Month: March 2003

  • ART WARS:


    Geometry for Jews


    Today is Michelangelo's birthday.


    Those who prefer the Sistine Chapel to the Rothko Chapel may invite their Jewish friends to answer the following essay question:



    Discuss the geometry underlying the above picture.  How is this geometry related to the work of Jewish artist Sol LeWitt? How is it related to the work of Aryan artist Ernst Witt?  How is it related to the Griess "Monster" sporadic simple group whose elements number 


    808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000?


    Some background:


  • Eat at Joe's


    In honor of the 50th anniversary of the
    death of Joseph Stalin:



    National Student Strike * March 5th



    Courtesy of the Young Communist League






  • Ash
    Wednesday
    Sermon


    "Teach us to care and not to care."
    — T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"


    From The Jerusalem Post, August 6, 2001:



    In the movie Godfather II there is a scene when Michael Corleone is in Batista-ruled Havana. A Marxist rebel is arrested, and rather than be taken alive he explodes a grenade he had hidden in his jacket, killing himself and the officers arresting him.

    His partner says: "Those rebels, you know, they're lunatics."

    "Maybe so," Michael Corleone says. "But it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight - the rebels aren't."

    "What does that tell you?" asks his partner.

    "They can win," he replies.


    — Analysis by Arieh O'Sullivan


    The date of the above analysis, August 6, was the date of the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration and the anniversary of the first use in warfare of a nuclear weapon.


    "And the light shone in darkness and
    Against the Word* the unstilled world still whirled
    About the centre of the silent Word....


    Where shall the word be found, where will the word
    Resound?"

    — T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday," 1930

    Hiroshima, perhaps?

    See also my entries for Transfiguration 2002.


    * Eliot does not say what "Word" he is talking about.  Perhaps it is "Arieh," the name of the journalist who wrote the perceptive Havana passage above.  A search for the meaning of this word reveals that it means "an adult lion, having paired, in search of his prey (Nahum 2:12; 2 Sam 17:10; Num 23:24)."  This is from The Witness of the Stars, a work that views the constellation Leo as a symbol of the Messiah.  A particularly relevant passage: "The brightest star... marks the heart of the Lion (hence sometimes called by the moderns, Cor Leonis, the heart of the Lion)."  Cor Leonis, Corleone.  Is this the "Word" you meant, T. S.?

  • Ash Wednesday


    Brace Yourself, Maureen


    From Maureen Dowd's New York Times column today:


    "During the innocent summer before 9/11, the defense secretary's office sponsored a study of ancient empires — Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols — to figure out how they maintained dominance.


    What tips could Rummy glean from Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan?"



    Saddle up!


    Background briefing, added at 6:29 AM:


    See also the use of the hyperbolic paraboloid in Mexican church architecture by Félix Candela and an essay on saddle surfaces by Joseph F. MacDonnell, Society of Jesus, who spent eight years in Iraq teaching physics and mathematics at two Jesuit schools in Baghdad: Baghdad College and Al Hikma University.  He writes that "since the 1968 Baathi takeover of the two Jesuit schools and expulsion of all Jesuits from Iraq in 1969" he has been teaching mathematics at Fairfield University. 


    MacDonnell notes that there are only three doubly ruled surfaces (in real 3-space): the hyperboloid (used for nuclear cooling towers), the hyperbolic paraboloid (used, as noted, for Mexican churches), and the plane (used widely).  The geometry here is perhaps less relevant than the existence of the Society of Jesus as a sort of intelligence agency within the Church -- an agency the current Pope has never understood how to use.  Opus Dei is a greatly inferior substitute.

  • Fearful Symmetry


    I just Googled this phrase and found the following site, which turns out to be related to my previous entry on the Bead Game and the death of John P. Thompson.


    Fearful Symmetry:
    The Music Master's Lecture    ,


    by Daniel d'Quincy.


    This in turn links to an excerpt from The Glass Bead Game that includes this passage: 


    "I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created."


    It is very easy to get dangerously confused about holiness, but here are some relevant quotes:


    "You will have to allow me to digress a bit in order to bring ourselves to a sufficiently elevated perspective... I warn you, it will require an attitude of playfulness on your part. Our approach will aim more at sincerity than seriousness. The attitude I'm aiming at is best expressed, I suppose, in the playing of a unique game, known by its German name as Das Glasperlenspiel, and which we may translate as the Glass Bead Game."


    — Daniel d'Quincy, Fearful Symmetry 


    "7:11"


    — God himself said this, at least according to the previous entry and to my Jan. 28 entry, State of the Communion.


    "Seven is heaven."


    — See my web page Eight is a Gate.


    "An excellent example of a 'universal' in the sense of Charles Williams, Jung, or Plato is Hexagram 11 in China's 3,000-year-old classic, the I Ching:







    Hexagram 11

    'Heaven and earth unite:
     the image of PEACE.' 
     (Wilhelm/Baynes translation,
     Princeton University Press, 1967)" 



    — S. H. Cullinane, Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star


    Thus we may associate the numbers 7 and 11 with the notions of heaven and peace; for a somewhat darker association of the time 7:11 with Kali as Time the Destroyer, see my last entry and also my previous entries


    Fat Man and Dancing Girl (Feb. 18, 2003), and 


    Time and Eternity (Feb. 1, 2003).

  • 7:20 PM CALI Time


    The Bus and the Bead Game:
     
    The Communion of Saints as
     the Association of Ideas


    On this date in 1955, "Bus Stop," a play by William Inge, opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City.


    "I seemed to be standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street."


    — C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, opening sentence


    Today's birthdays:


    Sam Houston
    Dr. Seuss
    Kurt Weill
    Mikhail Gorbachev
    Tom Wolfe
    Desi Arnaz
    Jennifer Jones
    Karen Carpenter


    and many others.

    Today is the feast day of  

    St. Randolph Scott, 
    St. Sandy Dennis, 
    St. D. H. Lawrence, and
    St. Charlie Christian.


    "Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear..."


    — Karen Carpenter singing "Superstar"


    "And if I find me a good man,
     I won't be back at all."


    — C. C. Rider lyrics


    See (and hear) also "Seven Come Eleven," played by St. Charlie Christian.


    One might (disregarding separation in time and space -- never major hindrances to the saints) imagine C. S. Lewis in Heaven listening to a conversation among the four saints listed above.  For more on the communion of saints, see my entry "State of the Communion" of Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003.  This entry, quoting an old spiritual, concluded with "Now hear the word of the Lord"  -- followed by this notation: 


     7:11 PM.


    See also the N.Y. Times obituary of John P. Thompson of Dallas, former 7-Eleven chairman, who died, as it happened, on that very day (Jan. 28).  See also Karen Carpenter's "first take luck."


    The sort of association of ideas described in the "Communion" entry is not unrelated to the Glasperlenspiel, or Glass Bead Game, of Hermann Hesse.  For a somewhat different approach to the Game, see


    "The Glass Bead Game,"


    by John S. Wilson, group theorist and head of the Pure Mathematics Group at the University of Birmingham in England. Wilson is "not convinced that Hesse's... game is only a metaphor." Neither am I.


    For the association-of-ideas approach, see the page cited in my "Communion" entry,


    "A Game Designer's Holy Grail,"


    and (if you can find a copy) one of the greatest forgotten books of the twentieth century,


    The Third Word War,


    by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978).  As Lee remarks concerning the communion of saints and the association of ideas,


    "The association is the idea."