December 2020 – Page 2 – The Inner Frame

He Wrote To Me (Wenckheim IV)

Old Baron Wenckheim is returning. Hidden behind the noisy preparations of his home town to welcome him and his expected fortune, the third chapter of Krasznahorkai’s novel includes a more delicate dialogue in form of a letter Wenckheim wrote to Marika, the love of his youth, and her brief but intense reply.

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… she was an old lady, there was no embellishing that, so that what could they expect, she just sat there bent over the postcard, she looked at the three words, and tears came to her eyes, and somehow her back became even more hunched, her two shoulders fell forward,…

How do we communicate across time? How do we talk to someone whom we have long forgotten, or maybe even never met? I keep quoting Paul Celan, who compared poems to messages in a bottle, sent off with the hope that they will eventually be washed ashore at heartland.

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Marika’s emotional breakdown while responding to Wenckheim is contrasted with the nervous breakdown of the entire city that is afraid of making costly mistakes:

…because that moment, everywhere in the town, had somehow shattered apart, everything came to a halt, from fear, to a dead stop because of the fear which had swept across the city,…

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The dialogue between a town and its visitors is not necessarily doomed. New Harmony manages to talk to the visitors to various works of public art, some immensely popular like its labyrinths or the Roofless Church, others well hidden like the installation of 20 tableaus of writing from the Kcymaerxthaere project, which are slowly eroding away.

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But it’s not enough that words are being written, they also need to be read.

Browning Mountain

Today I climbed Browning Mountain, with staggering 283 meters the 53rd highest mountain of Indiana according to Wikpedia, while on Peakery’s list it’s at position 57.

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First, one has to find the trailhead, which is located along Combs Road near Elkinsville, whose inhabitants were displaced in 1964 in order to create Lake Monroe Reservoir. It turned out later that due to a miscalculation of the elevation the town would not flood after all, but too late, alas.

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Google maps takes you to the closed bridge above that crosses Salt Creek below. This place feels like the end of the world.

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Topo maps got it right. The trail is easy to follow but not marked (there is another access to this trail via the Nebo Ridge trail).

On top are three highlights. Indiana Stonehenge, a collection of boulders that don’t seem to belong there,

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a large sinkhole (maybe that’s where the boulders were quarried?),

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and the foundation of a home together with a perfectly intact fairly deep well.

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Apparently stone was cut and used up there, some time in the early 19th century.

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What will remain of us in 200 years?

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Here is the location of the house foundations and well:

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Pale, Much too Pale (Wenckheim III – Quarries II)

…it was only the sky that surprised him, because a few strips of this enormous, dark, heavy, and interconnected mass had broken open, so that the light broke through here and there across a few narrow bands, and the rays of light reached down from the heavens to the earth, innumerable thick shimmering rays of light gently spreading out — like an intricate aureole…

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The second chapter in László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming fulfills the title’s promise: Baron Wenckheim returns, by train, through the gloomy Hungarian plains.

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It is not particularly difficult to substitute the (for me currently inaccessible) Hungarian gloominess with what I have at hand, and I chose to seek out an elusive quarry, the Empire Quarry, to obtain appropriate illustration.

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The darkness of this second chapter is broken with the occasional appearance of light, as in the introductory quote, leading eventually to recognition:

…and he just watched as the streaks of light played across the landscape, he just watched, and he couldn’t get enough of this sight, he was happy that he could see what he had never dared hope to see again, he was happy that he could be happy again, he stared and he wondered, his eyes filled with tears, and he thought that indeed now he had come home.

Then, near the end of the chapter, light takes the center stage with a photographer seeking out the perfect conditions for a photo shoot at the Kelety railway station in Budapest where Wenckheim is about to arrive.

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So there is, like here, a convergence of lines, railway lines, light rays, paths, a promise of more to come…

Binomino (Cooperation Games V)

Here is yet another domino variation. Below are the eight 3-binominoes:

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You place them sideways so that colors of adjacent squares match. This is, alas, impossible, unless you use two identical binominoes. Therefore we are generous and allow the binominoes to be shifted up or down by one square, so that they have contact only along two squares. A chain using all eight might look like this: Rules 01

The connectivity graph is surprisingly complicated. I have drawn the directed version, the target of an edge connects to the source by sliding it down one square.

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A simple game for two players divides the eight binominoes in two sets of four. Each player gets one set, and they take turns placing binominoes in a chain so they match along two squares. If a player can’t play (either because their binominoes don’t fit, or because they are out of them), they have to take one from either end of the chain. The goal is for both players to finish simultaneously. Binominoes 01

Above is a circular version with 4-binominoes, ragged so that not only the colors have to match, but the notches as well. I hope this looks appealing. The same rules apply, but now the goal is to create a closed chain, like so:

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Here this is even done so that the binominoes are always shifted the same way. In other words, this solution represents a Hamiltonian cycle in the directed connectivity graph. I believe this graph is always Hamiltonian, for n-binominoes with arbitrary n.