Aesthetics for Jesuits

Joke

From July 28:

The Guardian, July 26,
on a work by the
late playwright
 George Tabori:

"... inspired satire, laced with Jewish and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects. For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. 'Just two,' says Jay. 'The boy is bringing his own.' Tabori often claimed that the joke was the most perfect literary form."

"When may we expect to have
something from you on the
  esthetic question? he asked."

-- A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man

From The Gag Seven - Eleven Dice  Throw a seven or eleven every time. Set consists of a pair of regular dice and another set that can't miss. A product of the S. S. Adams Company. Make your friends and family laugh with this great prank!

 July 11, 2003
New York State Lottery

7-11 Evening Number: 000.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007  6:00 AM

For St. Ignatius Loyola's Day:

Filed with The New York Times at 5:14 a.m. ET

"ROME (AP) -- Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, best known for his movies 'Blow-Up' and 'L'Avventura,' has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94.

The ANSA news agency said that Antonioni died at his home on Monday evening.

'With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,' Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said in a statement.

In 1995, Hollywood honored Antonioni's career work-- 25 films and several screenplays-- with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement."

Related material:

1. "Zabriskie Point" (1970), a film by Antonioni.
   
   "The name refers to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, the location of the film's famous desert love scene, in which members of the Open Theatre simulate an orgy." --Wikipedia
   
   
2. Play It As It Lays (1970), a novel by Joan Didion

   
     

   

   
   
3. Log24: The Word in the Desert
   
   

Monday, July 30, 2007  7:00 PM

Harry Potter and...

The Deathly Hallows Symbol

The instrument tinkled into life at once with rhythmic clinking noises. Tiny puffs of pale green smoke issued from the minuscule silver tube at the top. Dumbledore watched the smoke closely, his brow furrowed, and after a few seconds, the tiny puffs became a steady stream of smoke that thickened and coiled into he air... A serpent's head grew out of the end of it, opening its mouth wide. Harry wondered whether the instrument was confirming his story; He looked eagerly at Dumbledore for a sign that he was right, but Dumbledore did not look up.

"Naturally, Naturally," muttered Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise. "But in essence divided?"

Harry could make neither head not tail of this question. The smoke serpent, however split instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air. With a look of grim satisfaction Dumbledore gave the instrument another gentle tap with his wand; The clinking noise slowed and died, and the smoke serpents grew faint, became a formless haze, and vanished.

Related material

The previous entry--

"And the serpent's eyes shine    
As he wraps around the vine
In The Garden of Allah" --

and the following
famous illustration of
the double-helix
structure of DNA:

 
This is taken from
a figure accompanying
an obituary, in today's
New York Times, of the
artist who drew the figure.

The double helix
is not a structure
from magic; it may,
however, as the Rowling
quote above shows, have
certain occult uses,
better suited to
Don Henley's
Garden of Allah
than to the
  Garden of Apollo.



Similarly, the three objects
above (Log24 on April 9)
are from pure mathematics--
the realm of Apollo, not
of those in Henley's song.

The similarity of the
top object of the three --
the "Fano plane" -- to
the "Deathly Hallows"
symbol is probably
entirely coincidental.

Monday, July 30, 2007  9:00 AM

Nine is a Vine, continued:

In The Garden of Allah

 "But not, perhaps,
in the Garden of Apollo":



-- "Garden Party" --
Log24, April 9, 2007

Related material:

"When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: 'He was always saying that kind of thing.' But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable."

-- Matt Ridley on Odile Crick (The Independent, July 20, 2007), who drew what "may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology," according to Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla quoted by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post, July 21, 2007

See also "Game Boy"
(Log24 on the Feast
of the Transfiguration--
August 6, 2006):

Monday, July 30, 2007  8:00 AM

Eight is a Gate, continued:

 Behind Every
Great Man...

"Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: 'Mrs. Crick's drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing.

'The models you see now have all the atoms in them,' Sejnowski said. 'The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology.'"

Monday, July 30, 2007  7:59 AM

Final Arrangements, continued:

Structure

Illustration from
Log24, April 7, 2003:

April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

Illustration from
this morning's
New York Times:



Illustration from
the journal Nature, 1953:

Monday, July 30, 2007  7:00 AM

Seven is Heaven, continued:

Sunday, July 29, 2007  9:00 AM

Nordic Truth, continued:

The Ninefold Square

"This translation plane is defined by
a spreadset in a 2-dimensional
vector space over the field GF(3),
consisting of the following matrices."

 

Priv.-Doz. Dr. H. Klein,
Arbeitsgruppe Geometrie,
Mathematical Seminar of
Christian-Albrechts University

(See Log24, The Nine
and Translation Plane
for Rosh Hashanah.)

Sunday, July 29, 2007  8:00 AM

Jewish Fiction, continued:

Sunday, July 29, 2007  7:59 AM

Variations on Truth and Fiction

Nordic Truth:	Jewish Fiction:
Snowball	In Hell
From The New York Times in 2005: Portrait of conductor Arild Remmereit: April 24, 2005 Have Baton, Will Travel by James R. Oestreich   PITTSBURGH "HE'S the hottest conductor you've never heard of.... In music, as in most other pursuits, one person's misfortune can be another's opportunity. Many a podium career has been built on successful substitutions.... typically, the process is cumulative and measured. In Mr. Remmereit's case, it seems a sort of spontaneous combustion.... he seems destined for big things, and soon. Regarding his sudden change in stature, he spoke as if from afar. 'The snowball has reached such a size that it has started to roll,' he said matter-of-factly.... 'It's terrifying when it happens,' he said, 'but I can't tell you how naively happy I am when it goes well. These are such major steps that I wasn't even hoping for a few weeks ago.' ARILD REMMEREIT (pronounced AHR-eeld REMM-uh-right, with the r's heavily rolled) was born in a village in Norway, between Bergen and Trondheim, and has lived in Vienna since 1987. Slim and fresh-faced at 43, he has had a busy but low-level career in Europe.... So here he was, on April 15, conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony... in a vintage... Germanic program.... Wagner's 'Siegfried Idyll,' Schumann's Fourth Symphony and Brahms's Second Piano Concerto...." Review: Württemberg Philharmonic February 2004 Nielsen, Sibelius, Grieg. Reutlinger Nachrichten. "Distant closeness, close distance. Arild Remmereit as a guest conductor: 'As when the sun rises in the North.' The Philharmonics and their brilliant guest conductor fetched the mind-blowing, tempting and exciting Scandinavia. It was like a lucky strike to see the Norwegian conductor on stage with the Philharmonic. When he conducts the Dane Nielsen, the Finn Sibelius and the Norwegian Grieg, one can really feel that this man has the locally marked music floating in his blood."	From The New York Times today:   Discussion of a new novel: Variations on the Beast, by psychoanalyst Henry Grinberg When Great Art Meets Great Evil An interview with Henry Grinberg conducted by James R. Oestreich: "For those who find inspiration and edification in great art, it is always painful to be reminded that artists are not necessarily admirable as people and that art is powerless in the face of great evil. That truth was baldly evident in Nazi Germany and in the way the regime used and abused music and musicians, to say nothing of the way it used and abused human beings of all kinds. [A new novel touches on] these issues.... In Variations on the Beast (Dragon Press), Henry Grinberg, a psychoanalyst, posits Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder, a powerful maestro, as a fictional rival of Wilhelm Furtwängler (whose qualms about working under the regime he does not share) and Herbert von Karajan (whose vaulting ambition he does)." GRINBERG: "And it soon occurred to me... that, my God, a lot of the famous, the notable, the moving, the magnificent composers in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier were Germans. And I tried to understand, how did such a nation turn out to be so bestial and cruel, so indifferent to the suffering of others? And I have no explanation for it. As a practicing psychoanalyst, I can see individual expressions of rage and their causes and their so-called justifications. But for a whole nation to be consumed, to be seduced by an overwhelming idea-- well, there are rationalizations, I guess, but not explanations. There's no forgiveness for this. And I tried to put together a story of a person who was a participant and a causer of these kinds of things.... So I sort of poured my feelings of contempt and rage into the character I was devising. And I have to admit, after having been psychoanalyzed myself in preparation for the training, that something of Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder exists in me. I shudder to think that this may be so, but I have to accept the possibility. Murderous thoughts may have occurred to me, but, thank God, I've never killed anyone."

Saturday, July 28, 2007  6:15 AM

Tabori's Wit:

Related material:

Log24 on
the date of
Tabori's death:


 
Click on image
for variations
 on the theme.

Thurs, July 26, 2007  4:00 AM

Lottery Hermeneutics, continued:

The Varieties
of Religious Experience

57: "The author takes the place of the omniscient narrator. He heightens the tension by using striking dialogue. To decrease the tension he uses some light forms of comedy, like the commands for the Dobermans of the little boy: 'Ketchup' for retreating, 'Pickles' for attacking, and 'Mustard' for killing." -- Menno Mertens   on Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil

225:   Log24 on 2/25, 2007: "I caught the sudden look of some dead master...." -- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Wednesday, July 25, 2007  9:00 AM

Variations:

The Comedy of
George Tabori

From AP "Obituaries in the News"--
Filed with The New York Times
at 11:16 p.m. ET July 24, 2007--

George Tabori

"BERLIN (AP) -- Hungarian-born playwright and director George Tabori, a legend in Germany's postwar theater world whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday [July 23, 2007]. He was 93.

Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare's 'King Lear,' died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied him through his final days. No cause of death was given.

Born into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936 to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp., and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his family, were killed at Auschwitz.

Tabori moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing the script for Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 film, 'I Confess.'

He moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism.

Among his best-known works are 'Mein Kampf,' set in the Viennese hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the 'Goldberg Variations,' both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis."

From Year of Jewish Culture:

"The year 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague."

From the related page Programme (October-December):

"Divadlo v Dlouhé
George Tabori: GOLDBERGOVSKÉ VARIACE / THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, 19 October, 7 p.m. A comedy on creation and martyrdom."

Variations on
Birth and Death

From Log24 on the date of the Prague production of the Tabori "Goldberg Variations," an illustration in honor of Sir Thomas Browne, who was born, and died, on that date: The above is from Variable Resolution 4–k Meshes: Concepts and Applications (pdf), by Luiz Velho and Jonas Gomes. See also Symmetry Framed and The Garden of Cyrus.

From Log24 on the date of Tabori's death: Theme (Plato, Meno) and Variations: Click on "variations" above for some material on the "Goldberg Variations" of Johann Sebastian Bach.

 

Tuesday, July 24, 2007  7:11 AM

Quotations for...

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give [...] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love [...] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness [...] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)

-- Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.

For more on what Bloom calls the "Will-to-Power over nature," see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University.  These matters are also discussed in "Log24 - Juneteenth through Midsummer Night."

For more on what Underhill calls "the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness," see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter-- a writer on the nature of consciousness-- by magician Martin Gardner.

Monday, July 23, 2007  8:00 AM

8:00 AM - The Rock

Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.



Greetings.

"The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)  would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?" --Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise"

"El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis) sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas. ¿No sería este nuestro caso?" --Jorge Luis Borges, "Los Avatares de la Tortuga"

Autonomous Apparition

Sunday, June 24, 2007 --

At Midsummer Noon: On Charles Williams:   "In Many Dimensions (1931) Williams sets before his reader the mysterious Stone of King Solomon, an image he probably drew from a brief description in Waite's The Holy Kabbalah (1929) of a supernatural cubic stone on which was inscribed 'the Divine Name.'" Related material: Solomon's Cube, Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube, The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model

It is not enough to   

             cover the rock with leaves.
 We must be cured of it
        by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves,
     that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure 
    beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves,    
     if they broke into bud,
   If they broke into bloom,
if they bore fruit,  

And if we ate              
    the incipient colorings
      Of their fresh culls might be
  a cure of the ground.

-- Wallace Stevens,
    "The Rock"

See also

the recent venture of
Douglas Hofstadter
into trinitarian theology,

as well as
Hofstadter on
his magnum opus:

"... I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book."

Hofstadter's cover

Here are three patterns,
"shadows" of a sort,
derived from a different
"central object":

Click on image for details.

Monday, July 23, 2007  7:59 AM

7:59 AM - The Philosopher's Stone

Today's Birthday:
Daniel Radcliffe
("Harry Potter")

Theme

(Plato, Meno)

and Variations:

Click on picture for details

"A diamond jubilance
beyond the fire,
That gives its power
to the wild-ringed eye"

-- Wallace Stevens,
"The Owl in the Sarcophagus"

Saturday, July 21, 2007  9:45 AM

For Hemingway's birthday:

"Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, 'The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.' Similarly, the 'situations' in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated-- perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.⁵ The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful."

⁵ The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.

[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.

From Log24 on the date of Goguen's death:

Requiem for a clown:

"At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit."

-- Norman Mailer

This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer's birth.  Also quoted on that date:

Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.

Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God....

Whether the above excerpt-- from Hans Christian Oersted's The Soul in Nature (1852)-- is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.

Thursday, July 19, 2007  10:31 AM

Hocus Pocus and...

Volta da Morte:
Friday the 13th

TV listing from Brazil
for Friday, Jan. 13th, 2006:

Related material:

If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts,

Friday the 13th
of January, 2006,

and

Catholic Schools Sermon

Thursday, July 19, 2007  2:00 AM

Found in Translation:

Wednesday, July 18, 2007  6:28 PM

Varieties of Religious Experience:

Reminder Reuters News Agency, Wed., July 18, 2007, 3:48 PM EDT By Mauricio Savarese SAO PAULO (Reuters) - The flames from Brazil's worst plane crash were contained around dawn on Wednesday, but the smell of smoke and death wafted over travelers at Sao Paulo's airport as a reminder of disaster.... The airport resumed flights on an alternate runway. Despite the deterioration of Brazil's air safety record over the past year, Guilherme Braghetto, 72, showed little concern for his son, whom he brought to the airport for a flight to Goiania. 'I feel for those who lost loved ones, but I don't think lightning so strong will hit twice,' he said. On September 29, 2006, a Boeing 737 operated by Brazilian carrier Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes crashed after clipping wings with a Legacy business jet over the Amazon rainforest, killing 154 people.

 
Elsewhere:

Log24, Sept. 28, 2006:

Click on picture for a midi.

Log24, Sept. 29, 2006:

"...consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
'perceptual universals.'

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:
Shining Forth...."

The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 42:

"While out-of-body experiences
have the character of
 a perceptual illusion
(albeit a complex and
singular one), near-death
experiences have all the
hallmarks of mystical
experience, as William
James defines it...."

-- Oliver Sacks,
"A Bolt from the Blue"

The New Yorker, issue dated
July 23, 2007, page 70:

Wednesday, July 18, 2007  7:03 AM

Lottery Phenomenology:

Burning Bright

"What is real?"
-- Pope Benedict XVI
in Brazil on May 13

Yesterday in
the Keystone State:

This suggests-- via a search on "853-856" + "universals"-- that we consult pages 853-856 in The Library of America's William James: Writings 1902-1910.

Beginning on page 853 in this book, and ending on page 856, is an excerpt from a James address that the editor has titled...

The Tigers in India

"There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively.  Altho such things as the white paper before our eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case of conceptual knowledge, and let it be our knowledge of the tigers in India, as we sit here.  Exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers? ....

Most men would answer that what we mean by knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in body, become in some way present to our thought.... At the very least, people would say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is mentally pointing towards them as we sit here....

... The pointing of our thought to the tigers is known simply and solely as a procession of mental associates and motor consequences that follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoniously, if followed out, into some ideal or real context, or even into the immediate presence, of the tigers....

... In all this there is no self-transcendency in our mental images taken by themselves. They are one phenomenal fact; the tigers are another; and their pointing to the tigers is a perfectly commonplace intra-experiential relation, if you once grant a connecting world to be there.  In short, the ideas and the tigers are in themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume's language, as any two things can be, and pointing means here an operation as external and adventitious as any that nature yields.

I hope you may agree with me now that in representative knowledge there is no special inner mystery, but only an outer chain of physical or mental intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To know an object is here to lead to it through a context which the world supplies....

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the object be the white paper before our eyes.... What now do we mean by 'knowing' such a sort of object as this?  For this is also the way in which we should know the tiger if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate by having led us to his lair?

... the paper seen and the seeing of it are only two names for one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the experience. The paper is in the mind and the mind is around the paper, because paper and mind are only two names that are given later to the one experience, when, taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, its connections are traced in different directions.¹"

The same volume also contains
James's The Varieties of
Religious Experience.

"The Tigers in India" is
only a part of a 20-page
James address originally titled
"The Knowing of Things Together"
(my emphasis).

Tuesday, July 17, 2007  7:00 AM

Latin Mass:

Habeas Corpus
 
The Hex Witch of Seldom,
by Nancy Springer:



Log24 on 9/11, 2003:

Here is a rhetorical exercise
for Jesuits that James Joyce
might appreciate:

Discuss Bobbi's "little squares"
of bread as the Body of Christ.
Formulate, using Santayana's
criteria, a definition of beauty
that includes this sacrament.

Monday, July 16, 2007  8:06 AM

Short Story:

Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette

"I know"-- she was getting excited-- "it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope." Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. "Come on," she said.

LOS ANGELES - Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation's largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a "terrible sin and crime" as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.

Log24 7/11, "Magic Time"-- Mary Karr, "Facing Altars:   Poetry and Prayer"-- "There is a body on the cross    in my church."

"Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know
what you've got
till it's gone"

-- Joni Mitchell