March 7, 2004
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Ridgepole
CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching–
By Richard Wilhelm:
“He who has perceived the meaning of change fixes his attention no longer on transitory individual things but on the immutable, eternal law at work in all change. This law is the tao of Lao-tse, the course of things, the principle of the one in the many. That it may become manifest, a decision, a postulate, is necessary. This fundamental postulate is the ‘great primal beginning’ of all that exists, t’ai chi — in its original meaning, the ‘ridgepole.’ Later Chinese philosophers devoted much thought to this idea of a primal beginning. A still earlier beginning, wu chi, was represented by the symbol of a circle. Under this conception, t’ai chi was represented by the circle divided into the light and the dark, yang and yin,
.
This symbol has also played a significant part in India and Europe. However, speculations of a gnostic-dualistic character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching; what it posits is simply the ridgepole, the line. With this line, which in itself represents oneness, duality comes into the world, for the line at the same time posits an above and a below, a right and left, front and back-in a word, the world of the opposites.”
The t’ai chi symbol is also illustrated on the web page Cognitive Iconology, which says that
“W.J.T. Mitchell calls ‘iconology’ a study of the ‘logos’ (the words, ideas, discourse, or ‘science’) of ‘icons’ (images, pictures, or likenesses). It is thus a ‘rhetoric of images’ (Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, p. 1).”
A variation on the t’ai chi symbol appears in a log24.net entry for March 5:
The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane
See too my web page Logos and Logic, which has the following:
“The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction. Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics.”
– Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
Logos Alogos,
by S. H. Cullinane
In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of “Notes,” Stevens says
“They will get it straight one day
at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight
from the lecture
Pleased that
the irrational is rational….”
This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.
