Continued from March 7, 2011
" One for my baby, and one more… "
See also this morning's previous posts "Unique Figure" and "One of a Kind."
Continued from March 7, 2011
" One for my baby, and one more… "
See also this morning's previous posts "Unique Figure" and "One of a Kind."
Recommended— An essay (part 1 of 5 parts) in today's New York TImes—
I don’t want to die in |
"I agree with one of the earlier commenters that this is a piece of fine literary work. And in response to some of those who have wondered 'WHAT IS THE POINT?!' of this essay, I would like to say: Must literature always answer that question for us (and as quickly and efficiently as possible)?"
For an excellent survey of the essay's historical context, see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article
"The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories,"
First published Wed., Feb. 25, 2009,
by Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene.
Related material from this journal—
Paradigms, Paradigms Lost, and a search for "mere geometry." This last includes remarks contrasting Euclid's definition of a point ("that which has no parts") with a later notion useful in finite geometry.
See also (in the spirit of The Abacus Conundrum )…
(Note the Borges epigraph above.)
— "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
For some backstory, click or touch the dark passage above.
See also Monolith (August 23, 2014).
An example for the Feast of the Epiphany*
For one approach to defining this form, see Diamond Star.
* And for Pomona College
Some related resources from Malcolm Lowry—
"…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…."
— Under the Volcano , Chapter VI
— and from Matilde Marcolli—
Seven books on analytical psychology
See also Marcolli in this morning's previous post, The Garden Path.
For the relevance of alchemy to form, see Alchemy in this journal.
"Not all those who have sought to decode the symbolism of the Tarot pack
have been occultists; some have been serious scholars…."
— Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot , Ch. 20
“Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’
in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps .”
— Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings , Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 106
From a talk on April 16, 2010, in Cuernavaca—
Related material—
See also The Martial Art of Giving Talks.
(Thanks to Lieven Le Bruyn for his Twelfth Night post on this topic.)
From April 28, 2008:
Religious Art
The black monolith of One artistic shortcoming The following One approach to "Transformations play See 4/28/08 for examples |
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, pp. 117-118:
"… his point of origin is external nature, the fount to which we come seeking inspiration for our fictions. We come, many of Stevens's poems suggest, as initiates, ritualistically celebrating the place through which we will travel to achieve fictive shape. Stevens's 'real' is a bountiful place, continually giving forth life, continually changing. It is fertile enough to meet any imagination, as florid and as multifaceted as the tropical flora about which the poet often writes. It therefore naturally lends itself to rituals of spring rebirth, summer fruition, and fall harvest. But in Stevens's fictive world, these rituals are symbols: they acknowledge the real and thereby enable the initiate to pass beyond it into the realms of his fictions. Two counter rituals help to explain the function of celebration as Stevens envisions it. The first occurs in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer. A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. For in 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' he tells us that ... the first idea was not to shape the clouds In imitation. The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. We are the mimics. (Collected Poems, 383-84) Believing that they are the life and not the mimics thereof, the world and not its fiction-forming imitators, these young men cannot find the savage transparence for which they are looking. In its place they find the pediment, a scowling rock that, far from being life's source, is symbol of the human delusion that there exists a 'form alone,' apart from 'chains of circumstance.' A far more productive ritual occurs in 'Sunday Morning.'…." |
For transformations of a more
specifically religious nature,
see the remarks on
Richard Strauss,
"Death and Transfiguration,"
(Tod und Verklärung, Opus 24)
in Mathematics and Metaphor
on July 31, 2008, and the entries
of August 3, 2008, related to the
death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The black monolith of
Kubrick's 2001 is, in
its way, an example
of religious art.
One artistic shortcoming
(or strength– it is, after
all, monolithic) of
that artifact is its
resistance to being
analyzed as a whole
consisting of parts, as
in a Joycean epiphany.
The following
figure does
allow such
an epiphany.
One approach to
the epiphany:
"Transformations play
a major role in
modern mathematics."
– A biography of
Felix Christian Klein
The above 2×4 array
(2 columns, 4 rows)
furnishes an example of
a transformation acting
on the parts of
an organized whole:
For other transformations
acting on the eight parts,
hence on the 35 partitions, see
"Geometry of the 4×4 Square,"
as well as Peter J. Cameron's
"The Klein Quadric
and Triality" (pdf),
and (for added context)
"The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and
a Finite Model."
For a related structure–
not rectangle but cube–
see Epiphany 2008.
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd"
— City of God
Adapted from
Ad Reinhardt
Epiphany
“A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: ‘Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class– for Joyce knew no Greek– that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
— William T. Noon, Society of Jesus,
Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas,
Yale University Press, 1957
Epigraphs to The Shining, by Stephen King:
For more about shining, click on the star.
Powered by WordPress