Tag: Correspondence

Exercises in Hermetic Mnemonics

“Four years ago,” wrote Wittgenstein in the preface to his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, “I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together; that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking” (vi).

So too with my arrival to the decision to append old work, Trance-Scripts, to the Tractatus Computationalis.

Rereading Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, I note (and thus recognize?) a previously unacknowledged resemblance between Wittgenstein’s concerns and those of Renaissance magus Giordano Bruno.

We “distinguish between superficially glancing at a drawing (seeing it as a face),” writes Wittgenstein toward the end of the Brown Book, “and letting the face make its full impression on us. […]. Absorbing its expression, I don’t find a prototype of this expression in my mind; rather, I, as it were, cut a seal from the expression” (165).

The seal cut by Wittgenstein’s image reminds me of those proposed in Bruno’s 1583 memory treatise Seals. Frances A. Yates makes much of this treatise in her 1966 book The Art of Memory.

“With Bruno, the exercises in Hermetic mnemonics have become the spiritual exercises of a religion,” writes Yates. “And there is a certain grandeur in these efforts which represent, at bottom, a religious striving. The religion of Love and Magic is based on the Power of the Imagination, and on an Art of Imagery through which the Magus attempts to grasp, and to hold within, the universe in all its ever changing forms, through images passing the one into the other in intricate associative orders, reflecting the ever changing movements of the heavens, charged with emotional affects, unifying, forever attempting to unify, to reflect the great monas of the world in its image, the mind of man. There is surely something which commands respect in an attempt so vast in its scope” (The Art of Memory, p. 260).

I arrange before my mind’s eye a narrative map of the “intricate associative orders” between these passages, and weave into them another:

“Somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system,” writes Neal Stephenson, “coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge.” This “cosmic operating system,” he adds, “uses a command line interface” (In the Beginning Was the Command Line, p. 148).

Sunday July 7, 2019

Laid out on a futon on a screened-in porch at my sister-in-law’s house in upstate New York, I sip a Belgian-style wit brewed locally with hints of lavender, children’s voices rising up from the park across the street. Origami birds hung with wire circle and converse beside a Japanese maple. My favorite moments are ones like these when, through modest experiments with sense and awareness, I’m able to reach out and investigate my surroundings. The books I’ve been reading these past few days all seem connected in accordance with what the Three Initiates refer to as “the Principle of Correspondence.” Brian C. Short’s New People of the Flat Earth, The Kybalion, even the movie Back to the Future, which my nephews watched for the first time last night: all of these works seem to resonate when properly aligned. The same can be said of these origami birds hanging by the window, their forked tails and black-and-white plumage resembling those of the frigatebirds I noticed last night flying in the sky above my sister’s back yard. The question now is: how might I utilize this principle in service of the good?