Notes toward a Supreme Fact

In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," Wallace Stevens lists criteria for a work of the imagination:

• It Must Be Abstract
  
• It Must Change
  
• It Must Give Pleasure.

For a work that seems to satisfy these criteria, see the movable images at my diamond theory website. Central to these images is the interplay of rational sides and irrational diagonals in square subimages.

"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
 Incipit and a form to speak the word
 And every latent double in the word...."

-- "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," Section 1, Canto VIII

Recall that "logos" in Greek means "ratio," as well as (human or divine) "word." Thus when I read the following words of Simone Weil today, I thought of Stevens.

"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction.   Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor in mathematics."

-- Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies, éd. Quarto, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100

 

 

In the conclusion of Section 3, Canto X, of "Notes," Stevens says

"They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
 We shall return at twilight from the lecture
 Pleased that the irrational is rational...."

This is the logoi alogoi of Simone Weil.

Dancing about Architecture

The title's origin is obscure, but its immediate source is a weblog entry and ensuing comments: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.''

A related quote:

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

-- T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" in Four Quartets

"Eliot by his own admission took 'the still point of the turning world' in 'Burnt Norton' from the Fool in Williams's The Greater Trumps."

-- Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (1978), Ballantine Books, 1981, page 106. Carpenter cites an "unpublished journal of Mary Trevelyan (in possession of the author)."

The following was written this morning as a comment on a weblog entry, but may stand on its own as a partial description of Eliot's and Williams's "dance."

Three sermons on the Fool card, each related to Charles Williams's novel The Greater Trumps:

To Play the Fool,
Games "Not Unlike Chesse," and
Charles Williams and Inklings Links.

"Here is the Church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the door and see all the People."

For some architecture that may or may not be worth dancing about, see the illustrations to Simone Weil's remarks in my note of November 25, 2002, "The Artist's Signature."

ART WARS

Driving the Point Home

From

SUSAN WEIL

EAR'S EYE FOR JAMES JOYCE:

From Finnegans Wake,
by James Joyce, p. 293:

The Vesica Piscis,
also known as
The Ya-Ya:

See also the
Geometries of Creation
art exhibit at the University of Waterloo.

Swashbucklers and Misfits

There are two theories of truth, according to a a book on the history of geometry —

The "Story Theory" and the "Diamond Theory." 

For those who prefer the story theory...

From a review by Brian Hayes of A Beautiful Mind:

"Mathematical genius is rare enough. Cloaked in madness, or wrapped in serious eccentricity, it's the stuff legends are made of.

There are brilliant and productive mathematicians who go to the office from nine to five, play tennis on the weekend, and worry about fixing the gearbox in the Volvo. Not many of them become the subjects of popular biographies. Instead we read about the great swashbucklers and misfits of mathematics, whose stories combine genius with high romance or eccentricity."

Russell Crowe, swashbuckler

Marilyn Monroe, misfit

Hollywood has recently given us a mathematical Russell Crowe.  For a somewhat tougher sell, Marilyn Monroe as a mathematician, see "Insignificance," 1985: "Marilyn Monroe on her hands and knees explains the theory of relativity to Albert Einstein."  

For a combination of misfit and swashbuckler in one Holy Name, see today's earlier note, "The Artist's Signature."

See also my note of October 4, 2002, on Michelangelo, and the description of "the face of God" in this review.

Practice, Man, Practice

Andrew Carnegie

Born today: Andrew Carnegie.  Born yesterday or today, depending on where you look: Bob "Elusive Butterfly" Lind. Click here and here.

This site's background music has been changed,
for the time being, to honor Patti LaBelle's performances
at Carnegie Hall.

The Artist's Signature

This title is taken from the final chapter of Carl Sagan's novel Contact.

"There might be a game in which paper figures were put together to form a story, or at any rate were somehow assembled. The materials might be collected and stored in a scrap-book, full of pictures and anecdotes. The child might then take various bits from the scrap-book to put into the construction; and he might take a considerable picture because it had something in it which he wanted and he might just include the rest because it was there.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff, Deconstructing Sondheim,” The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76

Architectural Vesica Piscis Arch at Glastonbury Tor "All goods in this world, all beauties, all truths, are diverse and partial aspects of one unique good. Therefore they are goods which need to be ranged in order. Puzzle games are an image of this operation. Taken all together, viewed from the right point and rightly related, they make an architecture. Through this architecture the unique good, which cannot be grasped, becomes apprehensible. All architecture is a symbol of this, an image of this. The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor." — Simone Weil, sister of Princeton mathematician André Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 98

This passage from Weil is quoted in
Gateway to God,
p. 42, paperback, fourth impression,
printed in Glasgow in 1982 by
Fontana Books

"He would leave enigmatic messages on blackboards,
signed Ya Ya Fontana."

— Brian Hayes on John Nash,
The Sciences magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1998

"I have a friend who is a Chief of the Aniunkwia (Cherokee) people and I asked him the name of the Creator in which
he replied... Ya Ho Wah. This is also how it is spoken in Hebrew. In my native language it is spoken
Ya Ya*,
which is also what Moses was told
at the 'Burning Bush' incident."

— "Tank" (of Taino ancestry), Bronx, NY, Wednesday, April 17, 2002

From a website reviewing books published by
 Fontana:

1/17/02: NEW YORK (Variety) - Russell Crowe is negotiating to star in 20th Century Fox's "Master and Commander,'' the Peter Weir-directed adaptation of the Patrick O'Brian book series.

Hmmm.

*For another religious interpretation of this phrase, see my note of October 4, 2002, "The Agony and the Ya-Ya."

In honor of
William F. Buckley's birthday

Results of a Google search -

Searched the web for "Joyce and Aquinas" "William T. Noon".  Results 1-5 of about 15:

Dogma
... Dogma, theological" -- entry in the index (paper, not marble) to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, SJ, Yale U. Press 1957, 2nd printing 1963, page 162. ...
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-20-dogma.html - 9k - Nov. 23, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

The Matthias Defense
... Contemplatio: aesthetic joy of, 54-5" -- index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William
T. Noon, SJ, Yale University Press, second printing, 1963, page 162. ...
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-22-matthias.html - 6k - Nov. 23, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Wag the Dogma
... One economy would be to teach the trivium using only one book -- Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon (Yale, 1957), which ties together philology, logic, and ...
m759.freeservers.com/2001-04-06-wag.html - 6k - Nov. 23, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Shining Forth
... Please go away, Paz begged silently.... "De veras! It's so romantic!". -- Let Noon
Be Fair William T. Noon, SJ, Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University ...
m759.freeservers.com/2001-03-15-shining.html - 10k - Nov. 23, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Midsummer Eve's Dream
... notions... The quidditas or essence of an angel is the same as its
form. (See William T. Noon, SJ, Joyce and Aquinas, Yale, 1957). ...
m759.freeservers.com/1995-06-23-midsummer.html - 12k - Nov. 23, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Harvard 20, Yale 13

Pie

Carl Sagan in Contact:

"According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three."

Don McLean, song lyric: 

"The three men I admire the most,
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.*"

Those days are not entirely forgotten in Texas.

*November 22 is the feast day of
Saint Cecelia, celebrated by Chaucer
in the Second Nun's Tale. 

Trivia quiz: What is the world's
most popular piece of music? 

This space is reserved for a glass slipper.