Month: June 2008

  • Happy Birthday, Aaron Sorkin:

    Interpret This

    "With respect, you only interpret."
    "Countries have gone to war
    after misinterpreting one another."

    -- The Interpreter

    "Once upon a time (say, for Dante),
    it must have been
    a revolutionary
    and
    creative move to design works
    of art so that they might be
    experienced
    on several
    levels."

    -- Susan Sontag,
    "Against Interpretation"

    Edward Rothstein in today's New York Times review of San Francisco's new Contemporary Jewish Museum:

    "An introductory wall panel tells us that in the Jewish mystical
    tradition the four letters [in Hebrew] of pardes each stand for a level of biblical
    interpretation: very roughly, the literal, the allusive, the
    allegorical and the hidden. Pardes, we are told, became the museum’s
    symbol because it reflected the museum’s intention to cultivate
    different levels of interpretation: 'to create an environment for
    exploring multiple perspectives, encouraging open-mindedness' and
    'acknowledging diverse backgrounds.' Pardes is treated as a form of
    mystical multiculturalism.

    But even the most elaborate interpretations of a text or tradition
    require more rigor and must begin with the literal. What is being said?
    What does it mean? Where does it come from and where else is it used?
    Yet those are the types of questions-- fundamental ones-- that are not
    being asked or examined [...].

    How can multiple perspectives and open-mindedness and diverse
    backgrounds be celebrated without a grounding in knowledge, without
    history, detail, object and belief?"

    "It's the system that matters.
    How the data arrange
    themselves inside it."

    -- Gravity's Rainbow  

    "Examples are the stained-
    glass windows of knowledge."

    -- Vladimir Nabokov  

    Map Systems (decomposition of functions over a finite field)

    Click on image to enlarge.   

  • Annals of Religion, continued:

    The System

    Pennsylvania Lottery
    Sunday, June 8, 2008:

    Mid-day 638
    Evening 913

    Midrash:

    638 --

    "It's the system that matters.
    How the data arrange
    themselves inside it."

    -- Gravity's Rainbow,
    page 638

    913 --

    "For every kind of vampire,
    there is a kind of cross."

    -- Thomas Pynchon, quoted
    here on 9/13, 2007

  • Today's Sermon:

    The Holy Trinity vs.
    The New York Times

    From the illustrator of
    today's NY Times review of
    The Drunkard's Walk --

    http://indexed.blogspot.com/

    Thursday, February 15, 2007

    Scary stories.
    Jessica Hagy, card 675: The Holy Trinity

    Posted by Jessica Hagy at 10:31 PM
    39 comments Labels: ,

    The book under review--
    The Drunkard's Walk:
    How Randomness Rules Our Lives    ,
    by the author of Euclid's Window--
    is, appropriately, published by
    Random House:

    Random House logo (color-reversed image)

    Click image for
    related material.

  • Annals of Religion:

    CHANGE
     TO BELIEVE IN
     


    Part I:

    NY Lottery June 7, 2008: Mid-day 925, Evening 016

    Part II:

    I Ching Hexagram 16

    16

    Thus the ancient kings made music
    In order to honor merit,
    And offered it with splendor
    To the Supreme Deity,
    Inviting their ancestors to be present.

    When, at the beginning of summer, thunder-- electrical energy-- comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical contact. These ideas are the final summation of Chinese culture. Confucius has said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: "He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand."

    --  Richard Wilhelm, commentary
        on Hexagram 16 of the I Ching

    Part III:

    The Dance

    Song 'The Dance' performed by Tony Arata, who wrote it

    See also 9/25.

  • Requiem for a Poet:

    The Dance

    "At the still point,
    there the dance is."

    -- T. S. Eliot,
    quoted here in the entry
    of 2:45 AM Friday

    In memory of
    Eugenio Montejo,
    Venezuelan poet who
    died at around midnight
    on Thursday night:

    Excerpt form 'Sobremesa'-- 'Talking Across the Table'-- by the late Eugenio Montejo

    From an obituary:

    Montejo's work "reached a wider audience thanks to the
    2003 film '21 Grams' by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

    In one scene, Sean Penn's
    character quoted a line from a 1988 poem by Montejo. It reads: 'The
    earth turned to bring us closer. It turned on itself and in us, until
    it finally brought us together in this dream.'"

    Related material:

    A link in the entry of
     2:45 AM Friday to
    "The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory
    of Scientific Discovery"
    and a news story from the
    Cannes Film Festival
    dated May 18, 2007,
    that features Inarritu:

    "Filmmakers form
    cha cha cha"

  • For MIT's Commencement Day:

    Order and Disorder

    Robin Williams observes the Keystone State lottery of June 5, 2008: Mid-day 025, Evening 761
    Midrash:
    The Dance of Chance

    Associated Press
    "Today in History"
     Thought for Today:

    "Two dangers constantly threaten
    the world: order and disorder."
    -- Paul Valery, French poet
    (1871-1945).
    [La Crise de l'Esprit]

    Also from Valéry:

    «Notre esprit est fait d'un désordre,
    plus un besoin de mettre en ordre    .»
    (Mauvaises Pensées et Autres)

    «L’ordre pèse toujours à l’individu. Le désordre lui fait désirer la police ou la mort. Ce sont deux circonstances extrêmes où la nature humaine n’est pas à l’aise. L’individu recherche une époque tout agréable, où il soit le plus libre et le plus aidé. Il la trouve vers le commencement de la fin d’un système social. Alors, entre l’ordre et le désordre, règne un moment délicieux. Tout le bien possible que procure l’arrangement des pouvoirs et des devoirs étant acquis, c’est maintenant que l’on peut jouir des premiers relâchements de ce système. Les institutions tiennent encore. Elles sont grandes et imposantes. Mais sans que rien de visible soit altéré en elles, elles n’ont guère plus que cette belle présence; leurs vertus se sont toutes produites; leur avenir est secrètement épuisé; leur caractère n’est plus sacré, ou bien il n’est plus que sacré; la critique et le mépris les exténuent et les vident de toute valeur prochaine. Le corps social perd doucement son lendemain. C’est l’heure de la jouissance et de la consommation générale.»

    -- Paul Valéry, Préface aux Lettres Persanes (1926), recueillie dans Variété, II, 1930

  • Wonders of the Invisible World:

    The Dance of Chance

    "Harvard
    seniors have
    every right to demand a
        Harvard-calibre speaker."

    -- Adam Goldenberg in
    The Harvard Crimson

    "Look
    down now, Cotton Mather    "

    -- Wallace Stevens,
    Harvard College
    Class of 1901

    For Thursday, June 5, 2008,
    commencement day for Harvard's
    Class of 2008, here are the
    Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

    Mid-day 025
    Evening 761

    Thanks to the late
    Harvard professor

    Willard Van Orman Quine    ,
    the mid-day number 025
    suggests the name
    "Isaac Newton."

    (For the logic of this suggestion,
    see On
    Linguistic Creation
    and Raiders of
    the Lost Matrix    .)

    Thanks to Google search, the
     
    name of Newton, combined with
     
    Thursday's evening number 761,
    suggests the following essay:

    Science 10 August 2007:
    Vol.
    317. no. 5839, pp. 761-762

    PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE:
    The
    Cha-Cha-Cha Theory
    of Scientific Discovery

    Daniel E. Koshland Jr.*

    * D. E. Koshland Jr. passed away on 23 July 2007. He was
    a
    professor of
    biochemistry and molecular and cell biology at the University of
    California, Berkeley, since 1965. He served as Science's
    editor-in-chief from 1985 to 1995.

    What can a non-scientist add?

    Perhaps the Log24 entries for
    the date of Koshland's death:

    The Philosopher's Stone
    and The Rock.

    Or perhaps the following
    observations:

    On the figure of 25 parts
    discussed in
    "On Linguistic Creation"--

    5x5 ultra super magic square

    "The Moslems thought of the
    central 1 as being symbolic
    of the unity of Allah.     "

    -- Clifford Pickover  

    "At the still point,
    there the dance is.    "

    -- T. S. Eliot,
    Harvard College
    Class of 1910

  • Annals of Religion:

    Faith, Doubt, Art
    and     The New Yorker
    On Faith:

    "God is the original conspiracy theory....

    Among the varieties of Christian monotheism, none is more totalitarian, none lodges more radical claims for God's omnipotence, than Calvinism-- and within America, the chief analogue of Calvinist theology, Puritanism. According to Calvin every particle of dust, every act, every thought, every creature is governed by the will of God, and yields clues to the divine plan."

    -- Scott Sanders, "Pynchon's Paranoid History"

    On Doubt:
     
    "a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders beyond the visible, also known as paranoia"

    -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), p. 188

    On Art    :

    The current annual fiction issue of The New Yorker has a section of apparently non-fictional memoirs titled "Faith and Doubt."

    I suggest that faith and doubt are best reconciled by art-- as in A Contrapuntal Theme and in the magazine's current online podcast of Mary Gaitskill reading a 1948 New Yorker story by Vladimir Nabokov.

    For the text of the story, see "Signs and Symbols." For an excellent discussion of Nabokov's art, see "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's 'Signs and Symbols,'" by Alexander Dolinin.

  • ART WARS continued:

    The conclusion of yesterday's commentary on the May 30-31 Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

    Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:

    "The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You.... A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

    He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don't mean too much, he knows that's what haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

    Then there's this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees and

         286"

    What are we to make of this enigmatic 286? (No fair peeking at page 287.)

    One possible meaning, given The Archivist's claim that "existence is infinitely cross-referenced"--

    Page 286 of Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human Development and the Psychology of Creativity (first published in 1959), Hillsdale NJ and London, The Analytic Press, 2001 (chapter-- "On Memory and Childhood Amnesia"):

    "Both Freud and Proust speak of the
    autobiographical [my italics] memory, and it is only with regard to this memory that
    the striking phenomenon of childhood amnesia and the less obvious
    difficulty of recovering any past experience may be observed."

    The concluding "summer afternoon of lilacs and bees" suggests that 286 may also be a chance allusion to the golden afternoon of Disney's Alice in Wonderland. (Cf. St. Sarah's Day, 2008)

    Some may find the Disney afternoon charming; others may see it as yet another of Paul Simon's dreaded cartoon graveyards.

    More tastefully, there is poem 286 in the 1919 Oxford Book of English Verse-- "Love."

    For a midrash on this poem, see Simone Weil, who became acquainted with the poem by chance:

    "I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence."

    -- Simone Weil, letter of about May 15, 1942

    Weil's brother André might prefer Providence (source of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.)

    Andre Weil and his sister Simone, summer of 1922

    (Photo from Providence)

    Related material:


    Log24, December 20, 2003--
    White, Geometric, and Eternal--

    A description in Gravity's Rainbow of prewar Berlin as "white and geometric"  suggested, in combination with a reference elsewhere to "the eternal," a citation of the following illustration of the concept "white, geometric, and eternal"--

    For more on the mathematical significance of this figure, see (for instance) Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney, and Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups, by Anders Björner and Francesco Brenti, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 231, Springer, New York, 2005.

    This book is reviewed in the current issue (July 2008) of the above-mentioned Providence Bulletin.

    The review in the Bulletin discusses reflection groups in continuous spaces.

    For a more elementary approach, see Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry and Knight Moves: The Relativity Theory of Kindergarten Blocks.

    See also a commentary on
    the phrase "as a little child."