The Line 

Notes on Iconology by Steven H. Cullinane

Preface of April 2, 2004  A related webpage, ART WARS, discusses opposing views on religion and art. Two reviews from today's New York Times are relevant to the themes of ART WARS: Minimal Art, by Michael Kimmelman Hannah and Martin, by Margo Jefferson. The themes of these reviews -- a minimalist dividing line, and polar opposites -- are combined in the material below, from March 5-13, 2004.

(With a Link to a Concluding Lenten Meditation,
"The Word in the Desert")

Friday, March 5, 2004  1:20 AM

Songs for Shakespeare

from Willie and Waylon

LEAR:

Now you better do some thinkin'
    then you'll find
You got the only daddy
    that'll walk the line.

FOOL:

I've always been different
    with one foot over the line....
I've always been crazy
    but it's kept me from going insane.

".... in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead."

-- The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

Follow-up of Friday, March 5

From Arts & Letters Daily,
Weekend Edition, March 6-7, 2004 --

The "more" link of the item at left above leads to an American Scientist article titled

The Importance of
Being Nothingness.

The appearance of these two items side-by-side at Arts & Letters Daily, together with Brantley's remark above, is an example of Jungian synchronicity -- a concept that the American Scientist author and Jonathan Miller probably both sneer at.  Sneer away.

Sunday, March 7, 2004  12:00 PM

Ridgepole

CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.

From the web page

Introduction to the I Ching--
By Richard Wilhelm:

"He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the 'great primal beginning' of all that exists, t'ai chi -- in its original meaning, the 'ridgepole.' Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t'ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin, .

This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites."

The t'ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that 

"W.J.T. Mitchell calls 'iconology' a study of the 'logos' (the words, ideas, discourse, or 'science') of 'icons' (images, pictures, or likenesses). It is thus a 'rhetoric of images' (Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 1)."

A variation on the t'ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:

See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:

"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics."

-- Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, ed. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100

In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says

"They will get it straight one day
     at the Sorbonne.
 We shall return at twilight
     from the lecture
 Pleased that
     the irrational is rational...."

This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.

Sunday, March 7, 2004  6:00 PM

Apartments

From Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; and yet so poisonous

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
May there be an ennui of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?....

From Guyan Robertson,
Groups Acting on Affine Buildings
and their Boundaries:

From Plato's Meno:

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture         
Pleased that the irrational is rational....              

See Logos and Logic
and the previous entry.

Wednesday, March 10, 2004  4:07 AM

Ennui of the First Idea

The ennui of apartments described by Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (see previous entry) did not, of course, refer to the "apartments" of incidence geometry.  A more likely connection is with the apartments -- the "ever fancier apartments and furnishings" -- of Stephane Mallarme, described by John Simon as the setting for what might plausibly be called, in Stevens's words, "an ennui of the first idea":

"Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment. He [Mallarme] became aware, in Millan's* words, 'of the extremely fine line

separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death, which later ... he could place at the very centre of his work and make the cornerstone of his personal philosophy and his mature poetics.' "

-- John Simon, Squaring the Circle

* A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stephane Mallarme, by Gordon Millan

The illustration of the "fine line" is not by Mallarme but by myself.  (See Songs for Shakespeare, March 5, where the line separates being from nothingness, and Ridgepole, March 7, where the line represents the "great primal beginning" of Chinese philosophy (or, equivalently, Stevens's "first idea" or Mallarme's line "separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death.")

Wednesday, March 10, 2004  6:01 PM

Split

The first idea was not our own. Adam
in Eden was the father of Descartes.

-- Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

A very interesting web site at
Middle Tennessee State University
relates the Stevens quote
to two others:

"The sundering we sense, between nature and culture, lies not like a canyon outside us but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed: our expulsion from Eden. It differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness--logically at odds--but grew apart over the years like those husbands and wives who draw themselves into different corners of contemplation."

-- William Gass,
"The Polemical Philosopher"

"The experiment [to make rationality primary] reached the reductio ad absurdum following the attempt by Descartes to solve problems of human knowledge by giving ontological status to the dichotomy of thinking substance and extended substance, that is subject and object. Not only were God and man, sacred and secular, being and becoming, play and seriousness severed, but now also the subject which wished to unite these fragmented dichotomies was itself severed from that which it would attempt to reconcile."

-- David Miller, God and Games

"Which is it then? For Gass, the Cartesian schism is a post- lapsarian divorce-in progress, only apparently similar to the expulsion from paradise. For Stevens the fault is primordial and Descartes only its latter-day avatar. For Miller, Descartes is the historical culprit, the patriarch of the split."

-- The Evil Genius Notebook,
by David Lavery

Saturday, March 13, 2004  12:00 PM

The Line

From a March 10, 2004, entry:

"Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment.  [Mallarme] became aware, in Millan's* words, 'of the extremely fine line separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death, which later ... he could place at the very centre of his work and make the cornerstone of his personal philosophy and his mature poetics.' " -- John Simon, Squaring the Circle * A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stephane Mallarme, by Gordon Millan The illustration of the "fine line" is not by Mallarme but by myself.  (See Songs for Shakespeare, March 5, where the line separates being from nothingness, and Ridgepole, March 7, where the line represents the "great primal beginning" of Chinese philosophy (or, equivalently, Stevens's "first idea" or Mallarme's line "separating absence and presence, being and nothingness, life and death.")

By the Associated Press,
Saturday, March 13, 2004:

"Dave Schulthise, known as Dave Blood during his career as a bassist with the 1980's Philadelphia punk-rock band the Dead Milkmen, died on Wednesday [March 10, 2004] at the home of friends in North Salem, N.Y. He was 47.

'David chose to end his life,' Mr. Schulthise's sister, Kathy, wrote on the band's Web site."

I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
Between the light and dark sides of my mind

-- The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba album

Related material: The Word in the Desert.

Page created March 15, 2004