June 9, 2005

• Kernel of Eternity
  
  continued

  “At that instant he saw,
  in one blaze of light,
  an image of
  unutterable conviction….
  the core of life, the essential
  pattern
  whence all other things proceed,
  the kernel of eternity.”

  – Thomas Wolfe,
  Of Time and the River

  From “The Relations between
  Poetry and Painting,” by Wallace Stevens:

  “The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the
  theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology
  or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear.
  The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern
  art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious
  search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing
  that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it
  is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be,
  joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality
  changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point
  of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: ‘But he is one
  chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law
  fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself
  there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which
  he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.’
  Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not
  too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a
  modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less.”

  As yesterday’s entry “Kernel of Eternity”
  indicated, the word “kernel” has a definite meaning in
  mathematics.  The Klein four group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

  Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of
  Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin’s

  The Basic Picture, a Structure for Topology:

  

  Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures
  of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to
  describe what  Klee called the “mind or heart of creation.” 

  But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems
  that a simple picture of the “kernel of eternity” as the four group, a
  picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without
  distracting
  letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to
  supply such a picture:

  

  This is a picture of the four group
  as a permutation group on four points.
  Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
  transformations other than the identity,
  which may be regarded either as
  invisible or as rendered by
  the four black points themselves.

  
  Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:
  
  
  Review of the above (see comments)
  by a typical Xanga reader:

  “Ur a FUCKIN’ LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!”

  For more merriment, see
  The Optical Unconscious
  and
  The Painted Word.

  A recent Xangan movie review:

  “Annakin’s an idiot, but he’s not an idiot because that’s the way
  the character works, he’s an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to
  make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the
  dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but
  offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares
  about the republic, the next he’s killing his friends, and then for
  some reason he’s duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not
  me….

  So a big ol’ fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!“

  Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the “fuck patois.”

  A related suggestion from Google:
  

  
  

  Give Dad a photo
  gift
  this Father’s Day (June 19)

  These remarks from Xangans and Google
   suggest the following photo gift,
  based on a 2003 journal entry:

  

  • 7:45 pm
  • 2 Comments