November 16, 2003
-
Russell Crowe as Santa’s Helper
From The Age, Nov. 17, 2003:
“Russell Crowe’s period naval epic has been relegated to second place at the US box office by an elf raised by Santa’s helpers at the North Pole.”
From A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“The lunatic,¹ the lover,² and the poet³
Are of imagination all compact.”
1
2
3
In acceping a British Film Award for his work in A Beautiful Mind, Crowe said that
“Richard Harris, one of the finest of this profession, recently brought to my attention the verse of Patrick Kavanagh:
‘To be a poet and not know the trade,
To be a lover and repel all women,
Twin ironies by which
great saints are made,
The agonising
pincer jaws of heaven.’ “
A theological image both more pleasant and more in keeping with the mathematical background of A Beautiful Mind is the following:
This picture, from a site titled Strange and Complex, illustrates a one-to-one correspondence between the points of the complex plane and all the points of the sphere except for the North Pole.
To complete the correspondence (to, in Shakespeare’s words, make the sphere’s image “all compact“), we may adjoin a “point at infinity” to the plane — the image, under the revised correspondence, of the North Pole.
For related poetry, see Stevens’s “A Primitive Like an Orb.”
For more on the point at infinity, see the conclusion of Midsummer Eve’s Dream.
For Crowe’s role as Santa’s helper, consider how he has helped make known the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and see Kavanagh’s “Advent“:
O after Christmas† we’ll have
no need to go searching….
… Christ comes with a January flower.
† i.e. Christ Mass… as, for instance, performed by the six Jesuits who were murdered in El Salvador on this date in 1989.
