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Unfortunate as it is, we humans are caught in a niche with a limited purview : A visible wavelength range of around 500 nanometers. // What our measurements deem "elementary particles"—the quarks and leptons and the like—are in themselves vestiges of domains having depths perhaps commensurate with the size of our cosmos. Following this trend of thought, the concepts of "small" and "large", "here" and "there" come to describe nothing at all particularly.

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(An electron can exist in more than one space simultaneously? As both wave and particle?) Geometry fails. Scale appalls. What are we? Where? This shot recalls 2001, 2:05:32:

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Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Scorsese's never far away?

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And Spielberg? War of the Worlds, 1:49:36 :

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There is a slowly-rotating spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. It is a tenant of the Local Bubble, two dozen or so galaxies in an irregularly-shaped array, which is itself but one component of the Local Supercluster, which as a whole is being dragged at a high rate of speed through the abyss along with other superclusters towards an unseen attractor. On the inside edge of one of the Milky Way’s stellar arms, 30,000 light years from the galactic center, the fragments that one supernova explosion disseminated formed a special yellow sun. This happened five billion years ago. The debris of the heavier elements left over from the blast became caught in the pull of the nascent sun and began to revolve around the host star with its white-hot surface (but one star in the Milky Way’s collection of 100 billion stars). This debris of one millimeter-long grains joined together over time one by one as they circled the ray-spreading sun until eventually hard-rock spinning planets were formed.

 

Yet this particular view is not of stars, but of fundamental particles swirling. Contemplating such magnitudes, these dimensions large and small stretching into the Unknown beyond sight in all directions, basic conceptions such as reality, laws of nature, and matter break down in the mind.

 

The imagery of the particles swirling is also a visual metaphor of the engine of Creation in operation. The engine generating . . .

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Initiation.

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The spark catches. An idea comes; an audience connects; Revelation appears in the “monotonous sublime” (Robert Lowell, “Waking Early Sunday Morning”). // This is Creation. // Such as our sun, which completes a circuit around the black hole at the galactic center once every 200 million years. Up close, our sun’s coruscating surface is seen to be oscillating rhythmically, resonating with acoustical tones trapped underneath the photosphere, sounds struggling to escape but unable to, convective vibrations like those of a boiling kettle, ten million separate notes ringing simultaneously and in sequence perpetually in a solar symphony.

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Fade out. What have we just witnessed? Just as in Dunkirk, where Nolan confuses the audience as to what is up and what is down and what is left and what is right (1:22:38–1:22:44), so here : What is the scale? Is Nolan following Kubrick and Spielberg and showing us Infinity?

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Psalm 96

 

O with new praise sing of the Lord,

Sing to the Lord and all the earth.

Sing to the Lord and praise His name,

Proclaim from day to day glad word of His salvation.

Of His glory bring news to all the nations,

To all the peoples His wonders.

 

For great is the Lord,

And exceedingly praiseworthy;

Fearsome is He above all gods.

For the gods of the Gentiles are demons;

And the Lord made the Heavens.

Praise and beauty are before him,

Holiness and majesty in His sanctuary.

 

Bring to the Lord, O families of nations,

Bring to the Lord honor and respect.

Bring to the Lord the glory of His name;

Bring offerings and come into His courts.

 

Revere the Lord in His holy house;

Tremble, all the earth, in His presence.

Say among the nations: the Lord rules,

For He has created our world, which will not be moved;

He will judge the people with righteousness.

 

Rejoice, Heavens; exult, O earth;

Shake, sea, and all it holds.

Rejoice, plains, and everything in them;

Exult, all trees of the forest.

Exult before the presence of the Lord, for He comes;

He comes to judge the earth,

To judge the world in righteousness,

And the people with His truth.

 

 

[When the house was built after the captivity; a song of David; translated from the Septuagint by JSB]

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Ariadne's Thread

 

Now King Minos solemnly promised the god to sacrifice
a body of one hundred bulls, once the king touched foot to Crete,
and all his ships were landed, and Minos had decorated
his palace with all the spoils of his wartime victories.

 

The scandal of his mother’s adultery spread far and wide,
however, as its repulsive issue, the two-shaped baby,
lay open to all. So Minos resolved to hide away
the disgrace, by prisoning it in a many-winding maze.

 

Daedalus, famous artist, celebrated architect,
fabricated the work with much inbuilt confusion, leading
the eye into uncertainty, into error, into wandering
along hallways of ingenious digressions ever-changing.

 

Just so the liquid Maeander plays through the Phrygian land,
winding ambiguously so that stream runs alongside stream
till the waters see themselves flowing back into the waters :
Maeander at play uncertainly from source to open sea.

 

Daedalus, in just this way, perfected innumerable
intricacies in his maze; and so difficult was his work,
he barely extricated himself from his own creation.

 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII.152–68 (translated by JSB)
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It was darkest night, and deep mild sleep

Nourished the weary creatures of the earth.

The fierce had diminished into level peace 

While the stars followed their way in silence. 

The herds of the field and the bright-winged birds,

Those who sip the pure-flowing lakewater

And those who haunt the spiny thorn-bushes

Lay silent in the country lands they own,

Their pains eased, their hearts forgetful of toil.

But not the unhappy Phoenician queen.

Neither her eyes nor heart set free by sleep,

Her cares returning, her incensed love

Increasing afresh, she moved restlessly

Between fury and passion in hot swelling waves.

 

Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem

corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant

aequora: cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu,

cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque volucres,

quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis

rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti

lenibant curas, et corda oblita laborum.

At non infelix animi Phoenissa, nec umquam

Solvitur in somnos, oculisve aut pectore noctem

accipit: ingeminant curae, rursusque resurgens

saevit amor, magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu.

 

Virgil, Aeneid, Bk. 4 522–532 (translated by JSB)

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From Euripides, Hippolytus

 

ὅσοις διδακτὸν μηδὲν ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τῇ φύσει τὸ σωφρονεῖν εἴληχεν ἐς τὰ πάντ᾽ ἀεί

‘the nature of things cannot be taught, but only obtained through one of sound mind.’

(ll. 79–80)

 

ὦ κακὰ θνητῶν στυγεραί τε νόσοι

‘O what troubles humans have, the hateful sicknesses!’

(l. 176)

 

πᾶς δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸς βίος ἀνθρώπων

‘Human life is wholly distressing!’

(l. 189)

 

μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα

‘We’re borne along by vain fictions.'

(l. 197)

 

τόδε σοι φέγγος, λαμπρὸς ὅδ᾽ αἰθήρ

‘(But) here is light, bright heaven!’

(l. 178)

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Oppenheimer trailer shot-bt-shot : Part II

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Homo Sapiens is roughly 150,000 years old, whereas the time of the formation of our home planet to its present circumference is upwards of 4,600,000 years anterior to that. In that era our sun was wholly enveloped in a gauze of fragmented metals and silicates shuttling every which way in a traumatic mix. It was a chaos of perturbations and dynamic collisions, particulates in dizzying aggravation colliding, adhering, by a process of accretion swelling in size from small balls to big balls to planetesimals ten kilometers across, lithic nuggets and iron-rich lumps rushing into one another like lawn bowls. Often when they hit each other they smashed back to talc-sized powder only for the dust to recondense into new arrays of asymmetric debris spinning unstably in erratic orbits. Upwards of 100 million years passed before the original stellar grains consolidated with enough of the others to arrive at our particular earth-sized world.

 

For close to a billion years our Earth was fated to endure a battery of apocalyptic assaults. Caught in the swarm of tumbling brown-black stones, the primitive earth, along with the other planets of our forming Solar System, was pulverized over and again by a heavy bombardment of projectiles, asteroids and comets raining down at nine kilometers a second and faster, pummeling the planet, delivering tons of diamonds, gouging out craters and pyrolizing the surface, sending ejecta blankets of carbon and nitrogen high up into the air. It was an earth-defining moment. The momentum of the continuous impacts sent shock waves deep into the planet’s indurated interior, heating it, reducing to a magma ocean the iron compacted at the center. The convection currents in this fluid core turned the earth into an oversized magnet. At the same time, the seeping heat transformed the structure of the planet from a dead chunk into a multi-layered ball of plastic forces. Stratification began. As heavy elements and minerals were subducted deep inside the red candescent cauldron of the young planet, granite and basalt, the light rocks, floated up and frothed at the surface, forming a thin crust, like the skin of a grape. Scrappy proto-continents floated buoyant on the slushy upper reaches of the earth’s shell—the mantle of high-pressure crystalline rock flecked throughout with olive-green grains, comprising two-thirds of the whole in the manner of the pulp of a grape. At the surface, the liquescent silicate cooled and hardened to form drifting plates of barren plains, a hellacious terrain of fissures, hissing hydrothermal vents, hot springs, boiling mud pools. Sulphurous flatlands ranged over the sphere, broken by salty ridges, haunted by methane-respiring anaerobes; with cyanides and amino acids pooled in dints and grooves.

 

The pressure of the furnace in the core pushed volatilizing gases and lava up through the packed rock and spurted them out into space in hyperbolic volcanic outgassings. Thus was the early earth swaddled in a portentous atmosphere of carbon dioxide mostly, shunting its original surrounding (which included such exotics as nitrous oxide) out of the way. In the puddles heated by thermal cracks and lightning, mats of algae and bacteria accumulated. Genetic material developed within membrane-enclosed spaces. Cyanobacteria evolved respiratory pathways, breathing in and breaking down carbon dioxide, then breathing out oxygen atoms. Our earth became a world of microbes, a world in which strands of DNA, programs of instructions, unraveling, copying itself, then coiling again into tight helical knots, produce enzymes which act as catalysts for change upon DNA;—it is a self-referential cyclical system of complex interactions, in a realm where 1/25,000th of an inch is a huge open space, wherein various materials act in concert towards the creation of the phenotype from the genotype—epigenesis.

 

Solar rays consistently reached earth to strike airborne water droplets, penetrating inside, bouncing off the spherical walls to be refracted back out at a skew, drawing rainbows in the primitive sky, arcs of color stretching over the desolate flatlands busy with seething lava flows, mounds of meteorite rubble, cinder heaps and smoking vents: a barren emptiness. Relentlessly comets and meteors kept striking the land and the oceans, raising up tsunamis, injecting water into the atmosphere, evaporating large amounts of the ocean, exterminating all embryonic life only for life and the waters to begin again. The scattered rock vapor from such smashing impacts rose up to collect around the earth in a geocentric orbit and eventually merged into a satellite, Earth’s pitted, scarred child, offspring of Earth and asteroid, the Moon.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Oppenheimer : the question concerning technology

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Heidegger : In the last 30 years, it’s certainly become clearer that the planetary movement of modern technology is a force whose magnitude can hardly be overestimated. For me the decisive question today is how this technological age can be subjected to a political system and to which system. I’ve no answer to that question. . . . Behind all [the different major political systems on Earth] is the idea that technology is by nature subject to man’s control. I don’t think it is. The essential thing about technology is that man does not control it by himself.

 

Der Spiegel : Is it not excessively pessimistic to say, “We’re not going to be able to cope with the much larger tools of modern technology?”

 

Heidegger : Pessimistic? No. In the present context pessimism and optimism are inadequate positions. But modern technology is no tool and it no longer has anything to do with tools.

 

Spiegel : Why should we be so overwhelmed by technology?

 

Heidegger : Not overwhelmed. What I’m saying is we’ve found no path that corresponds to the essence of technology.

 

Spiegel : But one might quite naively answer that by asking what is to be mastered? Everything works. Ever more electric plants are built. Production proceeds vigorously. In the highly technological parts of the world, man is well off. We live well. In fact, what’s missing?

 

Heidegger : Everything works. That’s what uncanny, that it works, that it leads to further functioning, and that technology continues to rip and uproot man from the earth. I don’t know whether you’re frightened. I am when I see TV transmissions of the earth from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb. Man has been uprooted from the earth. What’s left are purely technical relations. Where man lives today is no longer an earth. In Provence I recently had a long talk with René Char, the poet and resistance fighter. Rocket installations are being built there. The land is being unimaginably desolated. Now Char’s no sentimentalist, no admirer of the idyllic, but he said to me that this is the end unless thinking and writing can, without violence, regain power.

 

Spiegel : Well, then the question is, can individuals come together to undertake a particular action to save things?

 

Heidegger : To put it briefly, perhaps a bit ponderously, but after long thought : Philosophy will not be able to effect any direct transformation of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of any simply human contemplation and striving. Only a god can save us now.

 

. . . Spiegel : Professor Heidegger, we thank you for this interview.

 

Newspaper interview, 1966

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Seven inches long. As little as the length of a book. . . . 

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Something so small causes something so . . .

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The fourth shot in this series is a wondrously multivalent characterological moment. (1) Oppenheimer is directing the operation : he is in complete control. (2a) As usual by now, Oppenheimer may be questioning his involvement in such an apocalyptic operation (but it's too late for him now!) : he is not in complete control. (2b) May we say he looks as worried as he looks concerned? (2c) His worry and concern may suggest the close, immediate danger of the delicate Situation. (4) The fire is another vision of the Creative Force that brings Invention into Being.

 

 

 

Edited by Jeff Bernstein
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Ezekiel 1.1–28

 

(1) And it came to pass on the fifth day of the fourth month of the thirtieth year that, in the midst of captivity by the river Kebar, I saw the sky open, and I saw the appearance of God. (2) This happened in the fifth year of the captivity of King Jeconiah. (3) And the word of the Lord came to priest Ezekiel, son of Buzi, by the river Kebar in the Chaldean land. Upon him there came the hand of God. (4) And I saw, marvellous to see, a breath of wind swell from the north, and an awesome mist, with a fiery brilliancy blazing around it, and in the midst a shining vision of amber (הַחַשְׁמַ֖ל ἠλέκτρου) beaming in the midst of the fire. (5) And there in the midst appeared four living beings (חַיּ֑וֹת ζῴων) and this was their appearance: Their shape was human. (6) But each had four faces, and four wings each. (7) Their legs stood upright, and their winged feet flashed like gleaming brass, and their wings lay lightly. (8) And underneath their four wings were human hands. And all of the four had been given faces and wings. (9) With wings combined they moved with straightforward gaze. (10) And their faces had a human shape. And on the right side the four had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of a bull, and each had the face of an eagle. (11) And their wings were spread high. Two wings of each overlapped with those alongside, while for each two wings covered their bodies. (12) And each according to their gaze moved as their spirit moved them and did not turn. (13) And in the midst of these living beings the vision of their faces was like burning coals that kindle fire, or set torches alight. And in the midst they shone as one equal fire and from the fire sparked forth lightning. (14) And the living beings moved in a flash of lightning. (15) And I saw, and beheld over the ground a wheel (אוֹפַ֨ן κύκλῳ) posessed by the four. (16) And the body of the wheels were of the body of beryl (תַּרְשִׁ֔ישׁ θαρσις) and the work of all four shared the same form. And their workings were just as wheels working in wheels. (17) Through any of the four they moved, their movement not self-advancing, but united when they moved. (18) And the grandeur of those wheels! I saw many eyes cycling around the rims of the wheels of the four. (19) And where the living creatures went, the wheels went with them; and when the living creatures lifted from the earth, the wheels lifted with them. (20) Where the cloud moves, moves the spirit (הָר֤וּחַ πνεῦμα) of living beings. When the wheels rise, the spirit rises with them, as the spirit of the living beings is in the wheels. (21) When those move, these move. When they stand still, these stand still. When those rise from the earth, the wheels rise with them, as the spirit of the living beings is in the wheels. (22) And crystalline was the vision above the heads of the living beings: the vision of the firmamentum extended over their wings. (23) And their wings extended within the firmamentum, two wings uniting each to each while two wings concealed the body of each. (24) And I heard the sound of the movement of their wings like the liquid sound of water, many-tongued like a tumultuous step of the mighty. And I heard the quiet of rest when they settled their tumidulus wings down. (25) And down upon us came a voice from over the firmamentum (לָרָקִ֖יעַ — ὑπεράνωθεν ὑπερ-firmamentum). (26) And over them like a vision of a precious sapphire (סַפִּ֖יר σαπφείρου) came the image of a throne, and on this image of a throne was a vision in the shape of a human, high over their heads. (27) And I saw a vision of amber and inside a vision of creative fire (מָתְנָ֖יו. . .   אֵ֤ש ὀσφῦς . . . . πυρὸς) and a vision of fire all around and brightness circling. (28) Like a rainbow on a rain-cloudy day stood the light circling this vision. I see this exalted state (δόξης κυρίου) and drop to my face. And I hear a voice speak—

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