“Rock music from car . . .”
Friday, December 4, 2020
Here’s to Efficient Packing!
Monday, June 29, 2020
The De Palma Balcony
“The Demolished Man was a novel that had fascinated De Palma
since the late 1950s and appealed to his background in mathematics
and avant-garde storytelling. Its unconventional unfolding of plot
(exemplified in its mathematical layout of dialogue) and its stress on
perception have analogs in De Palma’s filmmaking.” — Wikipedia
This, together with the Cuernavaca balcony in Deschooling MIT, is
perhaps enough of a clue for mystified theologians on St. Peter’s Day.
Monday, June 22, 2020
The Long Hello…
“In July, 1960, having just received a doctorate from Harvard
and a research and training fellowship from the National Institute
of Mental Health, I drove, together with my wife, Sandylee,
from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cuernavaca, Mexico.”
— Michael Maccoby, June 26, 2014
This is the Michael Maccoby of . . .
First published, with a less lurid cover, in 1958 by Arlington Books
of Cambridge, Mass.
What appears to be that 1958 edition, with the Maccoby introduction,
is available as a PDF —
http://paragoninspects.com/articles/pdfs/temp/operators_and_things.pdf .
Some Harvard-related material — See Leary and 6 Prescott .
Friday, June 12, 2020
Log Lady
“Just as these lines that merge to form a key
Are as chess squares; when month and day are four;
Don’t risk another chance to move to mate.
One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
“One game is real and one’s a metaphor” —
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Deschooling* M.I.T.
New York Times opinion yesterday from a professor at M.I.T. —
* For some background on Deschooling, see (for instance) . . .
Monday, April 6, 2020
Sunday, January 19, 2020
For 6 Prescott Street*
"Freshman Seminar Program Department Administrator Corinna S. Rohse
described the program’s courses, which allow students to study subjects
that vary from Sanskrit to the mathematical basis for chess, as
'jewel-like: small and incredibly well-cut.' "
— The Harvard Crimson , Dec. 10, 2008
For remarks related to Sanskrit, chessboard structure, and "jewel-like"
mathematics, see A Prince of Darkness (Log24, March 28, 2006).
See also Walsh Functions in this journal and …
Lecture notes on dyadic harmonic analysis
(Cuernavaca, 2000)
Compare and contrast these remarks of Pereyra with the following
remarks, apparently by the same Corinna S. Rohse quoted above.
* Location of the Harvard Freshman Seminar program in the 2008
article above. The building at 6 Prescott was moved there from
5 Divinity Avenue in 1978. When the seminar program was started
in the fall of 1959, it was located in a house at 8 Prescott St. (In
1958-1959 this was a freshman dorm, the home of Ted Kaczynski.)
Monday, July 22, 2019
From the Church of Synchronology*
From this journal on September 16, 2013 —
"La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable." — Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne," IV (1863) "By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable." — Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," IV (1863), translated by Jonathan Mayne (in 1964 Phaidon Press book of same title) |
Also on September 16, 2013 —
* See that term in this journal.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Propriation
The phrase "quantum space" in today's 10:45 AM post
was used earlier in a book title —
Amazon.com gives the Quantum Space publication date
for its Kindle edition as April 10, 2017.
I prefer my own remarks of April 10, 2017 —
From "Heidegger for Passover"
"Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying
— p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings ,
"Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" |
Monday, April 9, 2018
The Long Hello
Es la línea de transporte más antigua que va de Cuernavaca a Tepoztlán . . . .
Image from the 1973 Elliott Gould film "The Long Goodbye" —
Some backstory . . . .
-
https://hidden-films.com/2014/11/09/the-little-movie-that-couldnt-
an-oral-history-of-elliott-goulds-never-completed-a-glimpse-of-tiger/
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glimpse_of_Tiger
- http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=71956 —
Monday, January 8, 2018
|
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Time and Chance Continues …
Monday, April 10, 2017
Heidegger for Passover
From this journal on August 7, 2010 (footnotes added today) —
The title of this post, "Rift Designs," … is taken from Heidegger. From a recent New Yorker review of Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson— "Robinson is eloquent in her defense of the mind’s prerogatives, but her call for a renewed metaphysics might be better served by rereading Heidegger than by dusting off the Psalms." Following this advice, we find— "Propriation1 gathers the rift-design2 of the saying and unfolds it3 in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure4 of a manifold showing." — p. 415 of Heidegger's Basic Writings , edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993 "Das Ereignis versammelt den Aufriß der Sage und entfaltet ihn zum Gefüge des vielfältigen Zeigens." — Heidegger, Weg zur Sprache 1. "Mirror-Play of the Fourfold" 2. "Christ descending into the abyss" 3. Barrancas of Cuernavaca 4. Combinatorics, Philosophy, Geometry |
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Annals of Psychopharmacology
The New Yorker , issue dated Feb. 9, 2015 —
"After trying magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, in 1960,
Leary conceived the Harvard Psilocybin Project, to study
the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. His involvement
with LSD came a few years later."
Related viewing —
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Global Game
Seymour Lazar, Flamboyant Entertainment Lawyer, Dies at 88
The New York Times this evening has an obituary for Seymour Lazar,
"Seymour the Head in Supermoney , George Goodman’s 1972 account
of the global financial game, written under the pen name Adam Smith."
From that obituary —
"It was in Cuernavaca that Mr. Goodman, quite skeptical of the Lazar lore
he had heard so much of, met the man behind the myth. 'Seymour was
real,' he wrote…."
As is the Hungarian algorithm.
Mr. Lazar reportedly died on March 30. This journal on that date —
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Metaphors
A rose on a Harvard University Press book cover (2014) —
A Log24 post's "lotus" (2004) —
A business mandorla (2016) —
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Duckworth*
See pato.jpg and Venn's Cuernavaca.
* A reference to the British publishing company
in the previous post.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Love and Death–
— Title of a 1975 film. The late Martin Poll (previous post)
was the executive producer.
See also "A Corpse Will Be Transported by Express."
Related material—
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Community*
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Office Visit
From the screenplay of "The Number 23"—
INT. NATHANIEL'S INSTITUTE, STAIRWELL – NIGHT
Agatha climbs a dark staircase. Layers of dust
testify to years of neglect.
INT. 3RD FLOOR CORRIDOR – CONTINUOUS
Agatha finds ROOM 318. A rusting door plaque reads,
"DR. SIRIUS LEARY, M.D. PSYCHIATRY."
For related material, see "Leary + Cuernavaca" and "Prime Cut."
Happy belated 2/3 birthday to Walter Sparrow.
Related material— Two other occurrences of "318" in this journal—
in another horror story, "The Sweet Smell of Avon,"
and in a quote from the Feast of St. Nicholas, 2010—
"When Novelists Become Cubists," by Andre Furlani—
"A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that
it is the only way to get all the meaning in.
Genius always proceeds by faith" (312).
The unparaphrasable architectonic text
"differs from other narrative in that the meaning
shapes into a web, or globe, rather than along a line" (318).
[The references are to page numbers in
Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination .]
Friday, January 6, 2012
The Garden Path
"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.)
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Signature*
"He gazed out of the window hoping that somehow everything could make sense to him."
— "Passing in Silence," by Oliver Humpage
"You gotta be true to your code." —Sinatra
Exercise: Trace a path from the June 27 NY Lottery numbers
to the above two quotations. Hint: See Cuernavaca and
Pilgrim's Progress in TIME Magazine, May 3, 1948.
For some further background, click on the CBS quote above.
I still prefer, as I did in 1948, less up-to-the-minute developments.
* The title refers to the phrase "the artist's signature."
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
24-Part Invention
“Next to the bookcase stands a wooden cabinet with 24 drawers that looks like something you might have seen in a library decades ago, or perhaps in an old apothecary. The drawers are marked with the names of her novels or characters in the novels and crammed with indexed notes.
She pulls open a drawer marked ‘Lozen,’ the name of a main female character in another historical western novel, ‘The Ghost Warrior,’ and reads a few of the index tabs: ‘social relationships, puberty, death, quotes….'”
— From an article on Lucia St. Clair Robson in The Baltimore Sun by Arthur Hirsch, dated 1:31 p.m. EDT April 30, 2011*
From this journal later that same day —
![]() |
Robson’s most recent novel is Last Train from Cuernavaca .
“A corpse will be transported by express!”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
* Update of 5:48 AM EDT May 3—
The same article was also published with a different dateline— April 28.
Enthusiasts of synchronicity may lament the confusion, or they may
turn to April 28 in this journal for a different 24-part invention.
See also Art Wars, April 7, 2003 and White Horse .
Monday, May 2, 2011
Pasaje
From Under the Volcano , Chapter II—
Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.
From Shining Forth—
"What he sees is something real."
— Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Party On, Kid Charlemagne
Part I: A search in this journal for Cuernavaca+garden
Part II: This life can be very strange –Steely Dan, 1976
Part III: Owsley Stanley Dies at 76
Monday, August 16, 2010
Utopia 14
The following, from Wikipedia, is an image of Utopia 14, the 1954 paperback reissue of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano.
Commentary from Wikipedia—
“A player piano is a modified piano that ‘plays itself.’ The piano keys move according to a pattern of holes punched in an unwinding scroll…. Like its counterpart, a player piano can be played by hand as well. When a scroll is run through the ghost-operated instrument, the movement of its keys produce the illusion that an invisible performer is playing the instrument.”
See also last night’s “The Game“—
“One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation….”
— as well as Vonnegut in this journal yesterday and the following from the August 14 post Iconic Notation—
A question from Ivan Illich
(founder of CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation,
in Cuernavaca, Mexico)—
“Who can be served by bridges to nowhere?“
For more about nowhere, see Utopia.
For more about Cuernavaca and ghosts, see a recurring motif in this journal.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Iconic Notation
Continued from Friday the 13th—
Related material—
Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted from an earlier (1984) edition
A question from Ivan Illich
(founder of CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation,
in Cuernavaca, Mexico)—
"Who can be served by bridges to nowhere?"
For more about nowhere, see Utopia. See also http://outis.blogspot.com.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
The Lotus Gate*
See also a prequel to
Ramanujan’s Flowering Tree—
* “Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls.
In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit.”
— Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
Sunday, April 18, 2010
A Generation Lost in Space
or, Deja Vu All Over Again
Top two obituaries in this morning's NY Times list–
David Simons, Who Flew High Dr. Simons, a physician turned Air Force officer, had sent animals aloft for several years before his record-breaking flight. James Aubrey, who Portrayed the Hero Mr. Aubrey portrayed Ralph in the film version of the William Golding novel and had a busy career on stage and television in England. |
Simons reportedly died on April 5,
Aubrey on April 6.
This journal on those dates–
April 5 —
Monday, April 5, 2010Space CowboysGoogle News, 11:32 AM ET today– Related material: Yesterday's Easter message, |
April 6 —
Tuesday, April 6, 2010ClueSee also Leary on Cuernavaca, Team Daedalus"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162 "Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys" "Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction\ |
"At the moment which is not of action or inaction |
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Clue
See also Leary on Cuernavaca,
John O'Hara's fleeting reference
to Cuernavaca in Hope of Heaven,
and Cuernavaca in this journal.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Nexus
From Google today, some excerpts from the result of the search “define:nexus”–
|
This search was suggested by a book review in today’s New York Times that mentions both the Harvard classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and some religious experiences affecting my own Harvard class– that of 1964.
Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960 was the site of what Harvard’s Timothy Leary later called the deepest religious experience of his life. For some other experiences related to Harvard and Cuernavaca, see a search on those two terms in this journal. The book under review is titled “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” My own experiences with the Harvard-Cuernavaca nexus might more appropriately be titled “The Harvard Alcoholic Club.” |
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Wednesday June 17, 2009
Back to the Real
Colum McCann on yesterday’s history:
“Fiction gives us access to a very real history.”
The Associated Press thought for today:
“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”
— John Hersey, American author (born on this date in 1914, died 1993).
From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):
“I was wondering about that this morning… About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time…. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
|
Monday, October 20, 2008
Monday October 20, 2008
Thoughts suggested by Saturday's entry–
"… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality…."
— Carl G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.
For a video of such undifferentiated chaos, see the Four Tops' "Loco in Acapulco."
"Yes, you'll be goin' loco
down in Acapulco,
the magic down there
is so strong."
This song is from the 1988 film "Buster."
(For a related religious use of that name– "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"– see Fritz Leiber's "Damnation Morning," quoted here on Sept. 28.)
Art, science, and religion are not apparent within the undifferentiated chaos of the Four Tops' Acapulco video, which appears to incorporate time travel in its cross-cutting of scenes that seem to be from the Mexican revolution with contemporary pool-party scenes. Art, science, and religion do, however, appear within my own memories of Acapulco. While staying at a small thatched-roof hostel on a beach at Acapulco in the early 1960's, I read a paperback edition of Three Philosophical Poets, a book by George Santayana on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Here we may regard art as represented by Goethe, science by Lucretius, and religion by Dante. For a more recent and personal combination of these topics, see Juneteenth through Midsummer Night, 2007, which also has references to the "primitives" and "magical mentality" discussed by Jung.
"The major structures of the psyche for Jung include the ego, which is comprised of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the 'mask' which the person presents [to] the world, while the shadow holds the parts of the self which the person feels ashamed and guilty about."
— Brent Dean Robbins, Jung page at Mythos & Logos
As for shame and guilt, see Malcolm Lowry's classic Under the Volcano, a novel dealing not with Acapulco but with a part of Mexico where in my youth I spent much more time– Cuernavaca.
Lest Lowry's reflections prove too depressing, I recommend as background music the jazz piano of the late Dave McKenna… in particular, "Me and My Shadow."
McKenna died on Saturday, the date of the entry that included "Loco in Acapulco." Saturday was also the Feast of Saint Luke.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Thursday October 9, 2008
of History
(Click to enlarge)

Deep Background:
From the Terrace…
of the Hotel Bella Vista
in Cuernavaca…
Related Material:
Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil
“Right through hell
there is a path…“
(Voice-over by
Richard Burton,
“Volcano,” 1976)
Monday, October 6, 2008
Monday October 6, 2008
Yesterday's entry contained the following unattributed quotation:
"One must join forces with friends of like mind."
As the link to Leap Day indicated, the source of the quotation is the I Ching.
Yesterday's entry also quoted the late Terence McKenna, a confused writer on psychosis and the I Ching. Lest the reader conclude that I consider McKenna or similar authors (for instance, Timothy Leary in Cuernavaca) as "friends of like mind," I would point rather to more sober students of the I Ching (cf. my June 2002 notes on philosophy, religion, and science) and to the late Scottish theologian John Macquarrie:
Macquarrie's connection in this journal to the I Ching is, like that book itself, purely coincidental. For details, click on the figure below.

The persistent reader will
find a further link that
leads to an entry titled
"Notes on the I Ching."
"A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted."
Friday, June 20, 2008
Friday June 20, 2008
Drunkard’s Walk
In memory of Episcopal priest
and Jungian analyst
Brewster Yale Beach,
who died on Tuesday,
June 17, 2008
“A man walks down the street…”
Related material:
In the above screenshot of New York Times obituaries on the date of Brewster Beach’s death, Tim Russert seems to be looking at the obituary of Air Force Academy chapel architect Walter Netsch.
This suggests another chapel, more closely related to my own experience, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Some background…
Walter Netsch in Oral History (pdf, 467 pp.):
“I also had a book that inspired me– this is 1947– called Communitas by Percival and Paul Goodman. Percival Goodman was the architect, and Paul Goodman was the writer and leftist. And this came out of the University of Chicago– part of the leftist bit of the University of Chicago….
I had sort of in the back of my mind, Communitas appeared from my subconscious of the new town out of town, and there were other people who knew of it….”
“God As Trauma”
by Brewster Yale Beach:
“The problem of crucifixion is
the beginning of individuation.”
“Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
— Lucero Hernandez,
Cuernavaca, 1962
A more impersonal approach
to my own drunkard’s walk
(Cuernavaca, 1962, after
reading the above words):
Cognitive Blending
and the Two Cultures
An approach from the culture
(more precisely, the alternate
religion) of Scientism–
The Drunkard’s Walk:
How Randomness
Rules Our Lives—
is sketched in
Today’s Sermon:
The Holy Trinity vs.
The New York Times
(Sunday, June 8, 2008).
The Times illustrated its review
of The Drunkard’s Walk
with facetious drawings
by Jessica Hagy, who uses
Venn diagrams to make
cynical jokes.
A less cynical use of
a Venn diagram:
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Thursday March 27, 2008
Back to the Garden
Film star Richard Widmark
died on Monday, March 24.
From Log24 on that date:
"Hanging from the highest limb
of the apple tree are
the three God's Eyes…"
Related material:
The Beauty Test, 5/23/07–
H.S.M. Coxeter's classic
Introduction to Geometry (2nd ed.):
Note the resemblance of
the central part to
a magical counterpart–
the Ojo de Dios
of Mexico's Sierra Madre.
From a Richard Widmark film festival:
GARDEN OF EVIL
Henry Hathaway, 1954
"A severely underrated Scope western, shot in breathtaking mountain locations near Cuernavaca. Widmark, Gary Cooper and Cameron Mitchell are a trio of fortune hunters stranded in Mexico, when they are approached by Susan Hayward to rescue her husband (Hugh Marlowe) from a caved-in gold mine in Indian country. When they arrive at the 'Garden of Evil,' they must first battle with one another before they have to stave off their bloodthirsty Indian attackers. Widmark gives a tough, moving performance as Fiske, the one who sacrifices himself to save his friends. 'Every day it goes, and somebody goes with it,' he says as he watches the setting sun. 'Today it's me.' This was one of the best of Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway's later films. With a brilliant score by Bernard Herrmann."
See also
the apple-tree
entries from Monday
(the date of Widmark's death)
and Tuesday, as well as
today's previous entry and
previous Log24
entries on Cuernavaca.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday February 24, 2008

“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….”
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Tuesday May 8, 2007
Symbology:
“Also known as ‘processual symbolic analysis,’ this concept was developed by Victor Turner in the mid-1970s to refer to the use of symbols within cultural contexts, in particular ritual. In anthropology, symbology originated as part of Victor Turner’s concept of ‘comparative symbology.’ Turner (1920-1983) was professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and finally he was Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.” —Wikipedia
Symbology and Communitas:
From Beth Barrie’s
“Victor Turner“— “‘The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole’ (Turner, 1967:51). Turner considered himself a comparative symbologist, which suggests he valued his contributions to the study of ritual symbols. It is in the closely related study of ritual processes that he had the most impact.
The most important contribution Turner made to the field of anthropology is his work on liminality and communitas. Believing the liminal stage to be of ‘crucial importance’ in the ritual process, Turner explored the idea of liminality more seriously than other anthropologists of his day. As noted earlier Turner elaborated on van Gennep’s concept of liminality in rites of passage. Liminality is a state of being in between phases. In a rite of passage the individual in the liminal phase is neither a member of the group she previously belonged to nor is she a member of the group she will belong to upon the completion of the rite. The most obvious example is the teenager who is neither an adult nor a child. ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969:95). Turner extended the liminal concept to modern societies in his study of liminoid phenomena in western society. He pointed out the similarities between the ‘leisure genres of art and entertainment in complex industrial societies and the rituals and myths of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures’ (1977:43). Closely associated to liminality is communitas which describes a society during a liminal period that is ‘unstructured or rudimentarily structured [with] a relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’ (Turner, 1969:96). The notion of communitas is enhanced by Turner’s concept of anti-structure. In the following passage Turner clarifies the ideas of liminal, communitas and anti-structure:
It is the potential of an anti-structured liminal person or liminal society (i.e., communitas) that makes Turner’s ideas so engaging. People or societies in a liminal phase are a ‘kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social developments, of societal change’ (Turner, 1982:45). Turner’s ideas on liminality and communitas have provided scholars with language to describe the state in which societal change takes place.”
Turner, V. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. Turner, V. (1977). Variations of the theme of liminality. In Secular ritual. Ed. S. Moore & B. Myerhoff. Assen: Van Gorcum, 36-52. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theater: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications. |
Related material on Turner in Log24:
Aug. 27, 2006 and Aug. 30, 2006. For further context, see archive of Aug. 19-31, 2006.
Related material on Cuernavaca:
Google search on Cuernavaca + Log24.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Wednesday August 2, 2006
connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
— Opening sentence of
Martha Cooley’s The Archivist
“Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
Friday, May 19, 2006
Friday May 19, 2006
Meeting at Princeton
From May 15 through May 26, there is a women-only meeting on zeta functions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Today’s activities:
Breakfast (Dining Hall) | |
T-shirt Sale, Harry’s Bar – Dining Hall | |
Depart for Princeton University (talks, lunch, campus and art museum tour, and dinner) |
From Log24, July 27, 2003: “…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.” — Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).
|
|
Lucero |
See also |
Women’s History Month–
Global and Local: One Small Step
Monday, February 27, 2006
Monday February 27, 2006
Sudden View
From John O’Hara’s Birthday:
“We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there. We had Lanson 1926. ‘Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you’re gonna sound.'”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938
“And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
“Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
PARIS,
1922-1939.”
— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake
“Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic ramblings of James Joyce.”
— Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit
Monica Potts in today’s New York Times on Sybille Bedford:
“Though her works were not always widely popular, they inspired a deeply fervent following of committed admirers, starting with her first published work, A Sudden View, in 1953. Later retitled A Visit to Don Otavio, it was an account of her journey through Mexico.”
… “I addressed him. ‘Is Cuernavaca not below Mexico City?’
‘It is low.’
‘Then what is this?’ Another summit had sprung up above a curve.
‘At your orders, the Three Marias.’
‘What are the Three Marias?’
‘These.’
Later, I learned from Terry that they were the three peaks by the La Cima Pass which is indeed one of the highest passes in the Republic; and still later from experience, that before running down to anywhere in this country one must first run up some six or seven thousand feet. The descents are more alarming than the climbs. We hurtled towards Cuernavaca down unparapeted slopes with the speed and angle, if not the precision, of a scenic railway– cacti flashed past like telegraph poles, the sun was brilliant, the air like laughing gas, below an enchanting valley, and the lack of brakes became part of a general allegro accelerando.”
— Sybille Bedford, A Sudden View, Counterpoint Press, Counterpoint edition (April 2003), page 77
“How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed! Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees. An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres Marias, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st Perennial Classics edition (May 1, 2000), page 10
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Thursday December 15, 2005
The Cinematic
Imagination,
or
“Frida” meets
“Under the Volcano”
A scene from “Frida”
and a scene from the
Day of the Dead festival,
Cuernavaca, 10/30/04
Related material:
For the Man in Black
(Log 24, 9/13/03)
and
For a Man in Black
(Log 24, 11/17/05).
Tuesday, December 6, 2005
Tuesday December 6, 2005
In memory of…
CUERNAVACA, Mexico – Spanish singer Gloria Lasso, who made her name recording romantic ballads in Latin America and Paris, died in her sleep on Sunday at her home in Cuernavaca. She was 83.
Today’s Harvard Crimson– “Pudding Show Features From yesterday’s entry, “At the still point, Xanadu (1980) For related material, see Balanchine’s Birthday (1/9/03) |
Olivia Newton-John, Sunday,
and Eliot’s “still point,”
see the previous entry.
For more Harvard humor,
see The Crimson Passion.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Wednesday May 11, 2005
From a goodbye letter
by a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:
“Si me de veras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
(See Shining Forth.)
Natasha Richardson,
Martha Quinn,
Frances Fisher —
remind me of
The Sprite and the Synergist Three drinks later he was suddenly inspired. “What I need right now is a girl to lose myself in. That’s the only way to wait for a pattern to show.”
One of his reciprocal Rogues (he had a dozen alternate selves) answered, “Feel free, but you left your big red book in the workshop.” “Why, for jigjeeze sake, can’t I have the little black book, famed in song and story?” “Why can’t you remember a phone number? Never mind. Shall we join the ladies?” He made three calls, all negative. He had three more drinks, all positive. He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk’s cell, thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed p a t t e r n s |
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Wednesday July 14, 2004
Only On My Own Turf.
By Esther Dyson, Editor at Large
Special to ZDNet
July 12, 2004, 3:00 AM PT
On social-networking Web services:
“Perhaps people will revert to private social networks–ones they manage locally….
Perhaps the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links–would become more apparent, and perhaps that would be a good thing.
I’m not sure how good that is as a business model, but it works as a social model.”
The beautiful, brilliant, and charming Esther Dyson seems to have suffered a temporary lapse in brilliance with the above remark on the strength of ties in social networks….
“the law of networks–the strength of a tie degrades by the square of the number of links….”
Here are some useful references encountered while fact-checking Ms. Dyson’s assertion about the “law of networks” —
Links on Graph Theory and Network Analysis
The Navigability of Strong Ties:
Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology (pdf)
Modeling Coleman’s Friendly Association Networks (pdf)
The Strength of Weak Ties:
A Network Theory Revisited (pdf)
Scientific Collaboration Networks, II (pdf)
(Deals specifically with tie-strength computation.)
Dynamic Visualization of Social Networks
and, finally, a diagram of social networks in Shakespeare that conclusively demonstrates that there is no simple relationship between strength of ties and number of ties:
Cleopatra’s Social Ties (png)
Perhaps what Ms. Dyson had in mind was the following (courtesy of The Motley Fool):
“Metcalfe’s Law of Networks states that the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network. Translated, this means that a network that is twice as large as another network will actually be at least four times as valuable. Why? Because four times as many interconnections are possible between participants in the larger network.
When you add a fourth person to a group of three, you don’t add just one more networked relationship. You add several. The new individual can network with all three of the existing persons, and vice versa. The Internet is no different. It became more and more valuable as the numbers of computers using it grew.”
For another perspective on this alleged law, from science fiction author Orson Scott Card, see The Group, a Log24 entry of Sept. 24, 2002.
Elsewhere, in a discussion of social-networking software:
“Esther Dyson starts with a request that people turn to their left and ask the person next to them, ‘Will you be my friend?’ The room erupts in chatter, but, of course, the problem is we don’t have enough information about one another to make a snap decision about that question.”
Obviously, ties resulting from such a request will be weak, rather than strong. However, as study of the above network-theory links will reveal, weak ties can sometimes be more useful than strong ties. An example:
Compare and contrast with
Ms. Dyson’s request to turn and
ask the Mr. Rogers question,
“Will you be my friend?”
The best response to this question
that I know of was contained in
a good-bye letter from a girl named
Lucero in Cuernavaca
in the early 1960’s:
“Si me deveras quieres,
deja me en paz.”
(See Shining Forth.)
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Thursday March 11, 2004
Sequel
From an entry of July 27, 2003…
“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.” — Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).
|
|
Lucero |
See also |
Catholic Tastes, Part II:
A Catholic priest on “The Passion of the Christ”:
“By the time it’s over, the make-up artists give his skin the texture of spaghetti marinara.”
— The Rev. Richard A. Blake, S.J., professor of fine arts and co-director of the film studies program at Boston College, in America magazine, issue dated March 15, 2004.
Related material:
“I’m waiting for Mel’s sequel:
‘He’s back. Christ Almighty!
The Resurrection.
This time, it’s personal.’ “
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Wednesday March 3, 2004
An Association of Ideas
“The association is the idea.” — Ian Lee
“One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist… I took it as a compliment.”
— Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted
MIT biography of Carl Kaysen, Susanna Kaysen’s father:
“His scholarly work has ranged widely in the areas where economics, sociology, politics and law overlap.”
From Venn Diagram
by Alejandro Fuentes Penna and
Oscar de la Paz Arroyo,
ITESM Campus Cuernavaca,
Lomas de Cuernavaca,
Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
“Ahí construyó Félix Candela la Capilla abierta (1959, junto con Guillermo Rosell y Manuel Larrosa)
que iba a ser un templo para todas las religiones, pero que no fue autorizada por las autoridades. Más adelante la Capilla habría de convertirse en restaurante, como el de Xochimilco construido en 1957, discoteca, bar y teatro. En el Casino de la Selva vivieron personajes famosos. Uno de ellos fue el escritor inglés Malcolm Lowry….”
— El Casino de la Selva,
Octavio Rodríguez Araujo
“No se puede vivir sin amar.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Friday, January 2, 2004
Friday January 2, 2004
What, and Give Up Show Biz?
"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
— Saying attributed to Edmund Gwenn, star of "Miracle on 34th Street," and also attributed to "Noel Coward, David Garrick, William Holden, Edmund Kean, Marcel Marceau, Groucho Marx, and Oscar Wilde."
See also yesterday's entry on the Dark Lady. For more on Santa and the Dark Lady, see my archive for Aug.-Sept. 2002.
"Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound."
— Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara,
"another acidic writer to whom he
[John Gregory Dunne]
was often compared"
(Adam Bernstein, Washington Post)
For some context for the Hope of Heaven quotation, see Immortal Diamond: O'Hara, Hopkins, and Joyce, or click on the adding machine in yesterday's entry.
For more on miracles and the afterlife, see my archive for September 2002.
Monday, October 27, 2003
Monday October 27, 2003
“Heaven is a state, a sort of
metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara,
Hope of Heaven, 1938
“Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca,
ach du lieber August.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven
Frère Jacques
is a
“canon à quatre voix.”
For another, purely visual,
four-part canon, see the
owl-like picture
in the web page
Poetry’s Bones.
See, too, the Wallace Stevens poem
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus,”
and hear Stevie Nicks as the voice
of The Wizard Owl in a story titled
Frère Jacques.
Friday, September 12, 2003
Friday September 12, 2003
Into the Sunset
I just learned of Johnny’s Cash’s death. On Google News, the headline was Johnny Cash rides into sunset. The source was the Bangkok Post.
“Don’t you know that
when you play at this level
there’s no ordinary venue.”
— One Night in Bangkok (midi)
“They are the horses of a dream.
They are not what they seem.”
— The Hex Witch of Seldom, page 16
A Singer
7-Cycle
The Magnificent Seven:
CLICK HERE for
“the adventures of filming this epic
on location in Cuernavaca, Mexico.”
“He is the outlaw the people love, — The Hex Witch of Seldom, |
“Words are events.”
— Walter J. Ong, Society of Jesus
“…search for thirty-three and three…”
— The Black Queen in The Eight
Thursday, August 28, 2003
Thursday August 28, 2003
"Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, — John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven |
"anticipate the happiness of heaven" |
= | "himmlisches Glück vorweg empfinden" |
See also today's previous entries.
Thursday August 28, 2003
Spirit
In memory of
Walter J. Ong, S. J.,
professor emeritus
at St. Louis University,
St. Louis, Missouri
"The Garden of Eden is behind us
and there is no road back to innocence;
we can only go forward."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Earth Shine, p. xii
Earth Shine, p. xiii:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets.
Eliot was a native of St. Louis.
"Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls.
In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit."
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
Book Cover,
1954:
"The pattern of the heavens
and high, night air"
— Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
See also my notes of
Monday, August 25, 2003
(the feast day of Saint Louis,
for whom the city is named).
For a more Eden-like city,
see my note of
October 23, 2002,
on Cuernavaca, Mexico,
where Charles Lindbergh
courted Anne Morrow.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Sunday July 27, 2003
Catholic Tastes
In memory of New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday, July 26, 2003:
Nous Voici Dans La Ville – A Christmas song from 15th century France (midi by John Philip Dimick).
In memory of my own youth:
![]() |
Formaggio Address Paseo del Conquistador # 144 Food Type Italian Dress Casual Tel 777-313-0584 Comment Chef Lorenzo Villagra is formally trained in Italian Cuisine. Great food and views of the valley of Cuernavaca. |
In memory of love:
Volverán del amor en tus oídos
Las palabras ardientes a sonor;
Tu corazón de su profundo sueño
Tal vez despertará;
Pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,
Como se adora a Dios ante su altar,
Como yo te he querido…desengáñate,
¡Así no te querrán!
— from “Rima LIII“
by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
(1836-1870)
Translation by Young Allison, 1924:
Burning words of love will come
Again full oft within thine ears to sound;
Perchance thy heart will even be aroused
From its sleep profound;
But mute and prostrate and absorbed,
As God is worshipped in His holy fane,
As I have loved thee…undeceive thyself:
Thou wilt not be thus loved again!
The Robert Lowell version of
the complete poem by Bécquer:
Will Not Come Back
(Volverán)
Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak:
but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty
and my good fortune… as if they knew our names–
they’ll not come back. The thick lemony honeysuckle,
climbing from the earthroot to your window,
will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;
but these… like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,
the tears of day–they’ll not come back…
Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;
but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,
as men adore God at the altar, as I love you–
don’t blind yourself, you’ll not be loved like that.
“…my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.” — Charles Small, Harvard ’64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 11/21/02).
|
|
Lucero |
See also |
See, too, my entry for the feast day of
Saint Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,
which happens to be December 22.
Friday, January 31, 2003
Friday January 31, 2003
John O'Hara's Birthday
"We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there. We had Lanson 1926. 'Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that champagne, my sweet, or how you're gonna sound.'"
— John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938
"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."
"Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
PARIS,
1922-1939."
— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake
"Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic ramblings of James Joyce."
— Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit
Illustration added at 3:21 AM Feb. 3, 2003:
Firefall
Available for $220 from
Worship Banners
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Thursday January 30, 2003
Poetic Justice:
The Peacock Throne
Yesterday was the death day of two proponents of Empire: George III (in 1820) and Robert Frost (in 1963). Lord Byron argued that the King slipped through heaven's gate unobserved while a friend distracted St. Peter with bad poetry. We may imagine, on this dark night of the soul, Frost performing a similar service.
Though poets of the traditional sort may still perform such services in Heaven, here on earth they have been superseded by writers of song lyrics. An example, Roddy Frame (formerly of the group "Aztec Camera"), was born on yesterday's date in 1964. A Frame lyric:
Transformed by some strange alchemy,*
You stand apart and point to me
And point to something I can't see….
Namely:
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The Back Door to Heaven
For poetic purposes, we may think of surreptitious entry into Heaven as being conveniently accomplished through a portal like the above back door, which is that of a small hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
This is not your average Motel 6 back door. As a former New York Times correspondent has written,
"Over the years, the guest list has drawn the likes of Prince Philip and the Shah of Iran, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But informality still reigns."
This small hotel (or its heavenly equivalent), whose gardens are inhabited by various exotic birds, including peacocks, may still be haunted by the late Shah, who apparently styled himself "King of Kings and Emperor of the Peacock Throne." Of course, the ghost of the King of Kings, after entering the garden of Paradise, may not be able to resume his former human shape. He might still, however, be among those greeted by his fellow Emperor, George III, with the famous words
*For more on alchemy and Cuernavaca, see
my journal note "The Black Queen."
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
Wednesday January 1, 2003
ART WARS: That Old Devil Moon |
|
From The New York Times, Wed., Jan. 1, 2003:
Richard Horner, 82,
Broadway Producer, Is DeadRichard Horner, a Broadway theater owner and producer who won a Tony Award for the 1974 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Moon for the Misbegotten,” died on Saturday [December 28, 2002] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 82.
According to one source, the O’Neill revival opened on December 28, 1973 — the same date on which the life of one of its producers was later to close.
From a CurtainUp review:
The revival at the Morosco was dubbed by its company “The Resurrection Play” since Jason Robards undertook the part just after a near fatal car accident and its legendary director José Quintero had just given up drinking.
According to the Internet Broadway Database, this revival, or resurrection, took place officially not on December 28 — the date of Horner’s death — but, appropriately, a day later.
At any rate, O’Neill’s title, along with my weblog entry of December 28, 2002,
“On This Date,” featuring Kylie Minogue,
suggests the following mini-exhibit of artistic efforts:
Curtain Up! July 2000 |
![]() |
Under the Volcano: A painting based on Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel. Having played tennis, Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle talk about the events a year earlier. The view is of Cuernavaca from the Casino de la Selva hotel. Painting by |
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For further details on Kylie, Mexico, tequila, and
Under the Volcano,
see my entry of November 5, 2002.
For today’s site music, click “Old Devil Moon” here.
Addendum of 9:30 pm 1/1/03: For a politically correct view For a more perceptive analysis, If there is a devil here, J. D. Salinger (Nine Stories), Frazer might appreciate the remarks in
Raven, take a bough. |
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Wednesday October 23, 2002
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:
Wednesday October 23, 2002
Eleven Years Ago Today…
On October 23, 1991, I placed in my (paper) journal various entries that would remind me of the past… of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and a girl I knew there in 1962. One of the entries dealt with a book by Arthur Koestler, The Challenge of Chance. A search for links related to that book led to the following site, which I find very interesting:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2740/.
This is a commonplace-book site, apparently a collection of readings for the end of the century and millennium. No site title or owner is indicated, but the readings are excellent. Accepting the challenge of chance, I reproduce one of the readings… The author was not writing about Cuernavaca, but may as well have been.
From Winter’s Tale, Harcourt Brace (1983):
Four Gates to the CityBy MARK HELPRIN Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls. In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery. To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream, and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever. |
Thursday, October 3, 2002
Thursday October 3, 2002
Literary Landmarks
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for Oct. 3:
“On this day in 1610, Ben Jonson’s funniest comedy The Alchemist was entered into the Stationer’s Register. It involves a servant who when the masters are away sets up a necromantic shop, tricking all and everyone.”
From Literary Calendar for tomorrow, Oct. 4:
“1892 — Robert Lawson, the only author/illustrator to win both the Caldecott Award and the Newbery Award—both coveted awards in the United States for children’s literature, is born.”
As a child I was greatly influenced by Robert Lawson’s illustrations for the Godolphin abridgement of Pilgrim’s Progress. Later I was to grow up partly in Cuernavaca, Mexico, an appropriate setting for The Valley of the Shadow of Death and other Bunyan/Lawson themes. Still later, I encountered Malcolm Lowry’s great novel Under the Volcano, set in Cuernavaca. Lowry’s novel begins with an epigraph from Bunyan. For the connection with Ben Jonson, see Pete Hamill’s article “The Alchemist of Cuernavaca” in Art News magazine, April 2001, pages 134-137. See also my journal note of April 4, 2001, The Black Queen.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Tuesday September 24, 2002
The Shining of Lucero
From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:
The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”
The Eye of the Beholder:
When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.
— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“
From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:
He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….
Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.
……………… Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”
“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”
“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”
“Bohr’s words?”
“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”
……………… Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.” “We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”
To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in CuernavacaFrom On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….
I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”
From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:
“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”
“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”
…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”
……………… Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”
“No I’m not.”
……………… “Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.”
From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:
Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card….
For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.
For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”
Thursday, September 5, 2002
Thursday September 5, 2002
Trifecta
Born today: Arthur Koestler,
former Communist and writer on parapsychology
From To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973:
“Mary-Molly luv, it’s going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we’re the original nonconformists…. and Society will never permit us to integrate. That’s okay!” He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers. “The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”
“Yes, an airplane has blind spots. Where would you put a saddle?” Molly had her practical side.
He laughed and hugged her. Henry’s frequent demonstrations of affection were a source of great delight to Molly, whose own strength was in tactile contacts.
“Don’t know. Lord, how would you bridle a winged horse?”
“With the heart?”
“Indubitably!” The notion pleased him. “Yes, with the heart and the head because Pegasus is too strong a steed to control or subdue by any ordinary method.”
Born today: Darryl F. Zanuck,
producer of “Viva Zapata!”
Director Eliza Kazan consults with scriptwriter John Steinbeck about the production of “Viva Zapata!” in Cuernavaca, Mexico:
When John woke, I asked him, “Isn’t the Syndicate of Film Technicians and Workers here Communist-dominated?”
Elia Kazan on Darryl Zanuck’s insistence that Zapata’s white horse be emphasized:
Darryl made only one suggestion that he was insistent on. He’d stolen it, no doubt, from an old Warner western, but he offered it as if it were pristine stuff. “Zapata must have a white horse,” he said, “and after they shoot him, we should show the horse running free in the mountains — get the idea? A great fade-out.” We got the idea, all right. Darryl was innocent about the symbol in his suggestion, but so enthusiastic about the emotion of it that he practically foamed at the mouth. John’s face was without expression. Actually, while I thought it was corny, the idea worked out well in the end.
Born today: comedian Bob Newhart
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If Kazan hadn’t directed “Viva Zapata!”…
Zanuck would have ended up shouting, “I said a WHITE horse!” |
Thursday September 5, 2002
Birthdate of film producer Darryl F. Zanuck
Among Zanuck’s films were “All about Eve” and “Viva Zapata!”
Bright Star
I do not have a photograph of Lucero Hernandez, the subject of my journal notes
Shining Forth and
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
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In keeping with Zanuck’s commandment that “The kid stays in the picture!” —
The photo at left, of a very young actress, captures some of Lucero’s beauty. |
Center for Global Education,
Augsburg College
Semester-abroad Program in Mexico
“The program is based in Cuernavaca, a city known for its perennial springtime (70-80 degrees). Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, is about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Both the city and the state are important in Mexican history: the palace of the conqueror Hernan Cortez borders the central plaza in Cuernavaca and Morelos is known as “the cradle of the Mexican revolution” of 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata, who was born in a small town near Cuernavaca. A city of more than one million, Cuernavaca is also known for its innovative grass-roots education programs, economic cooperatives, and base Christian communities inspired by liberation theology.”