The title refers to a search (see below)
suggested by three things—
The search— Labyrinth 23.
(Within the search results, note particularly the post "The Infinity Point.")
"Having seen Labyrinth at St. Mark's-in-the-Valley Episcopal Church,
it's time to have a rest at this restaurant."
— https://restaurantguru.com/Bar-Le-Cote-Los-Olivos-California
"It's wine country , after all." — "All the Old Knives"
See as well Stein in posts tagged Narrative Labyrinth.
“Yo sé de un laberinto griego que es una línea única, recta.”
—Borges, “La Muerte y la Brújula”
“I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line.”
—Borges, “Death and the Compass”
Another single-line labyrinth—
Robert A. Wilson on the projective line with 24 points
and its image in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)—
Related material —
The remarks of Scott Carnahan at Math Overflow on October 25th, 2010
and the remarks at Log24 on that same date.
A search in the latter for miracle octad is updated below.
This search (here in a customized version) provides some context for the
Benedictine University discussion described here on February 25th and for
the number 759 mentioned rather cryptically in last night’s “Ariadne’s Clue.”
Update of March 3— For some historical background from 1931, see The Mathieu Relativity Problem.
"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship
Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —
"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."
A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
COIN
RING
"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
KEY
"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."
— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —
“The book by Hesse has many facets ….” (Link added.)
— V. V. Nalimov, In the Labyrinths of Language ,
Ch. 1, “What Language Is,” p. 22.
Related philosophical speculation —
(A sequel to the previous post, Narrative for Westworld)
"That corpse you planted last year . . . ." — T. S. Eliot
Circle and Square at the Court of King Minos —
Harmonic analysis based on the circle involves the
circular functions. Dyadic harmonic analysis involves …
For some related history, see (for instance) E. M. Stein
on square functions in a 1982 AMS Bulletin article.
A version of the I Ching’s Hexagram 19:
From Katherine Neville's The Eight , a book on the significance
of the date April 4 — the author's birthday —
|
The Eight by Katherine Neville —
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?” |
Related material: Posts now tagged Hourglass Code.
See also the hourglass in a search for Pilgrim's Progress Illustration.
For the title, see the phrase "reappearing number" in this journal.
Some related mathematics—
the Greek labyrinth of Borges, as well as…
.
Note that "0" here stands for "23," while ∞ corresponds to today's date.
"And she provided him besides with a ball of thread,
bidding him to fasten the end of it to the entrance
of the Labyrinth, and unwind it as he went in, that
it might serve him as a clue to find his way out again."
— "Theseus and Ariadne," by Charles Morris
From "Ariadne's Clue," a post of March 1 last year—
The Watson here is not Emma, but Victor—
From Labyrinth of the Line (March 2, 2011)—
"… construct the Golay code by taking the 24 points
to be the points of the projective line F23 ∪ {∞}…."
— Robert A. Wilson
A simpler projective line— a Galois geometry
model of the line F2 ∪ {∞}—
Here we may consider ∞ to be modeled*
by the third square above— the Galois window .
* Update of about 1 AM Jan. 25, 2012—
This infinity-modeling is of course a poetic conceit,
not to be taken too seriously. For a serious
discussion of points at infinity and finite fields,
see (for instance) Daniel Bump's "The Group GL(2)."
(Continued from November 12, 2005 and June 7, 2011)
Related material— "Labyrinth," a fiction
by the late Roberto Bolaño
in the current New Yorker —
"There's no photo credit."
A Story in Pictures
Errol Morris in The New York Times on March 9—
"If everything is incommensurable, then everything is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."
"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"
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—
Another view of Harvard–
"Let Noon Be Fair."
— Novel title, Willard Motley.
See also Soul at Harvard.
Note the number, 701,
on the colonel’s collar.
Adapted from Log24,
February 19-22, 2008:
See 2/22/08,
4/19/08,
and 5/22/08.
Die Liebe nahm kein Ende mehr.
Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.
“Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
— New York Times, May 22, 2008
THE IMAGE
Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.
Another version of
the image:
See 2/22/08
and 4/19/08.
Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times—
“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”
Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:
“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”
“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54
|
…. Now thou art an 0 |
“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”
— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14
“A labyrinthine man never seeks
the truth, but always, only, his Ariadne….
Who besides myself knows what Ariadne is?”
— Nietzsche,
epigraph to Ariadne’s Lives,
by Nina daVinci Nichols
(See yesterday’s entry.)
Related material:
Entries of Feb. 13
and Feb. 19 at Log24
and the entry of Feb. 13 at
Ariachne’s Broken Woof 
Troilus and Cressida in Act 5, Scene 2:
“And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.
Instance, O instance! strong as Pluto’s gates;
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven:
Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolved, and loosed….”
Prizes and Rewards
"… like the victors in the games
collecting their prizes,
we receive our reward…."
— Conclusion of
Plato's Republic
From The Harvard Crimson
front page on
Mardi Gras, 2008:
Harvard senior Matthew Di Pasquale
plans a new campus magazine called
"Diamond"–
Related material:
"… Bush spoke and answered audience questions for nearly 90 minutes inside East Grand Rapids High School in suburban Grand Rapids….
After leaving the school, Bush's motorcade stopped at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, where he stood silently for a few moments after placing a bouquet of white roses at Ford's burial site on the museum grounds. The 38th president, who grew up in Grand Rapids, died Dec. 26 at age 93."
For the meaning of multispeech,
see the entries of
All Hallows' Eve, 2005:
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— A Wrinkle in Time
|
The Library of Congress “American sculptor Daniel Chester French was born in Exeter, New Hampshire on April 20, 1850. His colossal seated figure of Abraham Lincoln presides over the Lincoln Memorial. Reared in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts, he was embraced by members of the Transcendentalist community including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Author and fellow Concord resident Louisa May Alcott encouraged young French to pursue a career as an artist. Louisa’s sister, artist May Alcott, was his early teacher. French studied in Boston and New York prior to receiving his first commission for the 1875 statue The Minute Man. Standing near the North Bridge in Concord, in the Minute Man National Historical Park, this work commemorates events at the North Bridge, the site of ‘the shot heard ’round the world.’ An American icon, images derivative of The Minute Man statue appeared on defense bonds, stamps, and posters during World War II.” |
 |
Log24 on the anniversary of
Lincoln’s assassination —
|
Saturday, April 14, 2007 4:30 AM The Sun Also Sets, or… This Way to
the Egress Continued from April 12: “I have only come here
— Robert Stone, |
Log24 entry of
November 7, 2003 —
 |
— and a
student play from
Virginia Tech:
Part V:
Symmetry
for Beavis and Butt-Head
and
The Rhetoric of Scientism:
It’s a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you’ll be taught.
— Oscar Hammerstein,
“Getting to Know You”
“Yo es que nací un 8 de marzo,
Día de la Mujer Trabajadora,
y no he hecho más que
trabajar toda mi vida.”
For background on Aldecoa,
see a paper (pdf) by
Sara Brenneis:
“Josefina Aldecoa intertwines
history, collective memory
and individual testimony in her
historical memory trilogy…”
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 146 garment workers who either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths.
Propaganda, March 1977:
“On March 8, 1908, after the death of 128 women trapped in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, 15,000 women workers from the garment and textile industry marched echoing the demands of their sisters 50 years earlier…”
Propaganda, March 2006:
“First of all, on March 8th, 1857, a large number of factory workers in the United States took to the streets to demand their economic and political rights. The owners called the police who arrived immediately and opened fire, engaging in blind repression… Later on, in 1908, the same date of March 8th was once again a memorable date of struggle. On this day, capitalist bosses in Chicago set fire to a textile factory where over a thousand women worked. A very large number was terribly burnt. 120 died!”
Propaganda disguised as news, March 2007:
From today’s top story in 24 HoursTM, a commuter daily in Vancouver published by Sun Media Corporation:
Fight still on for equality
By Robyn Stubbs and Carly Krug
“International Women’s Day commemorates a march by female garment workers protesting low wages, 12-hour workdays and bad working conditions in New York City on March 8, 1857.
Then in 1908, after 128 women were trapped and killed in a fire at a New York City garment and textile factory, 15,000 women workers again took their protests to the street.”
Related historical fiction:
A version of the
I Ching’s Hexagram 19:
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
|
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
“I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.” … “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?” “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….” Now things were beginning to click into place…. “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”…. “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.” The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before? |
Perhaps at the center of
Aldecoa’s labyrinth lurk the
capitalist bosses from Chicago
who, some say, set fire
to a textile factory
on this date in 1908.
For a Freudian perspective
on the above passage,
see yesterday’s entry
In the Labyrinth of Time,
with its link to
John Irwin‘s essay
“The False Artaxerxes:
Borges and the
Dream of Chess.”
Symbols
S. H. Cullinane
March 7, 2007
Today, by the way, is the
feast of a chess saint.
and
“The False Artaxerxes:
Borges and the
Dream of Chess“
This entry was inspired by
Xanga footprints yesterday
from Virginia:
| 1. Virginia Weblog ART WARS: Time and the Grid |
3/6/2007 9:48 AM |
| 2. Virginia Weblog Sequel |
3/6/2007 11:38 AM |
| 3. Virginia Weblog Games and Truth |
3/6/2007 1:25 PM |
| 4. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… The Transcendent Signified |
3/6/2007 5:15 PM |
| 5. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… Zen and Language Games |
3/6/2007 5:16 PM |
| 6. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… Balanchine’s Birthday |
3/6/2007 6:12 PM |
| 7. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… The Agony and the Ya-Ya |
3/6/2007 6:12 PM |
| 8. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… Directions Out |
3/6/2007 6:13 PM |
| 9. Virginia /item.aspx?user=m759&ta… The Four Last Things |
3/6/2007 6:13 PM |
“What on earth is
a concrete universal?”
— Robert M. Pirsig
From A Shot at Redemption—
John Constantine,
cartoon character, and
Donald E. Knuth,
Lutheran mathematician
A photo opportunity —
and a recent cartoon:
From Calvin College,
today’s meditation:
1:00:19 EST
The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe
premieres tonight at
the Royal Albert Hall.
Hexagram 19 in the
Cullinane series:
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
|
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
“I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me. The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe. The chess service dates to 2000 B.C. It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.” … “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added. “They always say it came from Persia or India. How could this Minoan chess service be so old?” “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….” Now things were beginning to click into place…. “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke. “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”…. “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly. “To kill the King.” The sacred axe was used to kill the King. The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment. Why hadn’t I recognized it before? |
|
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” |
The Diamond in the Labyrinth
From the labyrinth of Solitude:
(Phenomenology and Deconstruction, Vol 4
On page 13 of Solitude —
From Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” —
“… so long as philosophy merely busies itself with continually obstructing the possibility of admission to the subject of thinking– that is, the truth of being– it escapes the danger of ever being broken against the hardness of that subject. Thus ‘philosophizing’ about the shattering is separated by an abyss from a thinking that is shattered.”
This suggests a search for
“Heidegger” + “diamond,” which yields —
I hold my breath, the plane’s
wheels under me
still suspended in the minutes after
takeoff, when the planet’s brute gravity
statistically can cause a disaster.
We are flying low enough that I scan
civilization in miniature.
Blue pill swimming pools, and
roadways that fan
out like ribbons in the wind. On the sure
crust, too, a baseball diamond.
Young boys race
across the tilted surface, mute and small,
kicking up red dust. First base, Second base,
Third Base, Home. We ascend into nightfall
and beneath the broken stars one kid bunts.
I remember I was a rookie once.
From Margalit Fox in today’s New York Times:
“Eddie Barclay, who for three decades after World War II was arguably the most powerful music mogul in Europe and inarguably the most flamboyant, died on [Friday] May 13 in Paris. He was 84….
… Mr. Barclay was best known for three things: popularizing American jazz in France in the postwar years; keeping the traditional French chanson alive into the age of rock ‘n’ roll; and presiding over parties so lavish that they were considered just the tiniest bit excessive even by the standards of the French Riviera….
Among the guests at some of his glittering parties… Jack Nicholson….”
Related material:
— quoted by Bruce Graham from The Creators by Daniel Boorstin
“We’ll always have Paris.”
— An Invariant Feast, Log24, Sept. 6, 2004
In the Labyrinth of Memory
Taking a cue from Danny in the labyrinth of Kubrick’s film “The Shining,” today I retraced my steps.
My Jan. 6 entry, “Dead Poet in the City of Angels,” links to a set of five December 21, 2002, entries. In the last of these, “Irish Lament,” is a link to a site appropriate for Maud Gonne’s birthday — a discussion of Yeats’s “Among School Children.”
Those who recall a young woman named Patricia Collinge (Radcliffe ’64) might agree that her image is aptly described by Yeats:
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat
This meditation leads in turn to a Sept. 20, 2002, entry, “Music for Patricias,” and a tune familiar to James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake,” the lyrics of which lead back to images in my entries of Dec. 20, 2002, “Last-Minute Shopping,” and of Dec. 28, 2002, “Solace from Hell’s Kitchen.” The latter entry is in memory of George Roy Hill, director of “The Sting,” who died Dec. 27, 2002.
The Dec. 28 image from “The Sting” leads us back to more recent events — in particular, to the death of a cinematographer who won an Oscar for picturing Newman and Redford in another film — Conrad L. Hall, who died Saturday, Jan. 4, 2003.
For a 3-minute documentary on Hall’s career, click here.
Hall won Oscars for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “American Beauty,” and may win a posthumous Oscar for “Road to Perdition,” last year’s Irish-American mob saga:
“Tom Hanks plays Angel of Death Michael Sullivan. An orphan ‘adopted’ by crime boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), Sullivan worships Rooney above his own family. Rooney gave Sullivan a home when he had none. Rooney is the father Sullivan never knew. Too bad Rooney is the
Rock Island
branch of Capone’s mob.”
In keeping with this Irish connection, here is a set of images.
|
American Beauty |
|
|
A Game of Chess |
I need a photo-opportunity. I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard. — Paul Simon |
“Like a chess player, he knows that to win a tournament, it is sometimes wise to offer a draw in a game even when you think you can win it.”
— Roger Ebert on Robert Duvall’s character in “A Civil Action”
Director Steven Zaillian will take part in a tribute to Conrad L. Hall at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards ceremony on Jan 11. Hall was the cinematographer for Zaillian’s films “A Civil Action” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”
“A Civil Action” was cast by the Boston firm Collinge/Pickman Casting, named in part for that same Patricia Collinge (“hollow of cheek”) mentioned above.
See also “Conrad Hall looks back and forward to a Work in Progress.” (“Work in Progress” was for a time the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)
What is the moral of all this remembrance?
An 8-page (paper) journal note I compiled on November 14, 1995 (feast day of St. Lawrence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin, allegedly born in 1132) supplies an answer in the Catholic tradition that might have satisfied Joyce (to whom 1132 was a rather significant number):
How can you tell there’s an Irishman present
at a cockfight?
He enters a duck.
How can you tell a Pole is present?
He bets on the duck.
How can you tell an Italian is present?
The duck wins.
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Every picture tells a story. |
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