Vleeptron hopes it wiggles for you.Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
6 comments:
Ah, dear Edna. I have long contended that the mathematicians and the theologians are after the same thing, just with different approaches. One needs the other. The unsolvable, unknowable variable that lurks on the fringes and resides at the heart of all forms of mathematics is only solvable and knowable by the One who created the mathematics in the first place.
the Hebrew God is an almost entirely Moral God, that's all He cares about. There's 1 reference to mathematics in the O.T., in Kings, I think, and it states:
pi = 3
which is sorta embarrassing. But for some strange reason the gods the Greeks worshipped, and the Hindus, too, were crazy about mathematics and pretty much ignored icky Morals.
It's very common to read a mathematician say: "God is a mathematician." Physicists and mathematicians dig deep deep deep and find more and more mathematics at the Core of Nature and the Universe. Crazy old Pythagoras just refuses to be dismissed and go away, and continues to grab the imagination of scientists harder and harder. He forbad everyone in his cult from eating beans.
Hmm. I shall have to ponder that. I seem to recall that there is more math in the OT than that. There certainly is plenty of related numerology and calendrical/astronomical stuff.
Forget the numerology, it has as much to do with mathematics as astrology has to do with astronomy, or as alchemy has to do with chemistry. The Vleeptron High Non-Junk Science Council dismisses even Holy Scriptural Numerology, and the Kabbalistic numerology that Madonna finds so fascinating, as just superstitious mumbo-jumbo. There, I've said it.
One temptation into Holy Numerology comes from the ancient Hebrew system of number notation, which uses the letters of the alephbet as the digits. The ancient Jews were immediately tempted to wonder about numerical meanings in important words, like the many words for the name of God. The custom continues in the endless attempts to find Who The Evil Antichrist 666 is. There's a particularly interesting solution in Robert Graves' "The White Goddess."
Here is perhaps my fave piece of beauty from the O.T. -- no math, only the Puzzle and Awe of the Night Skies. Job is complaning to God, and God replies:
Job 38:31
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?
(In modern English: Who the hell are you, you putz? Can you build a Universe? Go ahead, try it.)
But the math reference ... To build the Temple, Solomon imported guys from Phoenicia who actually knew math and architecture and engineering stuff. The Jewish chronicler describes a circular fountain:
I Kings 7:23
And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
... which sets the value of pi = 3 .
(A few hundred miles away in Syracuse, Archimedes was working it out to about 4 decimal places.)
That was the title of a computer animated film I made back in the early 80's.
Hi JF ...
So uhhh ... how can I see the movie? Couldn't find reference to it on your website.
Bob
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