AncienTrails

The Environment Political

Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Bounced out of bed this morning at 9:30 am.  Yesterday’s early morning and late night at the capitol had taken its toll.  I’m awake now though.  My Latin for Chapter 7 is done, this is 3rd declension nouns.  I’ve already received one of two books of readings that Greg, our tutor, feels will move us forward faster in regard to translation.

Lobbying in this political environment is tough for the natural environment.  Jobs and deficits rule the world of the legislature; the natural world, or at least the world outside of the built world, intrudes like a beloved relative dropping by for an unexpected visit.

This session we can set the table for issues of future years, defend against certain potential harms and hope to pass some needed but relatively non-controversial legislation like complete streets (involved all potential users of transportation equally, not privileging motorized vehicles), extension of the open-bottle laws to off highway vehicles, promote economic development tools that promote green jobs and encourage retention of the state’s moratorium against building nuclear energy plants.

At some point the winds will become more favorable and we’ll be able to tack instead of run before the wind, as we’re doing now.

Our Democracy At Work

Imbolc                                   Waning Wild Moon

It’s late and I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I just came back from the capitol.  The event was a hearing on the proposed sulfide mining operation in northern Minnesota called Northmet or Polymet.  Like most hearings it went on too long and heard too much from too many people, but the depth and resonance of the environmental communities testimony made me proud to be there as part of it.

This issue is not going to go away because sulfide mining represents a real and ongoing threat to fragile wetlands, forests and watersheds, threatening to add mercury and other heavy metals, poisoning the very processes nature created to purify water and adding pollutants upstream from the Lake Superior watershed.

This one needs people on horses carrying red banners, trumpets blaring, and a town crier saying Beware, Beware, Beware.

That Old 8-Ball and Chain

Imbolc                              Waning Wild Moon

Oh, boy.  Woke up at 5:00 AM feeling behind the 8-ball, a feeling I don’t get much these days.  Kate’s ahead of me in the Latin and I’d done none.  I have a complicated presentation to have written by March 28th.  There’s that novel that needs work every day and I have to go the capitol for a hearing on sulfide mining tonight.

So.  Got up.  Stayed up.  Worked on Latin from 5:30 AM to around 10:30.  Fed the dogs.

Also have a guy coming to remove the door from the steam room.  Today.

Not A Day of Rest

Imbolc                                      Waning Wild Moon

Writing in the morning.  Worked on Liberalism II: The Present in the afternoon.  Spent more time getting to know my computer intimately.  Still no joy, but it turns out I’m not the only one who has ever had this problem.  That makes it sound like a solvable problem.

Reading the  paper on Sunday morning.  That takes a while.  Often as I do this so ordinary task, ordinary to my father’s generation and much of my sector of the baby boomer population, I realize I’m no longer doing this in concert with others across the metropolitan area and across the state.  Yes, there are still many newspaper readers out there, but they are graying.  I don’t even count Joseph among them.

An informed electorate is key to a functioning democracy, but newsprint may no longer be the best way to inform Joseph’s generation.  Just how to get solid reporting to them is not  so obvious although the remainder of Joseph’s subscription to Rolling Stone suggests that some of it may come from insightful articles put in with other content that interests them.  Some comes from TV news and some more from internet news sources.  I imagine some of it comes from movies and music.

I don’t know quite how to assess this, whether it represents the nadir of a responsible citizenry or a transition from one method of news distribution to many.  I suspect the latter.

The Common Experience

Imbolc                                                  Waning Wild Moon

“The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

I’ve had a lot of our common experience today.  Both of my computers have gone mute.  The Gateway, on which I’m writing my novel and doing art history research, I don’t mind.  This one, though, on which I listen to music from Folk Alley, Skype with the grandkids and watch videos on many websites, well, I do mind.

I spent several hours today under the hood of this device, trying this, trying that.  I don’t know.  My main speaker doesn’t show any electricity getting to it, but I’ve checked all the connections.  Frak, as they would say on Galactica.  Part way Geek but not far enough.  But enough about my common experience, Bucky.

We’ve had a run of weather that has not suggested much in the way of commentary for my weatherblog on the Star-Trib weatherwatcher site.  High pressure has kept us stable and reasonably warm.  Not a bad thing, even, perhaps, a good thing, since evaporation without rapid melting reduces the chance of flooding in the Red River Valley.

Kate has got her sewing machine humming, churning out princess regalia for the soon-to-be 4 queen in waiting of Pontiac Street.  She bought 4, 4, tiara’s for Ruth today.  A couple of cute outfits for the Gabester’s 2nd birthday, they’re both April babies, and a new shower head completed her longest shopping excursion since her back surgery.  She’s feeling a lot better, more stamina.  More sass.

Shopping

Imbolc                                            Waning Wild Moon

Watched The Hurt Locker.  It comes to mind this morning because Saturday is grocery shopping here at chez Ellis/Olson.  After spending a full rotation in Iraq as a fearless and emotionally committed bomb tech, the lead character rotates back to the mainland. The scene that takes us back to the states with him opens with him pushing a grocery cart down a frozen foods aisle.

The shift from the sandy, hot precincts of Iraq to a modern US grocery store jars on several levels.   The first is visual.  The glass is clean, the chrome gleaming, the banks of freezers stretching out quite a distance.  The second is aural, no bombs going off, no screaming civilians, no rumbling trucks, no blare of heavy metal music.  The third is the juxtaposition of this  bomb-suit wearing, in danger of dying, hard-drinking, rock and roll blasting, Staff Sergeant William James with the ordered gleam of American food retailing.

His wife comes by with his son, “Get some cereal and I’ll meet you at the checkout.”

He leaves frozen foods and goes into the cereal aisle.  Told to get some cereal he confronts another well-ordered aisle, this one with boxes upon boxes of varied types of grains made into breakfast food.  His confusion and inability to make a decision contrast sharply with his demeanor in the war zone where life becomes stripped down and, though often life or death, the decisions are more straight forward and apparently easier to make.

I have a very mild sense of this every time I go to a grocery store.  It comes from traveling in 3rd world countries and seeing the chaotic, but often much more interesting mercados and street merchandising there mixed in with the desperate poverty that makes the range of choice available to us enough to cause the kind of confusion and lack of decisiveness expressed by Staff Sergeant William James in the Hurt Locker.

Pyrrho of Elis

Imbolc                                          Waning Wild Moon

OK.  So I’m listening to the history of Western Philosophy on the way into the museum today.  The lecturer starts going on about Pyrrho of Elis.  I thought.  Cool.  Not only is the name of his hometown near my own, he was the originator of radical skepticism, which boils down to my own philosophical position.

Not only those two interesting things, but I also found this interesting note:

Elis was the only city that built a temple to Hades in one of its precincts. The Eleans were the only one to worship him. The construction was built after Heracles’ war against Neleus in Pylos. Only once a year, the doors to the temple of Hades would open, but no one would enter the temple except the priests.

So, here’s a nod to a philosophical ancestor, pictured here.  And to his hometown of Elis and to the temple of Hades built there.

A Grand Tour

Imbolc                             Waning Wild Moon

I took folks on a Grand Tour at the MIA this afternoon, seeing objects from the historical period 1600-1850.  I expanded the Grand Tour idea and took it beyond the confines of Italy and France to include North America, Africa and Asia.  The folks on the tour, five, Allison and four women together, and I traveled the world in a little over an hour.

One of the women, an ICU nurse at Southdale, said of Lucretia, she looks she’s trying to stabilize herself.  This from a person who sees people in extremis every day at work.  I’m inclined to believe now that Lucretia is stabilizing herself.  This same woman, a practical woman of science and data, she described herself this way, has a son who has begun to study the Middle Ages.  She seemed a bit puzzled by his choice and wondered about just what the Middle Ages were.  Allison gave the group a pitch about bringing in friends for tours and she wondered about organizing a tour of medieval art, to learn more about what her son had chosen to study.

The tour at 1 o’clock breaks up the day though and I got a late nap and didn’t get on the treadmill until 6 pm.  The writing this  morning was fine, but the time was too short.  When I  write I like to have a clear morning and time for a nap in the afternoon.  Not so today.  I’m now over 50,000 words into the new novel, which should be about midway.  Revision and changes along the way could change that of course.

Worlds Opening Up

Imbolc                                     Waning Wild Moon

On the way into St. Paul tonight I listened to lectures on Epicureanism, Stoicism and Skepticism.  These were especially relevant and resonant for me since Latin is the native language of many who took them up, though their roots were in Greece.  They got me excited about reading Cicero and Polybius, maybe Marcus Aurelius in the original.  It was a fun intersection current learnings.

Of course, in St. Paul, I play sheepshead with a group who have had varying relations with a Latinate institution, the Roman Catholic Church.  Mostly Jesuits, or ex-Jesuits rather, they have lived inside an institution directly influenced by the Latin language and Roman political culture.

The  card gods smiled on me tonight, sending me several wonderful hands.  This does not always happen so it’s fun to play them when they come.

Vita brevis, ars longa

Imbolc                                       Waning Wild Moon

Sheepshead tonight.  We seem to pass around the points, playing as if each person should get a turn at the head of the list and everyone a turn in the barrel.  Always a good time.

Tomorrow a public tour.  Stuff I enjoy.  Historical.  Highlights.  I’m still seeking a way to understand this world into which I emerged, a swimmer on the path to become a walker.  Objects, material objects, created by people with skilled hands, wild hearts and a need to create tell a part of the story.  They tell it from the inside out, the human experience filleted and boned, served up for others.  As I learn more, the ancientrail of the creator lays itself more and more open to me, oracle bones crackling in the fire, fish hooks made from bone, statues of bronze and brass, people molded from clay, ornaments from gold.  How do we wrap ourselves in the terrible passage of time, time that has seen the creators dead, dead long ago, gone, often, usually, nameless, yet the stuff they shaped continues on their journey, small capsules from the ancient past.

We see it and walk past it, looking for the next best thing, passing by the cycladic figures, the woman of LaMouthe, the Greek vases, the section of wall from Ashur-bur-nipals splendid palace, walking on past them to see the show, the Louvre show or the modern galleries, some of the objects in those places made by people still alive, still breathing, their hands still working while the sculptor who shaped the rock into the plump representation of a woman does not.

Museums are strange, often scary places if we look for the ghost, the hand behind the object, the living person with five fingers and a mother, creating with no thought that 15,000 years later–yes, 15,000 years later–we would pass by, maybe glance down, maybe not.  And what of 15,000 years from now?  17, 010 a.c.e.  Will someone walk past, glance down, wonder about who cared for this object, these objects, all those many years ago?