Category Archives: Writing

Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Transformation

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                    Waxing Bridgit Moon

On occasion the Woolly retreats have transformed me, given me energy for a project I had not imagined or that I had set aside.  When I talked about Missing tonight (my novel underway since sometime last year), I got feedback, positive feedback about my idea.

As it played in my head, a conviction grew, as it had in other years, before the Pilgrimage work, for example, that I had to get back to the writing, to Missing, to finish it and send it out.  Perhaps, too, I will  unbox those others, long dormant, spruce them up and send them out into the world again.

Here I was seen as myself, but also as writer, as fiction creator and that reflection back has warmed the heart and the hearth, both the precincts of Bridgit.  So the Goddess has come here, in this her holy week, to inflame and inspire me.  I will return to a new resolve.  Finish Missing and market the others.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate, Writing

Gut Check

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                    New Moon of the Cold Month

Last Monday night I ate dinner with my friends, six of them, at a restaurant, the Bukhara, which carries on the Mughal influenced culinary tradition of Northern India.  On the way home I got a gut check on my world view.  There was a light snow, the temperature hung at zero and the lights of other cars and trucks reflected off melted water on the highway as I headed toward Coon Rapids.

Near the intersection of 494 and Rockford Road some part of me, a deep part, reached up and said, your friend’s wife may die.  That part went on, speaking in images and feelings as the deepest parts of us do.  The reflected highway, a skidding truck, my death.  What then, Charlie, it asked?  What then?  Another aspect of my Self, perhaps even the same part asking the question, raised up an image from an old movie about Rome, The Fall of The Roman Empire.  Why?  What?  Oh.  Alec Guiness.  Marcus Aurelius.  A principled man, a Caesar, a Stoic.  The author of the Meditations.

How did this relate?  The epitaph.  Reported as the most popular of ancient Rome:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care.  Stoicism and a principled approach to this life.  Cast aside the final, eternal question.  Unanswerable.  Unknown.  Most likely unknowable.  Still act.  Still live.  Still care.

The windshield washers snicked, dirty water thrown up by vehicles in front of me cleared and I was back on the highway, headed toward 694.  And I knew.  Yes.  The deepest part of me knew, too.  Yes.  This life.  For all I’ve got.  This one.

Aging, Memories, Politics, US History, Writing

1967

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

1967.  Anastasia Pydych, a docent friend, has done a movie on 1968 which has a relevance to her father that I can’t recall right now.  A friend of hers, a writer for Rolling Stone, has a book underway about 1967.

When told her I was a sophomore in college that year, she said, “Oh, that’s perfect.  That would have been the perfect time.”  It reminded me of a comment made by one of the interviewees for the Sierra Club policy position, “I wish it could be like in the 70’s, when people had passion.”

We didn’t know it was historic, that year, we were living it.  It was a confusing, wonderful, chaotic, astonishingly hopeful, colorful, drugfull, penetrating, unafraid time.  Long ago, I don’t recall where now, I read that the 60’s happened because there was so many young adults than mature adults, that we, in effect, socialized ourselves.  That still seems like the most cogent explanation I’ve heard for the extraordinary sense of freedom and possibility that swept through my corner of the world, central Indiana.  As people passed through town, Muncie, and as some of us hitchiked around and saw other campuses in other states, we knew personally that it was not just us.  A crazy, heady wind had begun to blow, and the times, as Dylan said, were obviously changin’.

It was in ’67 when the draft became a big issue, right across the country.  And, yes, there is an obvious class bias involved in draft deferments, since those of us in college could get one and those who weren’t couldn’t.  Yes, again, there were many baby boomers, probably most, whose lives went on as they would have anyhow, taking a factory job, going into the military, learning a trade, trying out different jobs, getting married, settling down and raising kids.

That wasn’t the way it felt at the time, however.  In those years we believed, as I still believe, that US adventurism and a naive anti-Communism had caused us to insert ourselves in a civil war centuries old, a war in which we had no self-interest and chose our allies only because they identified themselves as the anti-communists.   Most of us men in college then, at least those of us on the left, saw the draft as a form of indentured servitude, only with a cruel twist, in this case the slaves had to die or kill.  Not a great choice.  Many of us, like me, were selective objectors, that is we opposed the Vietnam War as a stupid meat-grinder conceived in Washington and held in place by machismo gone wild, but we were not conscientious objectors, that is, we did not object to all wars.

That sense of being at odds with the ultimate power of the land, the Federal Government, was a powerful glue.  It stuck us together.  We were more disparate than unitary in our objections to the draft, but we were at one in our objection to the war.

This sense of overagainstness,  a feeling bordering on outlaw, made us courageous and reckless.  It made the days, the hours, we lived focus on experimentation, on analysis, on argument, on planning, yes, but also on relationships, parties, drugs and acid rock.  If the man didn’t understand us, we’d understand ourselves.  And boy we worked at it.

If you’re going to San Francisco…  I missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, though I did make it to two hot years of the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.  I wish I could get the words to say how it felt then.  We felt free, even called, to challenge anything and everything:  our parents, their values, college administrations and their ridiculous in loco parentis, the draft boards, day-to-day reality, sexual limits, congress, the President, the military.  All of it, each day, every minute.  The times were so intense, so charged, so electric.

Well, here’s the thing.  Kate has a colonoscopy in the morning and I have to drive her.  I’m drawing Social Security and so is she.  This next week is her last week of full time work.  1967 is a long time ago is what I’m saying.  But, boy am I glad I was part of it.  It was quite a ride.

Aging, Family, Memories, Travel, Writing

Warp and Weft

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Other blogs seem to have a slant, a bias, a thing.  I suppose I do too in a general way, the idea of ancientrails, the Great Wheel, the garden, a po-mo pagan sensibility, but what I’m doing is more like an online journal.  On a bookshelf I have two rows of journals kept in various forms since 1971, many erratic in the entries, then, as life moved on, I became more regular.  At one point I had several journals.  A diary like one in which I wrote short entries about my day, a spiritual journey one in which I recorded my experiences of meditation, lection divina, contemplative prayer, scripture study, another in which I took reading notes while I studied Islam, the year after 9/11, several more with reading notes from a year + when I gave up writing and took to reading the classics:  Divine Comedy, Faust, Metamorphosis, works of that nature.  During the year I studied Islam I read the Koran twice, once just to see what it said and another time during the month of Ramadan as I fasted and read enough to finish the entire Koran in thirty days, as many Muslims do.  Yet other blank books contain notes on art history, taken over many years of continuing education at the MIA, ideas for novels, short stories, about writing.

Writing is the thread, the weft I have chosen to weave the tapestry of my life.  The warp threads, stronger by far, developed in body and mind, feelings and thoughts as this Self has moved through life since birth.  The stuff of my daily existence has been the weft when shuttled through with the language I learned at my mother’s knee and my father’s typewriter.

So, this blog is just another pattern,  a particular tartan for this phase of my life.  It may pass away at some point, I certainly will, but, as I wrote the other day, the Web may have granted us bloggers a type of immortality.

When Kate I and were on our honeymoon, in late March or early April of 1990, the last phase of our trip which started a block from the Spanish Steps in Rome, we took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness.  Inverness is the capitol of Celtic Scotland, the northern reaches of the Picts.  The river Ness, from the storied Loch Ness, runs right through town.  On a stroll one afternoon, Kate and I made our way to a tartan mill, a place where tourists could go in and watch tartans being woven.

That day, the master weaver changed over from one tartan to another.  What this involved has stuck me indelibly since then.  The master weaver carries in his head the particular combination of colors, of large spools of yarn, that make, say, the tartan of the clan Sinclair.  He achieves that  particular combination of colors and patterns not by computer, not by telling weavers what to do, but by placing, on a huge rack of iron hooks, individual spools of yarn.  The number of hooks across the top of the hook rack, maybe 25 or 25, below each hook came at least 20 more, maybe 25 more hooks creating a large frame of individual hooks slanted up.  By his placement of the spools the master weaver achieved his design for the yarn from these spools fed precisely into the looms which clicked and clacked behind them.

Later than night, after we had finished our meal at the Station Hotel, Kate and I walked along the river Ness, tendrils of mist floating up from it, weaving themselves forever into our memory.

Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Lost in Translation

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                    Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

 

What happens in the act of translation?  After years of reading translated texts and noticing the often wide discrepancies among various translations of the same underlying words, I have wondered how such drastically different English versions can come from the same work.  Understanding this, really translation as a whole, and understanding Ovid’s Metamorphosis in particular, is what led to my current project, learn Latin and make my own translation of this Roman masterwork from the time of Augustus Caesar.

Some of that learning has already begun to happen.  Though I’m only 60 verses into the first of 5 books in the Metamorphosis, I have learned a complex truth about translation.  There is no such thing as an exact translation, probably not even such a thing as a literal translation.  Why?  Several things.  First, grammar has rules, sure, but the application of those rules can lead to different English.  In Latin a good example is the participial phrase.  Latin uses participles much more often than English and in ways we never do.   One such use, the ablative absolute, can consist of as few as two words, perhaps neither of them a verb, that gets translated into a subordinate clause in English.  Sometimes, in order to translate, you have to add a verb, almost always you have to add a conjunction.  There is no right conjunction nor is there one way to translate the participle into a verb in the clause though in both cases you can make an educated guess from the context.

Second, the words themselves, as in English, are polyvalent.  Example:  nebula.  It can mean mist, smoke, vapor, fog, exhalation.  Again, context helps, sometimes the desired English word is obvious, often not.

Third, at the level of a sentence or a paragraph, it may be impossible to render in any exact way what the author intended.  Instead, the translator has to read the Latin, understand the author’s intent as well as possible, then create an English sentence or paragraph that conveys the sense of the Latin rather than an accurate word for word translation.  In other words, translation is interpretation from the very beginning, in essence.

Fourth, as Greg and I found in today’s Ovid, texts themselves vary.  His text had three words in one phrase that mine did not have, one missing altogether in mine and two with different cases.  This is a phenomenon very familiar to me from study of the Bible, that is, textual criticism, where judgments must be made about the authenticity of the original text.  Usually, in textual criticism, it is assumed that the more difficult rendering is the older and therefore closer to the original, while the easier is assumed to be a scholarly “cleaning up” of a problematic passage.  So, the text used for translation matters.

Fifth, once you’ve cleared these hurdles, in a text like the Metamorphosis, you have to deal with the difficulties the text presents because it uses poetry rather than prose.  This means words may be in odd locations to justify rhyme schemes, metaphor or other poetic devices.  In particular words that need to be together in English may be separated by several other words, the relationship only apparent at all because of endings.

Sixth, in the case of poetry you have to consider the challenge in creating English poetry from Latin poetry. Often the decision is to render the whole in prose, because making Latin rhyme schemes, for example, work in English may be next to impossible.

So, even though I’m still far from my goal of fluent translation, I’ve already learned, from the inside, several things that explain vast differences in translated texts.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Listen, This New Year’s Night

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                       Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Have you ever been touched, brushed by a faint wing as it passes?  Perhaps a brief hesitation in an other wise confident progress, or a stutter in your step as you return home?  Some of us feel the passing of these birds of pray more than others.  We’ve not yet perfected the thickness, a protection against stooping falcons of unrest, leaving our Selves out there, unprotected, waiting for the faintest grazing, perhaps seeking it, knowing the tentativeness is real, life fleeing either before us or behind us, who can tell which?  Until it fails us altogether.

I’ve always been this way, though it got a burnishing after I entered college and studied philosophy, then anthropology.  Doubt, skepticism, questions come so naturally to me I have trouble noticing when they take me too far, leave me out there, dangling by myself, a victim of my own questing beast.  In my life there is no such thing as certainty.  Perhaps I was born post-modern, always aware of the interpreter, always aware of the Self as interpreted, subject to oceans of ideas, rivers of feeling, no life guards on this beach, the tide out, vanishing out to sea.

It sounds, I don’t know, dark, or at least gray, but I don’t experience it that way.  Instead, I take in things anew, fresh, not as expected, but as inspected, weighed, considered, felt.  This gives life a newness, a just been seen character that, no matter how exasperating to the other, gives me a world born again with every breath, every step, every sight.

It also means you can’t count on me to agree with you, can’t trust my perception of things since it’s so idiosyncratic, in fact, I don’t trust the things I perceived a day ago.  Perhaps this is true of everyone though I doubt it.  It is the fruit, whether rotten or delicious, of trying to know myself.

When I set foot in Delphi, walked the sacred way up to the temple of Apollo and put myself on the ancientrail of others seeking wisdom from the oracle, I was at my holy of holies.  Here you either learned to know yourself as the sign on the door way commanded or risked losing a kingdom.  Just ask the shade of Croesus.

Listen, this new years, for the sound of flight, air moved aside by feathers, softly.  It might be a raven who owns the sun, or an albatross who has ceased to follow the Ancient Mariner.  If you hear her, go still, watch.  Perhaps you can follow toward those caverns measureless to man.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Writing

Night Talk

Leave a comment

Samhain                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Though the pain has subsided, it still keeps me awake without medication.  So, I’m up at 6 am, a rarity for me these days.  When Kate shifts off regular work, no longer comes home around 10 pm, then I’ll go back to an earlier bed time and 6 might not be so unusual.

I understand the attraction of the night.  I feel it myself.  The quiet, the dark has a friendly feel to it, a time when the home becomes a hermitage or a studio or a writing garret, far off from the demands of mundane life.  Reading late has an appeal, the book, the words float up and occupy the whole, not reading anymore, but traveling along, carried on a river of narrative.  Writing has the same free, anchors away momentum.  The ship sails away from the dock, following the rhythm of an ocean current, one that runs just along the border between the conscious and unconscious realm, between the warmer, busier, lighter waters near the surface and the benthic deeps, unvisited, stygian, fecund, down there the ocean reaches its source, the collective unconscious, yet deeper and universally expansive, the holy well from which archetypes, genetic memory, forces creative enough to bring life itself into existence make their slow way.

Night talk.  Or, rather, very early morning talk.

Writing

Agents

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                                 New  Moon

Working on my query letter.  This is a strange animal consisting of a one sentence hook, a paragraph long synopsis (of a 103,000 word novel) and a short ending paragraph with writing credits and availability of a completed manuscript.

I’ve got the longer synopsis done (1,500 words) and I’ve clipped the first five pages.  Both of these go at the bottom of the e-mail query.

My body puts up resistance to this work.  It wants to read something, jump to translating Latin, sleep.  This resistance combines a visceral fear and my usual anti-hoop jumping.  Still, I pushed myself through it and now have a reasonably good long synopsis and a first-draft query letter.  One more pass or so should do it.

This is to get an agent to read the manuscript, or proposal in publishing speak.  That in hopes of representation and representation in hopes of a sale.  You can see we’re piling up the hopes here.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Writing

Weekend Delights

Leave a comment

Fall                            Waxing Harvest Moon

Ah, the weekend.  It came just in time for me this week.  Much to do and now some calm, free time in which to do it.

Ray, the Andover senior who mows our yard, raked leaves on Thursday, so I have bags o’ mulch sitting on the patio.  It’s way better than seed-filled hay.  Wish I could find some marsh hay, but the leaves will work well, too.

Bulbs today.  Kate and I plan to discuss bulb placement, then I’m going to go to work.  Also this weekend, writing the future of liberal thought, or Liberalism:  III.  Lots of ideas swirling around, gonna have to corral’em and find homes for them in a structure that makes some kind of sense.  Looking forward to that.

Writing always pulls me in, usually makes me happy.

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

Humanities

Leave a comment

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.