secretsofuniverse

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HIldegard von Bingen and Ouranos

The most recent pics of Uranus, our seventh and most Holy Holy Holy planet, reminded me of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. Here is her vision of the trinity. Christ is depicted as a sapphire figure ringed by gold and pale blue rings.

“This is the perception of God’s mysteries . . . that bright light bathes the whole of the glowing fire, and the glowing fire bathes the bright light; and the bright light and the glowing fire pour over the whole human figure, so that the three are one light in one power of potential.”

Hildy offers a vision of the trinity which eschews the anthropomorphizing of the father or the holy spirit. A circular and cohesive One emanating from God as Man.

I wrote a lot about Uranus in my zine about the nuclear bomb. Uranium, Uranus, Ouranos, Heaven. You get it. The bomb of Heaven-235 made hell out of heaven. The mind is its own place. We don’t gotta get into all that!

Hildegard had visions her whole life of what she called “The Living Light,” her term for the godhead. She glimpsed the visions I posted here in “the shade of the living light.” Hildegard was a prolific author, artist, and composer. You can listen to her compositions on youtube.

I included 3 for its similarity to Yeats’ cones. Hildegard saw the internal structure of earth as two truncated cones in which purgatory and hell awaited. image 4 i included as it’s a cosmic egg of fire just like Blake’s.

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Edited post: Joyce, Yeats and the gyres of time

Joyce’s euclidian diagram as drawn by the children Shem, Shaun, and Issy in the Nightlessons chapter of Finnegans Wake. It serves as a diagram of the book itself. FW is structured around, very broadly, a modified Viconian cycle: Age of Gods, Age of Heros, Age of Men, and the “ricorso”, a disastrous clap of thunder which begins the cycle again. FW is situated around this added age as three is made four. The ricorso and the beginning of a new age does not place one back where one started, but at the beginning of a NEW cycle which will follow the same thematic trajectory.

The gyres of Yeats function very similarly when looked at in a 3D way as in here. The famous words “the center cannot hold” is about the intersecting of these gyres. As one age contracts, the other expands, its opposite spiral unwinding the acts of the previous. The rape of Leda by a swan is unwound opposite by the annunciation of Christ by a dove to Mary. Yeats believe himself to be living in the narrow end of a 2000 year gyre started by Christ’s death a new age threatening to unwind into anarchy. He was in that place where the gyres pull at each other equally. The center could not hold. But consider that here still the gyre goes in circles reminiscent of ancient cyclical time, though moving serially towards a teleological end in a synthesis of Christian teleology and ancient pagan time we generally recognize today as progress.

Yeats had at times said his ambitious project of visualizing a cosmology in A Vision, was his attempt to “put the tail in the serpents mouth.” Yeats wanted his poetic system to be a perfect monad. He believed it his duty as a poet saying, “Perhaps the poet lives in the serpents mouth,” where this saintly poet  must bear witness to the eternal recurrence, the forever winding and unwinding of the world.

Joyce and Yeats both loosely ascribed to these ideas of cyclically progressive time. Joyce, however, in the Wake was very possibly poking fun at Yeats’ desire to square the circle of eternity in such a neat way. Yeats diagram of the great wheel (b) operates on a spoke of 28 wheels. Joyces Wake almost always adds that transcendent 1 to make 29, reminding that with each cycle we must add 1 for the rotation we’ve completed.

Now to Giordano Bruno, the astronomer who both these Irishmen were playing off of in their diagrams. Yeats’ Great Wheel (b) is directly inspired by Giordano’s mnemonic system (a).  While Joyce’s diagram bears far more resemblance to the Copernican diagram of the universe, the action of the book his Wakian diagram describes is Brunotian. Copernicus’ system is static and eternally recurring. A heliocentric system where the sun is at the center of the whole  universe which rotates like a clock, always returning to its initial position.

Bruno is the man who suggested that this Copernican system was in fact itself moving through an infinite and decentralized universe. The stars were not fixed, we were not fixed. The night sky would remain forever unable to return to exactly its original position. The solar system rotated like a clock and could ricorso to its initial position, but the system itself will have moved through infinite space. Time cycles, but moves ever forward. This is Joyce’s transcendent 1 and Yeats spiraling gyres of time.

Barbarically shoehorning Milton and Blake back into this rambling post we almost see this same function in  a way. A mythic system of Blake’s own design. Something circular, seemingly static, is shot through by this object, Milton, with a definite Christian teleology. Milton is a line, firing into this dormant egg at the center of all things like a sperm (This sounds far fetched, but based on how horny for Milton Blake I absolve myself) to awaken it as a new primordial man.

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The brief period of constructivist architecture in the USSR before Stalin’s aesthetic conservatism gave it the boot ruled. Such great examples of hope communicated through space, a socialist utopianism which sought to liberate beyond the economic. The world had been irrevocably changed, why should the buildings not as well? The cubist shattering of lines and exposed joints speak to a remaking of the world after a liberatory apocalypse. If the everyday man is liberated, the everyday should feel as such. Novel spaces for novel sociality yet unrealized. Every day would be avant-garde. What if your bus stop felt liberating?

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The Lenin Institute for Librarianship by Ivan Leonidov (1927)

from Fosco Lucarelli’s article for SOCKS :

Ivan Illich Leonidov (1902-1957) designed the Lenin Institute for Librarianship (the collective scientific and cultural center of the USSR) in 1927 as his thesis project at the VKhUTEMAS, the art and technical School of Moscow, with Alexander Vesnin as his tutor.

The Institute is made of a series of individualized shapes embodied by clear geometrical forms – mostly rectangular boxes and a sphere – which are boldly composed together. The three main buildings of the institute are a massive library with five million books joined by the Institute of librarianship, both contained in a high-rise building; the auditorium which also functions as a planetarium and as a speaking platform for mass demonstrations, located in a huge glass sphere elevated from the floor through a metallic structure; and the actual research institute hosting the research labs, a horizontal slab, suspended, which also connects the two other buildings. The single volumes are related through the composition of two asymmetrical axes on a decentralized circular platform where both the auditorium and the library are located. The library axis is also prolonged by a straight suspended roadway leading to the city center.

An important feature of the overall design is the presence of steel cables with the double role of guy-wires in tension and radio communication antennae. The cables counterbalance the anti-gravitational effect of the highest buildings and especially that of the auditorium which appears as a hot-air balloon ready to take a flight. They also underline the idea of communication among the people working together in the institute and in the whole country.

The center was supposed to be located in Moscow, on the Lenin Hills, the highest spot in the city, just a few kilometers southwest of the Red Square. An aerial tramway with a central aerodrome and suspended roadway would have connected the institute with the center of the city while the radio station would have put it in communication with the whole country.

As to underline an era of unlimited faith in an upcoming technological world, the role of technology is formally and functionally expressed throughout the whole project, especially in the library where an automated book-delivery system with a vertical and horizontal conveyor system delivers the books directly from the stacks to the reading rooms.

The sphere is the most evolutive area: as an auditorium, it can host up to 4000 people, but it can be repartitioned through mobile suspended walls in order to contain smaller audiences. When half of the sphere is opened, and all the seats are withdrawn into the remaining half, it can also be used as a speaking platform for mass gatherings. The sphere of the Planetarium can turn into a science theater after projection screens are installed along the inside skin. A system of elevators provides access to the auditorium.

The whole institute is equipped with communication technology like telephones, radios, and remote televisual pieces of equipment so that the whole staff can work together at the same time.

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from Linked : The New Science Of Networks Science Of Networks (2002) by Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Figure 2.2 The Party. At a party with ten guests, none of whom initially knows one another, social ties form as the guests start chatting in small groups. At first, the groups are isolated from each other (left panel). Indeed, though there are social links (shown as continuous lines) between those in the same group, everyone outside of that group is still a stranger. As time goes on (right panel), three guests move to different groups and a giant cluster emerges. Although not everyone knows everyone else, there is now a single social network that includes all the guests. By following the social links, one can now find a path between any two guests.

Figure 11.1 Paul Baran’s Networks. In 1964, Paul Baran began thinking about the optimal structure of the Internet. He suggested that there were three possible architectures for such a network— centralized, decentralized, and distributed— and warned that both the centralized and decentralized structures that dominated communications systems of the time were too vulnerable to attack. Instead, he proposed that the Internet should be designed to have a distributed, mesh-like architecture.

Figure 12.1 The Continents of a Directed Network: Directed networks such as the World Wide Web naturally break down into several easily identifiable continents. In the central core each node can be reached from every other node. Nodes in the IN continent are arranged such that following the links eventually brings you back to the central core, but starting from the core doesn’t allow you to return to the IN continent. In contrast, all nodes of the OUT continent can be reached from the core, but once you’ve arrived, there are no links taking you back to the core. Finally, tubes directly connect the IN to the OUT continent; some nodes form tendrils, attached only to the IN and OUT continents; and a few nodes form isolated islands that can’t be accessed from the rest of the nodes.

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one of my fave bits of the epic is a furthering of Satan as having very human and sympathetic emotions like being lonely and seeing two people in love. Satan is living in a psychological Hell even if he wriggled out of real hell. He is forever out of Gods grace, by his own hand and can no longer feel love or joy, only aching desire.

What he is specifically described being jealous of here isn't that God's new favorites exist in the light he once did, but their love of each other. In his state, at this moment he values human love (That happier Eden) over Godly love.

Even knowing the pain of Hells dark flames, he would seemingly run quicker towards the arms of an equal than those of the Father.

He's a romantic! And the book begins with him. It's easy to draw lines that the large, powerful Satan, described in terms of an epic hero and feeling such deeply human emotions as he embarks on an epic quest to defy God again is a classical protagonist who must be defeated not by another classical, but a modern hero in Jesus. Modern Christian narrative and story supplanting and playing off of classical myth just as takes place in the work itself through Milton’s use of classic myth to compare to the story of Genesis.

Satan as described by Dante in the Inferno, drawn by Dore

Milton’s initial descriptions of Satan are similarly monstrous. He is a giant. His shield is the size of the moon and his spear taller than any pine. He is practically framed as a Greco-Roman of the Age of Heroes.

However Milton strips him. His journey through chaos drains him. Slowly we see these very human moments of spite and envy driving him, not the abstracted evil of The Adversary.

Pulled down and down. No shield, no armor, no halo. He is a tragic hero of his story and shown to be at end a jealous child.

from William Fairfield Warren’s The Universe Pictures in Milton’s Paradise Lost; An Illustrated Study for Personal and Class Use

Paradise Lost is one of my favorite books, a retelling of Genesis spoken from the lips of a, by that point, entirely blind Milton to his three daughters who acted as scribes to his final masterpiece. Despite it being so driven by Milton’s religiosity it’s nothing but orthodox. Milton was a revolutionary thinker and staunch republican in the English civil war. A progressive in social terms as well, he spent two years petitioning the government to let him divorce his royalist absentee wife. He didn’t win, but took his wife back after the civil war was settled.

Paradise Lost is shockingly subversive even by these standards, depending on who you ask. As with anything, there are no clear champions of Milton’s meanings. Issues of his depiction of Eve as either remarkably feminist or wildly misogynistic, the problem of providence and the felix culpa, and whether Lucifer is actually the PROtagonist and a Promethean, liberatory figure are a fascinating academic battlefield.

His cosmology and descriptions of Lucifer’s path from Hell to Earth through space, chaos, and night make for some great secrets of the universe as well! The book absolutely rips and you should read it so we can talk about it.

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from William Fairfield Warren’s The Universe Pictures in Milton's Paradise Lost; An Illustrated Study for Personal and Class Use

Paradise Lost is one of my favorite books, a retelling of Genesis spoken from the lips of a, by that point, entirely blind Milton to his three daughters who acted as scribes to his final masterpiece. Despite it being so driven by Milton’s religiosity it’s nothing but orthodox. Milton was a revolutionary thinker and staunch republican in the English civil war. A progressive in social terms as well, he spent two years petitioning the government to let him divorce his royalist absentee wife. He didn’t win, but took his wife back after the civil war was settled.

Paradise Lost is shockingly subversive even by these standards, depending on who you ask. As with anything, there are no clear champions of Milton’s meanings. Issues of his depiction of Eve as either remarkably feminist or wildly misogynistic, the problem of providence and the felix culpa, and whether Lucifer is actually the PROtagonist and a Promethean, liberatory figure are a fascinating academic battlefield.

His cosmology and descriptions of Lucifer’s path from Hell to Earth through space, chaos, and night make for some great secrets of the universe as well! The book absolutely rips and you should read it so we can talk about it.

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art by Jorinde Voigt

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Mosaic decoration at the Hammath Tiberias synagogue, Late 3rd - Early 4th Century, located in modern Tiberius, Israel

Analysis and history from smarthistory.org

“Our civilization is an immense woven fabric in which very different elements are mixed, in which Nordic rapacity is reconciled to Roman law, and new Bourgeois conventions to the remains of a Syriac religion. In such a fabric, it is pointless searching for a thread that has remained pure, virgin and uninfluenced by other threads nearby. What race or language . . . can nowadays claim to be pure?”

James Joyce in a 1907 lecture

I recommend reading the really great explanation of this mosaic’s history and analysis of it by Smart History. I love anything that challenges a monolithic view of any ancient culture or tradition and this does that for me. It instantiates that almost nothing spanning a long enough time can really be instantiated as a whole. All we have are points of contact with what it once was, almost none of which will match modern conception. The above quote by Joyce was specifically aimed at those in his time seeking to RETVRN to a “Traditional Irish Identity” a nationalism based in a mythologized past, but all mythologized pasts are simply that, myth.

A mosaic decoration in an early millennia synagogue used the figurative language most relevant to those who built and attended it, Jewish subjects of the Roman Empire. They had full religious freedoms, but being so culturally acclimated to the imagery of an empire which at the time was beginning to worship Sol/Helios as a henologic deity in their pantheon, the image they used was Sol.

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“Timeline Los Angeles” as composed by Jason Kahn in his experimental notation. Performed on 25, 2008 at the CalArts Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival, Los Angeles.

From his website

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source: The Structure of Awareness (1969) by Thomas C. Oden available on archive.org

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Maxwell’s "Treatise on Electricity & Magnetism" (1873)

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Cybernetics and American Youth Subculture by Dr. Ron Eglash

Published in Cultural Studies 12:382-409, 1998

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Cybernetics and American Youth Subculture by Dr. Ron Eglash

Published in Cultural Studies 12:382-409, 1998

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Diagram of position determination using satellites. Patented by Gerard K. O'Neill

Source: US Patent 4359733A

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from How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand

page this is from

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experimental music notation by Jason Kahn