Log24

Saturday, April 8, 2023

The Harrowing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

Excerpt of Google Book Search results tonight —

(The search, suggested by a current art exhibition, was for
"Josefine Lyche" + Cullinane . See also a 2017 post titled
"So Set 'Em Up, Jo.")

Saturday, March 31, 2018

Notes for the Harrowing of Hell

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:18 pm

From a post of April 15, 2006

From elsewhere

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Harrowing of Hell (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:28 pm

Holy Saturday is, according to tradition, the day of 
the harrowing of Hell.

Notes:

The above passage on "Die Figuren der vier Modi
im Magischen Quadrat 
" should be read in the context of
a Log24 post from last year's Devil's Night (the night of
October 30-31).  The post, "Structure," indicates that, using
the transformations of the diamond theorem, the notorious
"magic" square of Albrecht Dürer may be transformed
into normal reading order.  That order is only one of
322,560 natural reading orders for any 4×4 array of
symbols. The above four "modi" describe another.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Harrowing Cuteness

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:22 am

The title is a phrase from yesterday's post.

An example of harrowing cuteness:

Charlize Theron in "Young Adult" (2011) —

Related material for older adults: Ravenna and Nietzsche.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Harrowing Pater

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

For the first word of the title, see The Harrowing of Hell.

For the second, see Pater and Hopkins.

This post was suggested by yesterday’s Symmetry and by…

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Harrowing (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Theology in 'A Flag for Sunrise'

There is an unwarranted leap here
from "suggests" to "knowledge."

See Under the Volcano  and "harrowing" in this journal.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Harrowing

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:28 am

"Oh Death oh Death please let me see
If Christ has turned his back on me
When you were called and asked to bow
You wouldn’t take heed
And it’s too late now

Oh Death oh Death please give me time
To fix my heart and change my mind
Your mind is fixed
Your heart is bound
And I have the shackles to drag you down

Farewell, farewell
To all farewell
My doom is fixed
I’m summoned to hell
As long as God
In heaven shall dwell
My soul my soul shall scream in hell"

— Sung by Hazel Dickens in "Songcatcher"

The rest of the lyrics, and a video, may be found
at PaganSpace.net — "The Meeting Place for the Occult Community."

See also Harrowing in this journal.

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Jacobean Jacobian:

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:09 am

An attempt to clear up confusion sown by a Christian witch.

The above OED quotations omit a notable instance of the phrase in
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" drawn from a Jacobean dramatist —

The Log24 date above, September 7, recurs in recent mathematics —

See as well a post on the so-called Hungarian Algorithm.

Thursday, August 26, 2021

Memorable

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:58 am

 Related remarks for mattress dancers
This  journal on the above Instagram date.

Friday, July 19, 2019

Young-Adult Story

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:20 am

See also . . .

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Progressive Matrix

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 am

Yesterday's post and recent Hollywood news suggest
a meditation on a Progressive Matrix —

Oct. 12-14, 2005:

'A Poem for Pinter,' conclusion: 'Tick Tick Hash.'

'The Interpreter'-- Sean Penn to Nicole Kidman-- 'My Card.'

Click to enlarge.

"My card."

Structurally related images —

A sample Raven's Progressive Matrices  test item
(such items share the 3×3 structure of the hash symbol above):

IMAGE- Raven's Progressive Matrices item with symbols from Cullinane's box-style I Ching

Structural background —

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Vonnegut’s Birthday

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Blackboard Jungle

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 am

(Continued)

Harrowing of Hell (Catholic Encyclopedia )

"This is the Old English and Middle English term
for the triumphant descent of Christ into hell (or Hades)
between the time of His Crucifixion and His Resurrection,
when, according to Christian belief, He brought salvation
to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world."

Through the Blackboard (Feb. 25, 2010)—

Physicist accelerated against his blackboard in 'A Serious Man'

See also The Dreaming Jewels and Colorful Tale.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Background

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:29 pm

From Joyce's 1912 Trieste lecture on Blake:

"Michelangelo's influence is felt in all of Blake's work, and especially in some passages of prose collected in the fragments, in which he always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void."

For a related thought from Michelangelo, see Marmo Solo .

For pure, clean lines, see Galois Geometry.

As for "the uncreated void," see the Ernst Gombrich link in Marmo Solo  for "an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void."

For some related religious remarks suited to the Harrowing of Hell on this Holy Saturday, see August 16, 2003

Monday, August 2, 2010

Specific and Robust

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

The New York Times  version of the philosophers' stone:

IMAGE-- The Philosophers' Stone, according to The New York Times-- Intro to a column by Prof. Gary Gutting of Notre Dame

In the Times 's latest sermon from THE STONE, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, discusses

"…the specific and robust claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about how God is concretely and continually involved in our existence."

A search shows that Gutting's phrase "specific and robust" has many echoes in biotechnology, and a few in software development. The latter is of more interest to me than the former. (The poetically inclined might say that Professor Gutting's line of work is  a sort of software development.)

"As a developer, you need a specific and robust set of development tools in the smallest and simplest package possible."

EasyEclipse web page

Here are two notes on related material:

Specific— The Pit:

See a search for "harrowing of Hell" in this journal.

("…right through hell there is a path…." –Malcolm Lowry)

Robust— The Pendulum:

See a search for "Foucault's Pendulum" in this journal.

(“Others say it is a stone that posseses mysterious powers…. often depicted as a dazzling light.  It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy.  It nourishes, heals, wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists….”

Foucault’s Pendulum )

Those puzzled by why the NY Times  would seek the opinions of a professor at a Catholic university may consult Gutting's home page.

He is an expert on the gay Communist Michel Foucault, a student of Althusser.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

07 Book

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:29 am

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Talent for Writing, and Falling Into Things

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/books/07book.html)

The above headline from this morning's New York Times  is a rather strong reminder of a post linked to here last night—  a post from April 10, 2004 (Holy Saturday), titled "Harrowing."

The book under review is a biography of William Golding, also quoted here in "Harrowing."

From that post—

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

– Stephen Spender, introduction to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

Related material:

Theater of Truth

 rift-design— Definition by Deborah Levitt

"Rift.  The stroke or rending by which a world worlds, opening both the 'old' world and the self-concealing earth to the possibility of a new world. As well as being this stroke, the rift is the site— the furrow or crack— created by the stroke. As the 'rift design' it is the particular characteristics or traits of this furrow."

– "Heidegger and the Theater of Truth," in Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, Vol. 1, 1998

See also "harrow up" + Hamlet  in this journal.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Virgil Vigil

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100403-WallaceLemniscate.jpg

The Cartesian cross

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-CartesianCross.jpg

The lemniscate

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-InfinitySymbol.jpg

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-LemniscateCross.gif
 
A more traditional symbol
that has been described as
  the cross of St. Boniface
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-%20BonifaceCross.gif
 
See also The Eight, a novel
by Katherine Neville related
to today's date, 4/4–
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100404-TheEight.jpg

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Symbology continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 pm

The Magic Lyre

The front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review is devoted to a new novel titled Angelology.

Detail of the front page, top right corner–

Lyre illustrating a review of the novel 'Angelology' by Danielle Trussoni

"…this will be popular for fans of such historical thrillers as… Katherine Neville's The Eight." —Library Journal

The New York Times review is more flattering– "a terrifically clever thriller– more Eco than Brown…."

Related historical remarks–

the symbology novels of Dan Brown and…

TIME Magazine cover, issue dated March 15, 2010- 'History Maker- How Tom Hanks is redefining America's past

TIME magazine cover, issue
dated March 15, 2010–
"History Maker: How Tom Hanks is
redefining America's past"

For some theological background to
this post and today's noon post,
see the use of the word "harrowing"
in this journal — particularly on
April 19, 2003– Holy Saturday.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Triptych

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

Triptych: 'Look at the Birdie,' 'A Wind in the Door,' and 'Diamond Theory'

Related material:

"Harrowing cuteness,"* The Eden Express, and a search on "harrowing" in this journal

* Perhaps a typo, but still a memorable phrase.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Thursday January 29, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:23 am
Dagger Definitions

From 'Ulysses,' 1922 first edition, page 178-- 'dagger definitions'
 
Midrash by a post-bac:

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

“Horseness is
the whatness of allhorse”:
Thingism vs. Thisness

By Amy Peterson

Jacques Derrida once asked the surly and self-revealing question, “Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?” As with philosophers generally, literary critics come with their own inaccessible argot, some terms of which are useful, but most of which are not and only add more loops to literary criticism’s spiraling abstraction. Take for example, James Wood’s neologism thisness (h/t: 3 Quarks Daily):

The project of modernity in Wood’s eyes is largely in revealing the contour and shape, the specific ‘feel’ of that essential mystery. He even borrows a concept from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, haecceitas or ‘thisness,’ to explain what he means: ‘By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.’ (my emphasis)

Wood is clearly taking his cue here from the new trend in literary criticism of referring to realism by its etymological meaning, thingism. Where thingism is meant to capture the materialism of late nineteenth and early 20th century Realist literature, thisness, it seems, is meant to capture the basic immaterialism of Modern realist literature. In this, it succeeds. Realism is no longer grounded in the thingism, or material aspect, of reality as it was during the Victorian era. In contemporary literature, it is a “puff of palpability” that hints at reality’s contours but does not disturb our essential understanding of existence as an impalpable mystery. So now we have this term that seems to encompass the Modern approach to reality, but is it useful as an accurate conception of reality (i.e. truth, human existence, and the like), and how are we to judge its accuracy?

I think that, as far as literature is concerned, the test of the term’s accuracy lies in the interpretation of the Modernist texts that Wood champions as truthful but largely abstract depictions of human experience:

‘Kafka’s ‘”Metamorphosis” and Hamsun’s “Hunger” and Beckett’s “Endgame” are not representations of likely or typical human activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts.’

For brevity’s sake, I’ll pick a passage from a different Modernist text that I think exemplifies the issues involved in the question of thingism and thisness’ reality. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, a pub discussionhttp://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif of art’s purpose arises in which the writer Geoffrey Russell asserts that “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences”; in his thoughts, Stephen Dedalus prepares to counter this:

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepy crawl after [William] Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

To give my best translation of Stephen-think: The physical being of the horse (“horseness”) grounds the over-arching, abstract idea of the horse (“allhorse”) in reality (“whatness”). God—the ultimate abstraction—is elusive and rarely manifests himself as a material reality (when listening to children playing earlier in the book, Stephen asserts that God is a “shout in the street”). Space—the material world—must be observed to make sense of abstract ideas (like God). Stephen’s opponents who believe that art must depict the abstract and the essential make claims about existence that have very little basis in material reality so that they can grasp at the divine through the work of such famously fantastic artists as William Blake, whose unrealistic poetry and paintings Stephen evidently holds in little esteem here, though he’s kinder to Blake elsewhere. Finally, the present makes concrete the abstract possibilities of the future by turning them into the realities of the past.

Ulysses elucidates the distinction between abstractly based and materially based realism because, while abstract to be sure, Joyce’s writing is deeply rooted in material existence, and it is this material existence which has given it its lasting meaning and influence. The larger point that I’m trying to make here is that material reality gives meaning to the abstract. (As a corollary, the abstract helps us to make sense of material reality.) There can be no truth without meaning, and there can be no meaning without a material form of existence against which to judge abstract ideas. To argue, as Wood does, that the abstract can produce concrete truths with little reference to material reality is to ignore the mutual nature of the relationship between material reality and truth. The more carefully we observe material reality, the more truth we gain from our abstractions of its phenomena, or, to state it in the vocabulary—though not the style—of literary criticism: thisness is a diluted form of thingism, which means that thisness is productive of fewer (and lesser) truths.

http://www.log24.com/images/asterisk8.gif “Space: what you
  damn well
     have to see.”

Amy Peterson
has failed to see
that the unsheathing
of dagger definitions
takes place not in
a pub, but in
The National Library
of Ireland
.

The Russell here is not
Geoffrey but rather
George William Russell,
also known as AE.

Related material:

Yesterday’s Log24 entry
for the Feast of
St. Thomas Aquinas,
Actual Being,”
and the four entries
that preceded it.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Monday December 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

The Folding

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

Ghost:

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!"

This recalls the title of a piece in this week's New Yorker:"The Book of Lists:
Susan Sontag’s early journals
." (See Log24 on Thursday, Dec. 18.)

In the rather grim holiday spirit of that piece, here are some journal notes for Sontag, whom we may imagine as the ghost of Hanukkah past.

There are at least two ways of folding a list (or tale) to fit a rectangular frame.The normal way, used in typesetting English prose and poetry, starts at the top, runs from left to right, jumps down a line, then again runs left to right, and so on until the passage is done or the bottom right corner of the frame is reached.

The boustrophedonic way again goes from top to bottom, with the first line running from left to right, the next from right to left, the next from left to right, and so on, with the lines' directions alternating.

The word "boustrophedon" is from the Greek words describing the turning, at the end of each row, of an ox plowing (or "harrowing") a field.

The Tale of
the Eternal Blazon

by Washington Irving

"Blazon meant originally a shield, and then the heraldic bearings on a shield.
Later it was applied to the art of describing or depicting heraldic bearings
in the proper manner; and finally the term came to signify ostentatious display
and also description or record by words or other means. In Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5,
the Ghost, while talking with Prince Hamlet, says:

'But this eternal blazon
must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.'

Eternal blazon signifies revelation or description of things pertaining to eternity."

Irving's Sketch Book, p. 461

By Washington Irving and Mary Elizabeth Litchfield, Ginn & Company, 1901

Related material:

Folding (and harrowing up)
some eternal blazons —

The 16 Puzzle: transformations of a 4x4 square
These are the foldings
described above.

They are two of the 322,560
natural ways to fit
the list (or tale)
"1, 2, 3, … 15, 16"
into a 4×4 frame.

For further details, see
The Diamond 16 Puzzle.

Moral of the tale:

Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker, issue dated April 12, 2004–

"Time, for L'Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, 'When you bring a sheet off the line, you can't handle it until it's folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can't exist until it's folded– or it's a story without a book.'"

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Wednesday July 9, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:28 am
God, Time, Epiphany

8:28:32 AM

Anthony Hopkins, from
All Hallows' Eve
last year
:

"For me time is God,
God is time. It's an equation,
like an Einstein equation."

James Joyce, from
June 26 (the day after
AntiChristmas) this year
:

"… he glanced up at the clock
of the Ballast Office and smiled:
— It has not epiphanised yet,
he said."

Ezra Pound (from a page
linked to yesterday morning):

"It seems quite natural to me
that an artist should have
just as much pleasure in an
arrangement of planes
or in a pattern of figures,
  as in painting portraits…."

From Epiphany 2008:

An arrangement of planes:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080709-Epiphany.gif

From May 10, 2008:

A pattern of figures:

 

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in 'Paradise of Childhood'

See also Richard Wilhelm on
Hexagram 32 of the I Ching:

 

"Duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances. It is not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression. Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending. The end is reached by an inward movement, by inhalation, systole, contraction, and this movement turns into a new beginning, in which the movement is directed outward, in exhalation, diastole, expansion."

 

'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell…

    by Hulme, 1907, page 64

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Tuesday July 8, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:14 pm

New York Lottery mid-day today: 672

'The Middle-English Harrowing of Hell,' by Hulme, 1907, page 64, line 672: 'with this he gaf the gaste'

The Middle-English
    Harrowing of Hell…
    by Hulme, 1907, page 64
 

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Wednesday May 28, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Tequila
Mockingbird

(November 5, 2002):

CelebritySexNews.com
on Kylie Minogue:

“Turns out she’s a party girl
who loves Tequila:
‘Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes.'”

From a web page on
Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel
Under the Volcano

The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  “A corpse will be transported by express!” (Lowry, Volcano, p. 43).

Kylie Minogue
Kylie

Film 'Under the Volcano'
Finney

 
Well if you want to ride
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
— Lonnie Donegan (d. Nov. 3) 
and others
 
Station of the Rock Island Line
 
The Rock Island Line’s namesake depot 
in Rock Island, Illinois


Related material:

Twenty-First Century Fox
(10/6/02)

Back to You, Kylie
(11/5/02)

Time, Eternity, and Grace
(11/22/02)

That Old Devil Moon
(1/1/03) and
The Shanghai Gesture
(1/3/03)

Whirligig
(1/5/03)

Harrowing
(4/19/03)

Temptation
(4/22/03)

Temptation
(4/9/04)

Tribute
,
Train of Thought,
Drunk Bird, and
From Here to Eternity
(8/17/04-8/18/04)

Heaven and Earth
(9/2/04)

Habeas Corpus

(11/24/04)

X, continued
(12/4/04)

Birth and Death
(5/28/05)

Time Travel
(5/28/06)

Timeagain and
Two-Bar Hook
(8/9/06)

Echoes
(8/11/06)

Phantasmagoria
and Tequila!
(9/23/06)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thursday October 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
The Nobel Prize
in Literature

this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.

Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007

Art History, 1955: Scenes from Bad Day at Black Rock

Background from 1947:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071011-Cleavage.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Further details:

WheelThe image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code
:

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”

— Robinson Jeffers

From Holy Saturday, 2004:

The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see

Rock of Ages

(St. Cecilia’s Day, 2006).

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Saturday April 7, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:25 pm
Today's birthdays:
Francis Ford Coppola
and Russell Crowe

Gift of the Third Kind
 

Background:
Art Wars and
Russell Crowe as
Santa's Helper
.

From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:

Froebel's Third Gift

From Christmas 2005:

The Eightfold Cube

Related material from
Pittsburgh:

Reinventing Froebel's Gifts

… and from Grand Rapids:

Color Cubes

Click on pictures for details.

Related material
for Holy Saturday:

Harrowing,
"Hey, Big Spender,"
and
Santa Versus the Volcano.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Saturday September 16, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am

Pandora's Box

Part I:
The Pandora Cross

"There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."

— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids"


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060916-Art.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(See Log24, Sept. 13)

Part II:
The Opening

Remarks by the Pope on Sept. 12,
as reported by the Vatican:

Faith, Reason, and the University:
Memories and Reflections

For the result of
the Pope's remarks, see
a transcript of
 yesterday's Google News
and the following
from BBC today:

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Click to enlarge the screenshot.

Part III:
Hope

The New Yorker (issue of June 5, 2006) on the late Oriana Fallaci:

"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger."

For further details, see yesterday's Log24.


Part IV:
The Sibyl's Song

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— From The Magic Circle,
 a spiritual narrative
 by Katherine Neville

For more on "the long-mute voice
of the past," on "darkness beneath
the volcano," and on uncorking,
see Glory Season and Harrowing.

Related material from
Log24 on Dec. 2, 2005:

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

"… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato's Socrates was 'the God' and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as 'the truly divine' is absolutely no longer sufficient."

A symbol of Apollo:

IMAGE- The ninefold square

and a related
Christian symbol,

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the Greek Cross
(adapted from
Ad Reinhardt).

Moral of the Pandora Cross:

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville in The Magic Circle…

quoted in The Nine, a Log24 entry
for Hermann Weyl's birthday,
November 9, 2004.
 

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Saturday April 15, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm
High Society


(See previous entry,
on Francis L. Kellogg)\

More bookmarks, in the spirit of
  Hemingway rather than Fitzgerald,
 from the date of Kellogg's death–

New York State lottery
on April 6, 2006:

Mid-day: 338
 Evening: 323

From A Flag for Sunrise, page 338:

"She seemed, superficially, to have
thrown every grain of her energy
into the driving…. She was stone
beautiful, he thought; to his eye
outrageously and provocatively
beautiful…."

Related material:
 
Compare with Grace Kelly driving
Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief"
and Frank Sinatra in "High Society."

Those who prefer a different sort
of high may also prefer a different
page in A Flag for Sunrise: 323.

"He was very high, higher than he
had ever been.  His thoughts
twisted off into spools,
arabesques, snatches of
music."

 Related material:

"Harrowing," from
Holy Saturday, 2003.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Saturday November 12, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm
Ten is a Hen

Follow the spiritual journey
that is BEE SEASON.

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“‘Tikkun Olam,
the fixing of the world,’
she whispers.  ‘I’ve been
gathering up the broken vessels
to make things whole again.'”

   — Miriam in Bee Season

Tikkun Olam, the gathering
of the divine fragments,
is a religious activity….
How do we work for
the repair of the world?
If we live in a
humpty dumpty world,
how do we get it all
put back together again?”

The Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder,
October 5, 2003

“… the tikkun can’t start until
everyone asks what happened–
not just the Jews but everybody.
The strange thing is that
  Christ evidently saw this.”

Martha Cooley, The Archivist 

“She understands that Bloom asked for breakfast in bed. Since we were present when Bloom fell asleep and he had not asked for breakfast in bed before he fell asleep, Molly may have misunderstood his sleepy murmurs about the Roc’s egg.”

Jorn Barger on Finnegans Wake:

“Acknowledging the dream as sexually harrowing, we’re offered relief in a view of ALP as a hen scratching up battle-relics from a midden heap after the fall/Flood.

And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there’ll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care….”

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Saturday March 26, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
Harrowing

Definition 1          Definition 2

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Click on picture for details.

Added at 1:11 PM Saturday:

From a discussion of gnostic heresies in today’s Tennessean.com:

Gnostic way a backlash against
lackluster sermons, worship

”Jesus is not a teacher in the conventional sense, according to the Gospel of Thomas, because people must come to knowledge themselves,” writes Marvin Meyer in The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus, the latest book to collect these hidden gospels and secret sayings of Jesus.

”Jesus was more like a bartender, in that he serves the intoxicating drink of knowledge, but people must drink for themselves.”

 
“It’s quarter to three…”

See also
The Twelve Steps of Christmas
from Sinatra’s birthday last year.

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Tuesday June 22, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

Dirty Trick

Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.

From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:

I

He frequently told the story of how, towards the end of the war, he had to interrogate a French traitor (imprisoned by the Free French), who refused to cooperate unless he was allowed to live. Should Hampshire, knowing the man was condemned to die, promise him a reprieve, which he was in no position to give, or truthfully refuse it, thereby jeopardising the lives of Resistance fighters?

“If you’re in a war,” said Hampshire, “you can’t start thinking, ‘Well I can’t lie to a man who’s going to be shot tomorrow and tell him that he isn’t.’ ”

But what the whole anecdote, and its incessant retelling, revealed was that Hampshire had, in fact, thought precisely what he said was unthinkable, and that whichever of the two decisions he finally took lay heavy on his conscience ever afterwards. Indicatively, too, it was especially loathsome to him because, although he did not say this in so many words, the traitor was almost a mirror image of himself – a cultivated young intellectual, looking like a film star, much influenced by elegant literary stylists – except that, in the traitor’s case, his literary mentors were fascist.

II

It is hard to know how Hampshire’s academic career was vitiated by the scandal over his affair with Ayer’s wife Renee, whom he married in 1961 after a divorce in which he was named as co-respondent. Even if less a matter of the dons’ moral conviction than their concern over how All Souls would appear, the affair caused a massive furore….

From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire’s death:

I

“Hemingway called it a dirty trick.  It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space…. the dirty Ordeal by Death….”

— Jack Kerouac in Desolation Angels

II

The New Yorker of June 14  & 21, 2004:

…in ‘The Devil’s Eye,’ Bergman’s little-known comedy of 1960. Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated, falling to his knees, he addresses her thus:

‘First, I’ll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch I saw. Then I’ll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel wonderfully cool. And I’ll breakfast on one of those sour apples down by the gate. After that, I shall go back to Hell.’ “

Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise.  Some evidence in Hampshire’s  favor:

His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999.  Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire’s death.

As for the day of death itself, consider the  following  remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry’s  book:

“But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty.”

In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell — Holy Saturday, 2004 — and on beauty —  Art Wars for Trotsky’s Birthday and A Mass for Lucero (written, as it happens, on June 13, 2002).

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Thursday April 29, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:12 pm

X

Tonight on PBS:
The Jesus Factor

From Good Friday:

3 PM
Good
Friday

For an explanation
of this icon, see

Art Wars
and
To Be.

From Eternity:

Red Hook! Jesus!

From Holy Saturday:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to
Under the Volcano

Couleurs

In memory of
René Descartes
(born March 31)
and
René Gruau
(died March 31)

On the former:

“The predominant use
of the letter

x
to represent
an unknown value
came about in
an interesting way.”

On the latter:

“The women he drew
often seemed
to come alive.”

“…a ‘dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse’ “

(p. 227, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
— Wallace Stevens
    as quoted by Michael Bryson

See also the entries of 5/12.

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Saturday April 10, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:23 am

Harrowing

“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

From the official
     Anne Francis Web Site:   

   Come into my parlor….

For some background,
see the use of the word
“spider” in Under the Volcano:

WRIDER/ESPIDER:
THE CONSUL AS ARTIST IN
UNDER THE VOLCANO,

by Patrick A. McCarthy.

See, too, Why Me?

Saturday, April 19, 2003

Saturday April 19, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:45 am

Harrowing

In memory of the many who have died on April 19, most notably Octavio Paz.

"There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ."

— Introduction to Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano, by Stephen Spender

"Hey, big Spender, spend a little time
with me." — Song lyric

For a somewhat deeper meditation on time, see Architecture of Eternity.

See also Literature of the Descent into Hell

"Mexico is a solar country — but it is also a black country, a dark country. This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child."

Octavio Paz, quoted by Homero Aridjis

Amen.

Concluding Unscientific Postscripts:

"Once upon a time…" — Anonymous

"It's quarter to three…" — Sinatra

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