Language Games:

Now You’re Playing
with Power

My latest preoccupation…

Using
search-and-replace programs to reformat earlier Xanga entries. 
This involves the use of “regular expressions,” which lead to the
following thoughts….

Notes on
Formal Language Theory
and Parsing

James Power

Department of Computer Science
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.

Click on picture
for details.

Here’s more on
language games and robot wisdom
from an authority on James Joyce,

Ineluctable

On the poetry of Geoffrey Hill:

“… why read him? Because of the things he writes about—war and peace and
sacrifice, and the search for meaning and the truths of the heart, and
for that haunting sense that, in spite of war and terror and the
indifferences that make up our daily hells, there really is some
grander reality, some ineluctable presence we keep touching. There
remains in Hill the daunting possibility that it may actually all
cohere in the end, or at least enough of it to keep us searching for
more.

There is a hard edge to Hill, a strong Calvinist streak in him, and an intelligence that reminds one of Milton…..”

– Paul Mariani, review in America of Geoffrey Hill’s The Orchards of Syon

“Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.” 

“A
very short space of time through very short times of space…. Am I walking into
eternity along Sandymount strand?”

– James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter

“Time has
been unfolded into space.”

– James O. Coplien, Bell Labs

“Pattern and symmetry are closely related.”

– James O. Coplien on Symmetry Breaking

“… as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts
it, ‘the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time .
. . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen
himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change
and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking
his self among its temporal manifestations’….

– Goldberg, S.L. ‘Homer and the Nightmare of History.’ Modern Critical
Views: James Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38.”

– from the Choate site of David M. Loeb

Coplien

Joyce

Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one:

A Form

John Leonard in the June 10, 2004, New York Review of Books, on E. L. Doctorow:

“… he’s got urgent things to say and seeks some form to say them in, or a form that will tease and torture secret meanings out of what he thinks he already knows, or a form, like a wishing well, down which to dream, scream, or drown.”

48. The Well

The Judgment

The Well. The town may be changed,
But the well cannot be changed.
It neither decreases nor increases.
They come and go and draw from the well.
If one gets down almost to the water
And the rope does not go all the way,
Or the jug breaks, it brings misfortune.

From the Book of Ecclesiastes 12:6—

or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern

From Chuck Polisher’s I Ching Lexicon:

See also the following form, discussed in

Balanchine’s Birthday
(1/9/03) and in

Art Theory
for Yom Kippur
(10/5/03)

Star Wars

In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:

“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”

— Obituary in the Telegraph 

Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004.  From a journal entry of my own on that date:

This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.

Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star.  Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:

From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:

Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:

Theme and Variations 

“Por ejemplo, con las posibles secuencias de sólo cuatro letras diferentes: A, R, O y M obtenemos cinco palabras con significados completamente distintos: MORA, ROMA, AMOR, RAMO y OMAR.”

— El Genoma Humano,
by Ricardo Tapia

For a deeper meditation on the genetic implications of four-letter words, see
the link to Richard Powers’s work at
Theme and Variations.

I personally prefer the following
selection of four-letter words:

The significance of these
words may be found
via these links:

ROMA
ORAM
MARO
 AMOR

Click on pictures
for further details.

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… 
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel“

Robinson Jeffers,
“Point Pinos and Point Lobos”

Parable, Part II

The juxtaposition in this morning’s Google news of the two wedding stories below calls for some commentary.  The best I can do is the illustrations above the wedding stories, along with a link to some of the best Romani music I have ever heard, from

La Perla de Cadiz.

See also this morning’s comments
on a May 24, 2003, entry
regarding the Dark Lady,
as well as the following
classic remarks by Jack Kerouac:

“So what do we all do in this life which comes on so much like an empty voidness yet warns us that we will die in pain, decay, old age, horror—?  Hemingway called it a dirty trick.  It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space, like the ordeal of the sieve and scissors, or even the water ordeal where they dump you in the water with toes tied to thumbs, O God— Only Lucifer could be so mean and I am Lucifer and I’m not that mean, in fact Lucifer goes to Heaven— The warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get out of the dirty Ordeal by Death—

When Ben and I sober up I say ‘How goes it with all that horror everywhere?’

‘It’s Mother Kali dancing around to eat up everything she gave birth to, eats it right back—  She wears dazzling dancing jewels and covered all over with silks and decorations and feathers, her dance maddens men, the only part of her aint covered is her vagina which is surrounded with a Mandala Crown of jade, lapis lazuli, cornelean, red pearls and mother of pearl.’

‘No diamonds.’

‘No, that’s beyond…’ “

— Desolation Angels,
1960-65, Book Two, Chapter 79

Parable

“A comparison or analogy. The word is simply a transliteration of the Greek word: parabolé (literally: ‘what is thrown beside’ or ‘juxtaposed’), a term used to designate the geometric application we call a ‘parabola.’….  The basic parables are extended similes or metaphors.”

– http://religion.rutgers.edu/nt/
    primer/parable.html

“If one style of thought stands out as the most potent explanation of genius, it is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude mere mortals.  Call it a facility with metaphor, the ability to connect the unconnected, to see relationships to which others are blind.”

– Sharon Begley, “The Puzzle of Genius,” Newsweek magazine, June 28, 1993, p. 50

“The poet sets one metaphor against another and hopes that the sparks set off by the juxtaposition will ignite something in the mind as well. Hopkins’ poem ‘Pied Beauty’ has to do with ‘creation.’ “

– Speaking in Parables, Ch. 2, by Sallie McFague

“The Act of Creation is, I believe, a more truly creative work than any of Koestler’s novels….  According to him, the creative faculty in whatever form is owing to a circumstance which he calls ‘bisociation.’ And we recognize this intuitively whenever we laugh at a joke, are dazzled by a fine metaphor, are astonished and excited by a unification of styles, or ‘see,’ for the first time, the possibility of a significant theoretical breakthrough in a scientific inquiry. In short, one touch of genius—or bisociation—makes the whole world kin. Or so Koestler believes.”

– Henry David Aiken, The Metaphysics of Arthur Koestler, New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 1964

For further details, see

Speaking in Parables:
A Study in Metaphor and Theology

by Sallie McFague

Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1975

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

“Perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without metaphor there would never have been any algebra.”

– attributed, in varying forms (1, 2, 3), to Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962

For metaphor and algebra combined, see

“Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring,” A.M.S. abstract 79T-A37, Notices of the Amer. Math. Soc., February 1979, pages A-193, 194 — the original version of the 4×4 case of the diamond theorem.

Style

In memory of Lynn H. Loomis:

The above diagram is from a
(paper) journal note of October 21, 1999.

It pictures the relationship of my own discovery, diamond theory (at center), to the field, harmonic analysis, of Professor Loomis, a writer whose style I have long admired.

A quotation from the 1999 note:

“…it is not impossible to draw a fairly sharp dividing line between our mental disposition in the case of esthetic response and that of the responses of ordinary life.  A far more difficult question arises if we try to distinguish it from the responses made by us to certain abstract mental constructions such as those of pure mathematics…. Perhaps the distinction lies in this, that in the case of works of art the whole end and purpose is found in the exact quality of the emotional state, whereas in the case of mathematics the purpose is the constatation of the universal validity of the relations without regard to the quality of the emotion accompanying apprehension.  Still, it would be impossible to deny the close similarity of the orientation of faculties and attention in the two cases.”
— Roger Fry, Transformations (1926), Doubleday Anchor paperback, 1956, p. 8

In other words, appreciating mathematics is much like appreciating art.

(Digitized diagram courtesy of Violet.)

Different.

Language Game

In memory of
Samuel Iwry, Hebrew scholar,
who died on May 8, 2004:

From a log24 entry of May 8, 2004,
on Wittgenstein’s “language games” —

    “Let us imagine a language …”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
    Philosophical Investigations

Okay…

Moral of the story:
If you must have a
religious language,
Elvish may,
in some situations,
do as well as Hebrew.

See also

The Unity of Mathematics,
or Shema, Israel.