A Beautiful Fantasy:

The Secret life of
 John Nash

"Dr. Blind (pronounced 'Blend') was about ninety years old and had taught, for the past fifty years, a course called 'Invariant Subspaces' which was noted for its monotony and virtually absolute unintelligibility, as well as for the fact that the final exam, as long as anyone could remember, had consisted of the same single yes-or-no question. The question was three pages long but the answer was always 'Yes'. That was all you needed to pass Invariant Subspaces."

-- The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

 

"...I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris
1914-1921"

-- Ulysses, by James Joyce

Today in History:
The Comeback Kid

(Courtesy of Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar)

On this date:

In 1962, having lost the California governor's race, Richard Nixon said to the press, "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more."

In 1972, Republican incumbent President Richard Nixon was re-elected, defeating Democratic candidate George McGovern, 520 electoral votes to 17.

From the archives of singer/songwriter Shannon Campbell ("voice of an angel, mouth of a truckdriver")--

Feb. 6, 2002: The Essential Matrix

NEO: (whines) Who am I?

TRINITY: You are The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Eh, he might be The One.

TRINITY: He is The One.

NEO: I am not The One.

TRINITY: You are The One.

THE ORACLE: You are not The One, but you can't tell anybody.

NEO: (whines) But I wanted to be The One. I want to go home....

TRINITY: Fuck. He's not The One.

EVERYONE ELSE: Told you so.

MORPHEUS: Sure wish someone was The One. I'm in deep shit.

Legacy Codes:

The Most Violent Poem

Lore of the Manhattan Project:

From The Trinity Site --

"I imagined Oppenheimer saying aloud, 'Batter my heart, three person'd God," unexpectedly recalling John Donne's 'Holy Sonnet [14],' and then he knew, ' "Trinity" will do.' Memory has its reasons.

'Batter my heart' -- I remember these words. I first heard them on a
fall day at Duke University in 1963. Inside a classroom twelve of us
were seated around a long seminar table listening to Reynolds Price
recite this holy sonnet....

I remember Reynolds saying, slowly, carefully, 'This is the most violent poem in the English language.' "

Related Entertainment

Today's birthday:
director Mike Nichols

From a dead Righteous Brother:

"If you believe in forever
Then life is just a one-night stand."

-- Bobby Hatfield, found dead
in his hotel room at
7 PM EST Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2003,
before a concert scheduled at
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.

From a review of The Matrix Revolutions:

"You'd have to be totally blind at the end to miss the Christian
symbolism.... Trinity gets a glimpse of heaven.... And in the end... God Put A Rainbow In The Clouds."

Moral of the
Entertainment:

According to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi],

"Li" is
"the principle or coherence
or order or pattern
underlying the cosmos."

-- Smith, Bol, Adler, and Wyatt,
Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching,
Princeton University Press, 1990

Related Non-Entertainment

Symmetry and a Trinity
(for the dotting-the-eye symbol above)

Introduction to Harmonic Analysis
(for musical and historical background)

Mathematical Proofs
(for the spirit of Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo)

Moral of the
Non-Entertainment:

"Many kinds of entity
become easier to handle
by decomposing them into
components belonging to spaces
invariant under specified symmetries."

-- The importance of
mathematical conceptualisation
by David Corfield,
Department of History and
Philosophy of Science,
University of Cambridge

See, too,
Symmetry of Walsh Functions and
Geometry of the I Ching.

Legacy Codes

"In writing The Legacy Codes, the term itself became the play's central metaphor. In newspaper accounts of the Wen Ho Lee case, the classified legacy codes which caused the uproar were described as computer simulations of plutonium explosions. The term is also used by computer experts for any archaic codes which are still necessary to run complex computer programs. For me the term can also be interpreted as the DNA genetic code, it can be interpreted as what is passed on in families regarding culture, family secrets, genetic traits. It also can relate to how people and institutions want to be remembered in the future."

-- Playwright Cherylene Lee

The Legacy Codes opens at 7 tonight in Manhattan.

Game Over

 "Everything that has a beginning
     has an end."

-- The Matrix Revolutions

Matrix, by Knots, Inc., 1979.

"Easy to master -- A lifetime to enjoy!"

The object for 2 players (8-adult)
is to be the first to form a line
consisting of 4 different
colored chips.

Imagist Poem

(Recall the Go-chip
in Wild Palms.)

Endings and Beginnings

Today's birthday: author Sam Shepard.

From pbs.org:

"Shepard has a noted aversion to pat endings: 'I hate endings. Just detest them. . . . The temptation toward resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already evolving towards another beginning. That's genius.' "

Chinese Poem

Translation:

End

Chu

(See previous entry.
Click on characters
above for details.)

Library of Paradise

Click to enlarge.

In memory of architect Philip Chu, who designed the above library at Amherst College:

"Chu was best known for his designs of college libraries, which his family said blended 'modern influences from such innovators as Frank Lloyd Wright, the Oriental use of space and exterior design together with the traditional materials.' Critics characterized his designs as 'warm and inviting,' his family said in a written statement.

Among his designs were the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, which was dedicated by President John Kennedy..."

-- Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 3, 2003

And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.

-- Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi

Chu died at 83 in Honolulu on
October 27, 2003.

See Dream of Heaven, Oct. 27, 2003.

See, too, ART WARS for Oct. 26, 2003...
Forty years to the day after Kennedy's remarks at Amherst.

  

Chronotope

The polytope at left in the illustration below might, to use the term of Bakhtin, be called a "chronotope."

See Time Fold for a literary context.

All Souls' Day
at the Still Point

From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:

"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along.  'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "

From The Bakhtin Circle:

"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:

Time and space merge ... into an inseparable unity ... a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination... this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space....

Dostoevskii... sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:

Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists.... "

Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined.  For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold.  For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.

From Four Quartets:

"At the still point, there the dance is."

From an essay by William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:

"There is no o'clock in a cantina."

Symmetry in Diamond Theory:
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

"Groups arise in most areas of pure and applied mathematics, usually as a set of operators or transformations of some structure. The appearance of a group generally reflects some kind of symmetry in the object under study, and such symmetry may be considered one of the fundamental notions of mathematics."

-- Peter Webb

"Counter-change is sometimes known as Robbing Peter to Pay Paul."

-- Helen Kelley Patchwork

Paul Robeson in King Solomon's Mines	Counterchange symmetry

For a look at the Soviet approach
to counterchange symmetry, see

The Kishinev School of Discrete Geometry.

The larger cultural context:

See War of Ideas (Oct. 24),
The Hunt for Red October (Oct. 25),
On the Left (Oct. 25), and
ART WARS for Trotsky's Birthday (Oct. 26).