Category Archives: World History

Great Work, Letters, Poetry, World History

They Say It’s Your Birthday

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Summer                                                                                     Most Heat Moon

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.” 
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

A good while back I sat down and wrote a list of my saints. These are writers, political activists, artists, naturalists, poets, film-makers, scientists, philosophers and others who have influenced my thinking, moved me toward various arenas of action. They are my mentors.

A bit later I sat down and began entering their birthdays onto my Google calendar so I could acknowledge them at least once a year. That’s why my calendar for today, July 12th, has three names on it: Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau and Pablo Neruda. What an odd threesome, a Roman general and the first emperor, a New England Renaissance naturalist and writer, a socialist Chilean poet.

Someday I plan a post that will feature most of my saints, a blog version of the Book of Saints, only these will be mine, an idiosyncratic list with very few outright religious folks on it.

Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History, Writing

Writing

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Started reading Erich S. Gruen’s, “The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.” This 1974 work challenges preceding understandings of the fall of the Roman Republic.  Until Gruen, scholars focused on the conflicts, tensions and undercurrents in the period just before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Gruen chooses to look at those elements of the Roman Republic that remained intact even after the civil war.  It’s a big book, heavy. But readable.

Over the years I’ve focused on Mexica, Celtic and Northern European gods and culture in my novels. There was one side excursion into chaos magic and another into contemporary iron range, boundary waters culture, but I’m headed now towards Rome, especially Augustan Rome, the time of Publius Ovidius Naso. I’m not sure where this journey will take me, though the translation of the Metamorphoses will inform it, as will the trip to Romania and Constanta.

What will happen to the Tailte novels I can’t say right now. If I start getting nibbles or a bite on Missing, they remain available to me with about a third of the second novel already written. As I wrote a while back, I don’t want to invest the years it will take to finish the trilogy if there’s no interest in the first book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently at another point.

That means I have the book about our property here, the Roman work and a couple of other novels part way done. One, Superior Wolf, a werewolf story set in northern Minnesota, still draws me back from time to time as does a story about witchcraft.

In light of the process before productivity thinking I described a few posts ago, I realize the writing itself, the process of creation defines me. The products, finished novels and short stories, are in fact byproducts of a relentless curiosity. A further byproduct, publication, is pretty far removed from the journey. Journey before destination.

 

 

 

Asia, Politics, US History, World History

World War?

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Beltane                                                                      Emergence Moon

Over breakfast this morning we got into an interesting conversation, first about climate change, then about China.  Climate change sentiments varied around this table of guys who mostly agree with each other.

China raised the most controversy. Mark Odegard feels a war with China, a world war, is inevitable. I don’t. I feel China is not historically expansionist and very far behind us in military spending, military preparedness and military competence. Doing much harm to the U.S. would also hurt the Chinese investments in our economy. I forgot to mention this morning that since both China and the U.S. have nuclear weapons the likelihood of a full-fledged war is much less.

Mark sees the region as rent by old wounds, like the Japanese invasion and rape of Nanjing, the occupation of Tibet and, he didn’t mention, but could have the Islamist Uighur’s in the West. He also sees Japan and North Korea, especially the latter, as prone to irrational decisions and likely to precipitate a full-scale war through some hot-headed action.

Certainly history is on the side of the one who foresees military action. As a species, we are violence prone and given the anarchic nature of politics at the nation-state level that tendency has often led to military rather than diplomatic solutions. There are, too, no end of possible trigger points, the major among them being China and Japan’s insatiable appetite for oil, which must come from largely from the Middle East. That makes the South China Sea a potential flash point and China has repeatedly engaged in provocative actions there.

It is my sense though that Chinese development benefits much, much more from peace and diplomacy than it would from a war fought across the vastness of the Pacific and especially against an enemy like the U.S. which already has significant military presence in its near ocean. A war would present the U.S. with major supply chain issues, of course, but we have shown ourselves willing to overcome that distance once and I imagine we could again, certainly much faster than China could project naval and armed forces power in the other direction.

History is the judge in this debate and we may not live long enough to see the question answered definitively.

 

GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Emergence, Complexity and Augustan Rome

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

Two projects are pushing themselves forward, aspects of work already underway.  After reading a recent batch of articles arguing against a crass materialism and insisting on looking at the world not only through reductionist goggles, I have decided now is a good time to reimmerse myself in the world of emergence.  Emergence is a concept that identifies emergent properties, things not predictable by the sum of a thing or processes immediately preceding a particular phenomena.

(Garni_Gorge Symphony of the Stones carved by Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.)  wiki, emergence

The example that is most familiar to me is culture.  Culture is that society based phenomenon that weaves language, place, kinship, food choice, divisions of work, art, music and play into a whole that shapes the individual, makes them part of something, a culture, larger than themselves.  Culture does not follow from an examination of an individual or even a small group of individuals, it only begins to emerge in a larger group over a period of time.

Another and easier to grasp emergent phenomenon is the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Am I a butterfly or am I a caterpillar dreaming I’m a butterfly?

This also relates to the complexity movement in science.  Science proceeds by breaking things down to their most basic components, then discerning law-like behaviors.  Physics is the paradigmatic science in this respect.  But there are many phenomena, like emergence, that appear not as things are reduced to their simplest parts, but as things combine to create more and more complex materials and organisms.  Science has historically ignored those areas because they are difficult to quantify and/or difficult to study using usual scientific methods.

I’ve flirted with learning these two areas:  emergence and complexity theory, but have never devoted the necessary time to it.  It’s time.  This fits in my reimagining my faith project.

The second is broadening the scope of my learning about Ovid, his time, the Augustan period, other tellings of the same myths Ovid works with, and Augustan poetry more generally.  This is in service of the commentary/translation I plan to begin in earnest after this growing season ends and of a big novel still forming itself.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Sierra Club, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Kairos

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Imbolc                                                      Hare Moon

A bit more on an old topic, inspired by thinking about Jenkinson’s remarks that appear below.

The humanities are important as just that, the human forming portion of our educational deposit.  Over the millennia, stretching back to the time of gods emerging from the deserts of the Middle East and continuing right through the poetry and literature and painting and sculpture, the movies and television and games, the sports and horticulture and domestic arts of our day, we have had to grow into our lives, into our identity as human beings. It is not easy, but it is the most important task we have and the one which the family, the schools, our societies and cultures exist to engage.

This is not an argument for the humanities over science, technology and mathematics.  Far from it.  We have needed and will continue to need the valuable insights that come from deep thinking about the atomic structure of things, the hard rock science of the earth, the softer touches of the biological inquiries and the neuroscientific and all the other forms of scientific endeavor with which we humans engage.  But consider the difference in importance between raising a boy or a girl and lifting a rocket ship to the moon.  Which matters more?

It is not in the theory of evolution or in the biological sciences or in matters astronomical that we find the answer to such a question.  Even though we often pretend it is in this insecure age the answer is not in the psychological studies.  No, the answer to a question of value, of significance, of which is more than this lies only in the realm of culture.

The most important task of our time is said simply and defined humanistically, but requires the sciences in all their potency to finish:  create a sustainable human presence on this earth.

Why is this most important?  Because if it is not accomplished, the earth, no matter our scientific prowess, will scour us from her face.  She will make the thin layer of our habitation, from maybe 6 inches below the surface of the soil, to maybe 12 miles or so above the earth-the troposphere where most weather occurs-outside the parameters necessary for our existence.  That is, as the biologists are found of saying, an extinction level event.

So we are at a moment of kairos, a greek word meaning the opportune time.  Paul Tillich a theologian of the last century saw kairotic moments as “…crises in history which create an opportunity for, and indeed demand, an existential decision by the human subject.” Wiki His clearest example from the mid-point of that bloody hundred years was World War II, but even WW II and WW I put together do not equal the crisis we face now, a kairotic moment which, as Tillich said, demands an existential decision by us all.

(damaged relief of the Greek god Kairos of 4 century. BC)

The will and the skill to make that decision, a decision for or against our children and our grandchildren’s future, lies not in the sciences, but in the humanities.  It is in our sense of who we are as a species, as a being with a history, that we will find what we need to decide.  And, contrary to many, I am now convinced that the biggest barriers confounding our ability to make a non-suicidal decision lie in the realm of governance, a thoroughly humanistic endeavor.

Strip away those disciplines that force us to consider our humanity and we will be left with the calculus of Malthus.

 

 

 

Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, World History

Flood Narratives

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Winter                                                          Seed Catalog Moon

Hmmm.  I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.”  Ah. At least I’m not alone.

Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors.  In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood.  Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.

I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees.  Nice.  Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.

There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e.  That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.

Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat.  This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till.  It can also mean to cultivate land.  Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm?  Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.

I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either.  This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.

Cinema and Television, Politics, World History

Hope

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Saw a Masterpiece theatre movie last night: Endgame.  The beginning of the end of apartheid.  Michael Young, head of communications for Consolidated Goldfields, was the unlikely and successful convenor of talks between the African National Congress and the South African elite.  You could read a bit about him here.  His role was crucial and yet he managed, as one of the delegates to the talks said, “To keep himself invisible.”

This was a movie with little overt action, a modest movie for the most part, but it moved me.  There is something deep in my soul that gets touched when people struggle in an authentic way for justice.  It is not easy.  It has many traps.  But the results are so powerful.

The main characters, the ANC representative in the talks, Thabo Mbeki, (top) and an Afrikaner Professor of Philosophy, Willie Esterhuyser, (bottom) were played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and William Hurt.  Their understated acting made the change they wrought in their country, and in themselves, more poignant.  Mbeki replaced Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa and Esterhuyser became one of his principal advisers.

A squib at the end of the movie noted that a similar process used in these talks had been pushed forward in Irish-British talks about the troubles and in the instance of Hammas and Israel.

Cinema and Television, Humanities, World History

Hannah Arendt

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Winter                                                                       Winter Moon

Hannah Arendt.  Here’s a movie that will challenge you.  It takes a particular moment in the life of this famous philosopher, the moment when she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, and opens it out into the massive controversy that followed.

It was in her coverage of the Eichmann trial that she coined the term “the banality of evil” based on her observations of Eichmann as an ordinary man.  The controversy that embroiled her ensued with the publication of the New Yorker Article.  It contained 10 pages in which she points to Jewish leadership as implicated, by omission, in the Holocaust.  She was damned as a self-hating Jew and a blamer of victims.

This movie shows her as a courageous, thoughtful and brave intellectual, unafraid to speak her own truth and unflinching in her analysis.

A difficult movie in some ways and certainly not thrilling, but important.  I recommend it.