Two items from this morning’s news:
“Sasaki Roshi trained for years in a distinctively strict style of Zen
that he transplanted to the U.S. His students rose at 3 a.m.
for chanting, exhausting hours of meditation and one-on-one
meetings with their teacher, who would pose impenetrable
koans, riddles like: ‘When you see the flower, where is God?'”
For a mathematician’s example of an alleged Zen ideal, see the feast day
this year of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins.
An RSS item today—
 Diamond squares Fri Aug 19, 2011 05:36 [EDT] from Peter Cameron
If you like Latin squares and such things, take a look at Diamond Geezer’s post for today: a pair of orthogonal Latin squares with two disjoint common transversals, and some entries given (if you do the harder puzzle).
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The post referred to—
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond." —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
Those now celebrating the Catholic Church's "World Youth" week in Madrid
may prefer a related puzzle for younger and nimbler minds:
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Some background—
An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins
"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"
— "Massive Attack"
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."
"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "
From this morning's New York Times…
"On November 12th and 13th, 2010,
a meeting of Roman Catholic bishops
convened to respond to the growing demand
for exorcism rites."
— Trailer for the film "The Rite," which opens today
Meanwhile, in this journal on November 12th and 13th, 2010… Award Show Story.
Related material — God, Time, Hopkins and a Faustian link from November 12th.
Update of 9:57 AM 1/28— The Faustian link suggests readings from
James G. Hart's The Person and the Common Life (Kluwer Academic, 1992).
See pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and note especially the spider metaphor on page 5 —
In memory of Kevin McCarthy, who died on Saturday, September 11
From a 9/11 post —
Sir Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream." See "Home from Home."
From Script-O-Rama, dialogue from "Slipstream" —
My God, this place must be a million years old. Will that be it, sweetie? I think this gentleman's next. No, sir. You're next. Thank you. That'll be $1.35. What? $1.35. That's all? Did you want to pay more? No, it's just so cheap. That's the way it is out here, sweetie, free and easy. Yes, sirree, home on the range where the buffalo roam, The deer and the antelope play. Dolly's Little Diner. Home from home. Home from home.
See also "Kevin McCarthy" in this journal.
8:28:32 AM
Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year:
"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."
James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
AntiChristmas) this year:
"… he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
— It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."
Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):
"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have
just as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
as in painting portraits…."
From Epiphany 2008:
An arrangement of planes:
From May 10, 2008:
A pattern of figures:
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See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:
— The Middle-English
Harrowing of Hell…
by Hulme, 1907, page 64
Anthony Hopkins on time:
"For me time is God, God is time…. I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time. The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time." —Cinema Blend
"For me time is God, God is time. It's an equation, like an Einstein equation." —Washington Square News
A Marxist on time:
"God demands scrutiny beyond his menacingly comic aspects. Primarily, the [Saramago] Gospel 's God is time, and not truth, the other attribute he asserts. Saramago, a Marxist (an eccentric one), and not a Christian, subverts St. Augustine on the theodicy of time. If time is God, then God can be forgiven nothing, and who would desire to forgive him anyway?"
—Harold Bloom on José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
Augustine's Theodicy
and Joyce's Aesthetics,
On Anthony Hopkins’s new film:
“At one point during ‘Slipstream,’ Hopkins’s character stumbles upon a Dolly Parton impersonator while Parton’s wonderful song, ‘Coat of Many Colors,’ plays on the soundtrack. I told Hopkins that I thought he used the tune– which is about a multi-hued coat that little Dolly’s grandmother made for her out of random pieces of cloth when the future superstar’s family was dirt poor– as a sort of commentary on the patchwork structure of ‘Slipstream’ itself. Hopkins smiled broadly and his eyes lit up. Yes, he said, that’s exactly what he was doing. He said he even tried to get Parton to appear in the movie, but she was booked and couldn’t do it.”
— Paul Tatara, Oct. 22, 2007
“Our existence is beyond understanding. Nobody has an answer. I sense that life is such a mystery. To me, God is time.”
It’s been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides– ‘Spiders’ and ‘Snakes’– battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.”
— Publisher’s description of Fritz Leiber’s Big Time.
“My God, this place must be
a million years old!”
“Dolly’s Little Diner–
Home from Home”
Meanwhile…
Country Star
Porter Wagoner, 80, Dies
Wallace Stevens,
“Country Words”–
“What is it that my feeling seeks?
I know from all the things it touched
And left beside and left behind.
It wants the diamond pivot bright.”
From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”
“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.
What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.”
— Jung, Collected Works,
Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Related material:
“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”
— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton
For some children…
It takes three Eleanors.
1 2 3
For Alice, a beautiful child
who died in London
on Tuesday
at 72:
Today’s New York Times says that
Alice, the author of Fairy Tale,
was a
“passionately traditional Catholic.”
For related material, see
Immortal Diamond:
O’Hara, Hopkins, and Joyce.
See also the conflict between Trudeau’s
“diamond theory” and
“story theory”
of truth,
and Suzanne Keen‘s article from the
Catholic publication Commonweal:
Particularity
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Upon learning of the recent death of Walter J. Ong, S. J., philosopher of language, I ordered a copy of his book
Hopkins, the Self, and God
University of Toronto Press, 1986.
As the reader of my previous entry will discover, I have a very low opinion of the literary skills of the first Christians. This sect’s writing has, however, improved in the past two millennia.
Despite my low opinion of the early Christians, I am still not convinced their religion is totally unfounded. Hence my ordering of the Ong book. Since then, I have also ordered two other books, reflecting my interests in philosophical fiction (see previous entry) and in philosophy itself:
Philosophical fiction —
The Hex Witch of Seldom,
by Nancy Springer,
Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002
(See 1 Corinthians 1:26-29)
Philosophy —
Definition,
by Richard Robinson,
Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford,
Oxford U. Press, 1954, reprinted 1962.
Following the scientific advice of Niels Bohr and Freeman Dyson, I articulated on April 25, 2003, a mad theory of the mystical significance of the number 162.
Here is that theory applied to the three works named above, all three of which I received, synchronistically, today.
Page 162 of Hopkins, the Self, and God is part of the long list of references at the back of the book. Undiscouraged by the seeming insignificance (vide my note Dogma) of this page, I looked more closely. Behold, there was Christ… Carol T. Christ, that is, author of The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry, Yale University Press, 1975. “Particularity” seemed an apt description of my “162” approach to literature, so I consulted Christ’s remarks as described in the main body of Ong’s book.
Particularity according to Christ —
“Victorian particularist aesthetics has prospered to the present time, and not only in novels. The isolated, particularized, unique ‘good moment’ [Christ, 105], the flash of awareness at one particular instant in just the right setting, which Hopkins celebrates….”
— Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God, p. 14
I highly recommend the rest of Ong’s remarks on particularity.
Turning to the other two of the literary trinity of books I received today….
Page 162 of The Hex Witch of Seldom has the following:
“There was a loaf of Stroehmann’s Sunbeam Bread in the grocery sack also; she and Witchie each had several slices. Bobbi folded and compressed hers into little squares and popped each slice into her mouth all at once.”
The religious significance of this passage seems, in Ong’s Jesuit context, quite clear.
Page 162 of Definition has the following:
“Real Definition as the Search for a Key. Mr. Santayana, in his book on The Sense of Beauty, made the following extremely large demands on real definition:
‘A definition <of beauty> that should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when, and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our sensibility. Nothing less will really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic appreciation is. The definition of beauty in this sense will be the task of this whole book, a task that can be only very imperfectly accomplished within its limits.’ ”
Here is a rhetorical exercise for Jesuits that James Joyce might appreciate:
Discuss Bobbi’s “little squares” of bread as the Body of Christ. Formulate, using Santayana’s criteria, a definition of beauty that includes this sacrament.
Refer, if necessary, to
the log24.net entries
Mr. Holland’s Week and Elegance.
Refrain from using the phrase
“scandal of particularity”
unless you can use it as well as
Annie Dillard.
For Jung’s 7/26 Birthday:
A Logocentric Meditation
Leftist academics are trying to pull a fast one again. An essay in the most prominent American mathematical publication tries to disguise a leftist attack on Christian theology as harmless philosophical woolgathering.
In a review of Vladimir Tasic’s Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, the reviewer, Michael Harris, is being less than candid when he discusses Derrida’s use of “logocentrism”:
“Derrida uses the term ‘logocentrism’… as ‘the metaphysics of phonetic writing’….”
— Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003, page 792
We find a rather different version of logocentrism in Tasic’s own Sept. 24, 2001, lecture “Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History,” which is “an abridged version of some arguments” in Tasic’s book on mathematics and postmodernism:
“Derrida apparently also employs certain ideas of formalist mathematics in his critique of idealist metaphysics: for example, he is on record saying that ‘the effective progress of mathematical notation goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics.’
Derrida’s position is rather subtle. I think it can be interpreted as a valiant sublation of two completely opposed schools in mathematical philosophy. For this reason it is not possible to reduce it to a readily available philosophy of mathematics. One could perhaps say that Derrida continues and critically reworks Heidegger’s attempt to ‘deconstruct’ traditional metaphysics, and that his method is more ‘mathematical’ than Heidegger’s because he has at his disposal the entire pseudo-mathematical tradition of structuralist thought. He has himself implied in an interview given to Julia Kristeva that mathematics could be used to challenge ‘logocentric theology,’ and hence it does not seem unreasonable to try looking for the mathematical roots of his philosophy.”
The unsuspecting reader would not know from Harris’s review that Derrida’s main concern is not mathematics, but theology. His ‘deconstruction of metaphysics’ is actually an attack on Christian theology.
From “Derrida and Deconstruction,” by David Arneson, a University of Manitoba professor and writer on literary theory:
“Logocentrism: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language (now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc.) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world.”
Some further background, putting my July 23 entry on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in the proper context:
Part I. The Roots of Structuralism
“Literary science had to have a firm theoretical basis…”
Part II. Structuralism/Poststructuralism
“Most [structuralists] insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless.”
Part III. Structuralism and
Jung’s Archetypes
Jung’s “theories, like those of Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, command for myth a central cultural position, unassailable by reductive intellectual methods or procedures.”
And so we are back to logocentrism, with the Logos — God in the form of story, myth, or archetype — in the “central cultural position.”
What does all this have to do with mathematics? See
“the Klein group (much beloved of Structuralists)”
Another Michael Harris Essay, Note 47 –
“From Krauss’s article I learned that the Klein group is also called the Piaget group.”
and Jung on Quaternity:
Beyond the Fringe –
“…there is no denying the fact that [analytical] psychology, like an illegitimate child of the spirit,
leads an esoteric, special existence beyond the fringe of what is generally acknowledged to be the academic world.”
What attitude should mathematicians have towards all this?
Towards postmodern French
atheist literary/art theorists –
Mathematicians should adopt the attitude toward “the demimonde of chic academic theorizing” expressed in Roger Kimball’s essay, Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss.
Towards logocentric German
Christian literary/art theorists –
Mathematicians should, of course, adopt a posture of humble respect, tugging their forelocks and admitting their ignorance of Christian theology. They should then, if sincere in their desire to honestly learn something about logocentric philosophy, begin by consulting the website
The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute.
For a better known, if similarly disrespected, “illegitimate child of the spirit,” see my July 22 entry.
Shine On, Robinson Jeffers
"…be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits,
that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth."
— Shine, Perishing Republic, by Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers died at Big Sur, California, on January 20, 1962 — a year to the day after Robert Frost spoke at the Kennedy inauguration.
"The poetry of Robinson Jeffers shines with a diamond's brilliance when he depicts Nature's beauty and magnificence. His verse also flashes with a diamond's hardness when he portrays human pain and folly."
— Gary Suttle
"Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number…."
— Howard Nemerov,
Grace To Be Said at the Supermarket
"Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fáll to the resíduary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is |, since he was what I am, and
Thís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, | patch, matchwood,
immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
"In the last two weeks, I've been returning to Hopkins. Even in the 'world's wildfire,' he asserts that 'this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.' A comfort."
— Michael Gerson, head White House speechwriter,
in Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
"There's none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
"The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth."
— Wallace Stevens
"My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite…."
— Robinson Jeffers, Tor House
On this date in 1993, the inauguration day of William Jefferson Clinton, Audrey Hepburn died.
"…today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully…."
— Maya Angelou, January 20, 1993
"So, purposing each moment to retire,
She linger'd still. Meantime, across the moors,
Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire"
— John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (January 20), IX
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"Eightpointed symmetrical signs are ancient symbols for the Venus goddess or the planet Venus as either the Morning star or the Evening star."
— Symbols.com
"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
"The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.' Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock: we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."
— The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs
"Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again."
— The Who
See also my note, "Bright Star," of October 23, 2002.
Miss Sauvé
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short story …. the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125]
….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.
— Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
— Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:
“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….
…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s. It’s gone now — like so many things.”
Ten thousand places
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”
Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:
… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”
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