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.

Dream

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Our imposed order of things gives time a direction, and all else seems to follow. But sometimes, this direction is lost, and certainty fails.

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Uncertainty means chance. Do we belong here?

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It seems there is another inward structure, more punctual, more concentrated, like a poem, that manifests itself when the flow of time is obstructed.

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What Paul Celan wrote in his Meridian Speech — the poem claims itself at its own limits, it calls and retrieves itself from Not-anymore to Still-there to persist without pause — becomes visible in extreme natural environments. In both there is seeking beyond these limits, words there, branches here.

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Is it possible to teach time to walk, to slide sideways?

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Poems, like dreams, are landmarks that help us to cross what we perceive as darkness of the mind. What seems wild and empty becomes possibility.

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Or do we prefer to sleep in our dreams?

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Memory and Imagination

Lick Creek Trail near Paoli is an 8 mile loop for hikers, mountain bikes, and horses. The southern branch is more scenic (and more muddy). Trail markers help to find the way…

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On a late fall day, much of it looks like everything else in Southern Indiana.

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Some trees offer perspective.

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But there is a highlight. Half way, there is a cemetery, which is all that’s left from a 19th century African-American settlement.

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There are just a few tombstones and wooden crosses, and it is hard to imagine what life was like for them.

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It’s a solemn place, reminding us that what others want to remember of us is more important than what we want to be remembered for.

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Praise of the Shadow

… and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.

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I usually prefer the early hours for taking pictures, and avoid the harsh daylight.

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But light allows to objectify darkness, in form of a shadow.

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Sometimes it’s not so much the question what creates the shadow on the wall, but what lies behind the wall.

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The interior (if there is one) should allow cause and effect to coexist.

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Light and shadow are folded together.

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But the gate is always open, which means that ultimately we have to leave again.

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In Chains (Cooperation Games IV)

We continue with translucent trominoes, add an I-tromino, and select those that have two translucent squares (gray with red border). There are just three of them, shown below to the left. To the right are how they can be attached to each other, overlapping in exactly one translucent square:

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What we don’t allow today is that two trominoes overlap in both of their translucent squares, as below.

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This has the interesting consequence that the gray squares will necessarily form chains or loops, which adds useful structure. A tiling is complete if all translucent squares are covered twice. We will then have twice as many translucent squares visible than colored squared.

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Below is an example of a complete tiling of a 6×6 board.

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And here is our game: Each player gets the same number of tiles. For two players, is a good choice, say three of each kind. The players take turns placing one tile on the table so that

each new tile links with a previous tile
two linked tiles are of different color

Alternatively, a player can also remove the last played tile and replace it by another one.

The goal is to create a complete closed chain when all tiles are used up.

Below is an example of a successfully closed loop of length 8.

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Lugentes Campi (Twin Swamps III)

I promised to return, and this time I came early enough, before sunrise, when the colors are still carried by darkness.

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The cypress trees with their robe like stems seem to have been waiting like limp angels.

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The boardwalk had suffered damage, and the railing had been removed for repair, providing unobstructed views for the adventurous.

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Are there swamp-green and cypress-red?

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With colors like these, this place belongs elsewhere.

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Thorn Bush (Wenckheim II)

… and then the thorn and the acacia bushes and a thousand kinds of weeds grew over them, and the Thorn Bush came into being — that’s what the residents of the city called it — as if it were some kind of proper neighborhood or something, …

The first chapter of László Krasznahorkai’s novel Wenckheim takes place in Thorn Bush, a derelict district, where the Professor has taken residence, amidst huge piles of styrofoam panels, … that if anyone should come along and pester him, let all and sundry be warned that whomever dared to approach his hut in the Thorn Bush would be shot immediately and without warning.

This chapter is about rejection — the city rejects one of its districts, the Professor reality, his daughter him as her father.

… but even then its reputation was enhanced not by the spice of juicy murders or sexual violence, but rather by being a no-man’s-land in the city, completely left to its own fate, an ownerless piece of land, needed by no one, and about which no one even debated who might need it and how it might be used; it was, accordingly, completely left to itself, …

Places like this give an opportunity for isolation, but the Professors needs go further:

…the basic problem with a window wasn’t a question of this or that practical advantage or disadvantage, but it was the principle of the window that troubled him greatly, and namely not because a window could be gazed into, but because that window could always be gazed out of — …

In the book, this leads to violent escalation, maybe because nobody truly can lock oneself in.

Has every city its own Thorn Bush, has everybody a place of self-abandonment?

The pictures here are from my city, taken 10 years ago, near a defunct railroad line that had been converted into a trail. Since then this area has changed, but this is another story.