Seal

The Log24 entry for yesterday, the date of Prince Rainier's funeral,
discussed a figure sometimes called "Solomon's seal."  Here are
some further reflections.

In memory of Leonardo and of Chen Yifei (previous entry), a link to the Sino-Judaic Institute's review of Chen's film "Escape to Shanghai" --

Click on the above for details.

Related material
from Log24.net:

---

Saturday, December 27, 2003  10:21 PM

Toy

"If little else, the brain is an educational toy.  While it may be a
frustrating plaything -- one whose finer points recede just when you think you
are mastering them -- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently
surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't
have to put it together on Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to
play with it, too.  Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than
theirs.  Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from
the way they play with theirs.  The result is, a few games out of a toy
department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated.  If you
don't play some people's game, they say that you have 'lost your marbles,' not
recognizing that,

while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play
dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette
with his brain.

One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called
'rational thought.' "

-- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Sol LeWitt
June 12, 1969:

"I took the number twenty-four and there's twenty-four ways of expressing the
numbers one, two, three, four.  And I assigned one kind of line to one, one
to two, one to three, and one to four.  One was a vertical line, two was a
horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right
to left.  These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take....
the absolute ways that lines can be drawn.   And I drew these things
as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes.  And then there was a
system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different
arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four.  Everything
was based on four.  So this was kind of a... more of a... less of a
rational... I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology."

Yes, it does.
See Art Wars, Poetry's Bones, and Time
Fold.

Friday, December 26, 2003  7:59 PM

ART WARS, St. Stephen's Day:

The Magdalene Code

Got The Da Vinci Code for Xmas.

From page 262:

When Langdon had first seen The Little Mermaid, he had actually
gasped aloud when he noticed that the painting in Ariel's underwater home was
none other than seventeenth-century artist Georges de la Tour's The
Penitent Magdalene -- a famous homage to the banished Mary Magdalene --
fitting decor considering the movie turned out to be a ninety-minute collage
of blatant symbolic references to the lost sanctity of Isis, Eve, Pisces the
fish goddess, and, repeatedly, Mary Magdalene.

Related Log24 material --

December 21, 2002:

A Maiden's Prayer

The Da Vinci Code, pages 445-446:

"The blade and chalice?" Marie asked.  "What exactly do they look
like?"

Langdon sensed she was toying with him, but he played along, quickly
describing the symbols.

A look of vague recollection crossed her face.  "Ah, yes, of
course.  The blade represents all that is masculine.  I believe it
is drawn like this, no?"  Using her index finger, she traced a shape on
her palm.

"Yes," Langdon said.  Marie had drawn the less common "closed" form of
the blade, although Langdon had seen the symbol portrayed both ways.

"And the inverse," she said, drawing again upon her palm, "is the
chalice, which represents the feminine."

"Correct," Langdon said....

... Marie turned on the lights and pointed....

"There you are, Mr. Langdon.  The blade and chalice."....

"But that's the Star of Dav--"

Langdon stopped short, mute with amazement as it dawned on him.

The blade and chalice.

Fused as one.

The Star of David... the perfect union of male and female... Solomon's
Seal... marking the Holy of Holies, where the male and female
deities -- Yahweh and Shekinah -- were thought
to dwell.

Related Log24 material --

Skewed Views

The Baltimore Sun on Saul Bellow, who died April 5, and women:

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice McDermott said she most admires the
way that Mr. Bellow carefully structured his novels and short stories.

"He's a writer's writer," she said.... "There's a
classical shape to everything he writes, and that gives his novels and
stories an air of inevitability...."

.... In spite, or perhaps because, of all the praise, Mr. Bellow also had
detractors....  Critic Alfred Kazin thought the author had become a
"university intellectual" with "contempt for the lower orders."

Even Ms. McDermott said she had to "park my feminism at the door" while reading Mr. Bellow's work.

"Despite all my resistance to his characters' worldview, through
his prose he's able to let you enter fully into the life of this white,
Jewish intellectual who has a skewed view of women," she said.

A great woman artist on skewed views:

"That's what you're supposed to do as an artist. We're not here to
stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that," [Julie] Taymor said. "We're here
to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see
yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint
the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction...."

Finally, a skewed view
of Pope John Paul II in Paradise:

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

In the Details

Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

XXII

Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search

For reality is as momentous as

The search for God."  It is the philosopher's search

For an interior made exterior

And the poet's search for the same exterior made

Interior....

   ... Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient
light in the most ancient sky,
That it is
wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy
bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a
possible for its possibleness.

Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview:

"... they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you
want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail....

They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside
to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was...it was the most
important thing that I ever experienced."

"Skewed Mirrors"
illustrated:

Click on the above to enlarge.

 "Mathematical realism
holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human
mind.  Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover
it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe
would presumably do the same. The term Platonism is used
because such a view is seen to parallel Plato's belief in a "heaven of
ideas", an unchanging ultimate reality that the everyday world can only
imperfectly approximate. Plato's view probably derives from Pythagoras,
and his
followers the Pythagoreans, who believed that the world was,
quite literally, built up by the numbers. This idea may have even older
origins that are unknown to us." -- Wikipedia

From Maureen Dowd's New York Times
column of June 9, 2002:

"The shape of the government is not as important as the policy
of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and
pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the
National Gallery of Art."

To order, see the
Amazing Music Box & Gifts Company.

"Then he began to narrate in his original style.... After this came
disclosure, confession.  Then he accused, fulminated, stammered,
blazed, cried out.  He crossed the universe like light....

He had no old friends, only ex-friends.  He could become terrible,
going into reverse without warning.  When this happened, it was
like being caught in a tunnel by the Express.  You could only
cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying."