Being and Time

Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.

Einstein’s birthday: March 14.

Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:

Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.

In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.”  In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore in “Xanadu”^◊ and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement.  Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.†

 Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,

 September 26, 1905.

^◊ Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.

† Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.

ART WARS:

Toward Eternity

April is Poetry Month, according to the Academy of American Poets.  It is also Mathematics Awareness Month, funded by the National Security Agency; this year’s theme is “Mathematics and Art.”

Some previous journal entries for this month seem to be summarized by Emily Dickinson’s remarks:

“Because I could not stop for Death–
He kindly stopped for me–
The Carriage held but just Ourselves–
And Immortality.

ART WARS:

Graphical Password

From a summary of “The Design and Analysis of Graphical Passwords“:

“Results from cognitive science show that people can remember pictures much better than words….

The 5×5 grid creates a good balance between security and memorability.”

– Ian Jermyn, New York University; Alain Mayer, Fabian Monrose, Michael K. Reiter, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies; Aviel Rubin, AT&T Labs — Research

Illustration — Warren Beatty as
a graphical password:

“Town & Country,”
released April 27, 2001

Those who prefer the simplicity of a 3×3 grid are referred to my entry of Jan. 9, 2003, Balanchine’s Birthday.  For material related to the “Town & Country” theme and to Balanchine, see Leadbelly Under the Volcano (Jan. 27, 2003). (“Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town…” – Huddie Ledbetter).  Those with more sophisticated tastes may prefer the work of Stephen Ledbetter on Gershwin’s piano preludes or, in view of Warren Beatty’s architectural work in “Town & Country,” the work of Stephen R. Ledbetter on window architecture.

As noted in Balanchine’s Birthday, Apollo (of the Balanchine ballet) has been associated by an architect with the 3×3, or “ninefold” grid.  The reader who wishes a deeper meditation on the number nine, related to the “Town & Country” theme and more suited to the fact that April is Poetry Month, is referred to my note of April 27 two years ago, Nine Gates to the Temple of Poetry.

Intermediate between the simplicity of the 3×3 square and the (apparent) complexity of the 5×5 square, the 4×4 square offers an introduction to geometrical concepts that appears deceptively simple, but is in reality fiendishly complex.  See Geometry for Jews.  The moral of this megilla?

3² + 4² = 5².

But that is another story.

Mark

Today is the feast of Saint Mark.  It seems an appropriate day to thank Dr. Gerald McDaniel for his online cultural calendar, which is invaluable for suggesting blog topics.

Yesterday’s entry “Cross-Referenced” referred to a bizarre meditation of mine titled “The Matthias Defense,” which combines some thoughts of Nabokov on lunacy with some of my own thoughts on the Judeo-Christian tradition (i.e., also on lunacy).  In this connection, the following is of interest:

From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century –

“Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called ‘Innovation in Physics,’ he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.’ To that Freeman added: ‘When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!’ “

– Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147

It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.  It is no less crazy than Christianity, and has a certain mad simplicity that perhaps improves on some of that religion’s lunatic doctrines. 

Some fruits of the “162 theory” —

Searching on Google for muses 162, we find the following Orphic Hymn to Apollo and a footnote of interest:

27 Tis thine all Nature’s music to inspire,
28 With various-sounding, harmonising lyre;
29 Now the last string thou tun’ft to sweet accord,
30 Divinely warbling now the highest chord….

“Page 162 Verse 29…. Now the last string…. Gesner well observes, in his notes to this Hymn, that the comparison and conjunction of the musical and astronomical elements are most ancient; being derived from Orpheus and Pythagoras, to Plato. Now, according to the Orphic and Pythagoric doctrine, the lyre of Apollo is an image of the celestial harmony….”

For the “highest chord” in a metaphorical sense, see selection 162 of the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse (whose editor apparently had a strong religious belief in the Muses (led by Apollo)).  This selection contains the phrase “an ever-fixèd mark” — appropriately enough for this saint’s day.  The word “mark,” in turn, suggests a Google search for the phrase “runes to grave” Hardy, after a poem quoted in G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology.

Such a search yields a website that quotes Housman as the source of the “runes” phrase, and a further search yields what is apparently the entire poem:

Smooth Between Sea and Land 

by A. E. Housman

Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.

Here the child comes to found
His unremaining mound,
And the grown lad to score
Two names upon the shore.

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.

Shall it be Troy or Rome
I fence against the foam
Or my own name, to stay
When I depart for aye?

Nothing: too near at hand
Planing the figured sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main.

(Said to be from More Poems (Knopf, 1936), p. 64)

Housman asks the reader to tell him of runes to grave or bastions to design.  Here, as examples, are one rune and one bastion.

 Dagaz: (Pronounced thaw-gauze, but with the “th” voiced as in “the,” not unvoiced as in “thick”) (Day or dawn.)

From Rune Meanings:

 Dagaz means “breakthrough, awakening, awareness. Daylight clarity as opposed to nighttime uncertainty. A time to plan or embark upon an enterprise. The power of change directed by your own will, transformation. Hope/happiness, the ideal. Security and certainty. Growth and release. Balance point, the place where opposites meet.”

Also known as “the rune of transformation.”

For the Dagaz rune in another context, see Geometry of the I Ching.  The geometry discussed there does, in a sense, “hold the bursting wave,” through its connection with Walsh functions, hence with harmonic analysis.

 Temple of Athena Nike on the Nike Bastion, the Acropolis, Athens.  Here is a relevant passage from Paul Valéry‘s Eupalinos ou L’Architecte about another temple of four columns:

Et puis… Écoute, Phèdre (me disait-il encore), ce petit temple que j’ai bâti pour Hermès, à quelques pas d’ici, si tu savais ce qu’il est pour moi ! — Où le passant ne voit qu’une élégante chapelle, — c’est peu de chose: quatre colonnes, un style très simple, — j’ai mis le souvenir d’un clair jour de ma vie. Ô douce métamorphose ! Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l’image mathématique d’une fille de Corinthe que j’ai heureusement aimée. Il en reproduit fidèlement les proportions particulières. Il vit pour moi !

Four columns, in a sense more suited to Hardy’s interests, are also a recurrent theme in The Diamond 16 Puzzle and Diamond Theory.

Apart from the word “mark” in The Oxford Book of English Verse, as noted above, neither the rune nor the bastion discussed has any apparent connection with the number 162… but seek and ye shall find.

ART WARS:

A Terrible Beauty

On this date in 1905, Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States, was born.  

This is also the date of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Monday rebellion, of which Yeats wrote that “a terrible beauty is born,”  and the date of Vatican I’s 1870 attack on reason, Dei Filius.

My comment on Yeats’s remarks:

“No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.”

– James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, published 1914-15 in serial form

My comment on the Vatican’s remarks:

“[Robert Penn] Warren taught for years at Yale and became toward the end of his life one of the most vocal critics of deconstruction, which had Yale as its headquarters. He is said to have exclaimed, ‘They got a whole new line of bullshit up here.’ ”

– Dr. Gerald McDaniel 

Warren wrote that

“…only, only,
In the name of Death do we learn
    the true name of Love.”

For some clues as to whether this, too, is bullshit, see my note of Easter Monday 2003,

Time, Song, and Tragedy.

Cross-Referenced

†

Shortly after midnight on the night of April 22-23, I updated my entry for Shakespeare’s birthday with the following quotation: 

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

– Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

About 24 hours later, I came across the following obituary in The New York Times: 

“Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday…. He was 79.”

The Times does not mention that the Friday it refers to is Good Friday.  God will have his little jokes.

From Computerworld.com:
1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database.	1969: Edgar F. “Ted” Codd invents the relational database. 1973: Cullinane, led by John J. Cullinane, ships IDMS, a network-model database for IBM mainframes. 1976: Honeywell ships Multics Relational Data Store, the first commercial relational database.

For a better (and earlier) obituary than the Times’s, see The San Jose Mercury News of Easter Sunday.  For some thoughts on death and the afterlife appropriate to last weekend, see The Matthias Defense.

† The Exorcist, 1973

Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday

Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:

“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”

See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:

Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002

Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002

Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002

Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002

Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002

For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002

Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002

For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

– Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

Temptation

In memory of Nina Simone, a singer who died April 21, whose autobiography was titled (after the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song) I Put a Spell on You, and in honor of Aaron Spelling, producer of “Satan’s School for Girls,” whose birthday is today, I suggest the following three cultural milestones.

First, an accurate, if tasteless, recounting of Scripture at a Christian site that correctly notes that Satan may appear as “an angel of light”… rather like Aaron Spelling?  This site also offers, as background music, a lame parody of the evils of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the form of a midi of “Fire“ that would hardly tempt even someone Hell-bent on sinning. 

Second, a book, The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, the basis of the Roman Polanski film “The Ninth Gate.”  This book is notable for the way it skillfully, and perhaps accurately, depicts Satan as an “angel of light” who does not resemble Aaron Spelling in the least.   This Satan could really tempt me.

Finally, my favorite music video of all time: the 1988 Kylie Minogue “Locomotion.”  If the Devil could now look, sing, and dance like Kylie in 1988, I would be lost.  Fortunately, perhaps, the days when Kylie could make me fall in love with one glance are now over.  Still, if I had to fall, I would much rather do it with Kylie than with Spelling.  As she herself says,  

“It’s better the Devil you know.”

For more on Kylie, trains, and death, see the Jan. 3 entry The Shanghai Gesture. 

The locomotive image is courtesy of a website that may, in view of the subject of this entry, prefer to remain anonymous.

From an obituary of a biographer of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall, who died on Wednesday, April 16, 2003:

“Descended from a line of Congregational ministers dating back to the Salem of the witch trial era, Mr. Sewall was known for infusing his lectures with an almost religious fervor.”

Riddle

What is the hardest thing to keep?

For one answer, see my entry of April 16, 2003.   For commentary on that answer, see the description of a poetry party that took place last April at Sleepy Hollow, New York.

See, too, the story that contains the following passages:

“As to the books and furniture of the schoolhouse, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanac, and book of dreams and fortune-telling….

The schoolhouse being deserted soon fell to decay, and was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the unfortunate pedagogue, and the plough-boy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.”

– Washington Irving

Update of 11:55 PM April 21, 2003,

in memory of
Nina Simone:

See also the last paragraph of this news story,
this website, and this essay,
or see all three combined.

From the entry of midnight, October 25-26, 2002:

Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll arrive late tonight,
Blackbird, Bye-bye.

Nina Simone

For more on the eight-point star of Venus,
see “Bright Star,” my note of October 23, 2002.

Hall of Shame

“You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame.”

– Actor Tim Robbins, who played pitcher Nuke LaLoosh in “Bull Durham,” in a letter to baseball Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey.  Petroskey cancelled a scheduled April 26-27 Hall of Fame celebration of the Bull film due to the possibility of political remarks.

In further remarks at the National Press Club on April 15, Robbins said

“Sportswriters across the country reacted with such overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the president of the Hall admitted he made a mistake and Major League Baseball disavowed any connection to the actions of the Hall’s president. A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.”