AncienTrails

“No one burns the Quran,” read the headline in Tuesday’s L’Osservatore Romano.

Lughnasa                                     New (Back to School) Moon

OK.  Here’s a head scratcher.  Some punk in Fla., probably a self-proclaimed minister, decides on National Burn a Quran day*.  Turns out this makes Muslims mad.  Well. It’s apparently not safe to just be a nut job anymore.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury was a cri de coeur  against the burning of all books.  The bonfire of the vanities, a second rate movie and good, not great novel by Thomas Wolfe, got its name from a practice made famous by the Florentine Savonarola who, in 1498, called on Florence to “burn all its books, paintings, sculptures, luxuries and fineries — everything, in a word, that drove men away from higher spirituality.”  Book burning is a time-tested way of expressing disgust, displeasure, fear, dictatorial authority and a deep-seated anti-intellectual fervor.  This latter, especially, often brings just folks into the event and makes them feel comfortable with their often incoherent distrust of, as Spiro Agnew said, “the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

I wonder if protected speech extends to protecting speech, which would include, at least in my mind, books.  Burning flags, bibles, qurans, Harry Potter novels, Renaissance paintings and books seems to lend an air of finality to the event.  The cremation sought is the extinction not of the physical article but of the spiritual peril it represents.  Here’s the big news to all you potential book burners.  They are not the problem.  The problem lies with authors, writers and artists of all kinds.  They insist on an unfettered search for various kinds of truth and fiction.  Burning a book has the same impact on authorship as burning a computer does on the internet, it confuses the vessel with the message.

Can it infuriate people?  Inflame them?  Create an emotional conflagration?  Could it spark a real political firestorm?  Yes, as can all acts of ignorance.  If we allow it to do so, however, we only prove the truth of Saul Alinsky, the great organizer in Chicago, when he said:  “The action is in the reaction.”  This pistol toting pentecostal preacher will not be the problem if he goes ahead, and if you read the article like I do, I bet he will.  No, the problem will be in the Muslim reaction, in the liberal reaction.  Is what he is doing despicable?  Yes, because it represents a small victory of dogma over good will, of narrow doctrine over larger virtues.  Is what he doing important? No.  Not at all.

Imagine if the quran burning had already occurred and we had not afforded him a national and an international stage.  Would anyone care outside the members of this congregation and their tiny number of followers?  No.  If you had not heard of it, it would not matter.  Does that make it all right?  Of course not, it merely points out that small minds and head-in-the-sand thinking exist in our century as it has in all centuries.  Should we oppose it?  I suppose so, but I think it comes down hard beside the point, just as book-burning itself does.  Now, if they start coming for authors, artists, movie actors, poets and dancers we had better re-read the 2nd amendment and form up an aesthetic and intellectual militia. We could have a poetry slam, a book fair, a movie festival, a display of great American painters, a contemporary dance event right alongside.  Wouldn’t that get’em?

*”GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A Christian minister vowed Tuesday to go ahead with plans to burn copies of the Quran to protest the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks despite warnings from the White House and the top U.S. general in Afghanistan that doing so would endanger American troops overseas.

Jones, who runs the small, evangelical Christian church with an anti-Islam philosophy, says he has received more than 100 death threats and has started wearing a .40-caliber pistol strapped to his hip.

The threats started not long after the 58-year-old minister proclaimed in July that he would stage “International Burn a Quran Day.” Supporters have been mailing copies of the Islamic holy text to his Dove World Outreach Center to be incinerated in a bonfire that evening.

School Days. Good Old Rule Days.

Lughnasa                                                    New (Back to School) Moon

See you in September

Have a good time but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love   The Happenings (see current pic, right, at EPCOT)

Mmmm.  Nothing says aging like current pics of yesterday’s bands.

Hi and Lois had a cartoon this morning in which Dot presents to his class on his summer vacation:  “Didn’t do anything much, but that was a lot better than here.”

Made me think.  Lots of cartoons, op ed pieces, jokes, old recollections place school over against summer:  freedom versus confinement, fun versus work, anarchy vs dictatorship, innocence vs real life.  You can add to the dialectics.

Granddaughter Ruth’s entry into pre-school, as I said a couple of weeks ago, opened my eyes to the exceptionally long journey on which she has just begun.  At a minimum for a girl like Ruth, teachers as parents, Jewish, well educated grandparents, seemingly bright, her schooling will last 4 years beyond high school.  That’s 18+ years of interrupted summer idylls, broken off by the sound of school bells, announcements over the pa system (text messages?) and the scramble to buy school supplies.

Like the putative frog in the slowly boiling pot of water most students don’t realize just how long this commitment is until they near the end of it, for some high school, for others college.  I was, for example, in the third (last) quarter of my senior year in college when, over a cup of coffee in the student union, it came to me.  I didn’t have to go to college.  It was a choice, but so little of one in fact that I only woke from the enchantment as the wicked witch of the real world was about to have me for lunch.

Shopping for school supplies.  Loved it.  First day of school.  Eager to be there.  Learning.  Loved it and still love it.  School and its silly restrictions, its teaching to the mean, its lack of imagination.  Hated it.  A result for me was a suspicion of the motivation of people in authority.  They said they wanted to educate me, really they wanted to control me.  I learned many lessons in school, many of them I wish I’d never encountered.

First among them was the sense that true learning was something one had to wrest from the world by main force, not expecting any real help from those who labeled themselves as teachers.  This was a bad, a terrible lesson.  It has not served me well.  I don’t trust mentors, teachers to have my interest ahead of their institutional commitments.  Still don’t.  I probably could have learned to write much better if I had.  Probably would have finished a Ph.D. if I hadn’t graduated from college soured on the whole apparatus of higher education.

This was a wonderful, blessed lesson.  It has served me very well.  I trust my own work, surround myself with opportunities to learn and apply myself to them with vigor.  My thought is mine, shaped only by the minds I encounter in books or in paintings or in movies or of friends.  This has lead to an independent, critical and outsider perspective for me, again, a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is the necessity of creating my own thoughtworld; the curse is the lack of peer interaction around it.

Since I believe with all my heart that life is one choice after another and that we are responsible for the choices we make, no matter the influences of others or institutions, I cannot blame anyone but me for where I’ve ended up.

The educational establishment, however, still has not gotten over its early industrial template of bells, order and discipline, the true goals of the system, not encouraging inquiry, creation and craft as Paul Goodman talks about:  “It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own. “  This is the job of education, to spark in us the gift of curiosity, the courage to make things and ideas of our own and to have the fundamentals of good work to polish them.

Our school system, contrary to the longing of the Asian educational establishment, does not in fact, stimulate creativity.  The creativity and self-initiative so prized by Asia happens in spite of the cloak of institutional rigor draped over the shoulders of even 4 year old Ruth.  It happens because our culture does allow for outliers, for outsiders, for prophets, for critics–our schools do not.

Do school bells, attendance taking, rigid curriculum, regimented class times, supervised play and little, if any, student input get to the goal, helping students grow up as human beings into a culture without losing nature,  learning how to be part of a sensible and honorable community? I say no, it does not. Paul Goodman, again:  “I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.”

Oh, You’re So Pragmatic.

Summer                                    Full Strawberry Moon

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” - William James

Pragmatism and pragmatists are an original American (US) contribution to the history of Western philosophy.  Since I can’t get my hands around it well, I’ll not try to explain it, though on its on my list.

But.  William James was among its founders and early proponents along with Charles Saunders Pierce and John Dewey.  He was also an early American psychologist as was Dewey.  So.  James is an important guy in philosophy, psychology and the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

His quote above is disarmingly simple.  On the face of it you might say, well, yeah.  Whatever, old dude.  If you took that perspective, you probably skipped over two important words:  I agree.  Now, I’m not going to get into the free will debate, very complicated at this moment in cognitive science, so I interpret this as our attention will go where we intend for it to go.  It’s the intentional nature of the I agree that I want to lift out and underline.

Why?  It reminded me of a dilemma I spoke with Kate about just this week, “Kate, there are several things, for example, pragmatism, Taoism, aesthetics, the Enlightenment that I would like to explore in greater depth.  The problem is that to do it I have to have sit down time, lots of it, to read complicated material and absorb it.”

“Yes,” she said, “There are just aren’t enough hours in a day.”

Just so.  We have a limited amount of time, that’s a given, both day to day, and in this finite trip, life.  How I agree to direct my attention will determine the nature of my experience.  If I choose to garden, I will not be reading Dewey’s Reconstruction of Philosophy.  If I choose to do Latin and translate the Metamorphosis, I cannot, at the same time, read Chuang Tzu.  If I use time writing this blog, I cannot use the same time to write a novel.  And so on.  And on.

Just using those examples I have chosen to direct my experience toward the garden, the soil and complex interactions within them both.  I have chosen to fill some of my experience with Latin grammar and vocabulary and learning how to translate.  I choose to write this blog and so have the experience of an ongoing journal/diary/weblog.

Is there anything bad about these choices?  No, at least not in my opinion.  I do, though, have to reckon with what James identifies.  Each of those choices makes other choices if not impossible at least less likely, therefore directing my stream of attention and with it my experience in one direction and not another.

The point here is that you decide the type and quality of the experiences you have and those experience not only shape your life, they are your life.  So, choose well.  And know what your choices mean.

Lost in Translation

Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

No thunderstorms yet, though I hope some rumble through.  They’re good for the crops.

Joseph has faced the joys of home ownership already.  The compressor on his air con died.  This is Macon, Georgia.  Not a place you want to be without AC.  He had the choice between several hundred dollars to replace the compressor and fans or buy a new unit.  He discovered he could get $1,200 rebate for energy efficiency which brought down the cost of a new, energy efficient system to less than double the repair.  He went for it.

Allina surprised me by calling Kate into work tonight.  It’s a long commute from Chino, California to here so I called them.  A scheduling error.

On translating Ovid.  It’s taken me a few weeks to get oriented to translation.  Now I have one yellow pad on which I write the book number (I-XV), the verse number and any notes about words or grammar.  Then I have another yellow pad on which I try out translations until the verse makes sense.  This way I have a record of why I chose particular English words and the resource I used:  A, Anderson’s Latin text and commentary; OLD, Oxford Latin Dictionary; L, Lewis Short Dictionary of Latin; W, Wheelock; and P, Perseus Project, a web-based classics resource which has spectacular resources for translation and study of ancient texts.

It surprises me still how much I enjoy it.  I can’t recall any task that has brought me as much pleasure.

Transformations

Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

A calmer day today.  After the bee work I planted bok choy and monkshood, finished raking the potato patch level, dead-headed tulips and daffodils.  A productive day.  The stuff I protected last night survived the frost well, though some of the coleus got nipped a bit the night before and I forgot three coleus plants in the park.  They don’t look great, but I think they’ll survive.

I said the other chapter 14 in Wheelock was half way through the book.  Not quite.  Chapter 20 is halfway.  It’s still a steep learning curve and that’s what I like.  Even the 9 verses of the Metamorphoses I’ve translated have already given me a deeper appreciation for the whole project Ovid set himself.  He correlates the painful and often vindictive transformations he records in the book with the kind of transformations the Gods have made to the whole of creation.  A dark thesis.

Kate’s hip is giving her fits.  I’m really glad she has the surgery scheduled for June 30th.  Won’t come too soon.

A Long Journey’s First Step

Spring                                                     Awakening Moon

The weather has turned cooler and the sky gray.

I’m proud to report that I have almost completed translating my first four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Of course, there are thousands of lines in the complete work and my translation is far from poetic, but this journey is underway.  When I feel a bit more comfortable with it, I’ll post it.  In fact, I’ll post the whole thing in progress on its own page.

Today is the birthday of cybermage, William Schmidt, ex-Jesuit and sheepshead connoisseur,  a combination of attributes that makes him in turn interesting, resourceful and a card shark.

For Mammoths reading this, I have added the Wandervogel entry to my webpage about Nick.

(Pygmalion by Gerome)

Among other top news items today:  Madonna laid a brick (in an African orphanage) and McNabb held up a Redskins jersey while Tiger was honest in a press conference and earned credit for it.   Meanwhile back in the real world health care reform continues to make news as does a 7.2 earthquake that struck southern California and drug cartels to the south.

I think I’m gonna go back to the first decade of the first millennium, no madonna there.  Well, ok.  The Madonna, but you know what I mean.

Liking Latin

Spring                               Awakening Moon

Didn’t go into the Woolly restaurant meeting this evening and feel mildly guilty.  I didn’t have a good reason not to go, I just wanted to stay home.  Showing up is important.  Anyhow.

How about this?  I’m really liking Latin.  Not quite sure why.  It has a puzzle aspect I find enjoyable and, of course, there’s the learning curve which I find challenging–a good thing for me.  The key reasons are two, I suspect.  First, I’ve never finished studying a language, have never gotten to a point where I felt like I had a good grasp of one.  A bit of French, some Greek, some Hebrew, some previous Latin, a disastrous semester of German, but no focused, positive experience.  I feel like I’m headed toward a good grasp of Latin.  Second, I have a particular goal, translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses for myself.

There’s a novel in there, too and I’m excited about that as the language comes more and more easily.

I also like having a tutor.  This one-to-one learning works well for me.  Kate’s taking it has ramped up my learning by the joint working through of chapters after we finish the assignments separately.  So, there’s that together aspect to it, too.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the ancient sentences, translating from Latin into English, then a bit of Cicero, but I’m most excited about a paragraph of Ovid I’ll translate, too.

Reason’s Dark Side

Spring                                             Awakening Moon

The history of ideas.  I love intellectual history, especially the history of philosophy, but also the history of political ideas, of literary and artistic ideas, religious ideas, even the history of landscape gardening.  A plunge I took a while back into the Renaissance, enlightenment, modernism and post-modernism has now pushed me into a consideration of Romanticism, a field of ideas which has fascinated me for a long while, but in which I’ve done little reading.

Romanticism and its sensibilities push squarely against what I said in Liberal II, which was, in one sense, a celebration of enlightenment ideas, especially the application of reason to human affairs, and its fellow traveling political philosophy of liberalism with its emphasis on individualism, liberty and equality.  In particular romanticism emphasizes intuition, emotion, the inner experience, mysticism.  It does, however, square up with the liberal emphasis on the individual.

It seems, in its origins, to have been a reaction against the radical wing of the enlightenment which insisted on applying reason to every aspect of reality including religion so that revelation had to account for itself empirically, something it could not then, and can not now, do.  This radical wing of the enlightenment, within which I would place my self, also had a hubristic view of reason’s possibilities, probably not unreasonably (pardon this) because reason had brought science into being, the industrial revolution and the revolutions in America and France.  Reason had swept away the ancien regime and ushered in an era of political life where most individuals had power for the first time in the history of the West outside of the city-states of ancient Greece.

These accomplishments blinded the radical enlightenment to the dark side of reason’s victories:  the satanic mills in England, the years of anarchic violence in France, the spread of colonialism around the world, the rise of slavery.  The Romantics saw them all too clearly and sought an alternate way of approaching life, one not dependent of cold logic, but on a feeling for life, a celebration of the natural world which operates on its own outside the bounds of reason, a willingness to challenge reason’s conclusions as all conquering.

The hubris lead the radicals and their liberal ideas to imagine a constantly perfecting world, a world in which reason would eliminate superstition and ignorance, ushering in a rationalist utopia.  But we are more complex and our hatreds, even our loves lead us to actions not guided by reason alone, perhaps not guided by reason at all.  These motivations, too, have to become part of the theoretical calculus.

As the song says, I’ve only just begun.

Latin and Contemporary Art

Spring                                                      Awakening Moon

Had our Latin session with Greg at noon today.  I asked him if he thought my trying to translate Ovid now would hurt my learning.  He said, no, go for it.  But.  Get a latin text with a commentary and work out your translation to your satisfaction before you compare it to someone else’s.  So, I went on Amazon and found a 2-volume latin text with commentary.  They are on their way.  I’m excited.  I know I’ve got a long way to go before I’m a competent translator, if I ever make it to that level, but I can punt away at it.  He said to expect frustration.  Oh, I do.

(from the Metamorphosis, Ulysses men turned into swine. 1591)

After that into the Art Institute for the first of two lectures on the upcoming spring show, Until Now.    The lecture was excellent.  Docent training leaves out huge chunks of the world’s artistic tradition with a necessary focus on the art history of objects in the museum’s collection, but the biggest lacuna was contemporary art. I found the guest curator’s lecture very informative, a good background for an aspect of art history in which I feel very weak.

Until Now is contemporary art in a large show and it combines with Art Remix which features museum contemporary works placed at provocative or evocative locations. David Ryan, curator of modern design, said years ago the museum would only purchase works of an artist who was dead.  This was to ensure that whatever work we purchased represented an important and/or mature example.  That policy ended a few years ago and the museum has begun collecting living artists.

We have a new contemporary art curator and her initial job was to figure out how contemporary art fits into the MIA’s mission as an encyclopedic collection.  At the MIA we can place contemporary work in context, the art historical context which informed and informs artists working especially since WWII.  The Art Remix is an attempt to draw on the museum’s historical examples and use them as conversation starters about contemporary art as it has evolved out of the older works and how the older works can be illuminated, seen in a different way when viewed through the lens of later artist’s work.

(a work by Kara Walker, African/American, 1998)

The last hour of the day was a conversation about the Art Remix.  I found Liz Armstrong’s rationale for the Remix strong though I felt this first effort was uneven.  Some of it is very provocative, like the photographic panels in the Korean collection and the TV Buddha, which features a bronze buddha watching television, a television screen filled with a video camera turned on the Buddha statue and especially the Chinese Ming dynasty chair carved from a single block of marble and placed in the Wu family reception hall.  The works put in the Egyptian and African galleries (not the Shonibare, which I love) are not as effective for me.

A day with a lot of learning.

Trivia (thanks, Tom)

Spring                            Awakening Moon

“Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.” - (?)Mark Twain

I like this quote, I even love this quote, but Mark Twain?  Doesn’t sound like Twain to me.  Sounds more like an existentialist thinking in Country Western.  A little bit country, a little bit Camus.

HONEYBEE FACTS:

The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is -40 or 110 degrees.

The St. Lawrence Seaway
opened in 1959
allowing oceangoing ships to
reach Duluth, now an
international port. Duluth,
Minnesota and Superior,
Wisconsin are ranked the 3rd and 4th largest ports in the world. If
counted together they would be the worlds largest port.

The
Minneapolis
Sculpture
Garden is the
largest urban
sculpture
garden in the
country.

The Guthrie Theater is the largest regional playhouse in the
country.

Minnesota has
90,000 miles of
shoreline, which is more
than California, Florida
and Hawaii combined!

In 1956,
Southdale, in the
Minneapolis suburb
of Edina, was the first
enclosed climatecontrolled
shopping
mall.

The Hormel Company of Austin, MN marketed the first
canned ham in 1926 and introduced spam in 1937.

Introduced in 1963, the Control Data 6600, designed by
Control Data Corporation, was the first “super” computer. It was
used by the military to simulate nuclear explosions and break
Soviet codes as well as to model complex phenomena such as
hurricanes and galaxies.

There are 201 named
Mud Lakes, 154 named
Long Lake, and 123
named Rice Lake in
Minnesota.
The Hull‐Rust mine in
Hibbing is the largest
open‐pit mine in the
world.