"... he triumphed again with The Goldberg Variations. Mr Jay, assisted by
Goldberg, a concentration camp survivor, is rehearsing a montage of
biblical scenes in Jerusalem. It is inspired satire, laced with Jewish
and Christian polemics, sparkling wit and dazzlingly simple effects.
For Golgotha a stagehand brings on three crosses. 'Just two,' says Jay.
'The boy is bringing his own.' Tabori often claimed that the joke was
the most perfect literary form."

George Tabori

"BERLIN (AP) -- Hungarian-born playwright and
director George Tabori, a legend in Germany's postwar theater world
whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday [July 23, 2007]. He was
93.

Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare's 'King Lear,' died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner
Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied
him through his final days. No cause of death was given.

Born
into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936
to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp.,
and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his
family, were killed at Auschwitz.

Tabori moved to Hollywood in
the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing
the script for Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 film, 'I Confess.'

He
moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that
spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and
humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the
Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism.

Among his best-known works are 'Mein Kampf,' set in the Viennese
hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the 'Goldberg
Variations,' both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis."

From Year of Jewish Culture:

"The year 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague."

From the related page Programme (October-December):

"Divadlo v Dlouhé
George Tabori: GOLDBERGOVSKÉ VARIACE / THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, 19 October, 7 p.m. A comedy on creation and martyrdom."

Variations on
Birth and Death

From Log24 on the date of the Prague production of the Tabori "Goldberg Variations," an illustration in honor of Sir Thomas Browne, who was born, and died, on that date: The above is from Variable Resolution 4–k Meshes: Concepts and Applications (pdf), by Luiz Velho and Jonas Gomes. See also Symmetry Framed and The Garden of Cyrus.

From Log24 on the date of Tabori's death: Theme (Plato, Meno) and Variations: Click on "variations" above for some material on the "Goldberg Variations" of Johann Sebastian Bach.

For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic "source of all images," see Scott McLaren on "Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams." McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic
wants to get, mysticism wants to give [...] In mysticism the will is
united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the
sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one
eternal and ultimate Object of love [...] In magic, the will unites
with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible
knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific
temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness [...]
(Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)

-- Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.

For more on what Bloom calls the "Will-to-Power over nature," see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in "Log24 - Juneteenth through Midsummer Night."

For more on what Underhill calls "the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific
temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness," see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter-- a writer on the nature of consciousness-- by magician Martin Gardner.

Death of a Nominalist

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge." --Ernest Hemingway

(The Hemingway quotation is from the AP's "Today in History" on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.)

Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007.

Joseph Goguen died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.)

Goguen's death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between
the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for
instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.)

Joseph A. Goguen, "Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology" (pdf):

"Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about
their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve.
For example, Euclid wrote, 'The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.' Similarly, the 'situations' in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble
conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated-- perhaps too sophisticated), are considered
to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally
considered judgements.⁵ The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that
all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as
scientific study or engineering design, for the
heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view,
all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course,
this does not mean that they are not useful."

⁵ The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.

[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.

From Log24 on the date of Goguen's death:

Requiem for a clown:

"At times, bullshit can only be

countered with superior bullshit."

-- Norman
Mailer

This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer's birth.  Also quoted on that date:

Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also
thoughts of God.

Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the
expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till
we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which
is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a
different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those
of God....

Whether the above excerpt-- from Hans Christian Oersted's The Soul in Nature (1852)-- is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.

Volta da Morte:
Friday the 13th

TV listing from Brazil
for Friday, Jan. 13th, 2006:

Related material:

If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts,

Friday the 13th
of January, 2006,

and

Catholic Schools Sermon

Death Flight

Lord Voldemort (in French vol de mort meaning "flight of death" or "steals of/in death," in Portuguese volta da morte meaning "return from death") made his debut in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

-- Wikipedia folk etymology; corrected, but may still contain errors.

Related material: Yesterday's entries and the remarks from Porto Alegre, Brazil, quoted here on January 25, 2005.