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| The Tempest
A tropical storm over Florida (lower left)
and a hurricane at Bermuda (upper right)
at 3:15 p.m. EDT on Friday, Sept. 5, 2003:
"Wind over Water"
as described by William Shakespeare in 1611.
"Wind over Water" in the I Ching,
the Classic of Transformations,
signifies huan, "dissolving."
Dissolving:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you,
were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: and, like the
baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous
palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it
inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero, IV.i)
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| For Grace Paley:
An Enormous Change
at the Last Minute
(of September 5)
Hexagram 59 of the I Ching comprises the trigrams for wind and water (as in the environmental art of Feng Shui).
The name of the hexagram, Huan, means dispersion or dissolution.
The character Huan may be written as shown at right above. The picture of the character Huan is taken from
The LiSe Heyboer I Ching.
Essentially the same picture is shown at
The Dan Stackhouse I Ching,
where it is explained as follows:
"At the top is a person or people  , a flattened version of the more familiar  . In the center an eye  looks out from a cave  or cavern. At the bottom a hand holds a stick or club  as though ready to strike something.  represents flowing water."
The creature in the cave holding a club is reminiscent of my previous entry for today, on the "bone people," or ancestors, of mankind.
For a transition, in the Kubrick 2001 style, to a more modern scene, see my next entry.
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| Da Capo
"The story bent and climbed and went into weird areas. For instance, at one time Simon Peter was a cave-dweller; at another, he only appeared in other characters' dreams...."
— Keri Hulme on The Bone People
"Words are events."
— The Walter J. Ong Project
In East Asian traditions, "Rocks are seen as events--rather slow-moving events--but as events...."
— Graham Parkes, professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii
Parkes is working on a translation of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and is the author of "The Overflowing Soul: Images of Transformation in Nietzsche's Zarathustra."
He is also the translator, with David Pellauer, of Nietzsche and Music, by Georges Liébert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
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| Recommended Reading
for Cullinane College:
"The Talented form their own society and that's as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus... the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You'd see a lot from the back of a winged horse..."
— To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey.
"Born in Cambridge, MA, on April Fool's Day 1926 ('I've tried very hard to live up to being an April-firster,' she quips), McCaffrey graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947."
— School Library Journal
Born on March 9, 1947, in Christchurch, Keri Hulme won the Pegasus Prize for her Maori novel, The Bone People.
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| Epitaphs
The late philosopher Donald Davidson (see previous entry) had a gift for titles. For example:
"The Folly of Trying to Define Truth"
(Journal of Philosophy June 1996, pp. 263-278) and
"A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"
(In R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
For my thoughts on the former, see
Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,
The Diamond Theory of Truth, and
Sept. 2, 2002 (Laurindo Almeida's Birthday).
For my thoughts on the latter, see
Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley (2003),
For Mary Shelley's Birthday (2002),
and, in honor of J. R. R. Tolkien, who died on the date September 2,
The Article on Epitaphs
at Wikipedia Encyclopedia, which contains the following:
"J. R. R. Tolkien is buried next to his wife, and on their tombstone the names 'Beren' and 'Luthien' are engraved, a fact that sheds light on the love story of Beren and Luthien which is recorded in several versions in his works."
A nice derangement, indeed.
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