[Image: graffiti artist Bansky visited a subway archway in central London, adding a caption to a wall which just happens to fall within the view of a surveillance camera.]
From whiskey river:
All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.
(Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism [source])
…and:
You’re like a witness. You’re the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you’re in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I’m a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you’re in the room but you’re not. You’re looking at the room, you’re not in the room.
(Julio Cortázar [source])
Not from whiskey river:
“It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo—“Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
(Lewis Carroll, from The Hunting of the Snark)
…and:
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
(Paul Valéry [source])
…and:
ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPSAt 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.
At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale…
Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.
(Errol Morris, from “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma” [source])
…and finally: When is a number not a number?
Artist Cristóbal Vila demonstrates some answers, which might boil down to: When you find it in the natural world.
If you’re after details of what’s depicted here, and have an affinity for numbers, you might appreciate this explanation of the mathematical theory behind the film.
Or maybe you’ll be content — this is a Friday, after all — just to let a general sense of the wonders of overlapping coincidence wash over you. Speaking for myself, now that I’ve seen this little film I’m inclined to forgive Vila’s little “cheat” (or artistic license, if you will) about the (non-)relationship of the nautilus’s structure to the Fibonacci sequence. (Just scroll down a little way down the page, labeled IMPORTANT NOTE. If you drill down through the various links provided which explain the mismatch between nautilus spirals and the Golden Spiral, you’ll come to a link for the ultimate source online: an article in a 2005 issue of Science News. However, that final link is broken. The article is now here, instead.)
Nance says
I can send the Vila video to my husband, the engineer and math fanatic, and he’ll know it’s a love letter that needs no words. He is an artist at heart who loves numbers for their truth. I am the philosophic skeptic whose trajectory has been toward greater and greater comfort with “an unsuccessful courtship” of truth. Three years into it, we”ve hit on the very thing for our retirement: we’ll take art classes together until one of us leaves first.
Paul Valery’s quotation is close to the heart of every silver-tongued devil.
And, on Nature, Numbers, Truth, and the nature of truth, this comes to mind from Monte Reel’s The Last of The Tribe:
“In the rain forest, the unremitting cycles of life and death are so tangled together that their differences quickly blur. By the time something dies, it has already started to become something else; the trunk of a dying tree is overtaken by fungi, and soon the tree becomes those fungi; the flesh of a peccary carcass instantly swarms with beetles, until beetles are all that’s left. Individual distinctions grow nebulous, which can rattle the nerves of anyone who prefers a world efined by neatly ruled borders.”
Imagine how Vila might illustrate those numbers, that beauty. Now, find the metaphor for it and there’s your truth.
Jayne says
What we know is always to changing, evolving. Numbers are constant. But whether measured by numbers or other means, I don’t believe truth–absolute truth–can ever fully be captured. (Simple truths, maybe.) But then again, perhaps that’s how I rationalization–or remain in denial?
Makes me think of the poet Seamus Heaney. From Postscript (last sentence):
“…You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
marta says
Okay, I’ve seen this video before. Did you send it to me once because of my son’s love for snails? I’m too tired to remember or to drill down through various emails or through broken links. Lovely video though.
I’d like to ask Mr. Underhill (hard for me not to think of a certain hobbit there) if women don’t fall in love with truth or maybe we are truth…
I am way too tired whether I am here or there.
John says
Nance: you and the husband sound like superb complements.
I’ve never been crazy about numbers as such — much prefer to understand them in terms of their, well, their meanings, as opposed to their manipulations. (That long book I just finished reading — The Information — contains nearly an entire chapter about logarithms. I read it, all right, and while I read it I “got” it. But five minutes later I’d moved on, and even after plenty of math training I still could not explain what a logarithm is.)
Valery/silver-tongued devils: yes. It rather suggests certain moments in Gaslight, no?
And as for the quotation from The Last of the Tribe (which sounds fascinating!)… I wonder if that’s behind the tendency for one’s memory to grow ever more ragged and fuzzy as one ages? Like, it’s being shorn of all those things which make it idiosyncratically one’s own; it’s melting into the background of human consciousness…
John says
Jayne: “You are… / A hurry through which known and strange things pass” — that’s quite a remarkable image. I may need to steal it. (A problem once I started wondering about epigraphs: if I let myself, the epigraph “page” would actually run to a fully chapter-length bulleted list. :))
I go with the Rashomon theory of “absolute truth”: that the only way to know it is from all sides, at the same time. (And even then, it changes from moment to moment, so you’d have to know it from all sides at all times.) One of my pet prejudices is that 99+% of human disputes come down to conflicting definitions of some facet of “truth” — that if everyone could just take a breath and say, like, What do YOU mean when you say “X”? we’d all get along a lot better.
On the other hand, if you’re talking about truth in terms of non-human concepts, it’s often even easier to arrive at. Haha.
John says
marta: I think the first time I saw that video was when working on this post.
(Coincidentally, on the wall of the bathroom of the hotel room where we stayed this weekend, they’d hung a good-sized painting of a chambered nautilus shell. It felt like the universe was trying to say something to me (even though, per usual, it was speaking in some tongue other than English).)
You may feel better about Evelyn Underhill’s apparently sexist bent if I tell you that she was a “she.”
And coincidentally again, now that I’ve checked her Wikipedia article, I see that one of her books on mysticism was called The Spiral Way. I wonder if it was a Golden Spiral???
marta says
@John – Hmmm. Someone sent me that video a while back. Or posted it on facebook? Oh well. Nice to see it again.
I don’t know if I would’ve gone so far as to the Underhill quote sexist. But I was in a bit of a mood because I’d heard that expression about having enough money for “wine, women, and cars” or some such, and that drives me crazy. So after I scolded the radio (yeah, I know) for suggesting that women were things to buy and that presumably only men can actually be successful, I read the quote and I couldn’t help but think, ah. Something else men do while we women sit around and wait to be won or desired or whatever.
And yet at the same time–it is a nice quote.
I’m conflicted that way.
John says
marta: I get in those moods sometimes, too — some stupid idea or another which drives me crazy suddenly seems to be gaining traction in the world, and starts appearing in various contexts. The only cure for it is to stop reading or listening to anything about current events. Easy, right? Haha.
But now that you’ve brought that up about the Underhill quote (hobbit, yes!), I can’t help wondering how come I didn’t pick up on that sooner. Granted, she was writing for an audience of decades ago, but now it jumps out at me how weirdly skewed the language and hence the perceptions were back then.
cynth says
And what about the Snark? I love Lewis Carroll for myriads of reasons. But I’ve met enough Boojams to believe that the Snark may just be a Boojam in pajamas.