another quick note: Back from Jasmine 26 with the Woollies. A Vietnamese fusion restaurant. Food was ok. Not magical. Warren, Frank, Bill, Scott, Tom, Paul, Stefan.
Now listening to a series of lectures on the early middle ages. Pretty interesting. No one know why Constantine converted. Gee, could it have been an act of faith?
Dick Rice describes the monks of Blue Cloud Abbey (site of our retreat next month) as cowboys.
67 bar steady 29.97 0mph NNW dew-point 58 sunrise 6:04 sunset 8:34 Lughnasa
Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
Last night I stood outside for a while and listened to the wind rustle the leaves of the poplars and oaks, an invisible hand caressing these giants. Tonight stars dot the sky and the air is quiet, the temperature a cool 66 (dropped a temp since I added the info. bar above.) These nights, summer nights, have stories that reach back in time, memories of cars pulling into neon lit drive-ins, dances in school gymnasiums and midnight rides through the countryside seeking bliss. A special place, the summer night.
Heresy Moves West will have two parts, I see no other way unless I perform drastic surgery on the introductory material, now seven and a half pages. My plan is to finish the second half, the stories and threads of thought that directly result in the building of liberal congregations in Minnesota. This is, of course, the assignment I originally gave myself, but I did not know then the complex of political, theological, institutional and intellectual lines necessary to make the story comprehensible at anything more than a superficial, potted history level. After I finish part II, then I’ll see what can be done with the whole.
The last piece of the whole considers the future, projecting a possible trajectory for the liberal faith tradition in a time of what I perceive as thinness and altogether too disparate a theological base. Here I will begin to answer the problem I addressed in my late night post August 3rd. Ideas have come to me of late and I have a way to go forward, at least one that makes sense to me.
In the build up to the Olympic Games the History Channel and National Geographic have run programs on Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and first emperor of China (Qina). His story makes for conflicted reading or watching since he brought the dreadful warring states period to an end by subduing the seven larger states that had survived. He also standardized weights and measures, the width of axels, coinage, language and law. As Chinese history developed after him, both the unification and these measures of standardization contributed to China’s long continuity in culture. In these ways he is the father of China.
He was, however, a cruel man who killed millions to achieve peace. He killed at least a million more building the Great Wall and at least hundreds of thousands building his mausoleum. The legal system he instituted was draconian and ran against the grain of the Confucian thought world that preceded him. His dynasty lasted only one generation beyond his and even that, from his perspective was a failure since he spent the last years of his life in a desperate search for an elixir of immortality.
76 bar rises 29.89 0mph NE dew-point 67 sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35 Lughnasa
Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
I saw the dentist today, oh boy. He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.” Does that sound like an oxymoron to you? Does to me. Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace. Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative. Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist. No, seriously. He’s a keeper.
The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them: This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo. We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.
What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me. I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now. This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling. And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do. Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s. That’s all right.
The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis. I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking. I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me. Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side. Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.
Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared. There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it. This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.
This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species. Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm. Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.
72 bar steady 29.81 1mph NE dew-point 65 sunrise 6:00 sunset 8:37 Lughnasa
Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
A writing day so far. I have started writing Heresy Moves West. It will take a bit longer than I imagined, maybe quite a bit, because I have this propensity to place things in context, deep context. In this case for example I have established the Protestant Reformation as the sine qua non of the development of Unitarianism and its westward expansion, at least I have established that to my content. Not too much further along I intend to swing back to Abraham who listened to YHWH and left his Canaanite Gods for monotheism. Since you can not just go back into the past and then jump into the present, the intervening time takes a paragraph or two (at least) to describe, and all this in service of the actual topic, the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.
Why do I do this? Sheer cussedness in part. Simplistic explanations that ignore real historical paths irritate me. I do not like to emulate them. That means rooting my thesis about U-U expansion in Minnesota in the soils from which it sprang. They have lots of topsoil, gathered from diverse times and places. The process is sort of like archaeology. In order to explain the top, most recent layer of artifacts requires continuing to dig down, down, down until the physical culture either stops or changes to something completely different.
Anyhow, all this means I’ll be writing for some time, maybe as long as 2 or 3 days. That eats into posting time. So, for the next few days it might be a little sparse here. Might not.
In the past week AncienTrails had 2100 unique visits, about 300 a day. You are not alone.
Kate and I carried the old sliding door screen into the front shed. We had to take all the onions off it to get it inside, then move the onions back on it. In addition I had to remove the remaining stalks so my hands smell like onions. The onions must remain in the shed for two to three weeks, then they will go in tangerine crates. Once in the crates the onions will await their turn in the kitchen on an old book shelf in the furnace room. The garlic hangs not far from their future home.
When dead heading the last of the Lilium today, I found one that had bulbils. These form at the junction between stalk and leaf. They are another means of propagating lilies. I will cut this plant down and use the bulbils inside to create stock for next spring.
85 bar falls 29.79 3mph NE dew-point 55 Summer, hot and unpleasant
Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon
The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities. I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.
The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition. What are the humanities? An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?
I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota. The connection is not obvious, but it is real. In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees. A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine. In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.
Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society. In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding. He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”
This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science. Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:
“So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science. Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.” My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5 Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3
The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.
I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities? The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West. That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution. Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection. This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.
What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans. That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become. How do we know what we have been? We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties. We listen to karnatic music. The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our eyes. Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace. The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality. The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.
The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.
Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say: “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”
77 bar steady 29.75 5mph E dew-point 49 Summer, breezy and pleasant
Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon
“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within me.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi
“And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the
rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake,
but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the
fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” 1 KINGS 19:11-12
After this wonderful passage, Elijah descends to the valley floor from his mountain cave and passes on the mantle of prophecy to his successor, Elisha. God loves Elijah, but could not countenance his suspicion of the chosen people, so He calls Elijah up into heaven in a whirlwind, forcing him to give up his role on earth.
Elijah is an incredibly important figure in Judaism. At the Seder a cup is set for him at the table, in anticipation of his coming to announce the messiah. During the bris the patron (me in Gabe’s case) sits in the Elijah seat while the mohel performs the circumcision. When asked about the Elijah seat, Jay Federer, rabbi and jeweler and mohel, told me this story. “It is in the Talmud that Elijah, for doubting the chosen people’s willingness to keep the covenant, is required by G-d to witness all the instances in which the people maintain the covenant.” The seder and the bris are two important moments. “This can be seen,” Jay said, “As a blessing or a curse.”
66 bar steady 29.92 0mph N dew-point 58 Summer night
Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon
The drive into the MIA this afternoon was the first time I’d driven any distance since the long trip to Alabama.
Sheila gave a walking lecture on the African check out tours. She showed pieces in Egypt, then the Nok figure, the Ife Shrine head, the Benin head. She spoke briefly about the linguist’s staff, the kente cloth, the elephant tusk and the leopard. It was a usual well-informed presentation. Sheila knows the African collection in some depth. She tried to provide so-called Pan African ideas, but I didn’t find any of them unique to Africa.
Africa, like Asia and North America, is a land mass, not a cultural designation. It has, like Asia and North America, a bewildering variety of indigenous peoples, colonial adventures, global corporate interests and all this mixed now in the stew of politics referred to as developing nations. Seeking for identifiers by continent, across Africa, for example, is like seeking for unity across Asia or North America. It is a category mistake. Continents do not have cultures, people do. To maintain that somehow Algiers and Tunisia share a common cultural underlayment with, say, the Zulu or the Ashante or the Tutu or the Masai attempts to shoe horn disparate peoples in a too tight continental shoe.
Kate and I watched There Will Be Blood tonight. This is a powerful movie with mythic overtones. The push for oil, the mania required to build an oil company or a church, the violence of men competing for power and money and the interlocutor of the barren land combine in a peak at the roots of contemporary American society.
Much of the filming was done near Marfa, Texas. Marfa is the location of Donald Judd’s open air show places. It is a unique town, a place a reporter for the Ft. Stockton newspaper told me is “Taos fifty years ago.” She didn’t see this as a good thing.
The land in the movie is bleak. Until my trip to Imperial, Texas a few years ago to see our land I hadn’t understood why people would say West Texas and shake their head. It is mesquite, sand and rattle snakes. In a few places, for a time, there was oil and natural gas. There is a stark beauty to it, a beauty similar to the high plains, miles and miles of flat sameness, broken at the horizon by low mountains and foot hills.
More garden work tomorrow. Get the red car, too. The heads were delayed at the machine shop.
62 bar falls 29.66 0mph N dew-point 55 Beltane, night
First Quarter of the Flower Moon
Started Gettysburg tonight to get me in the mood for the southern trip. Even though I’ve canceled my Gettysburg trip for this time, I can’t head into the south without thinking of the Civil War and trying to visit a few battlefields or other historic sites along the way. Even as I write the word historic, I think back to something I wrote not long ago about how young our country is.
Think of Stonehenge, a temple from the paleolithic, over 5,000 years ago. There are probably citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestors were there, helped position the stones. Imagine Turkey and Iraq, nations where civilization has had a foot-hold for thousands of years. Egypt. China and its 6,000 years of history, much of it recorded.
Here, where most of us are boat people, only a few of the First Nations survive. They can trace their ancestry on this land back several thousand years, but none of us with roots in Europe or Africa or Asia (at least the most recent immigrations) can see deeper into the past than Plymouth Rock or Roanoke. Our history here spans no more than 400 years and as a country we are only 240 some years old.
The Hudson River School painters, in particular Thomas Cole, believed that the American equivalent of ruins were the natural wonders. The frontier in his day. The mountains. The Great Lakes. The mighty rivers. The forests that stretched over millions of square miles. Now we can add the Grand Canyon, the buttes and mesas of Utah, the homes of the Anasazi. Yellowstone. Yosemite. The Boundary Waters.
It is still true. Still true that the land itself is our vantage point to consider history and pre-history. Still true that the sight of the Rocky Mountains or Lake Superior or the Mississippi or the Smoky Mountains or the Everglades can move us to tears and anchor us here, anchor us here as firmly as the Bastille, the Tower of London, the temples of Angkor or the Great Wall of China.
57 bar steep fall 29.82 3mph SSW Dewpoint 31 Spring
Waning Crescent Moon of Winds
A highlights tour today with kids from Hudson. We saw Frank, the Chuck Close portrait, then the Promenade of Euclid by Magritte. After that the teacher wanted to see “something famous, that they might see in books.” That’s ok, so I took them to see Van Gogh’s Olive Trees, Goya’s Dr. Arrieta and Rembrandt’s Lucretia. They had a theme of westward expansion underway in class so I then took them over to the Minnesota gallery and we looked at first, the long rifles, then the painting of Ft. Snelling with the Lakota camped on the opposite shore of the Minnesota River. The kids were there, engaged. Fun.
On the way down and back I’ve continued listening to From Yao to Mao, the history of China. I’m now on disc 17 of 18 and this is my second time through the series. Mao has just begun to push for the peasant community in China as the vanguard of the revolution, replacing the urban worker, the industrial proletariat, whose communist members had been ousted in raids by the Nationalist Party and the tongs. This will result in the long march and the eventual attrition of Mao’s forces by the thousands. In this campaign Mao will create the modern guerilla war, sometimes called 4th generation warfare.
32 bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28 Spring
Full Moon of Winds
I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go. Let me try again.
In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form that dominated Chinese material culture for 1,500 years. Imagine if, say marble sculpture or fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE. That’s the length of time we’re discussing. Or the period of time between the birth of Jesus and the colonization of the New World. That’s a long time in people years.
To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced. These very ku, kuei, jueh, ting, lei, tsun and fang i came into the existence through a complex network of Chinese people who lived over 3,500 years. There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds. Other people sold and transported them after they were made and for years, centuries, even millennia in some cases these objects were either used in public ritual or stood by in a tomb ready to provide service in the afterlife. Think of that.
Think of the journey that graceful jueh had to take both as a created work of art, then, after that, as an artifact of a long dead culture now thousands of miles from its point of origin. That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.
The conceptual world that brought this work into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world had such a profound grip on the Chinese mentality that it stayed pretty much intact for the entire Shang dynasty, then only gradually lost its force in the later Western Zhou. Those are powerful ideas. Ideas can be more fragile than any ceramic; yet, these objects testify to the energizing and creative force these ideas carried, not just for a while but for hundreds of years.
To put myself back in those times, to feel the ebb and flow of both the material culture and the beliefs that animated it, is to come alive to the human experience in a way I can’t in any other way. It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public.