Category Archives: Literature

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Heavy, Man, Heavy

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

File under the things we do for love.  Kate asked me, as a big favor, if I would clear the sidewalk and a path to the mailbox.  I agreed albeit reluctantly. Never again.  This type of snow, laden with water, dense and prone to packing tight when moved, is just too hard for me to clear.  It clogs up the snowblower, so the snowblower’s out.  Lifting it is beyond my frame’s capacity.  I knew it, but I did it anyhow.  Ouch.

The snow took off the top of the cedar tree’s other trunk, too, so the whole thing will need to come down.  That means the chain saw, sometime soon.  That, I can do.

After pushing some snow around, I harvested the last of the leeks, fine looking vegetables.  The greens, kale and chard in particular, will continue growing until the ground freezes, so I’ll probably have one more harvest from them, too.

Most of the morning I tried to pack in some material not too different from the heavy snow:  Latin participles.  As participles, they share in the attributes of both the adjective–meaning declensions–and verbs–meaning tense and voice.  In addition the participles tense does not follow the verbs because the participle can cue action either concurrent, before or after the action of the verb.  In addition, just to confuse things, the present tense and the passive future tense use the verbs present tense stem to form the participle while the future tense and the passive perfect tense use the participle stem.  Yikes.

I know, I know.  I’m doing this on purpose.  I’m just venting.

Art and Culture, Hydroponics, Letters, Literature, US History, World History, Writing

Humanities

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Fall                                   Waxing Harvest Moon

With Latin, the Baroque and a sermon on the future of liberal thought all coming up this week and the next, plus the horticultural fall chores:  plant bulbs, clean up, harvest the last of the vegetable crop and care for the bees, I react strongly to the recent closing down of humanities classes in SUNY.

There is hope, though, since the humanities are academic disciplines that can be done at home with little discernible drop in quality.  Yes, there’s the problem of training the next generation in how to do the work at home.  It may be time for the disintermediation of the University’s original core curriculum, putting it on the web and in personal relationships, mentoring.  It may be time for Western culture to imitate the Chinese literati, the Mandarin bureaucrats who ran the country while painting, writing poetry, playing the Qin, doing calligraphy and focusing on the Tao.

Let’s get a dialogue going about how we can preserve the humanities one classic at a time, one work of fine art at a time, one poem at a time, one language at a time, one faith tradition at a time.  Like the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the earth, we must also labor to produce a humane human presence.  It is no easy task and one that requires facility in a number of areas:  literature, history, language, art history, the history of faith traditions.  We must not let the sacred deposit that reflects on our common life wither into dusts.

Perhaps we need a new renaissance, a new enlightenment, ones that focus no longer on the application of science and technology, but instead return to the big questions:  Why are we here?  What is justice?  What is beauty?  What is a nation?  Why do we fight?  Who was Ozymandias?  What is Baroque music?  How many administrators can dance on the head of the department of science?  What is life?  What does it mean to be human?

This is not an anti-science rant, science is fine; let’s not, however, throw out teaching the question askers of culture, the critics of public life, the dancers, painters and poets.  We need them, too, to know what to do with what science produces, in part, yes, but more to remind us that we have a past and that our big questions are similar and often the same as the big questions of that past.  That thought and that art helps us today.  Right now.

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Literature

Digging In

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Fall                                        Waxing Harvest Moon

Here’s a book recommendation:  36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein.  It has the shetl resonance of Singer, the contemporary Jewish life feel of Chaim Potok and philosophical skill worthy of a Talmudic scholar gone over to the dark side.  This book recounts a few events in the life of Cass Seltzer, a psychologist of religion whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, contains an appendix-36 arguments for the existence of God.  Since he dismantles each argument, he becomes a famous atheist, but “an atheist with a soul.”  This book is funny, sad, romantic, disillusioning, deep and wide.  An excellent read.

Pink daffodils and the baroque.  After I get done here, I plant two bags worth of pink daffodils, then work on Baroque tours for the Friends of the Institute.

On a dog note.  Vega and Rigel continue to dig and dig and dig in what I have decided to name the D.R.A., the dog recreation area.  This amounts to giving up.  After having spent a lot of time keeping Rigel in, expanded electric fencing, new barriers at the upper deck gate and hardening the chain link fences bottom against digging, and after having spent more money than I’m willing to acknowledge on keeping both Rigel and Vega out of the garden and the orchard, I’m gonna give’m this play area.  They know have more than hole they can stand in and only their backs show above the ground.  I think they’re after gophers, but whatever it is, my dog restraint activities have a limit and I’ve reached mind.  Let’em dig.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry

Books Along the Way

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Fall                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

I have begun to accept that I will never read everything I want to read.   Books sit stacked up on the floor in my study; they lie on top of rows of other books on bookshelves;  all my 6702010-10-09_0461bookshelves are full and many have books piled on top of them.  Each one I want to read.  Some I want to use only as reference, but most I want to read cover to cover.  The books range in topic from fairy tales and folklore to basic scientific texts on biology and geology, from philosophy to theology, art history to renaissance life, china, japan, india and cambodia to single dictionaries and the multiple volumes of the OED and the Dictionary of Art.  Of course there is fiction, too, and poetry, works on historiography and works on the enlightenment.  This doesn’t count the 90 books I now have on my kindle, many fiction, but many non-fiction, too.

When it comes to books and learning, I seem to not have an off button.  Maybe it’s a pathology, an escape from the world, from day to day responsibility, could be, but I don’t think so.  Reading and learning feel hardwired, expressions of genes as much as personal choice.  So it’s tough for me to admit that I have books here, in my own house, that I may never read.  A man has only so many hours in a day and I find spending any significant amount of them reading difficult.

That always surprises me.  I love to read, yet it often feels like a turn away from the world of politics, the garden, connecting with family and friends, so it takes discipline for me to sit and read for any length of time.  Instead, I read in snippets, chunks here and there.   Even so, I get a lot read, finishing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms took a lot of dedication, for example.  One year, I put the books I finished in one spot after I finished them.  I don’t recall the number or the number of pages, but it caused me to sit back and wonder how I’d done it.

Sometimes I fantasize about stopping all other pursuits, sitting down in my chair and begin reading through the most important books, the ones on the top of my list.  Right now that would 6702010-10-09_0460include the histories of Herodotus and substantial commentary.  The Mahabharata. Several works on Asia art.  A cabinet full of books on the enlightenment and liberalism.  Another cabinet full on calendars and holidays.  I will never do it.  Why?  Because I do have interests, obsessions maybe, that take me out into the garden or over to the State Capitol and the Minnesota Institute of Arts, the homes of the Woolly Mammoths and our children.  Kate and I will, I imagine, resume at least some of our SPCO attending when she retires and there will be travel, too.

This relates to an odd self-reflection occasioned by Lou Benders story of my first day on the Ball State Campus.  According to him, there was a picture of the Student Body President, I reached out and touched it and told him, “I’m going to do that.”  Three years later I ran and lost for Student Body President.  The year was 1969.  Recalling this, I wondered if my intention, my ability to clarify my direction had waned.  Had I defocused, living my life with no clear intentions, drifting along, letting life happen?

Then I recalled the moment I told Kate I wanted to write, the moment four years ago when I realized I had to put my shoulder behind the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the planet, the moment I began to pester Deb Hegstrom for a spot in the junior docent class of 2005, the time when Kate and I decided to push our property toward permaculture-the harmonious integration of people, plants and animals in a specific spot in a sustainable way.  No, I’ve not lost my ability to focus.  Not at all.6702010-10-09_0462

This life, the one I’m living now, is the one I’ve chosen to live, a life Kate and I have made together.  And that feels good.

Who knows, maybe I will finish these books?  Who knows?

Literature, Travel, US History

The Silversmith

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Fall                                     Waning Back to School Moon

Room 901, the Silversmith Hotel, Chicago  on Jeweler’s Row

The sun had just slipped below the horizon as we approached downtown Chicago.  Red fire glinted off the window walls of the many new skyscrapers in this, the home of the skyscrapers.  As the train slid toward Union Station, I felt the city cloak itself around me.  I was back.

I love this city.  It was, my first.  My first big city.  I came here when I was 12 with a United Methodist Church see-it tour.  We visited the Chapel in the Sky, the Pacific Garden Mission and saw a lot of the poorer areas of Chicago.

This is Sister Carrie’s city.  The city of the Titan, The Genius.  The city of Big Shoulders where the fog creeps in on little cat’s feet.  This is an American city, a Midwestern city built on stockyards and the commodity exchange, a collecting point for agricultural goods from the farms of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska.

The steel mills of Gary used to light up the southern tip of Lake Michigan, you could see them glowing like a peek into the infernal regions.  They glowed red with the heat of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.  A day now gone by.

The el encloses the loop and rattles just 7 floors below my hotel room here at the arts and craft decorated Silversmith.  This is a boutique hotel very near the Chicago Art Institute.

I have an appointment in Ada’s Deli, the restaurant here, at 10 tomorrow, then I’m off the Art Institute.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Politics

Moving From the Theoretical to the Concrete

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Lughnasa                                            Waxing Back to School Moon

Kate has had a nasty cold since Monday and I can feel it trying to claw its way up my esophagus, making my throat scratchy.  My hope is that the recent two time bout I had with some bug in July, then August has revved up my immune system.  With rest I can pound this sucker down before it takes hold.

Starting back on Latin today.  I took part of July, all of August and the last couple of weeks off with the bees and the vegetables and the orchard.  Thought I’d get work done on Ovid, review, but in fact I got very little done.  An old student habit of mine, if it’s not pressing, it’s not getting done.  I’m looking forward to the weekly sessions, building toward enough confidence to tackle Ovid and others on my own.  It’s a project, like the bees, that keeps the gears turning, not giving them a chance to rest.  Best that way.

A few years back it was the MIA docent training.  Then the move into permaculture and vegetables and fruit.  That one’s still underway as I learn the complicated dance of seasons, cultivars, pests, harvest and storage.  The MIA training, for that matter, only gives you enough legs to get into the books and files yourself, training you to look and think about art, but each tour demands specific self-education on the objects and the purpose of that tour.

(Minoan Gold Bee pendant from Crete, circa 2000 BC)

Part of my impatience with the seminary experience is that I’ve moved so deeply into more concrete endeavors.  Art has the object as an anchor, then its history and context.  Latin has words, grammar and literature as well as Roman history.  Vegetables and fruit have real plants, particular plants with needs and products.  The bees have the bees themselves, the colonies, woodenware, hive management, pest control, honey extraction.  This is, probably, the world I was meant to inhabit, but philosophy and the church lead onto another ancientrail, that of the abstract and faraway rather than the particular and the near.  It’s not that I don’t have an affection, even a passion for the theoretical, I do, but I find my life more calm, less stressful when I work with art, with potatoes and garlic, with conjugations and declensions.

I now have almost three decades of life devoted to the theoretical, the abstract and the political so I bring those skills and that learning to my present engagement with the mundane, but I no longer want to live in those worlds.  They are gardens others can tend better than I can.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature

Fulcrum Books

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Lughnasa                                   Waning Grandchildren Moon

Fulcrum books.  An idea I’ve been playing with for the last couple of weeks or so.  A fulcrum book (my definition) changed the course of your life, altered a point of view or opened a new world for you.  I have several that fit that definition, among them:  War and Peace, The Trial, The Glass-Bead Game, Steppenwolf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Mists of Avalon.  There are more, too, many more I imagine if I go back through my reading history with some care and I intend to do just that.

A fulcrum book has found a place to set that lever that can move a world.  In The Trial, for example, the givenness of bureaucracy began to shift for me.  It was as if the earth had moved.  Not only was bureaucracy inhuman whether at the high school or college, the social security office or the corporate offices of industry, it was also silly.  Absurd.  Poor K, trying forever to get through the doors into the house of justice as Kafka’s fable, Before the Law, suggests.  Then, K, dying, in his own words, “Like a dog.” without a trial or mercy.  Never again would I assume that the force of a bureaucracy was unquestioned and unquestionable.  The Trial also pushed me, along with The Stranger, another fulcrum book for me, to search for my own meaning, make my own path.

More on fulcrum books later.

Asia, Family, Humanities, Literature

One Cute Ruth

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Summer                                      Waxing Grandchildren Moon

ruthThree out of three grandparents agree.  This is one cute Ruth.  She’s four and smart as a whip.  Athletic, artistic and stubborn, too.  Watch out boys.

I’m still exhausted from the last week and a half.  Spent today getting to 95% in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  This is an amazing work of art and one I will reread for sure.

Tried Latin but my eyes wouldn’t focus.  Tomorrow.  If I can’t get far enough, I’ll just cancel class.  When you’re paying by the hour–literally, you can do that.

Night’s quiet cloak has fallen over us.  Again.  A time of serenity, of possibility.  Of vulnerability.  It’s allure is so strong, so winsome.  Easy to create in this time.

Asia, Humanities, Literature, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

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Summer                                              Waning Strawberry Moon

“if your vision is for a year, plant wheat. If your vision is for ten years, plant trees. If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people.”- Chinese Proverb

Ever have days that just happen, disappear with little trace?  The last couple have been like that for me.  The ear, the fuzz from the infection and a slow take on things.  That’s the extent of it.

I’m now in the last quarter of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  I’ve been at it since sometime early June, late May.  Now, I’ve been a little slow, I admit, but it is 2,340 pages long in print.  I’m reading it on the Kindle.  It carries a slow, but steady course in Chinese logic, especially as related to war and politics, Confucian and Taoist influences on Chinese culture in general and the courts and military in particular and a careful rendering of the demise of one of Empire, the Han.  The Han Empire, the Tang, the Song and the Ming have pride of place as golden ages of the Chinese people.

(this is the entry way to the tomb of Cao Cao, the arch villain of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Chinese archaeologists discovered it last year and opened it on Chinese television last month.  this stuff is still very relevant.)

It’s interesting to consider that the Chinese have not one golden age, but four when culture flourished and the nation was at peace.  I don’t know the whole well enough to say for sure, but one of the long lasting appeals of this 14th century (Song dynasty) novel may be the dissolution of the first of those.

My interest in China will never be more than that of a journeyman’s, perhaps no more than an  apprentice, but it fascinates me.  Part of that fascination is imagining what it would be like to live in a culture with that much depth, where a person in Shanghai today could read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and recognize not only names, but the culture of this ancient past.

In one view those of in the United States can look only as far back as 1776, in another 1602.  If we stretch our gaze back further, we can cross into European history and follow it back into the world of ancient Rome and further back yet, ancient Greece, but there, for the most part, it stops.  Yes, you can argue the history of the Jews and the Egyptians are also our history and they are in terms of influences intellectual and artistic, but I don’t have a personal bond even with the ancient Greeks.

The closest I can get in experience to that of the contemporary Chinese is to follow my Celtic line back into the mists of Celtic myth and legend.

Anyhow, it’s been an interesting read and I’ll be sorry when I’m finished.  Not sorry enough, however, to pick up another Chinese classic for a few months.