We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13

For James and Lucia Joyce

In the Orbit of Genius --
TIME, Dec. 1, 2003:

"Once, when her mother asked if Joyce should visit her in the sanatorium, Lucia said, 'Tell him I am a crossword puzzle, and if he does not mind seeing a crossword puzzle, he is to come out.' "

Compare and contrast
with Finnegans Wake

From Roger Zelazny's Eye of Cat:

"A massive, jaguarlike form with a single, gleaming eye landed on the vehicle's hood forward and to the front.  It was visible for but an instant, and then it sprang away. The car tipped, its air cushion awry, and it was already turning onto its side before he left the trail.  He fought with the wheel and the attitude control, already knowing that it was too late.  There came a strong shock accompanied by a crunching noise, and he felt himself thrown forward.

DEADLY, DEADLY, DEADLY...
Kaleidoscope turning... Shifting  pattern within unalterable structure... Was it a mistake? There is pain with the power...  Time's friction at the edges...  Center loosens, forms again elsewhere...  Unalterable?  But - Turn outward.  Here songs of self erode the will till actions lie stillborn upon night's counterpane.  But - Again the movement...  Will it hold beyond a catch of moment?  To fragment...  Not kaleidoscope.  No center.  But again... To form it will.  To will it form.  Structure... Pain...  Deadly, deadly...  And lovely.  Like a sleek, small dog... A plastic statue... The notes of an organ, the first slug of gin on an empty stomach... We settle again, farther than ever before... Center. The light!... It is difficult being a god. The pain. The beauty. The terror of selfless -  Act!  Yes. Center, center, center... Here? Deadly...

We are the key."

For Sinatra's Birthday

Sinatra made as good use as anyone in the past century of the 12-note tempered scale, so the above seems a reasonably apt tribute on this, his 12/12 birthday.

Rough Beast

The title is a reference to the horse in yesterday's entry of 6:13 PM.

The time of that entry, 6:13, is a deliberate reference* to the date of a June 13, 2003, entry, for the birthday of W. B. Yeats.

That entry contains the following --

Behold a Pale Horse:
A link in memory of Gregory Peck,

which leads to...

"It was not a mere soldier's courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like charging Death itself on his pale horse.

Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come."

-- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize Lecture
   of Dec. 10, 2003

Putting Descartes Before Dehors

"Descartes déclare que c'est en moi, non hors de moi, en moi, non dans le monde, que je pourrais voir si quelque chose existe hors de moi."

-- ATRIUM, Philosophie

For further details, see ART WARS.

Tru Story

From the Internet Broadway Database entry on the play Tru, starring Robert Morse:

"Setting: Truman Capote's
New York apartment at
870 United Nations Plaza.
One week before Christmas, 1975."

For Lewis Allen, producer of Tru, who died on Monday, the Buddhist holy day Rohatsu...

Robert Morse again performs "In My Room" (see previous entry), but this time the space he describes is the complex plane.

Capote collected paperweights; the complex plane is an apt setting for what might be called "paperweights of eternity" -- i.e., Riemann spheres.  Click on the spheres for a larger version, the work of Anders Sandberg.

Street of the Fathers

From Bruce Wagner's Wild Palms --

Robert Morse sings in Kyoto
as negotiators discuss
the Go chip:

"In My Room"

Coordinates for a 4x4 space:

A Small Go Board Study:

From
Université René Descartes,
45 rue des Saints Pères,
Paris

Today's birthdays:

Kirk Douglas
Buck Henry
John Malkovich

Dream of Youth

Today is the feast day of

Saint Hermann Weyl.

In his honor, here are two links:

The Jugendtraum and

Langlands on the Jugendtraum.

Dead Poets Society

On Friday, December 5, 2003, I picked up a copy of An Introduction to Poetry, by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 8th ed., at a used book sale for 50 cents.

The previous entry concerns a poem by Buson I found in that book, and contains a link on Kennedy's name to a work suitable for this holiday season.

As additional thanks for the poem, here are links to a two-part interview with Gioia:

Paradigms Lost: Part One, and

Paradigms Lost: Part Two.

"A poem need not shout to be heard."
-- Dana Gioia

Happy Rohatsu

"The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus."

-- Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk

A poem for Rohatsu:

On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.

~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)

Commentary on poetry of Buson:

Poetry as an open space
 for lightening of Being

"... a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where 'nothing' crosses with 'being' or the 'clearing' in Heidegger's term, the only light place in the dark forest."

-- Hiroo Saga

In other words,
From Here to Eternity.

For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.

For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.

For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.

For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.

The Last Samurai
Grandmother

"The 'Samurai Grandmother'
Margaret Singer
   has passed away…"

Singer was the author of
Cults in Our Midst.

For some background on
Singer and Scientology,
see The Anti-Cult Movement.

" 'I might look like a little old grandma, but I'm no pushover,' she told a reporter last year, just before tossing back another shot of Bushmills Irish whiskey, her libation of choice."

"Occasionally threatened, Singer refused to back down. In a 2002 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, she told how, at 80, she had frightened off someone who'd been leaving menacing notes in her mailbox."

"I've got a 12-gauge shotgun up here with a spray pattern that'll put a three-foot hole in you, sonny, and you'd better get off my porch, or you'll be sorry!" she shouted out the window.