Category Archives: World History

Asia, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Weather +Climate, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Leave a comment

Summer                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Hot today.  At least by our standards.  85.  Plus a dewpoint of 70.  Not outside weather for this gardener.  I did work outside this morning, weeding in the orchard and checking the trees.  I’m going to need a consultation with Ecological Gardens because some of the stuff they planted, I don’t recognize and I don’t want to remove friendlies out of ignorance.

Kate’s off getting a pre-op physical, having dental work done and nails and hair.  A sort of clean up, paint up, fix up day for her.  Her surgery is a week from tomorrow and can’t come a day too soon for her.  The pain in her hip gives her fits during the day when she walks and at night when she sleeps.  She looks forward to having more than two sleeping positions.  So would I.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has held me for several weeks now, though I’m not reading in large chunks.  It’s a three-volume work about the end of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the three kingdoms of Wu, Wei and Shu.  This period only last for about 45 years, but it holds a position of particular importance in Chinese culture, with many of its figures like Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang and the three brothers:  Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Liu Bei attaining iconic and archetypal significance.

(Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu)

It’s not an exact analogy at all, but it resembles the mythos of the American West, a time when men were men and some men were very good and others were very bad.

If you enjoy political and military tales or have an interest in the logic of other cultures, then the Three Kingdoms may enthrall you as it has me.  If you’re not sure, I recommend seeing the Red Cliffs, the two disc version.  The movie showcases all the main characters and records a pivotal battle, one that has ongoing importance in Chinese culture.  Not to mention that it’s great fun.  Again, if political and military intrigue fascinate you.

Cinema and Television, Great Wheel, Humanities, Literature, World History

Cry the Beloved Country

Leave a comment

Spring                                                      Waxing Flower Moon

The crescent flower moon slung itself just beneath the tree to the west, over Round Lake.  A thin cloud passed across it, perhaps a cloud like the one Muhammad rode through on his way to Jerusalem and the Holy Mount.  These crescent moons have South Carolina and the Arab world in their wake, calling to mind on the one hand a new meaning to hiking the Appalachian trail and on the other lakes and rivers of sand, desert nights with stars so numerous no Caliph could count them all and tents raised near a palm filled caravan serai.

Kate and I watched Cry, the Beloved Country, only about 15 years after it made it to the screen.  I’ve never read this book though it’s one I’ve had on my list a long time.   Richard Harris and James Earl Jones are titans as far as I’m concerned, able to bring gravitas, authenticity and depth to movies in which they appear.  In one of the more memorable scenes in the movies, James Earl Jones and Richard Harris, the father of a murderer and the father of the victim, unknown to each other, yet coming from home ground close to each other, speak about the murder.  If you can watch this scene unmoved, you’ve lost touch with something important.  Four stars.

On a less elevated note I’ve begun watching Spartacus:  Blood and Sand.  It’s on the instant play feature Netflix has available through the wii.  It’s compelling tv, not as good as Cry, the Beloved Country but as a sand and sandal adventure yarn, it’s pretty damn good.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, World History

Night Casts Round A Cloak of Quiet

Leave a comment

Spring                                                  Awakening Moon

Night has fallen, the temperature, too and quiet dominates.  It is, as I have written here before, a meditative time, a free time, a time when the world is little with us and the mind can roam free over its own landscapes. The spinning of the planet then creates a certain amount of time in every 24, almost everywhere (with the polar exceptions), when we can all become hermits.  Yes, it’s harder in, say Manhattan or downtown Las Vegas, but even in these places where the bright lights and nocturnal activity pulse away, even there, the night is still a time of refuge for the soul, at least if we choose to take it.

I’ve begun watching another John Woo film, Red Cliff, which recounts the fall of the Han Dynasty in the early 3rd century A.C.E.  Red Cliff is a battle site, so recognized that it might be named Gettysburg or Bunker Hill or Pearl Harbor were it an American battle of equal renown.  Gradually Chinese film makers have begun to explore the long, long history of Chinese civilization and create films at least representative of key times in that history.

The Han Dynasty covers the same time period, roughly, as Rome immediately after Caesar, the time of the Emperors.  I find it interesting to keep these cross cultural time lines in mind, to know that as the battle of Red Cliff rages in China, the Emperor Diocletian has decided to sever the Roman Empire into its Eastern and Western halves.

Art and Culture, World History

Vita brevis, ars longa

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                       Waning Wild Moon

Sheepshead tonight.  We seem to pass around the points, playing as if each person should get a turn at the head of the list and everyone a turn in the barrel.  Always a good time.

Tomorrow a public tour.  Stuff I enjoy.  Historical.  Highlights.  I’m still seeking a way to understand this world into which I emerged, a swimmer on the path to become a walker.  Objects, material objects, created by people with skilled hands, wild hearts and a need to create tell a part of the story.  They tell it from the inside out, the human experience filleted and boned, served up for others.  As I learn more, the ancientrail of the creator lays itself more and more open to me, oracle bones crackling in the fire, fish hooks made from bone, statues of bronze and brass, people molded from clay, ornaments from gold.  How do we wrap ourselves in the terrible passage of time, time that has seen the creators dead, dead long ago, gone, often, usually, nameless, yet the stuff they shaped continues on their journey, small capsules from the ancient past.

We see it and walk past it, looking for the next best thing, passing by the cycladic figures, the woman of LaMouthe, the Greek vases, the section of wall from Ashur-bur-nipals splendid palace, walking on past them to see the show, the Louvre show or the modern galleries, some of the objects in those places made by people still alive, still breathing, their hands still working while the sculptor who shaped the rock into the plump representation of a woman does not.

Museums are strange, often scary places if we look for the ghost, the hand behind the object, the living person with five fingers and a mother, creating with no thought that 15,000 years later–yes, 15,000 years later–we would pass by, maybe glance down, maybe not.  And what of 15,000 years from now?  17, 010 a.c.e.  Will someone walk past, glance down, wonder about who cared for this object, these objects, all those many years ago?

Art and Culture, Asia, Sport, World History

Latin and Asia

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I reviewed our work on chapter 5 in Wheelock this morning.  Then 2,000 words on the novel after the nap.  Workout.  Sierra Club legcom conference call.

I’ve been reading my fourth Qiu Xiaolong mystery, The Red Mandarin Dress.  These are Chief Inspector Chen novels, set in today’s Shanghai.  They are interesting mysteries, but even more, they are a window into the struggle between the Maoist era and the contemporary one, a period when revolution ruled the land transformed into one in which to get rich is glorious.  These are not easy transitions and they have happened in the blink of an eye in the long history of China.

Asian art and asian culture, especially Chinese history, philosophy and literature have, for a long time, had my attention.  In my volunteer work at the MIA I have been allowed to indulge my interest in Chinese, Japanese and South Asian art.  This has led to more and more time with asian history, especially Chinese and Chinese poetry.  A casual tinkerer in these vast domains, I have only skimmed the top of a way of life radically different from our own, Western culture, yet, even with its differentness, still more like us than not, the human experience inflected, not the human experience transformed.

As I’ve watched the Winter Olympics, it doesn’t take a scholar to notice that its largely a northern hemisphere event.  Yes, there are the odd Australians, New Zealanders, but for the the most part it’s North America, Europe and the Asian countries.  Just another way in which we are more like than unlike.

Commentary on Religion, World History

Haiti

Leave a comment

Winter                                 Waning Moon of Long Nights (New Moon tomorrow)

The day before the journey.  Not a big journey as things go, but a trip.  Ruthie and Gabe, Jon and Jen.  Family.  As we grow older, family tends to take more and more of our focus.  Why?  Because the work world fades away, home and its memories remain.  This is, I imagine, much as it always has been.  I recall a theory from evolutionary biology that says grandparents were a reason for population increases and longevity increases.  We were around for child care.

The usual before trip minutiae:  a stuck garage door, cardboard recycling, packing, picking up a connector to make a keyboard usable on the net book.  This and that.

The death toll in Haiti adds catastrophe to the already multiple problems of a failed state, a failed state within our sphere of influence.  See the Monroe Doctrine.  I’ve not followed Haiti closely so I don’t know the history, how things have become the way they are, but I do know that we have a moral responsibility as a neighbor.

Acts of God.  Bah, humbug.  These are acts of nature, just like the great Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century.  That one caused a great deal of consternation in various Christian communities.

“The 1755 Lisbon earthquake (see engraving) created a crisis of faith in Europe and beyond. The catastrophe occurred on a holy day and destroyed many of the city’s magnificent sanctuaries. The destruction caused many to renounce religion; others interpreted the event as a sign of God’s displeasure, thus a sign of His omnipotence. Enlightened souls who considered the world innately good took a jolt. Voltaire contemplated the implications. Immanuel Kant devoted several tracts to Lisbon and its consequences.”

To read acts of the natural world as anything but what they are is folly.  In Haiti’s case a strike-slip fault–the San Andreas is such a fault–stored up energy since, oddly, about the same time as the Lisbon event, and yesterday a tectonic shift sprung free.  A great analogy in the newspaper compared a strike-slip fault to a person moving a heavy piano.  They push and push and push, nothing happens.  Then, suddenly, the piano moves.  In this instance however the piano then falls on you.

It is peculiar that we blame God for acts of nature but won’t take responsibility for our own acts against nature, like climate change.

World History

A Moat and the Tunnel

Leave a comment

Winter                                   Waning Moon of Long Nights

As any docent or academic knows, you learn strange things when you wander around in a new subject or when returning to an old one.  Castles, an ongoing fascination for me since I was a boy, have come up in this new book I’m writing.  As I launched myself into the names of things, e.g. machicolations (holes in a parapet through which rocks and boiling oil could be dropped on attackers), barbicans, portcullis and curtain wall, I came across the old familiar moat.

As in the picture, a moat is a water-filled trench around the outside of a castle.  Like you, I thought the moat offered an additional circle of protection for the outside of the castle, a wet barrier.  Not primarily.  Turns out that siege techniques grew very sophisticated and common protocol including tunneling under a castle’s curtain wall or one of its square sided towers (if such existed) and digging a deeper hole, then blowing it out with explosives or just letting it collapse under its own weight.   This effected an entry to the castle through its most imposing feature, the sheer rock sides.

The moat put a stop to that because any tunnel underneath it would collapse and fill in with water.  A definite deterrent.

Aging, Dogs, Health, World History

Mammals Here Nap

Leave a comment

Fall                                                   Waxing Dark Moon

It has been a strange fall for  leaf change and leaf shedding.  Our trees were green until just a week or so ago, then the trees with golden fall colors like the birch and the poplars changed.  A few of the red changed, but the large numbers of oak and ash trees still have their leaves.  They are brown, not green.

The wet, cool day put all the mammals here in a stupor.  Rigel and Vega slept in their crates instead of playing outside; the whippets dozed on chairs and the couch.  My eyes began to wink shut while I read about the masterpiece and Kate decided for an early nap.  So did I.  Something in us furry creatures find wet, fall days a nice time to head into the den and rest up.

Sarah, Lois our housekeeper’s daughter, took care of the 17 year old at Hennepin General.  She’s a nurse in the pediatric ICU.  That was a good story about backs against the wall medicine.

If I had a school age child, I told Kate, I’d be worried.  The random nature of the H1N1 serious complications makes it difficult to know just what to do.  Kate then reminded me of a reality I knew vaguely, but which surprised me.

Parents as late as the 1950’s and early 60’s lived in an age when it was still common for children to die.  Measles, mumps, diptheria, flu complications, polio all claimed the lives of children while adults who had them and lived were unharmed.  This is such a different reality from our own, an era when the death of a child is seen as an anomaly, an act against nature, when in fact, for the bulk of human history, living into adulthood has been the anomaly.

Even so, if you were a pioneer and you knew the odds of your children living into adulthood were low, the death of a child would still be the death of your child.  Hard.  In that regard those must of have been times of uncountable sorrow.

US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Vietnam

Leave a comment

Fall?                                       Waning Blood Moon

Woke up again this morning to snow covered trees and lawn.  The snow hasn’t let up since then, but no snow accumulates on the roads and driveways and sidewalks.  We’re still warm at ground level.

The truck had passed the 3,000 mile mark for an oil change a couple of weeks ago, so I got it in to Carlson’s today.

While I was there, a Vietnamese man sat down and we got to talking.  He’s lived here 20 years. “I go back 2-3 years to visit my family.  They live in Saigon City.  No job.  Poor.”  In his opinion Toyota stopped making good vehicles about 8-9 years ago.  Now “they make them all over.   China.  Vietnam.  Korea.  Everywhere.  Quality not as good.”  He’s here primarily to earn money for his family since a job there often pays $40-50 U.S. a month.

We talked about Cambodia for a bit.  “Not safe.  Americans who live there left.  There a lot of Americans in Saigon City.  Looks like a small American city right in Saigon City.”  He went on, “After 1975, American’s left.  Ten years they’re back with their families.”

After he left, I worked on a tour for the MIA.  The subject matter?  Asian art.

Art and Culture, World History

Learning, Always

Leave a comment

Imbolc      Waning Wild Moon

What a treat.  Janice Laurie, the MIA’s librarian, gave us a quick once over of the resources available in the library.  They have a JSTOR subscription, an Artfull Index subscription, plus several other expensive database collections available online in the library and through the computer in the docent lounge.  This makes me want to give up everything else and just dive into art history.  My first venture with it in depth will be the William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit coming in June.

All the while the lectures about the Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages right now, keep me company as I shuttle back and forth.

The sun came out today and improved my mood quite a bit.  I shook myself a bit this morning and said Carlos, you can choose.  You can lean into the day instead of away from it.  Seemed to have some positive effect.

My small black notebook remained behind when I left the library this morning.  The librarian told the guard to look for the guy with the Harry Potter glasses.  Me.

Kate and Anne went to see the Lipizzaner stallions perform at the Target Center.  They had lunch at the Chambers Hotel before hand.  Meanwhile I learned about art history databases.  Different strokes…