May 27, 2004

  • 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

    In summary:

    James Joyce

    Joyce

    Aleph,
    alpha:
    nought,
    nought,
    one
    :


    See also Time Fold.

    (By the way, Jorn Barger seems
    to have emerged from seclusion.)

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