(Click to enlarge)
Deep Background:
From the Terrace…
of the Hotel Bella Vista
in Cuernavaca…
Related Material:
Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil
“Right through hell
there is a path…“
(Voice-over by
Richard Burton,
“Volcano,” 1976)
A Yom Kippur
Meditation
“When times are mysterious
Serious numbers
Will always be heard.”
— Paul Simon,
“When Numbers Get Serious”
Trudeau’s 1987 book uses the phrase “diamond theory” to denote the philosophical theory, common since Plato and Euclid, that there exist truths (which Trudeau calls “diamonds”) that are certain and eternal– for instance, the truth in Euclidean geometry that the sum of a triangle’s angles is 180 degrees. As the excerpt below shows, Trudeau prefers what he calls the “story theory” of truth–
“There are no diamonds. People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch on are called ‘true.’”
Pilate’s skeptical tone suggests he may have shared a certain confusion about geometric truth with thinkers like Trudeau and the slave boy in Plato’s Meno. Truth in a different part of mathematics– elementary arithmetic– is perhaps more easily understood, although even there, the existence of what might be called “non-Euclidean number theory”– i.e., arithmetic over finite fields, in which 1+1 can equal zero– might prove baffling to thinkers like Trudeau.
Trudeau’s book exhibits, though it does not discuss, a less confusing use of numbers– to mark the location of pages. For some philosophical background on this version of numerical truth that may be of interest to devotees of the Semitic religions on this evening’s High Holiday, see Zen and Language Games.
For uses of numbers that are more confusing, see– for instance– the new website The Daily Beast and the old website Story Theory and the Number of the Beast.
The previous two entries mention,
and illustrate, the color grey.
Another illustration, on the cover
of one of my favorite books:
“A
colour is eternal.
It haunts time like a spirit.”
– Alfred North Whitehead
From John Lahr’s
winter 2002 review
of “Our Town”–
“We all know that something is eternal,”
the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it
ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars– everybody knows in their bones
that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”The Stage Manager was played by Paul Newman. The review was subtitled “Getting the Spirit Onstage.”
Yesterday’s entry contained the following unattributed quotation:
“One must join forces with friends of like mind.”
As the link to Leap Day indicated, the source of the quotation is the I Ching.
Yesterday’s entry also quoted the late Terence McKenna, a confused writer on psychosis and the I Ching. Lest the reader conclude that I consider McKenna or similar authors (for instance, Timothy Leary in Cuernavaca) as “friends of like mind,” I would point rather to more sober students of the I Ching (cf. my June 2002 notes on philosophy, religion, and science) and to the late Scottish theologian John Macquarrie:
The persistent reader will
find a further link that
leads to an entry titled
“Notes on the I Ching.”
“A
colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes
and it goes. But where it comes it is the same colour. It
neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted.”
– Science and the Modern World, 1925
short story
summarized byfour lottery numbers.
Today’s mid-day lotteries
and associated material:
Pennsylvania, 201– i.e., 2/01:
Kindergarten
Theology
–
“In a game of chess, the knight’s move
is unique because it alone
goes around corners. In this way, it combines the continuity of a set
sequence with the discontinuity of an unpredictable turn in the middle.
This meaningful combination of continuity and discontinuity in an
otherwise linear set of possibilities has led some to refer to the
creative act of discovery in any field of research as a ‘knight’s move’
in intelligence.”
“One
must join forces with friends of like mind”
Related material:
“Schizophrenia
is not a psychological disorder peculiar to human beings. Schizophrenia
is not a disease at all but rather a localized traveling discontinuity
of the space time matrix itself. It is like a travelling whirl-wind of
radical understanding that haunts time. It haunts time in the same way
that Alfred North Whitehead said that the color dove grey ‘haunts time
like a ghost.’”
“‘Knight’s move thinking’ is a psychiatric term describing a thought
disorder where in speech the usual logical sequence of ideas is lost, the sufferer
jumping from one idea to
another with no apparent connection. It is most commonly found in schizophrenia.”
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
For more on the sleep of Apollo,
see the front page of today’s
New York Times Book Review.
Garrison Keillor’s piece there,
“Dying of the Light,” is
about the fear of death felt
by an agnostic British twit.
For relevant remarks by
a British non-twit, see
William Dunbar–
“The Ambition of the Short Story,” the essay by Steven Millhauser quoted here on Tuesday, September 30, is now online.
“The secret to life, and
to love, is getting started,
keeping going, and then
getting started again.”
Nobel Laureate
Seamus Heaney
at Sanders Theatre,
Harvard College,
September 30, 2008
On Elke Sommer:
“…Young Elke… studied
in the prestigious
Gymnasium School
in Erlangen….”
Erlangen Prize Lecture:
Variations on a Theme of
Plato, Goethe, and Klein
(Background:
Christmas Knot, Sept. 26,
and Hard Core, July 17-18.)
