Numbers by the numbers: four

Not so long ago, in Numbers by the numbers: one, I posted a series of self-referential tweets that I’d collected over the last month or two — here I’d like to present some of Paul’s recent tweets:

Let’s start with one that’s a foreign policy insight, arguably as significant to day as it was when Vance first said it:

16 Jul @justknecht

“The Strait of Hormuz is the jugular vein of the West” (Cyrus Vance)

If these tweets can be timeless, they can also be timely:

4 Jul @justknecht

The Higgs boson is the quantum of the Higgs field, just as the photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field

As they accumulate over time, they can build a conceptual “mesh” that engages an entire field — in this case, recent classical music — while linking it to a variety of other areas:

16 Jul @justknecht

“Boulez’ Derive 2 sounds like birthday cakes ought to” – Philip Clark, Gramophone

22 Jun @justknecht

Wagner was a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn – Claude Debussy, quoted by Geoffrey Norris in Gramophone

30 May @justknecht

Fauré’s Theme and Variations (no. 9) is like an evening star falling slowly from the sky – Bryce Morrison cites Alfred Cortot in Gramophone

11 May @justknecht

Kraftwerk is the Warhol of pop music – The New Yorker

There’s profundity here:

9 Jun @justknecht

“Space is to place as eternity is to time.” – Joseph Joubert

This could be, as Paul says, “the beginning of forming a larger game from an individual move” — that quote in itself could plausibly be the keystone of an architecture bridging science with religion…

There are historical parallels to consider:

31 May @justknecht

Robert Burton : Oxford :: Jeremy Prynne :: Cambridge

Catty remarks by Nobel laureates:

21 May @justknecht

“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats” (Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman)

Near-tautologies:

21 May @justknecht

Macon Telegraph: Recipes are to food as blueprints are to buildings.

And, ooh, exotic forms of slander!

18 May @justknecht

“[Your daughter] has lovers as numerous as the striking of tablas on Palm Sunday” – Arabic satire by Abu Nawas, 756 – 813 AD

Once again, it’s form that generates insight, not content. Get used to form, play around with it, and content will leap out at you from the page, from the screen.

**

I’m no Arabist myself, but ah! that last quote reminds me irresistibly of the difficulties faced by translators from the Arabic, as recounted by William Chittick in The Self-disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology (SUNY Press, 1998, pp. xxxv-xxvi.)

An old joke among orientalists tells us that every Arabic word has four meanings: It means what it means, then it means the opposite of what it means, then it has something to do with sex, and finally it designates something to do with a camel …. The rational mind tends to push the meaning of a word away from experience to ‘what it means’ but the imaginal mind finds the self-disclosure of the Real in the sex and the camel … it is in the world’s concrete realities that God is found, not in its abstractions.

I’d been looking for an excuse to post that quote on Zenpundit — now I’ve found it!

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