Movie Date

For John and Klara von Neumann,
because they gave good parties:

"We gotta hurry or it's gonna be dark
'fore we get home!" 

Home Before Dark

A song by Judy Collins:

I won't be long
Don't worry about me
I'll be home before dark

Plato's Cave Valentine's Day Schedule

at UA Market Fair Movies,
 3521 Route 1
Princeton, NJ 08540 

Before-dark* showtime:

The Pianist, 5:30 PM

After-dark† showtime:

The Recruit, 7:15 PM 

* "Swiftly flow the years."

† "Nothing is as it seems."

Toy Soldiers

From a website biography of John von Neumann:

It is noteworthy that he was uninhibited by ethical considerations in weaponry. I was surprised, therefore, when he died a Roman Catholic. To be sure, his first wife had been Catholic. I presume that he was a nominal one in those early days of his marriage. In his last illness, he asked for a clergyman, but he surprised them by insisting upon a Roman Catholic priest. A Benedictine was succeeded by a Jesuit for instruction. The attending Air Force chaplain told me that Johnny could quote the Penitential Psalms in Latin. 

— "Von Neumann, Jewish Catholic," by Raymond J. Seeger, in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 40 (December 1988): 234-236.   

The sixth of the Seven Penitential Psalms is Psalm 129, "De Profundis."

From the film "The Sixth Sense":

CUT TO:

INT. CHURCH - DAY

Only a few people sit and pray in the sea of oak pews. Malcolm scans the majestic room and finds what he's looking for in the last row of the church. He moves down the center aisle towards the back.

Malcolm finds Cole playing in his pew with a set of green and beige plastic soldiers. Cole makes the soldiers talk to each other.

....

MALCOLM

What was that you were saying before with your soldiers?
Day pro fun.

COLE

...De profundis clamo ad te domine.

Malcolm stares surprised.

COLE

It's called Latin. It's a language.

Malcolm nods at the information.

MALCOLM

All your soldiers speak Latin?

COLE

No, just one.

Matrix Theory

"At the heart of The Matrix, buried under layers of cinema craft, is a meditation on the difference between essence and appearance. It's a trip into Plato's cave."

— McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

From Plato's Cave
(Von Neumann's Song, Part III)

In this entry we return to the classic words of the Hollywood Argyles as they sing a paean of praise to St. John von Neumann:

He's the king of the jungle jive.
Look at that caveman go!

This meditation is prompted by a description of caveman life by the functional analysis working group at the University of Tübingen:

Picture of von Neumann courtesy of
Princeton University Library 

Diamond Life
(Von Neumann's Song, Part II)

A reader of yesterday's entry "St. John von Neumann's Song" suggested the relevance of little Dougie Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  While the title of this work does continue the "golden" theme of my last three entries, Dougie is not playing in von Neumann's league.  The nature of this league is suggested by yesterday's citation of

Abstract Harmonic Analysis. 

For work that is more in von Neumann's league than in Hofstadter's, see the following

harmonic analysis abstract:

VECTOR-VALUED EXTENSIONS
OF SOME CLASSICAL THEOREMS
IN HARMONIC ANALYSIS

Maria Girardi and Lutz Weis

Abstract:
.... The approach used combines methods from Fourier analysis and the geometry of Banach spaces, such as R-boundedness.

A related paper by the same authors:

CRITERIA FOR R-BOUNDEDNESS
OF OPERATOR FAMILIES

Abstract:
...smooth operator-valued functions have a R-bounded range, where the degree of smoothness depends on the geometry of the Banach space.

Those who would like to make a connection to music in the charmingly childlike manner of Hofstadter are invited to sing a few choruses of "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

Personally, I prefer the following lyrics:

Diamond life, lover boy;
We move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy.
City lights and business nights
When you require streetcar desire for higher heights.

No place for beginners or sensitive hearts
When sentiment is left to chance.
No place to be ending but somewhere to start.

No need to ask.
He's a smooth operator....

Words and Music: Sade Adu and Ray St. John

Some may wish to alter the last five syllables of these lyrics in accordance with yesterday's entry on another St. John.

St. John von Neumann's Song

The mathematician John von Neumann, a heavy drinker and party animal, advocated a nuclear first strike on Moscow.*  Confined to a wheelchair before his death, he was, some say, the inspiration for Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.  He was a Jew converted to Catholicism.  His saint's day was February 8.  Here is an excerpt from a book titled Abstract Harmonic Analysis**, just one of the fields illuminated by von Neumann's brilliance:

"...von Neumann showed that an intrinsic definition can be given for the mean M(f) of an almost periodic function.... Von Neumann proved the existence and properties of M(f) by completely elementary methods...."

Should W. B. Yeats wander into the Catholic Anticommunists' section of Paradise, he might encounter, as in "Sailing to Byzantium," an unexpected set of "singing-masters" there: the Platonic archetypes of the Hollywood Argyles.

The Argyles' attire is in keeping with Yeats's desire for gold in his "artifice of eternity"... In this case, gold lamé, but hey, it's Hollywood.  The Argyles' lyrics will no doubt be somewhat more explicit in heaven.  For instance, in "Alley Oop," the line

"He's a mean motor scooter and a bad go-getter"

will in its purer heavenly version be rendered

"He's a mean M(f)er and..."

in keeping with von Neumann's artifice of eternity described above.

This theological meditation was suggested by previous entries on Yeats, music and Catholicism (see Feb. 8, von Neumann's saint's day) and by the following recent weblog entries of a Harvard senior majoring in mathematics:

"I changed my profile picture to Oedipus last night because I felt cursed by fate...."

"It's not rational for me to believe that I am cursed, that the gods are set against me.  Because I don't even believe in any gods!"

The spiritual benefits of a Harvard education are summarized by this student's new profile picture:

M(f)

*Source: Von Neumann and the Development of Game Theory

**by Harvard professor Lynn H. Loomis, Van Nostrand, 1953, p. 169.
 

Singing-Masters

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
— William Butler Yeats

One wonders whether Yeats will spend at least some small part of eternity in the pleasant company of Jimmy Durante and Shari Lewis, whom I would want to have among my singing-masters.  One also hopes that tonight they are celebrating Durante's birthday in that very pleasant part of heaven called Shariland.  Hence tonight's site music, "The Song That Never Ends."  This could, of course, easily become more hellish than heavenly if Durante were not himself present to yell, at an appropriate time, "Stop the music!"

Rainbow's End

For Ernst Kitzinger, professor of Byzantine art at Harvard, who died at 90 on January 22, 2003. 

In "Sailing to Byzantium," the poet W. B. Yeats wrote of Ireland,

That is no country for old men....
....
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
....
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Don't ever tell me the gods have no sense of humor.  After writing the phrase "rainbow's-end gold" in yesterday's entry, "Messe," I came across an obituary of Professor Kitzinger, which naturally prompted me to look for a good web page on "Sailing to Byzantium."

The poem concludes with images of "gold mosaic," "Grecian goldsmiths," "hammered gold," "gold enamelling," and "a golden bough."  I had forgotten that Yeats's poem begins to sound rather like the curse of King Midas.  And then the touch of divinity: the perfect deflation of Yeatsian and Byzantine pretentiousness, on the following web page:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atlantis/3260/sailing.html,

at "The Lonesome Surf-In Poetry Cafe."  With lovely faux-gold borders, this page has as background music a gloriously cheesy rendition of "Moon River."  (Rainbow's end... Waitin' 'round the bend....) So much for the Tiffany's approach to poetry.

I still admire Yeats' respect
For monuments of intellect
But even though I'm getting old
Can't share his appetite for gold.

For a rather different "artifice of eternity,"
see my entry of February 1, 2003,

Time and Eternity.

Messe

Yesterday's entry, "Requiem for a Queen," suggested a certain resemblance between the Jedburgh death mask of Mary Queen of Scots and the face of actress Vivien Leigh.  The following links are related to this resemblance.

1. The first great stage success of Miss Leigh was in a play called "The Mask of Virtue," which opened on May 15, 1935.
2. Leigh was educated for eight years at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton.
3. A requiem mass for Miss Leigh was held at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Mary's, Cadogan Street, London, on 12th July 1967, at 10 o'clock. On the coffin were her favorite white roses, picked from her garden at Tickerage Mill in Sussex.

Yesterday's site music, "The Water is Wide," was suggested by T. S. Eliot's language in Four Quartets.  Whether Eliot's use of the motto of the Catholic queen Mary Stuart, "In my end is my beginning," was meant as a tribute to that monarch is debatable.  As one web forum entry points out, the motto "Ma fin est ma [sic] commencement" is the title of a rondeau by Guillaume de Machaut written some two centuries earlier, and Eliot may have taken his motto from Machaut rather than Mary.  Some evidence for this is provided by the lyrics for Machaut's rondeau, which include Eliot's phrase "in my beginning is my end" as well as the reversed version.  At any rate, Machaut and Eliot share an interest in four-part compositions — as do I and as did, apparently, the compilers of the Gospels.

A search on the phrase Machaut Eliot "four part"  yields an essay that to me seems like rainbow's-end gold:

ON TIME, ORIGINALITY, AND THE ART OF
MUSICAL COMPOSITION

by Joseph Dillon Ford

In honor of Ford, Eliot, Machaut, Leigh, and Stuart, today's site music is the "Kyrie" from Machaut's "Messe de Notre Dame."

Requiem for a Queen

On February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was executed.

Jedburgh Death Mask

"En ma Fin gît mon Commencement..."
"In my End is my Beginning..."

"This is the saying which Mary embroidered on her cloth of estate whilst in prison in England and is the theme running through her life. It symbolises the eternity of life after death...."

— The Marie Stuart Society

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

— T. S. Eliot, conclusion of "East Coker" in Four Quartets

In keeping with Eliot's words, tonight's site music is

"The Water is Wide."