Category Archives: Literature

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Literature, Myth and Story

The Simple Life. Bah, Humbug

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Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau

(Walden Pond, 2010)

When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page.  The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned.  Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think simplicity is a beautiful thing.  Then again, so is complexity.  If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left.  If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.

There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature.  There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?

Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live.  I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action.  I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be.  I love art, often complex and difficult.

I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao.  I’m ok with that.  If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.

As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what?  Greater complexity.

 

Humanities, Letters, Literature

Influence Peddlers

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Fall                                                Waning Autumn Moon

What literature has influenced you the most?

The Bible, various authors

The Stranger, Albert Camus

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

Novels of Herman Hesse

The Trial, Franz Kafka

The Trilogy of Desire and Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

Metamorphoses, Ovid

(temple of literature, Hanoi)

Novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Novels of Willa Cather

Divine Comedy, Dante

Dramas of Eugene O’Neill

Poetry of Robert Frost

Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke

Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Chinese classical poetry

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

A Glastonbury Romance, Copper Powys

Short stories of Jorge Borges

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcia Marquez

Divine Comedy, John Milton

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Beowulf

These are the ones I’ll admit to right now.

Humanities, Literature

Reading Matters

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Fall                                                             Waning Autumn Moon

Found these questions on one of my frequent reads, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Thought they’d be interesting to answer.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly?

Wired, Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, The Economist, Funny Times, The Sporting News  (dropped this year long term subscriptions to Orion, Parabola)

What do you read in print vs. online vs. mobile?

All of the above I read in print with modest exceptions.  Online I read Dissent, Arts and Letters Daily, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and, as the election season heats up I read several political blogs (see below).   Big Think, TED and Connections give me a quick injection of creative, new ideas when I need them.

Q: What books have you recently read? Do they stand out?

Game of Thrones (4 volumes).  This is one of the best written fantasy novels I’ve ever read.  No competition for Tolkien, but very good.  Monkeys Journey to the West.  Another Chinese classic, a picaresque novel about Monkey as he guards a monk journeying to India to retrieve copies of Buddhist sutras.  The Sibling Effect.  Understudied in the past, this book recounts recent work on siblings.  All Things Shining.  How to find resources for living in the Western classical tradition.  Stumbled on their appreciation of the sacred and the holy.  Reading the Classics.  A very good book by Italo Calvino.  In the tradition of the Renaissance humanists.  Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  As any frequent reader of this blog knows, I’m reading this one line by line in Latin and translating as I go.  And learning Latin as I go.

I listened to Wolf.  A Booker Prize winner novel about Thomas Cromwell.  I also listened to a lecture series on existentialism.  Wonderful.

Q: Do you read blogs? If so, what blogs do you like best?

The Perseus Project

Not a blog, but if you love the classics, especially Greek and Latin classics, this website is a goldmine of resources.

What Should I Be Doing With My Bees This Month?

A Stillwater bee-keeper with common sense advice of northern bee keeping

 

All of these website offer analysis and strategic thinking about national and state level political matters.

Beyond the Polls,

Cook Report

Real Clear Politics

Politics: Analysis, Polls

 

Julia Bennet

Blog of a philosophical Australian model.  No kidding.

The Bottom of Heaven

An African-American woman writes this young black experience blog.

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

This one exists in its own dimension.

 

Q: Do you use Twitter? If so, whom do you follow?

Twitter proved too much of a pain for me.  Dropped it long ago.  Facebook.  I’m sorta there.  Check in once in a while.  Post less frequently than that.  Use none of the digital sharing technologies.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

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Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon

Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now.

The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we need resourcing in the first place.

The title offers a rationale, unpacked.  Humanism embraces a world shorn of its medieval metaphysics; the Great Chain of Being has met Nietzsche’s Bolt Cutter, God is dead. God is dead, of course, was not an argument, but an observation, a sensitive man’s awareness that the God drenched era of the ancien regime had been drained by the empirical method, reason and the strangely acidic effect of the Protestant Reformation.

This world, a world with a strangled sense of the sacred, gave birth to the angst and anomie of the existentialist 20th century, a world with no center, or rather, a world with millions of centers, each person a godhead struggling with their own creation.

What can buttress the Self that must navigate these empty places?  Does our supernatural vacuum hold enough air to nourish the isolated self?

We stumble toward wonder, toward joy, hope for a glimpse of the sacred, of the moment that can lift us out of our isolation and put us in communion with others, with the natural world, with the stars which birthed the very atoms which constitute us.

These things we seek not out of some vestigial institutional memory, an anachronistic impulse to live again in a God drenched world.  No, we seek these things because the essential paradox at the heart of our lives is this:  we live alone, the only one with our world; yet we live together, up against galaxies of other worlds, sometimes with other worlds so close that they seem to intersect with ours.  We seek the venn diagram, a mandorla labeled self and other, where the other is another person, a flower, a sky, a lightning bolt.

So, spiritual resources in this context, then, would be those fragments of culture that can weaken or penetrate the walled gardens of our Selves, not in order to breach the walls, but to let in companion armies, allies in our quest.

The quest seems to similar to the one Sir Gawain faced when he beheaded the Green Knight and, in a year and a day, had to bend his own neck before the Green Knight’s sword.  That is, we somehow must will ourselves into a vulnerable, ultimately vulnerable position, to those we have beheaded.  Interestingly, as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight proposes, this vulnerability is not only, perhaps not even mostly, a human to human one, rather, it is human to the whole Green world.

So we seek allies who will keep us strong in our vulnerability, mighty in our humility.  We seek at least love.

Aging, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

More Fun With Ovid

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Lughnasa                                                 Waning Harvest Moon

More fun with Ovid.  The curtain has begun to roll back a bit more.

Many of my friends have second and third languages, but until now I only had the one.  A bit of French.  A little Hebrew.  A little Greek.  But nothing solid.  The ability to look on a page filled with Latin words, words I would once have brushed over with little attempt at comprehension, and see meaning emerge delights me.

The words still look strange to me, foreign, but now they carry a pulse of meaning, one I can get if I look a bit longer, or turn to a book.

The same work I mentioned above, All Things Shining, that critiques Western individualism, has a section on the decline of craft, the disappearance of embodied learning, of skill at making.  Again, I find myself pushing against their analysis and in this instance Latin came to mind.

To translate requires a subtle knowledge of the original language and an idiomatic grasp of the home language.  This type of intellectual work is a skill, a craft like that of. woodworkers or, the example used in the book, wheelwrights.  It requires a mind numbing series of early, simple steps that build only gradually into a suite of skills.  My guess is that the traditional seven years to move from apprentice to journeyman is not far off for Latin.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Politics, Writing

Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Text, Reader, Learning

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Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.

Humanities, Letters, Literature

A Latinate Day

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Lughnasa                                                                     Waning Honey Extraction Moon

A Latinate day.  The am found me back in Pentheus, a story in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  I remember the story from the English version, at least in part.  Pentheus gets torn apart by his mother and her fellow Bacchantes while they are in the grip of a Dionysian frenzy.  As I’ve been translating this story, it’s clear that Pentheus is a tragic figure from Ovid’s perspective, a man’s man faced with hordes of soft, sweet smelling boys worshiping a God of irrational behavior.  Romans were not much into ecstasy unless it involved warfare or the circus.

They were orthopraxic in their religious views, at least most Romans were, that is, they believed that right rituals performed at the right time for the appropriate deity trumped everything else.

I have begun, in a modest way, work on the commentary.  I set up some files in Notes but made no entries.  It’s difficult for me, right now, to know what makes sense, but I’ll figure it out.

My next hurdle is to translate the Latin into idiomatic English.  Sometimes I can get there, often not.  To do that I need to have a solid understanding of the grammar–not yet–and a feel for how the Latin makes its meaning, not there either.  At least I’m no longer staring at the words on the page as if they were hieroglyphics.

Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth

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Lughnasa                                                           Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Much of yesterday and today spent amongst the Latin text of Metamorphoses.  I translated ten lines of the story of Pentheus.  In my effort to peek behind the curtain of translation I have learned several things already, even at my very modest skill level.  First, the choices translators make have far more range than I imagined.  Words have shades of meaning, grammar often can’t be translated and the biases that the writer of the original text brings complicate matters, too.

In Ovid, for example, I have noticed, very obviously, how Roman his slant on the Greek myths is.  He plumps up Latin virtues and denigrates the Greeks.  This does not make for a friendly representation of the Greek myths.  In fact, I’m beginning to suspect now that Ovid’s work is not only atheistic, but anti-Greek.  None of this challenges the beauty of his language or the compelling nature of the stories he tells, but it does set them in a different context than I found when I first read this work.

Also, I have a huge amount of respect now for the early humanists who took up these texts from their ancient past–by the Renaissance Ovid had been dead almost 1,500 years–and had to puzzle out translations with little in the way of aids like commentaries or literary historical work.

There are a lot allusions in this book and I’m sure in all the others, too, that simply make no sense to me.  Progeny of the dragon’s seed, for example, doesn’t immediately translate to Theban for me, yet the image is obvious if you remember that Cadmus, Actaeon’s grandfather and featured in this third book of the Metamorphoses, is the one who sowed the dragon’s teeth, grew an army and with its five survivors founded the city, Thebes.  Oh.  Yeah.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature

A Classic

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Mid-Summer                                                   Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Visiting the Inferno today, complete with air conditioning.  The Inferno exhibit, illustrations of this section of Dante’s masterpiece done by a contemporary artist, Michael Mazur, hang in a print exhibition at the MIA.  The Inferno, especially its introduction, has touched me deeply, as it has Western civilization. Here are two versions of its opening canto’s first lines.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Midway the path of life that men pursue
I found me in a darkling wood astray,
For the direct way had been lost to view.
Ah me, how hard a thing it is to say
What was this thorny wildwood intricate
Whose memory renews the first dismay!
Scarcely in death is bitterness more great
But as concerns the good discovered there
The other things I saw will I relate.

Dante has uncovered that moment in our lives, come soon or late, when the way we had known, probably the one we had carried with us to that point unconsciously, the culturally given pattern for our lives, fails to work for us.  The moment when I realized achievement and upward progress hindered my self-knowledge, that old gender roles no longer served as guideposts for intimate relationships, that the racial stereotypes I had grown up with were wrong, that the liberal politics I had received at the breakfast table could no longer explain the problems I saw in American society, that the Christian faith could not stretch wide enough to include even my own family, in that moment I set off with Dante, needing a Virgil to guide me through the underworld of my own changing Self.

This is the power of the classics, the mirror held up to our search, the challenge to our comfortable assumptions and, perhaps most important, suggestions about where the path may lead beyond them.