December 5, 2002
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For Otto Preminger’s birthday:
Lichtung!
Today’s symbol-mongering (see my Sept. 7, 2002, note The Boys from Uruguay) involves two illustrations from the website of the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, in Uruguay. The first, a follow-up to Wallace Stevens’s remarks on poetry and painting in my note “Sacerdotal Jargon” of earlier today, is a poem, “Lichtung,” by Ernst Jandl, with an illustration by Lucia Spangenberg.
manche meinen
lechts und rinks
kann man nicht
velwechsern.
werch ein illtum!
by Ernst Jandl
The second, from the same school, illustrates the meaning of “Lichtung” explained in my note The Shining of May 29:
“We acknowledge a theorem’s beauty when we see how the theorem ‘fits’ in its place, how it sheds light around itself, like a Lichtung, a clearing in the woods.”
– Gian-Carlo Rota, page 132 of Indiscrete Thoughts, Birkhauser Boston, 1997
From the Deutsche Schule Montevideo mathematics page, an illustration of the Pythagorean theorem:
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