Log24

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Space Itself

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:25 am

From The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens ,
John N. Serio, ed., "Stevens's Late Poetry," by B.J. Leggett,
pp. 62-75, an excerpt from page 70:

Click the above image for further details.

See also Nothingness and "The Rock" in this journal.

Further readings along these lines:

IMAGE- Parallel book covers- 'The Mystery of the Quantum World' and (adapted) 'The Stars My Destination'

For pure mathematics, rather than theories of the physical world, 
see the properties of the cube illustrated on the second (altered
book cover above.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Corpse Express

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:02 am

See Malcolm Lowry's "A corpse will be transported by express!" in this journal.

From June 23

"When Plato regards geometry as the prerequisite to
philosophical knowledge, it is because geometry alone
renders accessible the realm of things eternal;
tou gar aei ontos he geometrike gnosis estin."

— Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
   Volume V, Number 1, September, 1944.

Maybe.

June 23, Midsummer Eve, was the date of death for Colonel Michael Cobb.

Cobb, who died aged 93, was "a regular Army officer who in retirement produced
the definitive historical atlas of the railways of Great Britain." — Telegraph.co.uk, July 19

As for geometry, railways, and things eternal, see parallel lines converging
in Tequila Mockingbird and Bedlam Songs.

Station of the Rock Island Line

The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois

See also Wallace Stevens on "the giant of nothingness"
in "A Primitive Like an Orb" and in Midsummer Eve's Dream

At the center on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Tuesday February 24, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm
 
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism

Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
 to hear about our religion
… that we made up."

Tina Fey and Steve Martin at the 2009 Oscars

From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:

… 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.


Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."

As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.

Heinlein:

"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
    I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."

Stevens:

A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:

For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:

The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
     point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.

                    (Collected Poems, 528)

Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:

B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":

"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'….  Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."

This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.

More positively…

Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space
(or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)

The 4x4x4 cube

over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."

Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.

Cara:

Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Sunday March 30, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:14 pm
The Thing Itself

From a summary of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

“The human can never know being as it truly is, for to do that, one would have to be the thing itself. To know a rock, we have to be the rock (and of course, the rock, as a being-in-itself, lacks consciousness). Yet the being-for-itself sees and intuits the world through what is not present. In this way, the being-for-itself, already wholly free, also possesses the power of imagination. Even if absolute beauty (to Sartre, the absolute union of being and consciousness) cannot be apprehended, knowing it through its absence, as in the way one feels the emptiness left by a departed loved one, is its own truth.”

— Anonymous author at sparknotes.com

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Thursday December 16, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 am

Nothing Nothings
(Again)

Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).

From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:

"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."

Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.

Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:

  • " 'Nothingness itself nothings' — with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,' meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point entirely."
    Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
  • "Death and Metaphysics," by Peter Kraus, pp. 98-111 in Death and Philosophy, ed. by Jeff Malpas and Robert Solomon.  Heidegger's famous phrase (misquoted by Quine in Gray Particular in Hartford) "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" is discussed on page 102.

Friday, December 10, 2004

Friday December 10, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 am

Gray Particular
in Hartford

From Wallace Stevens,

"The Rock, Part III:
Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn" —

The rock is
   the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which
   he rises, up–and–ho,
The step to
   the bleaker depths of his descents…

From this morning's
New York Times obituaries

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix03/nytC.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 86.

The cause was a massive subdural hematoma suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray.

*******************************

Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to carefully calibrated chance, died on Wednesday….

… in 1999 [he] received the Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy of American Poets.

A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:

  I.  From a page linked to in
      Tuesday's entry White Christmas:

"A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger ventured that das Nichts nichtet — 'the nothing nothings' — evidently still sensing a problem."
— W. V. Quine in Quiddities

 II.  "As if nothingness
             contained a métier…"
      — Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

III.  "Massive subdural hematoma"
       — Three-word poem
           performed on Tuesday
           in Connecticut

IV.  mé·tier n.

 

  • An occupation, a trade, or a profession.
  • Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one's specialty.

[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

 

  V.  "ho"
        — Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

 VI.  Francine du Plessix Gray…
       From the
       Archives of the
       New York Review of Books:

July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of

Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan

La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler

Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer

Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson

VII.   From an entry of April 29, 2004:

 

"… a 'dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse' "

 

— Wallace Stevens
as quoted by Michael Bryson

 

(p. 227, The Palm
at the End of the Mind:

Selected Poems and a Play.
Ed. Holly Stevens.

New York: Vintage Books, 1990)

 

Powered by WordPress