Cullinane Journal 2007 October 16-31

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On Anthony Hopkins's new film:

"At one point during 'Slipstream,' Hopkins's character stumbles upon a Dolly Parton impersonator while Parton's wonderful song, 'Coat of Many Colors,' plays on the soundtrack. I told Hopkins that I thought he used the tune-- which is about a multi-hued coat that little Dolly's grandmother made for her out of random pieces of cloth when the future superstar's family was dirt poor-- as a sort of commentary on the patchwork structure of 'Slipstream' itself. Hopkins smiled broadly and his eyes lit up. Yes, he said, that's exactly what he was doing. He said he even tried to get Parton to appear in the movie, but she was booked and couldn't do it."

-- Paul Tatara, Oct. 22, 2007

Anthony Hopkins:

"Our existence is beyond understanding. Nobody has an answer. I sense that life is such a mystery. To me, God is time."

Related material:

"Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to recall exactly the same past from one day to the next? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, then you've had hints of the Change War...

Spider and Snake on cover of Fritz Leiber's novel Big Time

It's been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides-- 'Spiders' and 'Snakes'-- battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors."

-- Publisher's description of Fritz Leiber's Big Time.

This trinity of figures is taken from Descartes' Rule Twelve in Rules for the Direction of the Mind. It seems to be meant to suggest an analogy between superposition of colors and superposition of shapes.

Note that the first figure is made up of vertical lines, the second of vertical and horizontal lines, and the third of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

Leon R. Kass recently suggested that the Descartes figures might be replaced by a more modern concept-- colors as wavelengths. (Commentary, April 2007). This in turn suggests an analogy to Fourier series decomposition of a waveform in harmonic analysis.

See the Kass essay for a discussion of the Descartes figures in the context of (pdf) Science, Religion, and the Human Future (not to be confused with Life, the Universe, and Everything).

Compare and contrast:

The harmonic-analysis analogy
suggests a review
of an earlier entry's link today
to 4/30-- Structure and Logic--
as well as re-examination of
Symmetry and a Trinity

(Dec. 4, 2002).

See also --

A Four-Color Theorem,
The Diamond Theorem, and
The Most Violent Poem,

from Mike Nichols's
birthday, 2003.

"Trivia:

Took his pseudonym from the character Humphrey Bogart played in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."

"He has come to be fascinated... by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs."

In memory of
Harish-Chandra,
who died at 60
on this date in 1983

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071016-Harish-Chandra.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071016-Harish-Chandra.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Harish-Chandra in 1981
(Photo by Herman Landshof)

Recent Log24 entries have parodied the use of the phrase "deep beauty" as the title of the Oct. 3-4 physics symposium of that name, which was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University.

Such parody was in part suggested by the symposium's sources of financial and academic support. This support had, in the view of some, the effect of linking the symposium's topic, the mathematics of quantum theory, with both religion (the Templeton Foundation) and philosophy (a field sometimes associated in popular thought-- though not at Princeton-- with quantum mysticism.)

As a corrective to the previous parodies here, the following material on the mathematician Harish-Chandra may help to establish that there is, in fact, such a thing as "deep beauty"-- if not in physics, religion, or philosophy, at least in pure mathematics.

MacTutor History of Mathematics:

"Harish-Chandra worked at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963. He was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968."

R. P. Langlands (pdf, undated, apparently from a 1983 memorial talk):

"Almost immediately upon his arrival in Princeton he began working at a ferocious pace, setting standards that the rest of us may emulate but never achieve. For us there is a welter of semi-simple groups: orthogonal groups, symplectic groups, unitary groups, exceptional groups; and in our frailty we are often forced to treat them separately. For him, or so it appeared because his methods were always completely general, there was a single group. This was one of the sources of beauty of the subject in his hands, and I once asked him how he achieved it. He replied, honestly I believe, that he could think no other way. It is certainly true that he was driven back upon the simplifying properties of special examples only in desperate need and always temporarily."

"It is difficult to communicate the grandeur of Harish-Chandra's achievements and I have not tried to do so. The theory he created still stands-- if I may be excused a clumsy simile-- like a Gothic cathedral, heavily buttressed below but, in spite of its great weight, light and soaring in its upper reaches, coming as close to heaven as mathematics can. Harish, who was of a spiritual, even religious, cast and who liked to express himself in metaphors, vivid and compelling, did see, I believe, mathematics as mediating between man and what one can only call God. Occasionally, on a stroll after a seminar, usually towards evening, he would express his feelings, his fine hands slightly upraised, his eyes intent on the distant sky; but he saw as his task not to bring men closer to God but God closer to men. For those who can understand his work and who accept that God has a mathematical side, he accomplished it."

For deeper views of his work, see

Rebecca A. Herb, "Harish-Chandra and His Work" (pdf), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1991, and
R. P. Langlands, "Harish-Chandra, 1923-1983" (pdf, 28 pp., Royal Society memoir, 1985)

R. B. Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74

Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92

"Trivia: