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Annals of...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Mathematics
and Poetry

Click on the image for
some background related
to yesterday's The Aleph
and its link to a 2003
entry, At Mt. Sinai.

A related entry on Mt. Sinai
mentions the monumental
treatise by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image.

Midnight in the Garden continues...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:00:00 GMT

An Aleph for Pynchon

Part I:

A California Sixties version
of Heaven's Gate:
Aleph Sanctuary, by Mati Klarwein

Part II:

Log24 entries of April 29, 2009
(esp. the link to Anastasia Ashley)

Part III:

Inherent Vice,
a novel by Thomas Pynchon
to be published in August 2009

"The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine..."
-- Don Henley

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:07:00 GMT

The Aleph

From a link in
yesterday's entry:

Rabbi

Aleph

Click on the aleph for details.

Related material:

"The Aleph" by Borges.

A Memorial...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:10:00 GMT

Review

On June 25
in this journal--

A Word for AntiChristmas:

Apocatastasis

"... T. S. Eliot tried to recompose,
   in Four Quartets, the fragments
   he had grieved over
in The Waste Land."

-- "Beauty and Desecration,"
   Roger Scruton

Today's word
(thanks to Michael Jackson)--

Tikkun

From Log24 on Nov. 12, 2005:

"'Tikkun Olam, the fixing of the world,' she whispers. 'I've been gathering up the broken vessels to make things whole again.'"

-- Miriam in Bee Season

"Tikkun Olam, the gathering of the divine fragments, is a religious activity.... How do we work for the repair of the world? If we live in a humpty dumpty world, how do we get it all put back together again?"

-- A Sunday Sermon
    for Yom Kippur
    by the Rev. Joshua Snyder
    on Oct. 5, 2003
    [See also Log24 on that date.]

"... the tikkun can't start until everyone asks what happened-- not just the Jews but everybody. The strange thing is that Christ evidently saw this."

-- Martha Cooley, The Archivist

Midnight in the Garden continues...

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:59:53 GMT

A Soliloquy
for McNamara

"I've... seen things
you people wouldn't believe."

Annals of Philosophy:

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:09:00 GMT

Art and Faith

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harvest Books paperback, 1950, pp. 248-249:

"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house where the corn comes up to the window, 'The willow grows on the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.' Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives."

Up to the first semicolon, this is the Associated Press thought for today.

Related aesthetic philosophy from The Washington Post:

"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself, a church of American pragmatism that deals with the material stuff of experience in the history of art. To understand these lectures, which began promising an argument about how abstraction works and ended with an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void, one has to understand that Varnedoe views the history of abstraction as a pastor surveys the flock."

Some Observant Fellow:

Kirk Varnedoe

Yesterday's sermon --

"He pointed at the football
on his desk. 'There it is.'"
-- The Eater of Souls

Kirk Varnedoe
as football coach

Kirk Varnedoe
as art historian:
"There it is."

ART WARS continued:

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Sermon

7/01

"He pointed at the football
on his desk. 'There it is.'"
-- Glory Road

See also
Hieron Grammaton
and
Epiphany 2007.

From a Clean, Well-Lighted Place:

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Helen Lane

Religion according to Fritz Leiber:

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Damnation Morning
continued

"The tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction."

-- Blake

"... the moment is not
properly an atom of time
but an atom of eternity.
It is the first reflection
of eternity in time, its first
attempt, as it were, at
stopping time...."

-- Kierkegaard

Symmetry Axes
of the Square:

(Damnation Morning)

From the cover of the
Martin Cruz Smith novel
Stallion Gate:

A Monolith
for Kierkegaard:

Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

-- Rubén Darío

Related material:

The deaths of
Ernest Hemingway
on the morning of
Sunday, July 2, 1961,
and of Alexis Arguello
on the morning of
Wednesday, July 1, 2009.
See also philosophy professor
Clancy Martin in the
London Review of Books
(issue dated July 9, 2009)
on AA members as losers--
"the 'last men,' the nihilists,
the hopeless ones."

For Clancy Martin*

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Meditation

on a joke by George Carlin,
a passage by Kierkegaard,
and the death on this date
12 years ago
of actor James Stewart

The Catholic Carlin:

"Thank you, Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people." --George Carlin on learning he had won the Mark Twain award. Twain's people were Protestant, Carlin's Catholic.

The Protestant Kierkegaard:

"... the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time....

Once here in Copenhagen there were two actors who probably never thought that their performance could have a deeper significance. They stepped forth onto the stage, placed themselves opposite each other, and then began the mimical representation of one or another passionate conflict. When the mimical act was in full swing and the spectators' eyes followed the story with expectation of what was to follow, they suddenly stopped and remained motionless as though petrified in the mimical expression of the moment. The effect of this can he exceedingly comical, for the moment in an accidental way becomes commensurable with the eternal."

Catholic tableau
(with Vivien Leigh
   representing the Church)
    of Salvation by Works --

Protestant tableau
(with James Stewart
as Protestant Pilgrim)
    of Salvation by Grace --

Click on either tableau
for a (much) larger image.

* Thanks to University Diaries for an entry on Clancy Martin, a philosophy professor in the "show me" state, and his experiences with AA. For a sample of Martin's style, see a piece he wrote on Fabergé Easter eggs. For other Easter egg material, see this journal and (via a link) The Harvard Crimson, Easter 2008. A valuable philosophical remark by Martin in a recent interview:

"An unscrupulous jeweler will swap diamonds for cheaper ones when jewelry is dropped off to be sized or repaired, he said.
'It happens all the time,' Martin said. 'Nobody’s watching.'"