Da Capo, Part II:
The Elegant Window
From a review of
The Nick Tosches Reader,
published by Da Capo Press:
"Elegant as a slow blues."
-- Rolling Stone
"Examples are the
stained-glass windows of knowledge."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
And so....
See also
Month: January 2005
-
"I don’t know how you expiate guilt."
-
Crystal Night
Mies van der Rohe:
Mies in Berlin
Winner of
The Society of Architectural Historians
2002 Philip Johnson Award
for ExcellenceExhibition Catalog
"Published to accompany
a
groundbreaking 2001 exhibition at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.""It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog... to have
addressed the issue of his politics.... By ignoring such a central
subject... the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up.... Only the
German-born Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife)
alludes to the verboten topic
in her [catalog] essay on Mies's flirtation with crystal imagery, drawing a sharp
parallel between the architect's extensive use of Kristallglas
(plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht, which
erupted just three months after he left for the States."Also from Filler's essay:"Mies's rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and
glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal
of modernism for many people."For more on aesthetics, see the
Log24.net entry of Tuesday noon,For more on a Platonic ideal of sorts,
see the following figure in two versions:Version A, from Plato's Meno and
Diamond Theory,
and Version B,
from the date of Johnson's death
at his "famous crystalline box."Was less more?
-
Diamonds Are Forever
Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise:"
'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the
diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old
man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money--
you can tell that just by looking-- but it means something, I
think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's
see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's
hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The
jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal
in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of
compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me,
eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.'Pablo's
eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa
Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don't it?'
'I have heard it,' Egan said. 'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box( 
)
and logical possibility
with the diamond( "
).
FromIN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT
Nythamar Fernandes de OliveiraPontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil"Such is the paradoxical 'encounter' of the eternal with the
temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal
entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant
(Danish Ojeblikket, 'a glance of the eye, eyeblink,' German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:If the instant is posited, so is the eternal --but also the future,
which comes again like the past ... The concept around which everything
turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of
time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be
seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the
opposition between 'eternity' and 'temporality': the instant, as 'an
atom of eternity,' serves to restructure the whole synthesis of
selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s 'ascent' toward its Other and
the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every
synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness,
preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the
wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore,
that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of
becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),The possibility of the good
is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of
the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to
expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good
is eternal. ...But if there is less love in him, there is also less of
the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there
is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for
possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within
the eternal in a human being)." -
The Diamond
of Possibility
by Keith Allen Korcz"We symbolize logical necessity with the box
( and logical possibility with the diamond)( ).
I first discuss combining negations with the box and diamond, noting
that logical possibility and logical necessity are inter-definable with
the help of negation:
And what do we
symbolize by
? -
Old School Tie
From a review of A Beautiful Mind:
"We are introduced to John Nash, fuddling
flat-footed about the Princeton courtyard, uninterested in
his classmates' yammering about their various accolades. One
chap has a rather unfortunate sense of style, but rather than
tritely insult him, Nash holds a patterned glass to the sun,
[director Ron] Howard shows us refracted patterns of light that take shape
in a punch bowl, which Nash then displaces onto the neckwear,
replying, 'There must be a formula for how ugly your
tie is.' "
"Three readings of diamond and box
have been extremely influential."-- Draft of
Computing with Modal Logics
(pdf), by Carlos Areces
and Maarten de Rijke"Algebra in general is particularly suited for structuring and
abstracting. Here, structure is imposed via symmetries and
dualities, for instance in terms of Galois connections....... diamonds and boxes are upper and lower adjoints of Galois connections...."
-- "Modal Kleene Algebra
and Applications: A Survey"
(pdf), by Jules Desharnais,
Bernhard Möller, and
Georg Struth, March 2004See also
Galois Correspondence
Evariste Galois"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, 1962For 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 4x4 case
of the diamond theorem. -
Death and the Spirit,
Part IV
See also
Death and the Spirit, Part II, and
Death and the Spirit, Part III.
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