Saturday, December 31, 2005  2:20 PM

The Last Word
 
From an
album cover:



From Feb. 20:

Relativity Blues
and
Hunter Thompson
Commits Suicide





-- Stephen King



-- Hunter S. Thompson

Friday, December 30, 2005  10:10 PM

Rhapsody in Indigo
or:
We are stardust,
We are golden,
continued

1971:



Joni Mitchell, Blue

1994:



Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo

"Some call them
'Emissaries from Heaven,'
others say the 'New Kids'
or even the
'Children of the New Earth.'
They are best known as
 the Indigo Children...."

-- Brood Indigo  



Children of the Damned (1963)
(Set at
 St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church,
London)

Related material:
Shining Through
on
May 19, 2005,
 St. Dunstan's Day--



This was the opening date for
 the final episode of Star Wars.

Friday, December 30, 2005  1:00 AM

Expression

Expression is
an impossible word.
If you want to use it
I think you have to
  explain it further...
-- Ad Reinhardt, 
 Art as Art

"... an equation is a very    
abstract expression
of knowledge
about something."
-- The Hidden Side     
of Visualization 

Well, yes.
For example:



Abstract Expression,
pixels on screen, 12/30/05

The Scope and Limits of Quotation (pdf), in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson,  ed. L. E. Hahn, Open Court Publishers, 1999, pp. 691-714, by Dr. Ernest Lepore, Rutgers University: "... an assumption I wish to reject, namely, that in quotation an abstract expression (shape) is denoted.... Since Davidson, however, only says 'we may take [an expression] to be an abstract shape' [1979, p.85, my emphasis], his theory is compatible with expressions being something else. We need only find something that can be instantiated by radically differently shaped objects. Whatever it is must be such that written tokens, spoken tokens, signed tokens, Braille tokens, Semaphore tokens, finger language tokens, and any other way in which words can be produced, can be instantiated by it.... Such entities might exist; if they do, they might ultimately play some role in the metaphysics of language." My emphasis. Reference: Davidson, D., 1979, "Quotation," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp.79-92.

For more on zero and other entities,
see Is Nothing Sacred?

For more on Davidson,
see Shema.

Thursday, December 29, 2005  6:29 PM

Express

You've got to make him
Express himself
Hey, hey, hey, hey
-- Madonna  

Humboldt's Gift:

Related material on trains:

Davenport's Express
and End of Days.

Related material on 162:

Dogma Part II: Amores Perros,
The Matthias Defense,
The Still Point and the Wheel,
  Mark, and Confession.

Related material on
self-expression:

Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, SciFi channel, 7 PM tonight

Jenny O'Hara

"This world is not conclusion;
a sequel stands beyond."
-- Emily Dickinson

Thursday, December 29, 2005  3:31 PM

Parallel Lines
Meet at Infinity

From Log24, Dec. 16, 2005:

From today's New York Times, a man who died (like Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields) on Christmas Day:

From Log24, Dec. 6, 2002,
Santa Versus the Volcano:

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, 2002)

and others

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

Tuesday, December 27, 2005  12:11 PM

Monday, December 26, 2005  7:00 PM

Language Game on
Boxing Day

In the box-style I Ching
Hexagram 34,
The Power of the Great,
is represented by

  .

Art is represented
by a box
(Hexagram 20,
Contemplation, View)

  .

  And of course 
great art
is represented by
an X in a box.
(Hexagram 2,
The Receptive)

  .

"... as a Chinese jar still   
Moves perpetually
 in its stillness"

"... at the still point,  
there the dance is."

-- T. S. Eliot 

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching.... Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer.... For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   -- Marie-Louise von Franz,    Number and Time

For those who prefer
technology to poetry,
there is the Xbox 360.

(Today is day 360 of 2005.)

Monday, December 26, 2005  3:00 PM

Wren Day

"St. Stephen's Day [Dec. 26] is a national holiday in Ireland, but the celebrations have little connection to the Saint."

This day in Ireland is instead devoted to a barbaric ritual, "the hunting of the wren."

Let us therefore recall a more civilized figure-- St. Christopher Wren-- whose feast day is Feb. 25.

From Log24 on that date in 2005:

... Only by the form,
    the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as
    a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin,
    while the note lasts,
Not that only, but
    the co-existence,
Or say that the end
    precedes the beginning,
And the end
    and the beginning
    were always there
Before the beginning
    and after the end.
And all is always now.

-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Sunday, December 25, 2005  8:00 PM

Eight is a Gate
(continued)

Compare and contrast:





Click on pictures for details.

"... die Schönheit... [ist] die
richtige Übereinstimmung
der Teile miteinander
  und mit dem Ganzen."

"Beauty is the proper conformity
  of the parts to one another
  and to the whole."
 
  -- Werner Heisenberg,
"Die Bedeutung des Schönen
  in der exakten Naturwissenschaft,"
  address delivered to the
  Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts,
  Munich, 9 Oct. 1970, reprinted in
  Heisenberg's Across the Frontiers,
  translated by Peter Heath,
  Harper & Row, 1974

Saturday, December 24, 2005  9:00 PM

Nine is a Vine
(continued)



The figures are:
 
A symbol of Apollo from
Balanchine's Birthday and
A Minature Rosetta Stone,

a symbol of pure reason from
Visible Mathematics and
Analogical Train of Thought,

a symbol of Venus from
Why Me? and
To Graves at the Winter Solstice,

and, finally, a more
down-to-earth symbol,
adapted from a snowflake in



an online Christmas card.

Those who prefer their
theological art on the scary side
may enjoy the
Christian Snowflake
link in the comments on
the "Logos" entry of
Orthodox Easter (May 1), 2005.

Saturday, December 24, 2005  12:00 PM

High Concept

"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

Then there is
the Daughter's procession:



For the String Theory
Appreciation Club, see
  Raoul Bott, 1923-2005.

For another
imaginary club, see
The Club Dumas (below).

For a non-imaginary club,
see the organization
that included Noon (above).

Saturday, December 24, 2005  12:08 AM

Wednesday, December 21, 2005  4:07 PM

"A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces."

-- When Novelists Become Cubists:
    The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,
    by Andre Furlani

"T.S. Eliot's experiments in ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament.  Davenport's text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets."

-- Andre Furlani

"At the still point,
  there the dance is."

--  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
quoted in the epigraph to
the chapter on automorphism groups
in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
by Peter J. Cameron,
published when Cameron was at
Merton College, Oxford.

"As Gatsby closed the door of
'the Merton College Library'
I could have sworn I heard
the owl-eyed man
break into ghostly laughter."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Wednesday, December 21, 2005  1:35 PM

To Graves at the Winter Solstice "There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling.... Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling, Do not forget what flowers The great boar trampled down in ivy time. Her brow was creamy as the crested wave, Her sea-blue eyes were wild But nothing promised that is not performed. " -- Robert Graves,     To Juan at the Winter Solstice

Tuesday, December 20, 2005  12:00 AM

"Heaven-- Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?"

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer's birthday)

Fred Stein, 1945

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."

Monday, December 19, 2005  11:00 PM

"There's a place for us...."

Monday, December 19, 2005  2:00 PM

Then there is
the broken beer bottle
school of etiquette:

Monday, December 19, 2005  2:45 AM

It is to one of Schur's seminars that I owe the stimulus to work with permutation groups, my first research area. At that time the theory had nearly died out. It had developed last century, but at about the turn of the century had been so completely superseded by the more generally applicable theory of abstract groups that by 1930 even important results were practically forgotten - to my mind unjustly."

Sunday, December 18, 2005  6:00 PM

For the birthday of 
Steven Spielberg,   
director of "1941"--

Sunset for Sydney Leff,

who died at 104
on December 10,
and is said to have drawn
the illustration below.



The sun also rises,
and the sun goes down,
 and hurries to its place
where it rises.

-- Ecclesiastes 1:5

From Log24 Sunday a week ago:
a link to Satori at Pearl Harbor
and to

Philosophy in
Blue and Green.

Sunday, December 18, 2005  8:11 AM

The Meadow

"Heaven-- Where Is It?
  How Do We Get There?"

To air on ABC
Tuesday, Dec. 20
(John Spencer's birthday)

By Trevanian, who died on
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005:

From  Shibumi "Well... the flow of the play was just right, and it began to bring me to the meadow. It always begins with some kind of flowing motion... a stream or river, maybe the wind making waves in a field of ripe rice, the glitter of leaves moving in a breeze, clouds flowing by. And for me, if the structure of the Go stones is flowing classically, that too can bring me to the meadow." "The meadow?" "Yes. That's the place I expand into. It's how I recognize that I am resting." "Is it a real meadow?" "Yes, of course." "A meadow you visited at one time? A place in your memory?" "It's not in my memory. I've never been there when I was diminished." "Diminished?" "You know... when I'm in my body and not resting." "You consider normal life to be a diminished state, then?" "I consider time spent at rest to be normal. Time like this... temporary, and... yes, diminished." "Tell me about the meadow, Nikko." "It is triangular. And it slopes uphill, away from me. The grass is tall. There are no animals. Nothing has ever walked on the grass or eaten it. There are flowers, a breeze... warm. Pale sky. I'm always glad to be the grass again." "You are the grass?" "We are one another. Like the breeze, and the yellow sunlight. We're all... mixed in together." "I see. I see. Your description of the mystic experience resembles others I have read. And this meadow is what the writers call your 'gateway' or 'path.' Do you ever think of it in those terms?" "No." "So. What happens then?" "Nothing. I am at rest. I am everywhere at once. And everything is unimportant and delightful. And then... I begin to diminish. I separate from the sunlight and the meadow, and I contract again back into my bodyself. And the rest is over." Nicholai smiled uncertainly. "I suppose I am not describing it very well, Teacher. It's not... the kind of thing one describes." "No, you describe it very well, Nikko. You have evoked a memory in me that I had almost lost. Once or twice when I was a child... in summer, I think... I experienced brief transports such as you describe. I read once that most people have occasional mystic experiences when they are children, but soon outgrow them. And forget them...."

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."

Saturday, December 17, 2005  6:02 PM

Saturday, December 17, 2005  3:17 PM

Fade to White

For John Spencer,
who died on December 16:

"He was a kind, sweet, funny man...
a man who made your words come to life
in ways you would never expect."

-- James Mangold, quoted in     
today's Los Angeles Times 



 

Related material:

Entries from the date
of Spencer's death

and
 White, Geometric, and Eternal

(from Dec. 20, 2003--
 Spencer's birthday).

Saturday, December 17, 2005  1:01 PM

'Even black has various subtle shades,' Sosuke nodded." 

"The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless." 

-- Yasunari Kawabata,
    Nobel lecture, 1968 

Friday, December 16, 2005  5:00 PM

I cannot even remember the novel that accompanied it. But I remember that I was curled up on our beat-up old couch, the one with the huge embarrassing rip where my older sister would position me to sit demurely, my dress fanned out over the damage, when her dates arrived. I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)

The Forms are abstract but real, I read, graspable only through the eyes of the mind, pure reason. And it seemed to me, that dark winter afternoon as I read, that I was grasping them; that I, a yiddishe maidel of questionable worth, was seeing with the eyes of my mind exactly what that ancient Greek philosopher had seen; that just like him I was out beyond the phantasmagoria, suspended in formal perfection; that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost all touch with who I even was, and it was . . . bliss."

-- Rebecca Goldstein

  Related material:
  Davenport's Express.

  Update of 6:14 PM EST:

    Whistle Stop

  

For the late John Spencer,
actor on NBC's "West Wing"

    From "West Wing"--

-- "When was the last time
    you went to a meeting?"
-- "AA?.... What meeting
     could I possibly go to?"
-- "Mine."

Friday, December 16, 2005  2:00 PM

Related material:
Log24, December 10, 2005

Graves died on December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day), 1985.

Related material:
Log24, December 7, 2005, and
Log24, December 11, 2005

Jesus died, some say, on April 7 in the year 30 A.D.

Related material:

Art Wars, April 7, 2003:
Geometry and Conceptual Art,

Eight is a Gate, and

Mathematics and Narrative.

Plato's Diamond

-- Motto of
Plato's Academy

Thursday, December 15, 2005  10:00 PM

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).

Thursday, December 15, 2005  3:48 PM

"Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.

In Mahlburg's work, the partition numbers play the role of the dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.

Mahlburg's work 'has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,' Ono says.

'Each step in the story is a work of art,' Dyson says, 'and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'"

-- Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005

This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for "a story that works." (See previous entry.)  Whether the muse of dance (played in "Xanadu" by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born-- see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.

Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany. Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, West Germany.

Max Born

Those who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.

Related material: