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[ by Charles Cameron — in and out, up and down, black and white, fractals, enclaves, exclaves and chhitmahals, the prophet Isaiah and the Virgin Mary — a wild spin through geographies, religions, people, peoples, and their maps ]
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It’s remarkable, from a geotheological point of view, the prayers within prayers within orayers. But look at this excerpt from a Nation piece on a world without borders:

The so-called “Radcliffe line” separated a Hindu-majority India in the center from Muslim-majority East and West Pakistan on its wings, with a smattering of independent princely states throughout. But neat division wasn’t remotely possible, and what resulted was a labyrinthine confusion of over 100 enclaves (a portion of a nation entirely inside another nation), counter-enclaves (an enclave within an enclave), and even a counter-counter-enclave, in which a little pocket of India sat in a little pocket of East Pakistan which sat in a bigger pocket of India which was entirely enisled in East Pakistan.

The mind jumps to the Tai-chih symbol in Taois [left] and its implicit fractal presentation [right]m:

The thing is, one can map a single mini-me of the Tai Chih within the Tai Chih, but that’s about all the eye can manage, except when the symbol is blown up to all-size. But The Subcontinent is large enough for Indian within Pakistan within India within Pakistan — something we could abstractly represent using a target:

* in Cooch Behar
Well, here’s a map of what the French term LA VIE ENCHAÎNÉ — enclave within enclave within enclave:

Sensing that this sort of arrangement was unnecessarily complicated, India and Bangladesh have since done some land swaps to simplify matters, and moved villagers pof certain religious persuasions accordingly — and a certain complexity and perplexity is gone from the world map.

There’s a certain samenness, anyway:

A sari-clad woman tended to a small field of sticks of rolled cow dung, used as cooking fuel, bundling the ones that had baked in the sun and stacking them by a bamboo bench. A chicken, followed by four chicks, pecked nearby. If not for the corrugated metal barracks, we might have been witnessing village life almost anywhere in India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan, much as it had carried on for centuries.

That we could map with a simple white space:

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A friend where I write has a tattoo:

It’s okay to not be okay

That’s an enclave, Tai-Chih style insight — brava!

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And let’s wind up with two celebrated quotes from the Old and New Testaments, from Isaiah 40 (Deutero-Isaiah, for textual critics) and the Magnificat of the Virgin Mary:

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Isaiah‘s verse is a fom of land-swap — but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized Mary’s Magnificat echoes Isaiah, transposing positions within social hierarchy for heights and depths in social standing.

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Hm: I do seem to have noticed this echoing of Isaiah in the Magnificat before — see my post The trouble with moral high ground, which opoens with another interesting variant of high and low ground:

With the rise and fall of sea levels, sky levels, land emerges or submerges, mountain ranges with scattered lakes in their valleys transform into archipelagos, island clusters surge up to become continents — rise and fall, ebb and flow, wave upon wave..

I mean, really, what of the moral high ground?

and closes with yet another:

O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye

[ by Charles Cameron — a DoubleQuote that suggested itself to me today, posted here for your contemplative enjoyment ]
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Stage one was provided by my opening screen, which contained three or four questions against a background of countryside and waterfalls. The question which caught my eye was this one:

I’ve isolated it from a screen grab and placed it in the upper panel of my DoubleQuotes board, leaving the lower panel open for possible answers: Question and Answer, like Call and Response, would seem to be elementary forms of DoubleQuote play, just as DoubleQuotes are the elementary forms of HipBone Game moves, and HipBone Games elementary essays in rendering Hermann Hesse‘s fictional Glass Bead Game playable.

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I then used Google to find the correct answer to our question, and placed it in the lower panel:

That’s my play.

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And why do I trouble you with such a trifle?

Because asking a logophile what the word logophile means is an ouroboros — a serpent that bites its own tail — another of the elementary forms of the HipBone Games:

[ by Charles Cameron — you might not have thought of cats as liquid, though they flow quite nicely on a decent carpet; and as for mountains — would they flow to Mohammed, or would he have to flow to them? ]
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Somewhere I’d heard that Muhammad said that mountains moved like waves. I’d wondered which direction the Rocky Mountains might be moving in, whether they were aiming for the Pacific or the Atlantic coast, and what would happen to real estate prices and military bases in either case. I used to live in Denver..

And today I discovered the concept of the Deborah Number, defined thus:

The Deborah number (De) is a dimensionless number, often used in rheology to characterize the fluidity of materials under specific flow conditions. It quantifies the observation that given enough time even a solid-like material might flow, or a fluid-like material can act solid when it is deformed rapidly enough.

Reiner, whose paper originated the term, notes:

Deborah knew two things. First, that the mountains flow, as everything flows. But, secondly, that they flowed before the Lord, and not before man, for the simple reason that man in his short lifetime cannot see them flowing, while the time of observation of God is infinite. We may therefore well define a non-dimensional number the Deborah number..

The equation by which the Deborah Number, De, is defined as:

De = λ / T, where T is a characteristic time for the deformation process and λ is still the relaxation time.

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The Deborah reference here is to the book of Judges chapter 5, verse 5, which Reiner reads as saying “The mountains flowed before the lord” — whereas the KJV has “The mountains melted from before the LORD” and the NIV, “he mountains quaked before the Lord”. Melting at least has a transition from solid to liquid state implied, whereas quaking doesn’t really shift mountains from their solidity, though they shake — like Quakers, perhaps?

It seems there may have been some conflation here, for Isaiah finally provides us with a text that gives mountains complete liquidity — Isaiah 64:3 in the KJV gives us “the mountains flowed down at thy presence..”

But see also the SKV renderings in the Addendum below..

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And what of Muhammad? Shakir translates Qur’an 31.32:

And when a wave like mountains covers them they call upon Allah, being sincere to Him in obedience, but when He brings them safe to the land, some of them follow the middle course; and none denies Our signs but every perfidious, ungrateful one.

That has the waves moving, and their size resembling that of mountains, as I read it. Mohsin Khan‘s version often adds the translator’s explanations in brackets, as here:

And when a wave covers them like shades (i.e. like clouds or the mountains of sea­-water), they invoke Allah, making their invocations for Him only. But when He brings them safe to land, there are among them those that stop in the middle, between (Belief and disbelief). But none denies Our Signs except every perfidious ungrateful.

Here, “mountains of sea-water” are compared with “clouds” inside the brackets, but the text itself doesn’t mention either one..

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Maybe the mountains won’t budge. That was the opinion of John Owen, who wrote in 1643:

If the mountaine will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will goe to the mountaine.

Bakker, Egbert J. 2005. Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics. Hellenic Studies Series 12. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies devotes chapter 9 to the topic of Mohammed and the Mountain, referencing Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (1934):

As Bühler puts it himself in reference to the well-known anecdote: either the mountain comes to Mohammed or Mohammed goes to the mountain … he adds that in real life the mountain is a lot more willing to move than in the legend, since the ease with which any given speech arena can be transformed into an imagined new reality is remarkable, and lies at the basis of any mimetic, theatrical illusion. .

Here, the mountain’s movement depends on imagination, even though Bühler seems to refer to it as moving “in real life” as well as in “any mimetic, theatrical illusion”.

Of course, the very idea concealed within the name Rheology is that of universal flow, espoused by Heraclitus:

παντα ρει : Everything Flows

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And if everything, then cats. It was a tweet by blog-friend Adam Elkus that put me in mind of liquidity in the first place this morning:

cat physics. missed this from last year https://t.co/IWeowbo0BE

— "E1M1 – At Derp's Gate" (@Aelkus) November 24, 2019

Cat physics!

It’s an an obvious field of study once you understand the centrality of cats to the universe, and It’s appropriate enough that a cat physicist, Marc-Antoine Fardin, should have won the Ig Nobel Prize. His definition of liquid is a simple one:

A liquid is traditionally defined as a material that adapts its shape to fit a container.

He proceeds to show two examples which may fit this definition, which I’ve cropped to show you full size. First, a cat demonstrating oval form:

And here’s the rounded rectangle form, adopted by the cat from Adam‘s tweet —

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Suggested Thinking:

>Wolfram MathWorld tells us a sausage-form filled rounded rectangle is termed a stadium. Cat stadium, or a stadium cat? Now there’s food for a football (or baseball, or rock music) thought..

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Addendum:

Tweets from Splymoth A. Klavrock supplied us with the SKV translation of Isaiah 64:1-3:

Oh if you would only tear the Heavens apart and descend. In your presence the mountains would melt down like when fire crackles through kindling. The fire makes oceans seethe, so your name is made known to your adversaries, and nations quake in your presence.

You did fearsome things, things we never hoped for, and in the doing of them you descended. The mountains melted down in your presence.

From all eternity no ear has heard, and no eye has seen any god but you, and the things you do for the ones who wait for you.

Klavrock had another suggestion, linking the “motion” verb to something internal, close to an “emotion”:

I think “melted” is the same verb as when the Israelites’ hearts “melt” in fear facing a strong enemy. Which is interesting.

Many thanks, SK!

[ by Charles Cameron — with a definition that places poetry and the drama as a subset of music ]
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L’shana tovah!

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Christopher Rouse just died. I knew nothing of him, but already I love his Gorgon:

May he rest in peace.

Ligeti, Mysteries Macabre with the astounding Patricia Kopatchinskaja:

Furiously at play!

Kopatchinskaja it is, I guess, who writes:

Temperature and ocean levels go up. Whole world regions dry out. Hundreds of millions will have to leave, migrate, millions will fight wars, no end being in sight. Can we go on listening as usual to Buxtehude, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch, Bruckner?

and at last Teeth — with the Ligeti from the late ’70s as context, the stunning Roomful Of Teeth plays Caroline Shaw‘s Pulitzer-winning Partita:

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Music, it would seem, is the chosen placement of sounds, random or chosen, from the field of all sounds, in some form or container within which they may bounce and reverberate.

Note that under this definition, the barnyard’s sounds may sound (Ligeti, children’s rhymes), as may silence..

the words of operas and masses..

Note too, that under this definition, plays and poetry are a subset of music, also.

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L’shana tovah!

[ by Charles Cameron — logic, the arts, and technology offer an Easter, resurrection corrective, philosophically speaking, to the ruin of the cathedral of Notre Dame ]
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For the terrible fire that consumed so much of Notre Dame de Paris this week, grief is great. Here, I wish to recall some of the ways in which the essence of the great cathedral has been saved.

Above, Piero della Francesca‘s Madonna della Misericordia. Our Lady of Mercy, for whom the cathedral was named, continues to shelter us all..

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Perhaps the most extraordinary, as well as the most abstract, form of Notre Dame to survive fire, war, and the French Revolutionary idea — to replace Mary with the goddess Reason enthroned in her place — is the logic embedded in the theology that accompanied its building and — lex orandi, lex credendi — the worship within it, for which purpose it was designed and built

The American philosopher CS Peirce was among the first to propose a kinship between Gothic architecture and the logic of the Paris schoolmen:

Art felt the spirit of a new age, and there could hardly be a greater change than from the highly ornate round-arched architecture of the twelfth century to the comparatively simple Gothic of the thirteenth. Indeed, if any one wishes to know what a scholastic commentary is like, and what the tone of thought in it is, he has only to contemplate a Gothic cathedral. The first quality of either is a religious devotion, truly heroic. One feels that the men who did these works did really believe in religion as we believe in nothing. We cannot easily understand how Thomas Aquinas can speculate so much on the nature of angels, and whether ten thousand of them could dance on a needle’s point. But it was simply because he held them for real. If they are real, why are they not more interesting than the bewildering varieties of insects which naturalists study; or why should the orbits of double stars attract more attention than spiritual intelligences?

Erwin Panofsky‘s work, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, is the central presentation of the parallels. Pierre Bourdieu, who translated Panofsky into French, characterizes the work:

The parallelism between the development of Gothic art and the development of scholastic thought in the period between about 1130–1140 and about 1270 cannot be brought out unless one “brackets off phenomenal appearances” and seeks the hidden analogies between the principles of logical organization of Scholasticism and the principles of construction of Gothic architecture. This methodological choice is dictated by the intention of establishing more than a vague “parallelism” or discontinuous, fragmentary “influences”. Renouncing the semblances of proof which satisfy intuitionists or the reassuring but reductive circumstantial proofs which delight positivists, Panofsky is led to identify the historical convergence which provides the object of his research with a hidden principle, a habitus or “habit-forming force”.

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Rachel Donadio, Witnessing the Fall of Notre-Dame for the Atlantic, depicts the ruin of the cathedral with incredulityn–

How could Notre-Dame be burning? How could Notre-Dame, which had survived for eight centuries—survived plague and wars of religion, survived the French Revolution, survived the Nazis—be falling? Notre-Dame, the heart of Paris, not only a Catholic site but the preeminent symbol of European cultural consciousness, the heart of France, the kilometer zero from which all its farthest villages are measured—how could this majestic structure collapse so fast

— Oh, ruin, from the Latin ruere, meaning to fall.. John Milton, Paradise Lost:

                                                          Hell saw
Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled
Affrighted

Viollet-le-Duc‘s 19th century spire, in this archaic sense of the word, ruined.

Resurrection:

The competition is already afoot to rebuild it.

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Fortunately, a few years back the entire structure was mapped with ferocious accuracy by Vassar professor Andrew Tallon, using advanced laser photography to capture detail — wear and tear included, to an accuracy of a tenth of an inch:

Vassar College/AFP Photo / Andrew TALLON

Alexis Madrigal, in the Atlantic:

Now, with the building having sustained untold but very substantial damage, the data that Tallon and Blaer created could be an invaluable aid to whoever is charged with rebuilding the structure. Ochsendorf described the data as “essential for capturing [the structure] as built geometry.” (He added, however, that the cathedral, no matter what happens now, “is irreplaceable, of course.”)

Tallon and Blaer’s laser data consist of 1 billion data points, structured as “point clouds,” which software can render into images of the three-dimensional space. Stitch them together, inside and out, map the photographs onto the precise 3-D models, and you have a full digital re-creation of incredible detail and resolution.

Professor Tallon died less than six months ago, in November 2018, age 49. If you’re looking for another Easter parallel, Tallon may be metaphysically resurrected with the promised rebuilding of the cathedral he so loved and diligently studied.

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It appears that the great Rosace Nord (north rose window) survived the fire —

As Incunabula commented:

By far the greatest blessing – a miracle – is that the Rosace Nord has survived. The South and West windows were very extensively restored in the 18th and 19th century, but the North Rose Window has stood basically unchanged for 800 years, the glass is the 13th century original.

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To close with a blaze..

In January of this year, Olivier Latry, titular organist of Notre Dame, made what is very likely the final recordings of music on the cathedral’s great organ, for a recording which was released in March, just weeks before the terrible fire. The organ, as built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in the nineteenth century, houses some 8,000 pipes; it seems the fire has left it largely intact, though with damage to its electrical systems and wind-chest.

Olivier Latry plays Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 on the Cavaillé-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Paris::