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[ by Charles Cameron — suggesting that the ability to make “creative leaps” falls within the aesthetic realm ]
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Kiefer Sutherland asleep towards the beginning of the movie Dead Heat:

And Mantegna‘s Lamentation over the Dead Christ

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I don’t think there’s much doubt that the film-maker Mark Malone, was influenced by Mantegna’s mise-en-scène.

What interests me here, however, is not the diference between the two narratives, one secular, one sacred, nor the question of influence, but the opportunity this juxtaposition provides for me to stress that resemblance, or more generally, pattern (as in “pattern recognition”), is an aesthetic skill, with the corollary that the richest and most illuminating congruences between items of cognition across disciplines or media are those in which the parallelisms or oppositions are most exact.

It is the exactness of the formal correspondance between two thoughts, images, or events that permits their divergences to become salient to us, and in our search for insight, it will be precisely those correspondences which most richly illustrate this principle that will offer us the greatest possibility of fresh insight — which can then be explored with all the rigors our critical faculties can contrive.

[ by Charles Cameron — on self representation, avatars, and what we may be missing ]
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Caravaggio, Martha and Mary Magdalen, aka The Conversion of the Magdalen

Where to begin?

The Washington Post doesn’t like selfies much, according to Galen Guengerich in the Religion, yes, the Religion section — in a post titled ‘Selfie’ culture promotes a degraded worldview he writes:

The 2013 word of the year, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, was “selfie,” which Oxford defines as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” The first use of the term, according to Oxford, occurred when a young Australian got drunk at a friend’s 21st birthday party and fell down the stairs. He hit lip-first and his front teeth punched a hole in his bottom lip. His response was to take a photo of himself and post it online for his friends to see. “Sorry about the focus,” he wrote, “It was a selfie.”

Okayyyyy…

As usual, the Kierkegaard / Kardashian combo that tweets as @KimKierkegaard manages to straddle the worlds material (in the Madonna sense) and spiritual (in the sense of the Madonna):

What is the operation by which a self relates itself to its own self, transparently? Selfie.

— KimKierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) September 18, 2013

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I wanted to dig deeper — the WashPost Religion section, Kierkegaard, how could I not? I often want to dig deeper, and today I was driven to do so because today — not or the first time — I ran across a terrorism analyst and blogger named Cristina Caravaggio Giancchini, who uses a detail from her namesake Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio‘s Martha and Mary Magdalen (above) as her avatar…

Avatars are a kind of selfie, aren’t they?

In any case, I found myself looking for the particular Caravaggio that contains that detail, discovering it was the Martha and Mary Magdalen, which you see that the top of this post — then kept on digging via Google to learn a little more.

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Here’s what I found in a blog post titled Fingers and Mirrors: Caravaggio and the Conversion of Mary Magdalene in Renaissance Rome:

The inclusion of the mirror asks viewers to enter into a dynamic conversation about their own delight in the rich textures of the picture; alongside a powder puff and comb, it points us to Mary’s vanity, and her concern with the things of this world. Rather than showing Mary to herself, however, the mirror captures a diamond of light — a visual representation of the divine grace that inspires Mary to look beyond her earthly passions. The flower that Mary clutches to her chest is an orange blossom: symbol of purity.

As Debora Shuger realises, in a stimulating essay on early modern mirrors, for Renaissance viewers ‘the object viewed in the mirror is almost never the self’ (22). Such mirrors are, Shuger suggests, if not totally Platonic (reflected an absolute ideal), at least ‘platonically angled, titled upwards in order to reflect paradigms rather than the perceiving eye’ (26). Renaissance mirrors, she concludes, ask us to think differently about the mental worlds and self-awareness of people living in this period: ‘they reflect a selfhood that … is beheld, and beholds itself, in relation to God’ (38).

Pilgrims who travelled to Aachen in the fifteenth-century appear to have purchased small convex mirrors as souvenirs: as relics were carried through the thronging crowds, travellers held up the mirrors to catch a glimpse of them, and then preserved the mirrors as objects which, according to Rayna Kalas, ‘betokened that moment when the pilgrim had a vision of and was visible before the sacred relic. … Every subsequent glance at this mirror memento might serve to remind the believer of that glimpse of sacred divinity’. In Caravaggio’s painting, though, Mary looks away from the mirror which might capture her reflection (the ‘dark glass’ of Corinthians?), and towards her shadowed but persuasive sister.

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We began this post with the idea that our 21st century ‘Selfie’ culture “promotes a degraded worldview” — and here by way of contrast, in the use of hand-held mirrors in 15th century Aachen, we see what we are missing…

… a glimpse of the sacred, in which the sacred glimpses us in transcendent return.

[ by Charles Cameron — mildly NSFW if your office can’t handle Leonardo, which IMNSHO we should be able to manage now in this 21st century CE — and besides, it’s the weekend ]
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Well, we here at Zenpundit have a particular interest in creative thinking, and this last evening I unexpectedly found myself in excellent creative company…

…in a months-old blog-post by an old friend, an astrophysicist by profession who goes by the name Cygnus on the web — presumably after the constellation that harbors Deneb, and also Kepler-22b, the “first known transiting planet to orbit within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star” (WikiP, since I know no better). Cygnus means “swan” in Greek, and Zeus became a swan for his own imperious purposes when he saw Leda — Helen of Troy being one of their offspring (see eggs in Da Vinci‘s image below), with the Trojan War ensuing.

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Here’s then, is the A-Z of creative folk, as Cygnus pulled it together last April as part of an “A-Z- Challenge” — I’m honored and awed to be named in the company of such as Andre Breton, Donald Knuth, George Carlin, Octavia Butler, Samuel R Delany, Dame Frances Yates and the rest:

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For April 2013, my theme for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge was “An A to Z of Masters of the Imagination that You Oughtta Know About.”  In other words, on each day I profiled a person whose brains were just overflowing with weirdness and creativity.  Here’s a list of the posts:

• Intro post: “Here come the weirdos!”
• A is for Andre Breton  (father of surrealism)
• B is for the Bobs  (Ross and Haney)
• C is for Charles Cameron  (Glass Bead Game maestro)
• D is for Donald Knuth  (philosophical comp-sci prof)
• E is for Emmanuel Radnitsky  (Man Ray, to his friends)
• F is for Florence Farr  (mystical playwright)
• G is for George Carlin  (but without the 7 dirty words)
• H is for Harlan Ellison  (grand master of sci-fi)
• I is for Ithell Colquhoun  (surrealist artist & magician)
• J is for Jacob Kurtzberg  (comic visionary Jack Kirby)
• K is for Kenneth Grant  (eclectic & shadowy magician)
• L is for Lorq and Lobey  (really their author, Samuel Delany)
• M is for M. A. R. Barker  (game designer & worldbuilder)
• N is for Narpet  (Rush drummer/lyricist Neil Peart)
• O is for Octavia Butler  (sci-fi author & religion founder)
• P is for Phyllis Seckler  (teacher of true will)
• Q is for “Quien Mas?”  (whom did I leave out?)
• R is for Rimbaud  (dreamily evocative French poet)
• S is for Somtow Sucharitkul  (author & dozens of other things)
• T is for Tyagi and Catherine  (match made in a magic circle)
• U is for Unknown  (anonymous 17th century manifestos)
• V is for Vienna  (Slow down, you crazy child)
• W is for Walt  (Oh Whitman, my Whitman!)
• X is for Xenophanes?  (not really; Xena’s got nothin today)
• Y is for Yates, Dame Frances  (historian of lost mysteries)
• Z is for Zindell, David  (author of my favorite sci-fi novel)

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So that’s Cygnus’ list — quite a dinner party! You’ll recognise some members of your own constellation of creatives here, perhaps — feast on some of those you’re not yet familar with! Cygnus blogs about games and such at Servitor Ludi.

As for me, I’ll simply offer you William Bulter Yeats‘ great poem Leda and the Swan, to celebrate the company I just found myself in, and close out a memorable evening:

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                 Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

[ by Charles Cameron — at the intersection of zero-sum and non-zero sum games ]
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And the hands-down winner is — opening today’s Washington Post to the op-ed page — President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, who says:

The world has changed. International politics is no longer a zero-sum game but a multi-dimensional arena where cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously. Gone is the age of blood feuds. World leaders are expected to lead in turning threats into opportunities.

I think he’s right, though I’ll leave the question of whether he means it TBD — but if he does, that’s a.. that’s a.. that’s a Major Game Changer — and verra interesting in any case:

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For your further edification, here’s what a genuine game-changer, in both literal and metaphoric sense of the phrase, looks like:
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The court is a tennis court, the game in play is revolutionary politics, the event is the Tennis Court Oath, where the members of the National Assembly gathered to swear “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established” — the drawing is by Jacques-Louis David.

[ by Charles Cameron — on end-times rhetoric and having no need of sun or moon ]
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Detail from a Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liebana

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On the whole, the “signs of the end times” described in the installment of Maulana Asim Umar‘s Third World War and Dajjal, pp. 23-31, and now posted in the second issue of Azan on pp 83-89 are standard fare of the “wars and rumors of wars” type that could fit pretty much any time n history, including our own — “When the most despicable person of a nation would be its leader” would fit an astounding number of rulers across recorded history, depending on your point of view, including Nero and Diocletian, George III and Abe Lincoln, and a slew of Saddams, Mubaraks and Assads…

There was one section, however, that struck me as a powerful piece of visionary apocalyptic, and I wanted to bring it to the attention of those interested in such things.

The Maulana writes [I’ve omitted the Arabic honorifics since I lack Arabic, and corrected one typo in Enlish]:

“Hazrat Abu Hurayrah narrates that the Prophet of Allah said that the Day of Judgment would not occur before a fire erupts from Hijaz and lights up the necks of the camels of Basra.” [Bukhari, Muslim]

The incident mentioned in this Hadith has already occurred according to Hafiz Ibn Kathir (RA) and other historians. This fire appeared in 650 H on the Day of Jumu’ah in some valleys of Madinah Munawwarah and remained for about a month. The narrators have said that the fire suddenly erupted from the direction of Hijaz. The scene looked like a whole city of fire – containing a whole castle, tower or battlement etc. Its height was 4 “farsakh” (around 12 miles) and its width was 4 miles. The fire would melt any mountain it reached as if the mountain was made out of wax or glass. Its flames had the sound of thunder and the energy of river waves. Blue and red-colored rivers looked to be coming out of the fire. In such a (horrible) state, the fire reached Madinah Munawwarah. But the curious thing was that the wind that was emanating from the direction of the flames felt cool in Madinah. The scholars have written that the fire had encompassed all the jungles of Madinah such that in the Haram-e-Nabwi and in Madinah, all the houses were lit up as if from the sun. The people would do all their work in the night from the light (of the fire); in fact, the light of the sun and the moon would became faded because of the light of the fire.

Some people of Makkah (at the time of the fire) bore witness that they saw the fire while they were in Yamama and Basra.

A strange quality of the fire was that it used to burn the stones to coal but it would not have any effect on the trees. It is said that there was a large stone in a jungle – half of it was in the limits of Haram-e-Madina and half of it was outside the limits. The fire burnt to coal the half of the stone that was outside the limits of the Haram-e-Madina. However, it cooled when it reached to the other half and hence, this half remained safe.

The people of Basrah bore witness that they saw the necks of camels light up from the light of the fire…

[The Beginning and the End: Ibn Kathir (RA)]

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You know my interest in semblances and parallelisms. Compare:

in fact, the light of the sun and the moon would became faded because of the light of the fire

in that narrative with:

the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it

in Revelation 21:23.

I am not arguing that there is an echo between the two accounts, nor that they describe the same phenomenon — simply that the rhetoric of each has a similar poetic intensity. This just happens to be one of those occasions when there are more things in heaven than are dreamed of in your natural sciences.