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randomness randomized
Mar. 5th, 2007 10:44 amI have been writing attempts at short posts that begin cleverly and make their laborious way to a firm grasp on the obvious, so I'll discard those, and instead summarize several topics, pretty much off the top of my head.
One is best put as a question: Might someone tell me how James D. Tabor came off in the Discovery Channel program re the Talpiot tomb? Whatever one thinks of his hypotheses in The Jesus Dynasty, he is clearly a fascinating individual whose forty-year quest has led him to far-fetched but defensible conclusions. We are not talking Dan Brown or even Baigent and Leigh here; Tabor can read the relevant languages and knows something about epigraphy when it comes to the ossuaries. But he is also haunted by bizarre coincidence, which could be interpreted in any number of ways, given the stakes involved. Anyway, I'm wondering how he and his theories came off in the glare of last night's gross vulgarizations of complex theories of first-century history.
Am also intrigued by last week's concurrent publication of new theories regarding the mathematical substrate of Islamic geometric tile patterns. At least one of the Russian constructivists, Liubov Popova, was interested in the topic, and her Spatial Force Constructions from the early years of the Revolution do look a bit like attempts to create secular equivalents to what was clearly a complex set of mathematical interplays. (In other words, the rationalists and the occultists were duking it out over Islamic geometry in the early twentieth century, alongside the fourth dimension and many other math-and-science topics.)
I have been reminded, not altogether by chance, that my early interest in Ernst Bloch was reinforced by Walter Capps' course on the history of hope and utopia. Capps, who became a liberal member of the U.S. House of Representatives after retiring from teaching, had just come back from a sabbatical at the Warburg Institute, and in consequence of that, I myself wandered shyly by the Institute on my first trip to London. Having no idea what questions to ask, I looked around and went away. A decade or so later, Frances Yates' books suddenly became of much greater importance to me.
I need to re-examine and comment on Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, a recent re-evaluation of Warburg that reminds me of how genuinely contemporary the Warburg Institute's insights were and are...I mostly didn't have a clue when I was trying to figure out what on earth a maverick Marxist philosopher and a historian of the Renaissance were doing in the same graduate seminar...or maybe I'm conflating two seminars, because now I can see quite well what Bloch's re-reading of centuries of apocalyptic revolutionaries would have to do with Warburg's re-reading of the evolution of Renaissance rationalism out of Hermetic occultism.
And Tabor's re-reading of Jesus as apocalyptic proclaimer of a transcendently based program of social justice would fit prettily into the picture, come to think of it. Except that his story, however pretty, may itself be only another of those wonderful fictions that fit into other fictions and give us pictures from which something else productive proceeds.
One is best put as a question: Might someone tell me how James D. Tabor came off in the Discovery Channel program re the Talpiot tomb? Whatever one thinks of his hypotheses in The Jesus Dynasty, he is clearly a fascinating individual whose forty-year quest has led him to far-fetched but defensible conclusions. We are not talking Dan Brown or even Baigent and Leigh here; Tabor can read the relevant languages and knows something about epigraphy when it comes to the ossuaries. But he is also haunted by bizarre coincidence, which could be interpreted in any number of ways, given the stakes involved. Anyway, I'm wondering how he and his theories came off in the glare of last night's gross vulgarizations of complex theories of first-century history.
Am also intrigued by last week's concurrent publication of new theories regarding the mathematical substrate of Islamic geometric tile patterns. At least one of the Russian constructivists, Liubov Popova, was interested in the topic, and her Spatial Force Constructions from the early years of the Revolution do look a bit like attempts to create secular equivalents to what was clearly a complex set of mathematical interplays. (In other words, the rationalists and the occultists were duking it out over Islamic geometry in the early twentieth century, alongside the fourth dimension and many other math-and-science topics.)
I have been reminded, not altogether by chance, that my early interest in Ernst Bloch was reinforced by Walter Capps' course on the history of hope and utopia. Capps, who became a liberal member of the U.S. House of Representatives after retiring from teaching, had just come back from a sabbatical at the Warburg Institute, and in consequence of that, I myself wandered shyly by the Institute on my first trip to London. Having no idea what questions to ask, I looked around and went away. A decade or so later, Frances Yates' books suddenly became of much greater importance to me.
I need to re-examine and comment on Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, a recent re-evaluation of Warburg that reminds me of how genuinely contemporary the Warburg Institute's insights were and are...I mostly didn't have a clue when I was trying to figure out what on earth a maverick Marxist philosopher and a historian of the Renaissance were doing in the same graduate seminar...or maybe I'm conflating two seminars, because now I can see quite well what Bloch's re-reading of centuries of apocalyptic revolutionaries would have to do with Warburg's re-reading of the evolution of Renaissance rationalism out of Hermetic occultism.
And Tabor's re-reading of Jesus as apocalyptic proclaimer of a transcendently based program of social justice would fit prettily into the picture, come to think of it. Except that his story, however pretty, may itself be only another of those wonderful fictions that fit into other fictions and give us pictures from which something else productive proceeds.
