Tom Conoboy on James Purdy's novel Malcolm:

"Life, Purdy is telling us, is meaningless. Existence is absurd. It consists of events and happenings, all unavoidable, all simultaneously significant and meaningless. They touch you, wound even, ultimately kill, yet somehow existence appears to obtain in a bubble outside of the self. As Thomas M. Lorch describes it, 'the novel portays humanity revolving about an abyss.'[1] What is real is not real, and what is not real becomes real. Malcolm describes himself as a 'cypher' and, in the end, his death affects no-one, least of all him.

Yet, through this, Purdy presents us with the final, and greatest, paradox. In presenting us with nothingness, and in deliberately describing the action in such bland and emotionless language, Purdy actually creates a sense of loss: there is nothing to lose, he is telling us, and yet we feel the loss greatly. What he does is to create a world of genuine nihilism, where nobody communicates, nobody connects, so that we can, in negative, imagine what a world in harmony might be like."

[1] Thomas M. Lorch, "Purdy's Malcolm: A Unique Vision of Radical Emptiness." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1965), p. 212.

The Associated Press, "Today in History" March 11-- On this date...

"In 1959, the Lorraine Hansberry drama 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater."

The Times describes one of the empty rooms on exhibit as...

"... Yves Klein’s 'La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide' ('The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, the Void')"

This is a mistranslation. See "An Aesthetics of Matter" (pdf), by Kiyohiko Kitamura and Tomoyuki Kitamura, pp. 85-101 in International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Volume 6, 2002--

"The exhibition «La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière-première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée», better known as «Le Vide» (The Void) was held at the Gallery Iris Clert in Paris from April 28th till May 5th, 1955." --p. 94

"... «Sensibility in the state of prime matter»... filled the emptiness." --p. 95

Kitamura and Kitamura translate matière première correctly as "prime matter" (the prima materia of the scholastic philosophers) rather than "raw material." (The phrase in French can mean either.)

Immortal Diamond
continued:

"That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray,
Bright thoughts uncut by men:
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray,
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken,

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom,
Or in the imagined cave
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave."

-- From "In a Churchyard," by Richard Wilbur

"A metaphysical assertion of this kind is the idea of the 'diamond body,' the indestructible breath-body which develops in the Golden Flower, or in the square inch space."

-- The Secret of the Golden Flower, by Richard Wilhelm, Carl Gustav Jung, and Hua-Yang Liu, second rev. ed., publ. by Routledge, 1999, pp. 130-131

For more about these concepts, see the work cited.

"Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns). The child-master, like his adult counterpart, is able to visualize in an instantaneous yet preternaturally confident way how the thing should look several moves hence. He sees the logical, the necessary harmonic and melodic argument as it arises out of an initial key relation or the preliminary fragments of a theme. He knows the order, the appropriate dimension, of the sum or geometric figure before he has performed the intervening steps. He announces mate in six because the victorious end position, the maximally efficient configuration of his pieces on the board, lies somehow 'out there' in graphic, inexplicably clear sight of his mind...."

"... in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach's inverted canons or Euler's formula for polyhedra."

-- George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968

"Classrooms are filled with discussions not of the Bible and Jesus but of 10 'core values'-- perseverance and curiosity, for instance-- that are woven into the curriculum."

-- "Secular Education, Catholic Values," by Javier C. Hernandez, The New York Times, Sunday, March 8, 2009

-- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

The Chandler quotation appears in "Language Game," an entry in this journal on April 7, 2008.

Some say the "Language Game" date, April 7, is the true date (fixed, permanent) of the Crucifixion-- by analogy, Eliot's "still point" and Jung's "centre." (See yesterday, noon.)

Next Sunday's New York Times Book Review arrived in today's mail. On the inside of the first page is a full-page ad for a course of 24 lectures on DVD's called "Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond." On the inside of the last page is "Our Steiner Problem-- and Mine," a full-page essay by Lee Siegel on polymath George Steiner.

Related material:

• The five Log24 entries ending Jan. 19, 2008
• "The End of Endings," by Richard John Neuhaus

Happy birthday to the late Bobby Fischer.

Russell Crowe as game theorist
John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind"