zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — from a burial to Buddhism, just a skip and a jump away ]
.

A sweet visual DoubleQuote I ran across today —

'Lovers of Valdaro'
Neolithic bodies of a man & a woman locked in an eternal embrace.
6,000 years old burialhttps://t.co/esSOkX6OdP #Italy pic.twitter.com/dSmSqIGEbY

— Ticia Verveer (@ticiaverveer) February 25, 2017

— shows on the right, the Lovers of Valdaro — a matched pair of skeletons of which Time wrote in 2011:

For 6,000 years, two young lovers have been locked in an eternal embrace, hidden from the eyes of the world. This past weekend, the Lovers of Valdaro — named for the little village near Mantua, in northern Italy, where they were first discovered — were seen by the public for the first time.

On the left, you have an artist’s representation of how they might have been embraced in death.

**

All of which reminds me of Buddhist meditation on death, and of the dancing skeleton couple known collectively as Citipati:

By Wonderlane – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/3172647615/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, Link

Wiki tells us:

Citipati is a protector deity or supernatural being in Tibetan Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism of India. It is formed of two skeletal deities, one male and the other female, both dancing wildly with their limbs intertwined inside a halo of flames representing change. The Citipati is said to be one of the seventy-five forms of Mahakala. Their symbol is meant to represent both the eternal dance of death as well as perfect awareness. They are invoked as ‘wrathful deities’, benevolent protectors or fierce beings of demonic appearance. The dance of the Citipati is commemorated twice annually in Tibet.

**

Considering two together as one is a recurring interest of mine, see also my posts on duel and duet — themselves a great pairing or dual — in Duel in slow time and more prosaically, Numbers by the numbers: two.

Also: Of dualities, contradictions and the nonduality.

[ by Charles Cameron — Brexit, graphical thinking, serpents — there’s never a dull moment with Karl Sharro on Twitter! ]
.

Karl Sharro is reMarkable and indeed reTweetable:

I had to do this: The easy guide to why Brexit happened. pic.twitter.com/YpVRAZGBMT

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) July 1, 2016

**

An hour or so before I saw that tweet from Sharro, I’d tweeted a quote from Suzanne Langer:

The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but 4/5 @semblnet

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) July 3, 2016

I was quoting Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key — hat-tip: Steven H. Cullinane:

Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of articulation, i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision.”

I think that’s generally right, and goes some way to explaining why “reading” a HipBone Game is cognitively different, even when the game is played entirely in verbal moves, from an equivalent reading of the same “move” tests in sequence.

I noted Sharro’s visual example — worth clicking all the way through to see it full scale — because although it’s a visual representation of a cluster of texts, it follows a timeline from left to right, and is thus simultaneously sequential and synchronic. A neat trick.

BTW, Sharro is celebrated for an earlier diagram I’ve posted here — with glee, and with his amazing purely textual equivalent!

**

OK so now my focal length is just right for KarlreMarks Twitter feed, and I find this beauty — also about Brexit — too:

Large numbers of people gather in London to demand that large numbers of people shouldn't be heard.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) July 2, 2016

What’s so neat here? Well, it appears to be a paradox of self-reference — ourobouros, a serpent biting its own tail if you like — and it’s very nicely done. The “large numbers of people” gathered in London, of course, aren’t the “large numbers of people” they say shouldn’t be heard, and if Sharro had tweeted —

Large numbers of people gather in London to demand that large numbers of other people shouldn’t be heard”

— the paradox would have been gone, the serpent biting its own tail morphed into a serpent biting another serpent — a far less interesting spectacle.

Or would it? At the level of particular crowds, yes, the paradox would vanish, one crowd biting another, but at the level of implied principle, a crowd voicing the denial of the principle that the voices of crowds deserve a hearing would still be self-refuting in just the way Sharro plays on.

So the paradox would be like Schrodinger’s cat, dead while alive — or even better, the Cheshire Cat, niow here now gone, perhaps?

**

Life, she is rich in paradox.

[ by Charles Cameron — philosophy during a bank heist — and its implications in terms of military doctrine ]
.

Two screenshots in sequence from the Denzel Washington movie, Inside Man, bring me back to the philosophical fissures and fusions between mind and brain, subjective and objective, quantitative and qualitative, man half-angel and half-beast — in a law enforcement context.

**

When one side has reached the limits of its material strength, it can always add to its military efforts by mobilizing all possible moral strength.

I often need to talk about this. As material, for Clausewitz, is the counterpart to moral, what for TRADOC is the counterpart to Human Terrain?

[ by Charles Cameron — a brief comic digression about them and us ]
.

Generally, we’re stuck with this:

Best political cartoon I've seen in a long time. pic.twitter.com/LEjK1URjpk

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) March 1, 2015

It is a good one, I’ll admit.

I’m inclined, however, to agree with this analysis on occasion:

Could be the Best Cartoon Ever pic.twitter.com/UPTVTPMhCJ

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 6, 2014

What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the theriomorphic rabbit and duck divinities in question are orthogonally related:

Proper labeling of axes is absolutely crucial. pic.twitter.com/rngFg9PAXK

— Pascal Wallisch (@Pascallisch) June 25, 2014

Very clever!

**

Two sides to every coin, two hands for every koan?

[ by Charles Cameron — Aristotle, the Ismailis, CG Jung ]
.

Two is the first number:

From the tenth-century Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Epistles or Treatises of the Brethren of Purity) as found in Seyyed Hossein Nasr & Mehdi Aminrazavi, eds., An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, vol. 2, Ismaili Thought in the Classical Age:

We say that one is the source and generator of the numbers because when one is removed from existence all the numbers are removed with it, but when the numbers are removed from existence, one is not removed. We say that two is the first whole number because numbers are a plurality of ones, and the first plurality is two.

**

I am delighted to find myself in the company of the Ismailis, having written in On two, one, seven plus or minus, and ten – towards infinity:

When I worked as senior analyst in a tiny think-shop, my boss would often ask me for an early indicator of some trend. My brain couldn’t handle that — I always needed two data points to see a pattern, and so I coined the mantra for myself, two is the first number.

One isn’t a number until there are two, because it’s limitless across all spectra and unique, and because it is its own, only context.

One isn’t a number unless there’s a mind to think of it — in which case it’s already an abstraction within that mind, and thus there are, minimally, two. At which point we are in the numbers game, and there may be many, many more than two — twenty, or plenty, or plenty-three, or the cube root of aleph null, or (ridiculous, I know) infinity-six…

Go, figure.

Two is the first number, because the two can mingle or separate, duel or duet: either way, there’s a connection, a link between them.

And in Of a non-comparative use of the DoubleQuotes method:

Putting it bluntly, one point is pointless — things could go anywhere from there. Two points suggest a line, a link, a connection — a possible, maybe even plausible, trend.

It’s that sense I have of two being the beginning of thought that makes me so fond of the DoubleQuotes format — and of Arthur Koestler‘s insight about creation occurring at the intersection of two spheres..

If I’m a fundamentalist about anything, it’s the notion that it takes two to tango!

**

Furthermore..

From CG Jung, A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, in Psychology and Western Religion:

The number one claims an exceptional position, which we meet again in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. According to this, one is not a number at all; the first number is two. Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible. With the appearance of the number two, another appears alongside the one, a happening which is so striking that in many languages “the other” and “the second” are expressed by the same word.

And from Leonardo Tarán, Speusippus of Athens: A Critical Study With a Collection of the Related Texts and Commentary:

Now we know that Speusippus did consider one to be the first odd number, whereas Aristotle thinks that two is the first number and explicitly denies that one is a number. [ … ]

Concerning the One, then, the differences between Speusippus and Aristotle amount to this: For the latter the One is not a number, nor a separately existing entity, but the principle of number because, each number being a plurality of abstract monads, the One is its measure.

**

As Emerson wrote:

The world is young; the former great men call to us affectionately.