You arrived home a short time ago. Carol and
Gayle worked the flowers on Mom and Dad’s gravesite and are waiting until Mary
Lou has her stone up to place her flowers. Kim met you at Max and Erma’s for
lunch everyone appeared to enjoy their meals. You stopped by Westerville’s
administration building setting atop the old dump and while talking with the
woman in charge she said she would check with her supervisor next week to see
about the ‘open’ plots at the Cooks. You also asked about the Orndorff plots
and discovered two are open to the south of your grandfather and that you may
use your mother’s plot (she has a stone but her ashes were scattered) for the
cremains of Kim and Paul with permission by you, and Cathy and Gretchen. So,
Kim and Paul, one way or the other will be interred into the ground at
Otterbein Cemetery. Kim is pleased. And, the kicker, since the plot is paid for
there will be no charge for it. The other two plots are ‘open’ but you don’t
know if they are ‘owned’ presently by Aunt Patsy and whether your cousin (their
daughter Wendy) will inherit those two plots or if they are yours. So, it was a good day. – Amorella
1811
hours. I’ll find out more sometime next week. I would rather we all be buried
in the Cook’s area, but at least Kim and Paul will be in the cemetery with many
Cook and Orndorff relatives. I remember in the 1950’s Grandma Orndorff said
there would be a plot and you thought it was next to your grandfather, one for
you and one for your wife. Why, who knows? Anyway, that may not be the case today.
I’m pleased with how it has turned out. When I was a kid the cemetery was my
playground. Nice to know I’ll be buried in it with many others – friends, family
and acquaintances.
Post. - Amorella
2135 hours.
I just read an article in BBC’s ‘Culture’.
You like
the article because it deals with four-dimensions, something you have felt. You
have also experienced six dimensions and perhaps eight. You do not believe this
of course, but I, the Amorella, can make a case for it. Drop in this article
under ‘Art History’, “The painter who entered the fourth dimension”. - Amorella
** **
“The
painter who entered the fourth dimension”
A 1954 painting by Salvador Dalí features a mysterious, four-dimensional ‘hypercube’.
Fiona Macdonald finds out how math fascinated the great Spanish painter.
•
By Fiona MacDonald
11
May 2016
When
mathematician Thomas Banchoff received a message in 1975 asking him to contact
Salvador Dalí, his colleague told him: “It’s either a hoax or a law suit.” Yet
it turned out to be the start of a collaboration that lasted almost a decade.
Each year, Dalí visited New York and called on the Brown University professor
for advice, setting him challenges for artworks that he hoped one day to
complete – including a statue of a horse made up of three parts that were
kilometres apart.
The
Spanish artist had long found inspiration in science. He wrote in his 1958
Anti-Matter Manifesto: “In the Surrealist period I wanted to
create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvellous,
of my father Freud… Today the exterior world and that of physics, has
transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr Heisenberg.”
Although Dalí continued to
explore ideas of theoretical physics until his death in 1989, arguably the
greatest expression of his scientific curiosity came in the form of a 1954
painting. Hovering eerily in the air above a figure modelled by Dalí’s wife
Gala, Jesus Christ appears in a pose that has been painted by artists for
centuries. Yet there are no nails in this image of crucifixion, and the cross
is not made of wood. It’s not even in a dimension we can see.
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
unites a classical portrayal of Christ with a shape that only exists in
mathematical theory. Dalí’s floating cross is what Banchoff describes as “an
unfolded four-dimensional cube”. In a 2012 lecture given at the Dalí Museum,
Banchoff explains how the artist was trying to use “something from a
three-dimensional world and take it beyond… The exercise of the whole thing was
to do two perspectives at once – two superimposed crosses.”
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)
by Dali
Sculptures of the mind
Just
as the sides of a cube can be unfolded into six squares, a tesseract – or
four-dimensional cube – can be unfolded into eight cubes. While it’s difficult
to grasp, the idea of multiple dimensions allows scientists to envisage shapes
that mathematician Marcus du Sautoy calls “sculptures of the mind”. As he
argues in his Radio 3
programme The Secret Mathematician, “It’s not possible to see a
4D cube in our limited 3D universe, but there are different ways to imagine
one.”
Dalí’s own ‘sculpture of the
mind’ brings geometry into the realm of the metaphysical. “There is a
meditative intensity to Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus),” says art critic
and poet Kelly Grovier. “The painting seems to have cracked the link between
the spirituality of Christ's salvation and the materiality of geometric and
physical forces. It appears to bridge the divide that many feel separates
science from religion.”
By
breaking out of three dimensions, the artist could find new meaning in a
traditional biblical scene, argues du Sautoy. “The idea of the fourth dimension
existing beyond our material world resonated for Dalí with the spiritual world
transcending our physical universe.”
The shape of things to
come
A
fourth dimension in art seemed for many a natural development. In his 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto,
Hungarian poet and art theorist Charles Tamkó Sirató claimed that artistic
evolution had led to “Literature leaving the line and entering the plane…
Painting leaving the plane and entering space… [And] sculpture stepping out of
closed, immobile forms.” Next, Sirató said, there would be “the artistic
conquest of four-dimensional space, which to date has been completely
art-free”.
Cubists
like Pablo Picasso had already attempted to represent four-dimensional shapes
on the two-dimensional canvas, excited by the theories of 19th-Century
mathematicians Bernhard Riemann and Henri Poincaré. Yet Dalí looked further
back for inspiration, describing his painting as “metaphysical, transcendent
cubism”. He claimed that Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was influenced
by a 13th-Century mystic and a 16th-Century architect. “It is
based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip II’s
architect, builder of the Escorial Palace; it is a treatise inspired by Ars
Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist, Raymond Lull.”
According to Banchoff, “Lull was
a Catalonian who studied two dimensions; two centuries later Herrera took that
to the third dimension. Here’s Dalí in a direct line, taking it up to the
fourth dimension.” The Brown University professor can also see a link between
Dalí’s hypercube and drawings of crosses made by those studying perspective in
the 18th Century, such as the French astronomer Edme-Sebastien Jeaurat. When
Jeaurat and others were drawing these shapes in 1750, says Banchoff, they “were
not thinking of it as an unfolded four-dimensional cube – that came one or two
centuries later”.
Yet
Banchoff recognised the shape as soon as he saw Jeaurat’s sketches. “I said:
‘That’s it. That’s the 4D unfolded cross. That’s the Corpus Hypercubus.’” Dalí
was able to enter the fourth dimension with the help of astronomers and mystics
as well as mathematicians.
And
he brought with him the fears of his age. “Corpus Hypercubus was not an easy
problem to solve,” says Banchoff. “It took him four years… before he was
satisfied with the painting.” Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) was completed in
1954: the year Cern in Geneva was founded. “Cold War fears of nuclear
annihilation were accelerating,” says Grovier. “Atomic structure, in other
words, was on everyone's mind and how tampering with such mysteries might bring
about either our destruction or survival.”
For
Dalí, geometry could be a route to eternal salvation. “In Dalí’s work, atomism
and science appear to be the very fabric on which redemption and salvation are
stitched,” says Grovier. “The tesseractic crucifix would seem to extend beyond
the dimensions of this world into planes unknown.”
It’s
something the artist himself acknowledged. As he said in The Dalí
Dimension, “Thinkers and literati can’t give me anything.
Scientists give me everything, even the immortality of the soul.”
Selected
and edited from BBC - http://www.bbcDOTcom/culture/story/20160511-the-painter-who-entered-the-fourth-dimension
** **
2157
hours. I have an affinity for this painting: Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubes).
You had to look up ‘affinity’ to make sure
it is the word you want. Your heart is in conflict with your soul on the word’s
intent, not meaning, and this is the reason you are uncomfortable with the
decision to use it. First, write the definition from your Oxford-American
software.
** **
affinity noun (pl. affinities) (often affinity between/for/with)
a
spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something: he has
an affinity for the music of Berlioz.
Selected and edited from the Oxford-American software
** **
The
above edited definition is what fits here particularly “a spontaneous . . .
natural liking”. Does this rid you of your discomfort? – Amorella
2209
hours. Amazing, it does indeed. Now, I cannot remember what my concern was and
who had the concern my heart or my soul? Isn’t that odd?
What you really find odd is that you cannot
remember this ‘terrible conflict brewing’. – Amorella
2212
hours. This is true, Amorella. You had a truth in a dimension that no longer
exists.
Post. – Amorella
2213
hours. Wow. You blow me away, Amorella
On that note, where were you? And, where are
you now? – Amorella
2215 hours. Time for bed. This is all I know at present.
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