At Mount Sinai:
Art Theory for Yom Kippur

From the New York Times of Sunday, October 5, 2003 (the day that Yom Kippur begins at sunset):

"Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, whose interpretations of religious law helped sustain Lithuanian Jews during Nazi occupation.... died on Sept. 28 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was 89."

For a fictional portrait of Lithuanian Jews during Nazi occupation, see the E. L. Doctorow novel City of God.

For meditations on the spiritual in art, see the Rosalind Krauss essay "Grids."   As a memorial to Rabbi Oshry, here is a grid-based version of the Hebrew letter aleph:

Click on the aleph for details.

"In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd..."   
-- The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
       City of God, by E. L. Doctorow

Here are two meditations
on Even and Odd for Yom Kippur:

Meditation I

From Rosalind Krauss, "Grids":

"If we open any tract-- Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance-- we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."

Meditation II

Here, for reference, is a Greek cross
within a nine-square grid:

 Related religious meditation for
    Doctorow's "Garden of Adding"...

 4 + 5 = 9.

Today's birthday: ageless Charlton Heston.

Happy Birthday, Moses!

Elaine Pagels,
authority on the Gnostic gospels,
p. 12, New York Review of Books,
issue dated Oct. 23, 2003

Meditation for the High Holy Days:

Noble Lies or Criminal Fraud?

On Noble Lies:

"Leo Strauss, who for many years taught an esoteric reading of Plato at the University of Chicago, believed that an educated elite could rule through deception. A circle of his former students, now in appointed public office, are in a position to make Strauss's teaching national practice."

-- America, the Jesuit weekly, July 7, 2003

("Words are events."-- Walter J. Ong, S.J.) 

On Criminal Fraud:

"There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas.... This whole thing was a fraud."

-- Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Iraq war, Sept. 18, 2003

"Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a war based on false claims.... [The Bush administration's] handling of intelligence and its retaliation against its critics may have been criminal."

-- Gen. Wesley Clark, Oct. 3, 2003

On the Good versus the True

According to one reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-- a book that deals with, among other things, the reading of Plato at the University of Chicago (see the Jesuit remarks above)-- the Good is the enemy of the True.  This is a reading that may well appeal to Bush supporters, who would of course like to be on the side of the Good.  Let them recall two Middle Eastern sayings:

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend,"
 
 and

"Satan is the father of lies." 

ART WARS:
Time and the Grid

Art theorist Rosalind Krauss and poet T. S. Eliot on time, timelessness, and the grid.

For Wallace Stevens's Birthday

Unlicensed Metaphysics:
Annie Dillard Revisited

Noticer: The Visionary Art
of Annie Dillard