Month: June 2005

  • Drama of the Diagonal,
    continued

    "I could name other writers
    who share this sense of a world
    larger than ourselves; their writing provides
    a field in which something like
    a sacramental imagination is clearly at play."

    -- Paul Mariani,
    God and the Imagination

    "... the horizon is not the limit of meaning,
    but that which extends
    meaning
    from what is directly given
    to the whole context in which it is given,
    including a sense of a world."

    From Wallace Stevens,
    "A Primitive Like an Orb":
    X
    It is a giant, always, that is evolved,
    To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips
    Both size and solitude or thinks it does,
    As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece.
    But the virtuoso never leaves his shape,
    Still on the horizon elongates his cuts,
    And still angelic and still plenteous,
    Imposes power by the power of his form.
    XI
    Here, then, is an abstraction given head,
    A giant on the horizon, given arms,
    A massive body and long legs, stretched out,
    A definition with an illustration, not
    Too exactly labeled, a large among the smalls
    Of it, a close, parental magnitude,
    At the center of the horizon, concentrum, grave
    And prodigious person, patron of origins.
    XII
    That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
    The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
    Each one, his fated eccentricity,
    As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
    Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
    Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
    Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
    And the giant ever changing, living in change.



    Related material

    (Click on pictures
    for details.)

    Logos Alogos
    by S. H. Cullinane

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/021126-diagonH2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Logos Alogos II:
    Horizon

    See also
    Subject and Predicates and
    The Quality of Diamond.

  • The Barest Vocabulary
    at the Altar of Facts

    From Log24,
    April 28, 2005:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050310-hex.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    (See also Log24,


    April 5, 2005
    .)
     

    Compare this diagram with that of
    Samuel Beckett in Quad (1981):

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050428-Quad.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


    Related quotation:

    Barry Mazur on a seminal paper of algebraist Saunders Mac Lane:

    The paper was rejected "because the editor thought that it was 'more
    devoid of content' than any other he had read.  'Saunders wrote
    back and said, "That’s the point,"' Mazur said.  'And in some ways
    that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary
    that incorporates the theory and nothing else.'"

    Other related material:





    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050602-Duif.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    From Reuters:

    "Members
    of the ballot commission manually count EU referendum votes in the
    Duifkerk
    in Amsterdam June 1st, 2005. Dutch voters soundly rejected the
    European Union constitution in a referendum on June 1.....  Photo by... Ronald
    Fleurbaaij"

    Background reading on the new

    Prime Minister of France
    :

    "M. de Villepin
    positively worships Napoleon, and models himself after his hero. In a
    600-page biography, Villepin wrote admiringly about the difference
    between great men like Napoleon and the 'common run' of men. It is
    worth reading every word carefully.

    'Here we
    touch on that particular essence of great men, on what distinguishes
    Napoleon or Alexander, Caesar or de Gaulle, from the common run. It is
    excess, exaltation, and a taste for risk that forms their genius. It is
    why they are often better understood in their élan by writers and
    poets, who are possessed of the same thirst for the absolute, than by
    those who pray at the altar of facts.'

    (New Republic)

    And in praise of French nationalism, de Villepin wrote,

    'The
    Gaullist adventure renewed the élan of [Napoleon's] Consulate through
    the restoration of a strong executive and the authority of the State,
    the same scorn for political parties and for compromise, a common taste
    for action, and an obsession with the general interest and the grandeur
    of France.'

    Those words come
    straight from 1800. Napoleon’s 'genius,' his 'thirst for the absolute,'
    'excess, exaltation, and a taste for risk,' 'a strong executive and the
    authority of the State,' 'his 'scorn for political parties and for
    compromise,' and 'an obsession with the grandeur of France' --- it is
    all classic national hero worship. But today that kind of thinking is
    used to promote a new vision of destiny, the European Union."

    -- James Lewis at The American Thinker,
       Jan. 4, 2005

  • The Road to Brussels



    "History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It
    teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences
    of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover
    for itself what situations are in fact comparable."

     — Henry Kissinger, quoted in

         Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux

    "Les livres d’histoire et la vie
    racontent la même comédie....
    "
    Alain Boublil






    "Along the road from Ohain to Braine-l'Alleud that hemmed
    in the plain of Mont-St-Jean and cut at right angles the road to Brussels,
    which the Emperor wished to take, he [Wellington] had placed 67,000 men and 184 cannons." -- Fr. Libert, Waterloo

    The Emperor's Welcome

    From Expatriate Online:
    Your Bookmark to Belgium --

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050601-Waterloo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

  • Just Say Nee

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050601-Nee.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Click on picture
    for details.