness.”

–John Crowe Ransom

Posted by Lavery on Friday, June 26, 2009, at 9:00 PM

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Sunday March 22, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:30 am
The Craft

“Pope tells clergy in Angola
to work against
 belief in witchcraft”

— Headline in tonight’s
online New York Times

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”


— C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory

Related material:

Fantasy and Fugue
and the same words
as rendered by
Bach and Schweitzer

See also
Yesterday’s entries
and
Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil
.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wednesday January 14, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm
A Fight for
Love and Glory

The 8-point star
of Venus:

Eight-point star of Venus

This star is suggested by
the Spanish name “Lucero”
and by the following
passage from Heinlein’s
classic novel Glory Road:

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.'”

    “‘Aster,'” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Ricardo Montalban, d. Jan. 14, 2009-- NY Times
 
Que descanse en paz.

Little Mermaid bed

Later the same evening…
an update in memory
of Patrick McGoohan:

NYT obituaries 1/14/09 for both Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan

“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling….
 
…of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore….”
 
— Robert Graves,
   “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Wednesday November 19, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:01 pm

"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."

Four Quartets

(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)

"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric

The Great GatsbyChapter 6:

"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."

There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily  today:

"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost  has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»

The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For related material on Paradise Lost  and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Tuesday May 27, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 pm
For Sydney Pollack
(See last night’s entry.)

“Now, gentlemen,
I give you
our latest acquisition
from the enemy.”

Paths of Glory   

Final scene from 'Paths of Glory'

Note the number, 701,
on the colonel’s collar.

Adapted from Log24,
February 19-22, 2008:

“‘This is the last call for Jaunt-701,’
 the pleasant female voice echoed
 through the Blue Concourse
of 
New York’s
     Port Authority Terminal….

Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo
See 2/22/08,
 4/19/08,
and 5/22/08.

….’What happened?’
one of the scientists shouted….

‘It’s eternity in there,’ he said,
and dropped dead….”


— Stephen King, “The Jaunt

Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Monday February 25, 2008

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

Robert A. Heinlein’s 
Glory Road (1963):

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

“Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even  ‘Estrellita.’ ”

” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

“I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?”

I thought about it….

The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.”

” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,”and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name. Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice.

“No, no! Not ‘Oscar’– ‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’ For this.”

“Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster. Scar and Star.”


Related material:

In memory of
Albert Axelrod
,

who died on
February 24, 2004
(Mardi Gras) —

Road to Nowhere

and today’s comics:

Hagar the Horrible and fencer: 'You have to admire his guts.'

See also yesterday’s
entry for Oscar night

(the fourth anniversary
of Axelrod’s death and of
The Crimson Passion).

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Thursday February 21, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am
Class
Galore

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane reviewing the new film "Jumper"–

"I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class."

The "Jumper" theme, teleportation, has been better developed by three other writers– Bester, Zelazny, and King–

"As a long-time fan of both Alfie Bester and Roger Zelazny, I was delighted to find this posthumous collaboration. Psychoshop is, I think, true to both authors' bodies of work. After all, Bester's influence on Zelazny is evident in a a number of works, most notably Eye of Cat with its dazzling experimental typography so reminiscent of what Bester had done in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination."

— Amazon.com customer review

"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal."

— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
 

 
From another
"Jaunt-701"–
Log24, Feb. 7:
 

The Football
Mandorla

New York Lottery, 2008:

NY Lottery Feb. 6, 2008: Mid-day 064, Evening 701

The Mandorla (vesica piscis) as Football

7/01 

"He pointed at the football
  on his desk. 'There it is.'"
Glory Road   

"The
Wu  Li
Masters know
that physicists are
doing  more  than
'discovering  the endless
 diversity of nature.' They
 are  dancing with Kali,
 the Divine Mother of
 Hindu  mythology."
 — Gary Zukav,
 Harvard
 '64


"What happened?"
  one of the scientists shouted….

"It's eternity in there,"
 he said, and dropped dead….

— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
 

As
for  Ernst
Gombrich, see
his  link in  the
Log24 entries
of June 15,
 2007.

Related material:
the previous entry.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Thursday February 7, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
The Football
Mandorla

New York Lottery, 2008:

NY Lottery Feb. 6, 2008: Mid-day 064, Evening 701

The Mandorla as Football

7/01 

"He pointed at the football
  on his desk. 'There it is.'"
Glory Road   

 

  "The Rock" — 

Goodspeed:
"I'll do my best."

Mason:

"Your best. Losers
always whine about
their best. Winners
go home and …."

 

"The
Wu  Li
Masters know
that physicists are
doing  more  than
'discovering  the endless
 diversity of nature.' They
 are  dancing with Kali,
 the Divine Mother of
 Hindu  mythology."
 — Gary Zukav,
 Harvard
 '64
 

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Wednesday December 26, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
A Wonderful Life

Part I:
 
Language Games

 
on December 19:

 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071219-StanLilith.jpg

See also the noir entry on
"Nightmare Alley" for
Winter Solstice 2002,
as well as a solstice-related
commentary on I Ching
Hexagram 41, Decrease.

Part II:

Language Game
on Christmas Day

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 25, 2007:

PA Lottery Christmas Day: Mid-day 041 and 2911, Evening 173 and 0666
 

Part III:
 
A Wonderful Life

The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas at mid-day paired the number of the I Ching Hexagram 41, "Decrease," with the number 2911, which may be interpreted as a reference to I Chronicles 29:11
 
"Thine, O LORD is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all."

 

This verse is sometimes cited as influencing the Protestant conclusion of the Lord's Prayer:

"Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever" (Mt 6.13b; compare 1 Chr 29.11-13)….

This traditional epilogue to the Lord's prayer protects the petition for the coming of the kingdom from being understood as an exorcism, which we derive from the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, which belonged at the time to the synagogical liturgy.

World Alliance of Reformed Churches

The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas evening paired 173 with the beastly number 0666.  The latter number suggests that perhaps being "understood as an exorcism" might not, in this case, be such a bad thing. What, therefore, might "173" have to do with exorcism?  A search in the context of the phrase "language games" yields a reference to Wittgenstein's Zettel, section 173:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071226-Zettel.jpg

From Charles L. Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard:

Language-games give general guidelines of the application of language. Wittgenstein suggests that there are innumerably many language-games: innumerably many kinds of use of the components of language.24 The grammar of the language-game influences the possible relations of words, and things, within that game. But the players may modify the rules gradually. Some utterances within a given language-game are applications; others are 'grammatical remarks' or definitions of what is or should be possible. (Hence Wittgenstein's remark, 'Theology as grammar'25 – the grammar of religion.)

The idea of the 'form of life' is a reminder about even more basic phenomena. It is clearly bound up with the idea of language. (Language and 'form of life' are explicitly connected in four of the five passages from the Investigations in which the term 'form of life' appears.) Just as grammar is subject to change through language-uses, so 'form of life' is subject to change through changes in language. (The Copernican revolution is a paradigm case of this.) Nevertheless, 'form of life' expresses a deeper level of 'agreement.' It is the level of 'what has to be accepted, the given.'26 This is an agreement prior to agreement in opinions and decisions. Not everything can be doubted or judged at once.

This suggests that 'form of life' does not denote static phenomena of fixed scope. Rather, it serves to remind us of the general need for context in our activity of meaning. But the context of our meaning is a constantly changing mosaic involving both broad strokes and fine-grained distinctions.

The more commonly understood point of the 'Private Language Argument' – concerning the root of meaning in something public – comes into play here. But it is important to show just what public phenomenon Wittgenstein has in mind. He remarks: 'Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.'27

24
Investigations, sec. 23.
25
Investigations, sec. 373; compare Zettel, sec. 717.
26
Investigations, p. 226e.
27
Zettel, sec. 173. The thought is expressed many times in similar words.

And from an earlier chapter of Creegan:

The 'possibility of religion' manifested itself in considerable reading of religious works, and this in a person who chose his reading matter very carefully. Drury's recollections include conversations about Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Johnson's Prayers, Karl Barth, and, many times, the New Testament, which Wittgenstein had clearly read often and thought about.25 Wittgenstein had also thought about what it would mean to be a Christian. Some time during the 1930s, he remarked to Drury: 'There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.'26 In this context it is certainly worth noting that he had for a time said the Lord's Prayer each day.27

Wittgenstein's last words were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life!'28

25
Drury (1981) 'Conversations with Wittgenstein,' in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, pp. 112ff.
26
Drury, 'Conversations,' p. 130.
27
Drury, 'Some notes,' p. 109.
28
Reported by Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the doctor in whose house Wittgenstein was staying. Malcolm, Memoir, p. 81.

Part IV:  

L'Envoi

For more on the Christmas evening
number of the beast, see Dec. 3:
  "Santa's Polar Opposite?" —

"Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?
"

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Sunday July 1, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Object Lesson
continued…

"Three times the concentred
     self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
     having possessed
The object, grips it
     in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
     once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
     once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
     this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
     fully found."

— "Credences of Summer," VII,
    by Wallace Stevens, from
    Transport to Summer (1947)

 

Mathematics of the football mandorla (vesica piscis)

For a religious
interpretation
of 265, see
Sept. 30, 2004.

For a religious
interpretation
of 153, see
Fish Story.
 
A quotation from
the Eater of Souls:

"That's how it is, Easy," my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. "Yardage is all very well but you don't make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm." He pointed at the football on his desk. "There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you– it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet."

Glory Road,
by Robert A. Heinlein
 

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Wednesday June 27, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 pm
 
Juneteenth Revisited:
A Long and Strange Day

 
Time and chance
yesterday:

Pennsylvania Lottery
  June 26, 2007–
Mid-day 040
Evening 810

040:

A discussion of the work of Ralph Ellison:

"… why do you think he did not finish these novels? He wrote on them for many, many years– 40 years, I think."

"Yes, he worked for 40 years."

See Ellison's novel Juneteenth (New York Times review, 1999)

810:

August 10 (8/10), 2004

"But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood…."

Donald Justice, "Sadness"

John Baez, Diary, entry of June 22, 2007:

"On Tuesday the 19th….

I hiked down the completely dark but perfectly familiar gravel road with my suitcase in hand, listening to the forest creatures. But then, I couldn't find my parents' driveway! It was embarrassing: I could see their house perfectly well, off in the distance, but it was so darn dark I couldn't spot the driveway. It felt like a dream: after a long flight with many delays, one winds up walking to ones parents house, lost in a spooky forest….

… I sort of enjoy this kind of thing, as long as there's no real danger. It's also sort of scary. The well-lit grid of civilization slowly falls away, and you're out there alone in the night…

Anyway: I considered hiking straight through the woods to my parents' house, but I decided things were already interesting enough, so instead I called my mom and ask her to drive down the driveway a bit, just so I could see where it was. And so she did, and then it was obvious.

So, I got home shortly before midnight. A long and strange day. My dad was already in bed, but I said hi to him anyway."

Related material:

Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Sunday May 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm
Robert A. Heinlein,
Glory Road:

“Rufo’s baggage turned out
to be a little black box
about the size and shape
of a portable typewriter.
He opened it.
And opened it again.
   And kept on opening it….”
 
60 Minutes logo

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte’s dream is to put a laptop computer into the hands of every child as an educational aid. Lesley Stahl reports on his progress in Cambodia and Brazil. Catherine Olian is the producer.

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

Friday, April 27, 2007

Friday April 27, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm
It’s still the
same old story…

From today’s online
New York Times:

Jack Valenti, Confidant of
President and Stars, Dies

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070427-Valenti2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


Photo by Carol T. Powers
for The New York Times

Also in today’s online Times:

“Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland….

Mr. Rostropovich… was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian)….”

Related material:

I.Established on 8 November 1943, the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy – Орден Славы) was an Order (decoration) of the Soviet Union…. The Order of Glory… was modelled closely upon the Tsarist Cross of St. George….” —Wikipedia

II. Also on the 8th of November, in 2006 and 2002: Grave Matters and Religious Symbolism at Princeton.

III. “Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where on Wednesday his friend, Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was laid to rest.” —New York Times

IV. “A graveyard smash.” –Bobby (Boris) Pickett, who died Wednesday.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070427-Valentine.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“There is never any
ending to Paris….”
— Ernest Hemingway,  
A Moveable Feast 

 

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Saturday September 16, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am

Pandora's Box

Part I:
The Pandora Cross

"There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."

— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060916-Art.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(See Log24, Sept. 13)

Part II:
The Opening

Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:

Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections

For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
 yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060916-Benedict16.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Click to enlarge the screenshot.

Part III:
Hope

The New Yorker (issue of June 5, 2006) on the late Oriana Fallaci:

"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."

For further details, see yesterday's Log24.


Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060916-MC7.GIF” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— From The Magic Circle,
 a spiritual narrative
 by Katherine Neville

For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.

Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

"… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."

A symbol of Apollo:

IMAGE- The ninefold square

and a related
Christian symbol,

The image �http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051202-Cross.gif� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).

Moral of the Pandora Cross:

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…

quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
 

Friday, July 14, 2006

Friday July 14, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am
Assigned Names
and Numbers

“What do you hear when you listen?”
“Like the wind in a thousand wires.”

— “Fee-5,” a character in  
Alfred Bester’s 1975
The Computer Connection

From Robert A. Heinlein’s
1963 Glory Road:

“I have many names.
What would you like
to call me?”

From the Web:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060714-Esther.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(Former Chairman of the Board
of the
Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers)

Happy birthday, Star.

Related material:
Log24, July 14-15, 2004

Monday, May 8, 2006

Monday May 8, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:15 pm
Today is the feast of
Saint Robert Heinlein,
who died on this date
in 1988.

Why “saint”?  See his
accurate depiction of evil, the
Eater of Souls” in Glory Road.

Related material:
Steven Cullinane is a Crank
and “Certified Crank.”

Monday, March 27, 2006

Monday March 27, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:17 am

A Living Church

A skeptic’s remark:

“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”

— Xanga blogger “sejanus”

A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”

For Reba McEntire:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060327-Reba.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sunday’s lottery in the
State of Grace
(Kelly, of Philadelphia):

Mid-day: 024
Evening: 672

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/HoldingWonder.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A meditation on  
Sunday’s numbers —

From Log24, Jan. 8, 2005:

24

The Star
of Venus

“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”

Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra

From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:

An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

    ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Related material:

672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).

672 illustrated:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060327-BedeStar.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus

The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.

Postscript of 6 PM

A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:

The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).

A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:

Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition
, 1960,
on page 672.

In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
  maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”

Hee. Haw.
 

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Wednesday March 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:24 pm

Women's History Month continues:

Raiders of the Lost…
(cont. from Feb. 17)
 
For Harrison Ford
and Meg Ryan,
a quotation from
Sir Walter Raleigh,
via Susanna Moore
and Elizabeth Tallent:
 
"Give me my scallop shell of quiet"
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060301-Moore.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Author Susanna Moore,
photo by Paresh Gandhi

Related material:

An article in The Telegraph
on the late Sybille Bedford
(see also the previous entry), and

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/OnGloryRoads3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

On Glory Roads:
A Pilgrim's Book
About Pilgrimage
,
by Eleanor Munro

Monday, February 13, 2006

Monday February 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm
The Lincoln Brigade

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060213-Lincoln1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

The End of Endings
(excerpt)
by Father Richard John Neuhaus,
First Things
115 (Aug.-Sept. 2001), 47-56:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

Friday, November 18, 2005

Friday November 18, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 am
It’s still the same old story,
a fight for love and…

Glory

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside.”

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

    “Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.
    And opened it again.
    And kept on opening it– And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed….
    … Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory….  Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.”

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle
, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

“… there is much glory in this wonderfully written apocalypse.  Tirian, looking into the stable through the hole in the door, says, ‘The stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.’ Digory answers, ‘Its inside is bigger than its outside.’  It is the perceptive Lucy who voices the hope that is in us, ‘In our world, too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'”


Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”

 

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Sunday November 13, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:40 am
Structure

“Sunrise–
Hast thou a Flag for me?”
— Emily Dickinson

From a
Beethoven’s Birthday entry:

  

Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

Related material:

Blue
(below),

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051113-Blue.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Bee Season
(below),

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051113-Scope1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Halloween Meditations,
Aquarius Jazz,
We Are the Key,
and
Jazz on St. Lucia’s Day.

“Y’know, I never imagined
the competition version involved
so many tricky permutations.”

— David Brin, Glory Season

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Saturday November 12, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm
Nine is a Vine

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/quat-1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Representation
of a quaternion


Related material:

“Oh, I wasn’t about to hole up
in a monastery.  I still wanted–
  What did I want?
      I wanted a Roc’s egg….”

Robert A. Heinlein
  Glory Road

   And So To Bed.

(Log24, St. Peter’s Day, 2004)

Saturday November 12, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

State of Grace
On this date in 1929,
Grace Kelly was born.

Enough —
    the first Abode
On the familiar Road
Galloped in Dreams —

— Emily Dickinson

 

“Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato’s beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam’s razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine, 1948, “On What There Is,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, 1980

“Item: Friar Guillaume’s razor
ne’er shaved the barber,
it is much too dull.”

— Robert A. Heinlein
  Glory Road

Related material:
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star

Saturday November 12, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm
Glory Season

"…his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly… on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection…."

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Chapter VI

"… when Saul does reach for a slim leather-bound volume Eliza cannot help but feel that something momentous is about to happen.  There is care in the way he carries the book on the short journey from its shelf, as if it were constructed not of leather and parchment but of flesh and blood….
    "Otzar Eden HaGanuz," Saul says.  "The Hidden Eden.  In this book, Abulafia describes the process of permutation…. Once you have mastered it, you will have mastered words, and once you have mastered words, you will be ready to receive shefa."

Bee Season: A Novel

"In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."

The Gameplayers of Zan, a novel featuring games based on cellular automata

"Regarding cellular automata, I'm trying to think in what SF books I've seen them mentioned. Off the top of my head, only three come to mind:

The Gameplayers of Zan M.A. Foster
Permutation City Greg Egan
Glory Season David Brin"

— Jonathan L. Cunningham, Usenet

    "If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
    … Paul Durham is convinced by the 'logic of the dust' theory mentioned above, and plans to run, just for a few minutes, a complex cellular automaton (Permutation City) started in a 'Garden of Eden' configuration — one which isn't reachable from any other, and which therefore must have been the starting point of a simulation….  I didn't understand the need for this elaborate set-up, but I guess it makes for a better story than 'well, all possible worlds exist, and I'm going to tell you about one of them.'"

— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City

"Y'know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations."

— David Brin, Glory Season, 1994 Spectra paperback, p. 408
 

Related material:
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051112-EdenFigs.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Figure 2

 

 

"… matter is consciousness expressed in the intermixing of force and form, but so heavily structured and constrained by form that its behaviour becomes describable using the regular and simple laws of  physics. This is shown in Figure 2.
    The glyph in Figure 2 is the basis for a kabbalistic diagram called the Etz Chaiim, or Tree of Life. The first principle of being or consciousness is called Keter, which means Crown. The raw energy of consciousness is called Chokhmah or Wisdom, and the capacity to give form to the energy of consciousness is called Binah, which is sometimes translated as Understanding, and sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the interaction of force and form, the physical world, is called Malkhut or Kingdom.  This is shown… in Figure 3."

Figure 3

"This quaternary is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-Knowable, in the sense that it the most abstract representation of God we are capable of comprehending….
    God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two female: Keter and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and Malkhut are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah is Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is Imma, which means Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkhut is the daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not be wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. And what of God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in Kabbalah? There is…."

A Depth of Beginning: Notes on Kabbalah by Colin Low (pdf)

See also
Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures,
Mathematics and Narrative,
Deep Game,
and the previous entry.

Monday, June 13, 2005

Monday June 13, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Cliffs of Moher

My father’s father,
    his father’s father, his —
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought,
    before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher
    rising out of the mist….

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”

A Portrait of the Artist
 as a Young Man
,
James Joyce, Chapter 5:

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

–When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

–From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

–These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

See also Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a “Delian diver” in Chitwood’s Death by Philosophy.

From
Death by Philosophy:

“Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following  fragment.

31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but  indicates. (fr. 93)

Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of the Delian or Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the workings of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it.”

Related material:
A Mass for Lucero.

That web page concludes with a reference to esthetics and a Delian palm, and was written three years ago on this date.

Today is also the date of death for Martin Buber, philosophical Jew.

Here is a Delphic saying in memory of Buber:

“It is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears fruit.”

—  Steven Erlanger,
    New York Times story,
    dateline Jerusalem, June 11

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Tuesday August 10, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:24 am

The Day Justice Died

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood….

Donald Justice, “Sadness”

In memory of Justice,
Dante excerpts:

Canto I

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
 mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
 che la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era é cosa dura
 esta selva e selvaggia e aspra e forte
 che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Midway in the journey of our life
 I found myself in a dark wood,
 for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell what that
 wood was, wild, rugged, harsh;
 the very thought of it renews the fear!

Canto III

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
 per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
 per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
 fecemi la divina podestate,
 la somma sapïenza e ‘l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
 se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
 Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.

Through me you enter the woeful city,
 through me you enter eternal grief,
 through me you enter among the lost.
Justice moved my high maker;
 the divine power made me,
 the supreme wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing was created
 if not eternal, and eternal I endure.
 Abandon every hope, you who enter.

— Translation by Charles S. Singleton,
selection by Paul J. Viscuso

Justice moved my high maker…

From the day Justice died,
Friday, August 6, 2004,
The Feast of the Metamorphosis:

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Wednesday July 14, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:25 pm
Bright Star

From Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel, Glory Road:

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

    ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Today’s birthday:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040714-BrightStar.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Esther Dyson

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Thursday June 17, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 pm

Ishtar Wannabe

Reuters, Los Angeles,
June 17, 2004 09:09 PM ET

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone has adopted the Hebrew name Esther.

I personally feel that a more deserving candidate for such a flattering name change would be Piper Laurie (nee Rosetta Jacobs).

See an entry of  Dec. 30, 2002, on Miss Laurie:

From Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road:

Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent.  Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely.  Or ‘Aster.’  Or even ‘Estrellita.’ “

” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

Friday, April 9, 2004

Friday April 9, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

Triple Crown, Part II

(See previous entry.)

The winner is Mike Sullivan, far and away.

An essay, by Sullivan's son,
from Harper's magazine, Oct. 2002 —

Horseman, Pass By:
Glory, Grief, and the Race for
the Triple Crown

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Far back, far back in our dark soul
the horse prances.

— D. H. Lawrence  

"As opposed to the typical sportswriter, who has a passion for the subject and can put together a sentence, my father's ambition had been to Write (poetry, no less), and sports were what he knew, so he sort of stumbled onto making his living that way….

Two years ago, in May, I sat with him in his hospital room at Riverside Methodist, in Columbus….

I asked him to tell me what he remembered from all those years of writing about sports, for he had seen some things in his time…. This is what he told me:

I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73, the year before you were born — I don't guess you were even conceived yet. That was … just beauty, you know?  He started in last place, which he tended to do. I was covering the second-place horse, which wound up being Sham. It looked like Sham's race going into the last turn, I think. The thing you have to understand is that Sham was fast, a beautiful horse. He would have had the Triple Crown in another year. And it just didn't seem like there could be anything faster than that. Everybody was watching him. It was over, more or less. And all of a sudden there was this … like, just a disruption in the corner of your eye, in your peripheral vision. And then before you could make out what it was, here Secretariat came. And then Secretariat had passed him. No one had ever seen anything run like that–a lot of the old guys said the same thing. It was like he was some other animal out there …

I wrote that down when I got back to my father's apartment, where my younger sister and I were staying the night. He lived two more months, but that was the last time I saw him alive."

Thanks to the New York Times for today's review of John Jeremiah Sullivan's new book, which includes the above.

See, too,

Words Are Events.

Monday, December 8, 2003

Monday December 8, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:11 am

Dead Poets Society

On Friday, December 5, 2003, I picked up a copy of An Introduction to Poetry, by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 8th ed., at a used book sale for 50 cents.

The previous entry concerns a poem by Buson I found in that book, and contains a link on Kennedy’s name to a work suitable for this holiday season.

As additional thanks for the poem, here are links to a two-part interview with Gioia:

Paradigms Lost: Part One, and

Paradigms Lost: Part Two.

“A poem need not shout to be heard.”
— Dana Gioia

Wednesday, July 2, 2003

Wednesday July 2, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Three Days Late
and a Dollar Short

THE BOOK AGAINST GOD
By James Wood.
257 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. 

This is a book that attempts to recreate the myth of Saint Peter.

See the New York Times review of this book from today, July 2, 2003, three days late.  The Feast of St. Peter was on June 29.

The price, $24, also falls short of the theological glory reflected in the number 25, the common denominator of Christmas (12/25) and AntiChristmas (6/25), as well as the number of the heart of the Catholic church, the Bingo card

For all these issues, see my entries and links in memory of St. Peter, from June 29

The real “book against God,” a novel by Robert Stone, is cited there.  The legend of St. Peter is best described by Stone, not Wood.

Sunday, June 8, 2003

Sunday June 8, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:04 am

Of Time and the River

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Tuesday May 13, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:01 am

Operation Playmate:

11:01 AM

On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.

From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
    to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
    yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
    of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
   “Hurrahing in Harvest”

Mary Brian

Joe Foss

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

The Dixie Chicks

From my March 31, 2003, entry:

“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….

Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:

Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction. 

Etymology: Latin Terpsichor,
from Greek Terpsikhor,
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.

See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.

All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise.  To paraphrase an Eliot line, 

“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Wednesday January 29, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:09 pm

Inaugural Address
for Cullinane College

(undelivered):

The Prisoner

Cullinane College was scheduled to open its doors officially on January 29, 2003.  The following might have been an appropriate inaugural address.

From The Prisoner: Comments
 on the Final Episode, “Fall Out”
:

“When the President asks for a vote, he says: ‘All in favor.’ But he never asks for those opposed. (Though it appears that none will be opposed — and though he says its a democratic assembly, it is hardly that. The President even says that the society is in a ‘democratic crisis,’ though without democracy present, it’s just a sham.)

#48/Young Man sings ‘Dry Bones,’, which is his rebellion (notice its chaotic effect on ‘society’). But then the song gets taken over, ‘polished,’ and sung by a voice-over (presumably set up by #1). Does this mean that society is stealing the thunder (i.e. the creative energy) of youth, and cheapening it, or does it mean that youth is just rebelling in the same way that their fathers did (with equal ineffectiveness)? Perhaps it is simply a comment on the ease with which society can deal with the real rebellion of the 1960’s, which purported to be led by musicians; one that even the Beatles said was impossible in ‘Revolution.'”

President: Guilty! Read the Charge!

#48 is guilty, of something, and then the society pins something on him.”

The Other Side of the Coin

The Weinman Dime

From the CoinCentric website:

In 1916, sculptor Adolph A. Weinman produced a new design for the dime called the Liberty Head type. The motif features Miss Liberty facing left, wearing a Phrygian cap with wings, symbolizing “liberty of thought”. The word “LIBERTY” encircles her head, with “IN GOD WE TRUST” and the date below her head.

The reverse depicts Roman fasces, a bundle of rods with the center rod being an ax, against a branch in the background. It is a symbol of state authority, which offers a choice: “by the rod or by the ax”. The condemned was either beaten to death with the rods or allowed the mercy of the ax. The words “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “ONE DIME” surround the border. “E PLURIBUS UNUM” appears at the lower right.

Excerpt from the poem that Robert Frost (who died on this date in 1963) meant to read at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy:

It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

I greatly prefer Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic“:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
    heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, 
    and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember….

See also the thoughts on Republic vs. Empire in the work of Alec Guinness (as Marcus Aurelius and as Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Thursday, January 2, 2003

Thursday January 2, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

Mary Brian

Joe Foss

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

The Dixie Chicks

See
Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
in my notes of December 11, 2002.

 

Monday, December 30, 2002

Monday December 30, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:59 pm

Three in One

This evening’s earlier entry, “Homer,” is meant in part as a tribute to three goddess-figures from the world of film.  But there is one actress who combines the intelligence of Judy Davis with the glamour of Nicole Kidman and the goodness of Kate Winslet– Perhaps the only actress who could have made me cry Stella! as if I were Brando…. Piper Laurie.

From the Robert A. Heinlein novel

Glory Road

    “I have many names. What would you  like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even  ‘Estrellita.’ “

    ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

    “I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?”

    I thought about it….

   The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.”

    ” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,”and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name.  Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice.

    “No, no! Not ‘Oscar’– ‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’  For this.”

    “Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster.  Scar and Star.”

The Hustler

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Wednesday October 23, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Bright Star

From the website of Karey Lea Perkins:

“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”

Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975

Today’s New York Times story on Richard Helms, together with my reminiscences in the entry that follows it below, suggest the following possibility for symbol-mongering:

Compare the 16-point star of the C.I.A.

with the classic 8-point star of Venus:

This comparison is suggested by the Spanish word “Lucero” (the name, which means “Bright Star,” of the girl in Cuernavaca mentioned two entries down) and by the following passage from Robert A. Heinlein‘s classic novel, Glory Road:

    “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

    “Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

    She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

    “Is that one of your names?”

    “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

    ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

The C.I.A. star above is from that organization’s own site.  The star of Venus (alias Aster, alias Ishtar) is from Symbols.com, an excellent site that has the following variations on the Bright Star theme:

Ideogram for light Alchemical sign
Greek “Aster” Babylonian Ishtar
Phoenician Astarte Octagram of Venus
Phaistos Symbol Fortress Octagram

See also my notes The Still Point and the Wheel and Midsummer Eve’s Dream.  Both notes quote Robinson Jeffers:

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty…
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.”

— Robinson Jeffers, “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,”
quoted at the end of The Cosmic Code,
by Heinz Pagels, Simon & Schuster, 1982

Place the eightfold star in a circle, and you have the Buddhist Wheel of Life:

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