What Is Poetry?

Today in History

Happy birthday, Ronna.

Contrapuntal Structure

Click here for a web page based on my Sept. 16 entry The Form, the Pattern.

The Mysteries of 26

My entry of May 26, 2003 —

Many Dimensions — Why 26? —

dealt with the question of whether this number, said to be of significance (as a number of dimensions) in theoretical physics, has any purely mathematical properties of interest.

That entry contained the above figure, a so-called Levi graph illustrating point/line incidence in the finite projective plane with 13 points and 13 lines, PG(2,3).

It turns out that in a paper of April 7, 2000, John H. Conway and Christopher S. Simons discussed a close connection between this plane and the Monster group.  See

26 Implies the Bimonster 

(Journal of Algebra. Vol. 235, no. 2.
MR 2001k:20028).

Conway had written about such a connection as early as 1985.

I apologize for not knowing about this sooner, and so misleading any mathematical readers about the number 26, which it seems does have considerable purely mathematical significance.

Happy Ending

From yesterday morning:

From Jesus College, Oxford —
Not the Jesus I had in mind, but it will do:

"... Filled with despair, Orpheus dragged himself back to earth with only his music left to him.... In death Orpheus once more entered the Underworld, still playing the lyre. He and Eurydice were permanently reunited. Many scholars see Orpheus as another pagan prototype of Christ."

Amen.

Time's Breakdown

"... even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?"

-- The Professor, in "Passing in Silence,"
    by Oliver Humpage

"Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave."

-- Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)

"The Underground's 'flicker' is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly."

-- Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" in Four Quartets

From last year's entries:

ART WARS September 12, 2002

For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on

the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.

"At three o'clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it."
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency

For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.

Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.

The Form, the Pattern

"...the sort of organization that Eliot later called musical, in his lecture 'The Music of Poetry', delivered in 1942, just as he was completing Four Quartets: 'The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music,' Eliot says:

There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments ['different voices', we might say]; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter."

-- Louis L. Martz, from
"Origins of Form in Four Quartets,"
in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, ed. Edward Lobb, University of Michigan Press, 1993

"...  Only by the form, the pattern,     
Can words or music reach
The stillness...."

-- T. S. Eliot,
Four Quartets

Four Quartets

For a discussion of the above
form, or pattern, click here.

Time

Words move, music moves
Only in time....

-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

-- Wallace Stevens, "The Pure Good of Theory"

Only through time time is conquered.

-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

All the King's Horses

Johnny Cash's funeral was today.

Today is also the feast day of the Protestant saint Robert Penn Warren.

Here is how Stanley Kubrick might
make a memorial stone for Cash.

The title of this entry, "All the King's Horses," is of course a slightly altered version of the title of Robert Penn Warren's famous novel.  For the connection with horses, see my entries of

September 12, 2003, and of

September 5, 2002.

See also 

The Journey Westward and

Into the West,

as well as the beginning of Mark Helprin's novel

Winter's Tale:

"There was a white horse, on a quiet winter morning when snow covered the streets gently...." 

Two More Skewed Mirrors

Background: Previous three entries and
The Crucifixion of John O'Hara.

1. From The New Yorker,
   issue dated Sept. 22, 2003...
   
   John Updike on John O'Hara —
   
   

   And yet the ultimate units of society, the human individuals lost within the crushing agglomeration of hostility, rivalry, snobbery, exclusion, and defeat that O’Hara felt in his bones, have aspirations and hopes and passions, and can be regarded with tenderness by a writer whose bleak and swift style seems at first not to care. A small story from “Files on Parade” (1939) titled “By Way of Yonkers” sticks in my mind as especially moving. Its two principals, the young woman unnamed and the man named only in the last sentence, exist on the lower levels of Depression survival. She, with her gunmetal stockings and Cossack hat and “neat, short nose with jigsaw nostrils,” seems to be a hooker. She arrives at the man’s shabby apartment so late that he tells her she must have come by way of Yonkers, and when he asks “How’d you do?” of the engagement that delayed her she not quite evades the question:

   
   

   “Oh—” she said it very high. Then: “All right. Financially. But do we have to talk about it? You and me?”
   

   
   

   She talks instead about her fading appetite for liquor, and the expense of dental care. He, lying inert and fully dressed on his bed, talks of being broke, of not wanting to take money from her, of how he can’t seem “to make a connection in this town.” The town is New York, and he is a minor gangster thrown out of work by the repeal of Prohibition. But he has met a man who offered him a connection in Milwaukee, and he is going to go there for a long time. The concluding words are unspectacular and unexpectedly sweeping:

   
   

   [She asks,] “Any chance you being back in town soon?”
   “Well, not right away, honey. First I have to build up my connection again.”
   “Well, I don’t have to tell you, I’m glad for you. It’s about time you got a good break.” She resumed rubbing his ankle. He put his hand on the top of her head.
   “Yeah? You’re as good a break as I ever got.”
   “Ah, Christ, Bill,” she said, and fell face down in tears.
   

   
   

   One is moved not only by their plight of presumably eternal separation but by the dignity that O’Hara, in a literary time of programmatic pro-proletarian advocacy (Odets and Steinbeck and Mike Gold), instinctively brings to his two specimens of lowlife. He does not view them politically, from above; he is there in the room with them, and one is moved by the unspoken presence of an author so knowing, so unjudgmental, so nearly an outcast himself.

   
   
2. 
   

   Johnny Cash singing "Hurt" —
   
   The video can be seen here.

Ah, Christ, Johnny.