Prospero's Books

The walls of our memory palaces

From Joscelyn Godwin's The Golden Thread:

"Since most of us . . . are not expert in traveling the inner world of the imagination, we hang the walls of our memory palaces with pictures that others have given us. If we are fortunate, our parents began the process by telling us stories and giving us picture books that filled our imaginations with archetypal images of talking beasts, heroes, and heroines, far-off places, comedy and tragedy. Maybe they also brought us up in one of the richly imagistic religious traditions. We may have left its dogmas behind as we grew up, but its mythology is a trust fund on which we will never cease to draw.

"If we were unfortunate, our parents parked us in front of the television. And that is the measure of the gulf between the imaginal world of the poor, ignorant medieval peasants and that of today" (93-93).

Bucky's knot

In the early 1970s, in Ann Arbor, I had the delight of attending a lecture by R. Buckminster Fuller. He planted himself "down center," on the edge of the stage's apron, and talked to us, rapidly, without moving, for (I think) two hours. The experience was intoxicating.

I can still see the rope he displayed, made from many different materials spliced together in a line. He tied a knot at one end, then moved the knot along the length of the rope, demonstrating that as the material making up the knot changed, its pattern remained. We are like the rope, he said, changing our molecules over and over again but maintaining the pattern that is us.

He didn't actually have a rope. He pantomimed it as he spoke. But I saw, and can see, it. And the very same knot is now composed not of cotton or nylon or hemp, but of thought and memory.

I was reminded of "Bucky" Fuller by a profile by Stephanie Smith in the September/October 2007 issue of Good magazine, and in an abridged version online.

For those who aren't familiar with Fuller, he was the creator of the now-ubiquitous geodesic dome, as well as hundreds of other things and ideas. Marshall McLuhan, another big-picture thinker of the mid 20th century, called Fuller "the Leonardo da Vinci of our time." Leonardo should be flattered by the comparison.

The great Globe itself

Far Explore has a beautiful set of photographs of Shakespeare's Globe, in London. Their quality is so high that I'm considering several of them for use as wallpaper or screensavers.

I've been teaching about Shakespeare's theatre for years, so when I first walked into the new Globe, I felt an especially eerie sense of deja vu, as if I had somehow walked into a familiar painting.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for the link.)

Come in! Wander around!

The Museum of Lost Wonder, Prospero's Books' 2006 Book of the Year, has a wonderful animated tour on its Web site.

I could live there.

Come in! Wander around! Push buttons!

Rome Reborn

If you're interested in the "big picture" viewpoint of this blog, and in dialogue between science and the humanities, you should visit the site of Rome Reborn 1.0, a digital 3D model of Rome as it existed on June 21, 320 A.D. The site currently includes still pictures, video and audio clips, and papers. Coming is interactive online exploration of the model.

Rome Reborn was created at the University of Virginia. I have to think that Thomas Jefferson would be delighted!

(Thanks to Seed Magazine for the link.)

Fundamentalism vs. Beauty

The Winter 2005 issue of Parabola was devoted to fundamentalism. One passage stands out in my clippings from it, the closing passage of the article "An Eternal Perfume," by Patrick Laude:

In order to make plain the shortcomings and dangers of fundamentalism, there may be . . . no better way than the language that is perhaps the most obviously and easily shared, that of beauty. It is enough to contemplate the mosque of Cordova or an exquisite Quaranic illumination to know that contemporary zealots and fanatics are missing the point of Islam, and we just need to read St. Francis' canticles or be in awe at the Cathedral of Chartres to know that genuine Christianity carries no national flag and cannot be merchandised. Religion distills a subtle perfume in the souls and the works that it informs, a perfume that religious ideologies riding on fundamentalism will always fail to exude (9).

Stones left to find your way back

My museum and library visits in London this week had a theme, but one I didn't recognize until the trip was over.

• At the British Museum, I found myself drawn to the ways ancient cultures, especially Greek culture, represented their gods in stone.
• At the new British Library (a stunning building), I lingered over a special exhibition called "The Sacred," a collection of early texts of the three great monotheistic religions.
• And at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, I marveled at the richness of three hundred years of the Craft's imagery.

This theme didn't jump out at me until I read a quotation from architect Louis I. Kahn (see my immediately previous post):

Symbols are gentle reminders. They are stones left to find your way back to where you want to go back to.

The forerunner of all knowing

The Summer 2004 issue of Parabola included an interesting article on architect Louis I. Kahn. In a sidebar were several quotations from What Will Be Has Always Been, a collection of Kahn's words edited by Richard Saul Wurman. Here are two quotes that seem especially apt for this blog:

Knowledge is a book that is incomplete. It will always be incomplete. Knowledge will always look for that marvelous point when everything relates to everything else.

Wonder is the forerunner of all knowing (84).

Drifting transformed into pilgrimage

A clipping from the Summer 1992 issue of Noetic Sciences Review carries a short piece on labyrinths by Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Jones writes:

The labyrinth represents the spiritual journey of humanity which does not proceed in a straight line but meanders in seemingly repetitive circles which nevertheless lead to a healing center.

Human beings have long known that their drifting needs to be transformed into pilgrimage (25).

And in a sidebar, Keith B. Critchlow notes:

The labyrinth is itself an astoundingly precise model of the spiritual understanding of the universe. Not only are the exact cosmic rhythms built into it but, as well, the other sacred measures that represent our relationship to the "journey back" to our spiritual wholeness (25).

The Pillars of Creation

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has given scientists a new look inside the "Pillars of Creation," columns of gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula. According to Chandra, "This penetrating view of the central region of the Eagle Nebula reveals how much star formation is happening inside these iconic structures."

Iconic indeed. This awe-inspiring birthplace of stars suggests the columns of Solomon's Temple, and their adoption as symbols by the Kabbalah and Freemasonry.

(Thanks to EurekAlert for the lead.)