Category Archives: Asia

Looking

October 30, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Glaucoma keeps my eye-docs in spare change since I have to go twice a year to get my nerves photographed (retinal), pressures taken and on one of the appointments play space invaders, a visual field test. I’m happy to say that this effort, now over 20 years long, has kept this sight robber at bay and I’m grateful for the care.

Also got an intermediate prescription today, for the computer. Certain things are not as clear as I’d like on the screen and since I spend a lot of time in front of one, seemed like a good plan.

After that I went to the museum, not far from the Phillips Eye Institute where my doc works. Looking at the Terra Cotta Warrior exhibition again, walking through thinking about tours and touring logistics. This will be a fun show. I’ve got a good bit more research to do for I feel fully ready, but I’m gettin’ there.

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

Qin Shi Huang Di Extends Reign to Minnesota

October 28, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Qin Shi Huang Di. Quite a guy. As Kate pointed out, starting your tomb when you’re 13, the age Ying Zeng assumed the throne of Qin, is precocious. He reigned 35 years and as his achievement grew, so did his ambition for his tomb and tomb complex. All of this he did in spite of a life-long obsession with immortality, since he wanted to be not only the first Qin Shi Huang Di, that is the emperor of Qin, ruling as the sage kings of deep antiquity, but he also wanted to be the last Qin Shi Huang Di. He wanted to rule forever.

He didn’t.

The last four days I’ve had a barrage of education about the state of Qin; its rise in the Spring and Autumn period; it’s emergence as a dominant state during the Warring States Period; and, its eventual absorption of the other 6 of the warring states to create the first unified Chinese state.

On Thursday Yang Liu gave the continuing education lecture for the exhibition. On Friday I attended the morning 2 hour + walk through of the show in which Liu went with us from gallery to gallery explaining his intentions and giving us additional background on all the objects. Yesterday and today was the Qin symposium with, what I learned from some sojourning Chinese students from Princeton, were the world’s authorities on all matters Qin and earlier.

I’m gonna let all that settle over the next couple of days while I work on Latin, my mythology course and revising Missing. Oh, cooking leeks and using our carrots, too.

Art and Culture, Asia, Dogs, Woolly Mammoths

Rock, then Roll

October 27, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

The way it goes. Life rumbles along, eggs getting bought and eaten, trash taken out, kisses given, strangers greeted. Then, a day like today rolls around.

Kate took me into the MIA today so I could attend the first of a day symposium on the Qin dynasty and matters related to its art. Three great lectures in the morning, another after lunch and a couple of so so ones following Jenny So, the after lunch lecturer.

Concepts, objects, new history all shoved in as fast as a willing brain could absorb it. And I was willing. Eager, even. However the bin gets full, develops what miners call an over burden and the mind says, no more, please not now.

So into the car with Kate to head out to France avenue for a memorial service for Regina Schmidt, Bill Schmidt’s wife. Woollys and sheepshead folks in the same space. Bill greeting people with his gracious dignity, pictures and videos going as is the new trend.

Then the service with songs and poems and testimony, a wonderful heartfelt poem by Bill.

All the while wrestling with Kate’s news that Gertie had taken a post-op turn for the worse, feverish and limp. Kate took her to the vet, they cut off the bandage and she’d developed an infection. Wind, Water, Wound is the post-op mantra for possibilities of infection.

(Bill and I on Big Island in Lake Minnetonka)

She got a second anti-biotic and Kate brought her home. She thought about calling me and asking if I could find a ride home to Andover.

So we left after the service, got a bulb syringe to encourage her to drink and some fancy wet dogfood. She’d not eaten nor drunk water. Both obvious concerns.

When we got home, she ate all the fancy wet food and, after I syringed several tablespoons of water through her teeth, she drank all on her own. Her eyes are alert though her temp is still high. We’ll see, but my guess is she’s turning this thing around.

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

China Rising

October 26, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Walk through with Yang Liu today for the Terra Cotta warrior exhibition. Using the terra cotta term to shorthand this exhibition does it a significant disservice. Yang Liu visited many provincial museums as well as the museums associated with Qin Shi Huang Di’s tomb complex. He chose objects from 16 different museums in all, the bulk of them intended to the story of the rise of the Qin.

That means including Spring and Autumn period bronze ritual vessels and bells, plus a sword (looks more like a dagger to me) made of iron! This same sword has a pure gold hilt done in sinuous rectangular shapes, dragon motif, and inlaid with turquoise. The Qin began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period, 770-476 BC, grew strong during the warring states period, 476-221 BC, then, for a brief but centrally important 15 years, unified China and invented many of the marks of empire that would follow: standardization of weights, currency, script, chariot axle widths, a pyramidal style government with the emperor at the top and a bureaucracy to support it.

The story this exhibit tells is of a region at war with itself, splintering into multiple states, each vying with the other for land, resources, power. It is a long period because it runs from 770 BC to 207 BC, but it is a critical, perhaps the critical period for understanding the rise of China, many of its concepts still intact even in today’s People’s Republic.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, World History

Warring States

October 25, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Today begins the journey to Shaanxi, the province of the Qin state as it emerged during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, a peripheral state on the frontier. In the lecture today I learned that there is some debate on the origin of the Qin state. Did it emerge from the barbarians to the west? Or, did it have, at least in its ruling family, linkage with the east coast?

Yang Liu, Curator of Chinese Art and Head of Asian Art Department, acknowledged this debate, then said, “Why is it important?” The problem is this. The Qin unified China and Qin Shi Huang Di is a national hero. Dynastic China as we come to know it after the Qin has its roots in many of the reforms of Qin Shi Huang Di. What would it mean if that founding state was not, after all, Chinese?

This show is going to be a big deal, a very big deal. Schools have already booked nearly all the available slots between now and the show’s end. The museum has asked docents to sign up for additional tours.

What Yang Liu wants to do is place the tomb, its guardians and other wonderful burial objects like life size water birds and half-size bronze chariots, in the context of the rise of the Qin state during the Eastern Zhou in the Spring and Autumn period, then its emergence as a powerful state during the Warring States Period. Only then can this massive tomb complex, of which the warriors are, after all, only a small part, be understood in its full historical significance.

Over the next few days I’ll post research I’ve located and things I learn at the Qin dynasty symposium over the weekend.

Art and Culture, Asia, Myth and Story

Old Timey

October 23, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes French, 1824-1898. Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses Art Institute of Chicago

Moving on in our mythology class to Hesiod and his Theogony, the Birth of the Gods. This is a very different epic poem from Homers though no less beloved in antiquity. Hesiod’s a beginnings and genealogies sort of guy over against Homer’s narrative genius. By our narrative saturated standards the two don’t stand comparison, but in the past Hesiod’s poem was seen as inhabiting an equal but different place.

I think it’s like Genesis compared to the gospels, a grand narrative of beginnings, including the first people and the first important sacred events over against the story of a well loved figure whose life had a distinct arc.

It’s interesting to me since I’m at the same time preparing to tour the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the MIA. This has me tucked into Asian antiquity, the Chinese branch, especially the Warring States Period, 475-221 BC and the immediately subsequent Qin dynasty, 221-207 BC. The Greek material from Homer and Hesiod is in 700-800 BC range, so deeper back in the Western story, yet it’s all well before the Christian era.

One of the things that really fascinates me at the moment is the cultural continuity in China from the early Shang dynasty in 1600 BC to the present laid over against the more fragmented but equally old Western cultural tradition. In material I study there seems to be a bias that the cultural continuity of Chinese civilization produces a superior civilization. I’m not sure at all that that’s true and I’m also not sure that there is less cultural continuity here in the West.

Another day on this controversial point.

Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Feelings, Writing

A Peat Bog

August 15, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon

This has been a down August for me. Still slogging through molasses. Only bursts of energy, clarity. Don’t like it. Doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it. One foot in front of the other.

Worked all morning on Missing. Right now I’m summarizing chapters, creating character bios and defining scenes. The result will be an outline with chapter summaries and a read through, quick, yes, but still a read through. Once the read through is done and all chapters summarized, I’ll be ready to start working on Loki’s Children.

When that comes, my days will be Missing revision, writing Loki’s children, translating Latin and the occasional tour. Hoping that I will get assigned to the terracotta warrior show since I’m prepared already for Qin Shi Huang-Di and the rise of the Qin dynasty.

Right now all this sounds too much, but a hold over from the days of salaried work is a good work ethic once I’m clear on where I’m going. That means I’ll keep going.

The bees. Dejected, yes. Defeated, no. Last year I decided I would buy packages, build up the colonies and take the honey they produced, all of it, including their winter stores, then start over again the next year. This was partly a response to difficulty over-wintering bees, partly to mite loads. Fail.

So. I have to look at this a first year project, in which case I have one colony, the aggressive one, that will have plenty of honey and brood for the upcoming winter. The other, the less active one, had, today, brood. Surprise! They must have swarmed earlier and created a new queen. Not sure right now how to encourage them through the winter, but I’ll find out. If the strong colony produces any extra honey, I’ll give it to the weak one.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, US History, World History

These Strange Times

August 14, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon

Pope’s butler accused of theft. Wait. The pope has a butler? Shootings yesterday at Texas A&M. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last week. Aurora the 20th of July. Can anyone else hear a tear in the moral fabric of the universe?

Not to mention that yesterday the stock market was down because of news from Asia. Asia? What happened to the euro? It’s true that bad news always happens and good news is not, usually, news at all. Still.

Let’s throw in the news from Europe’s Cryosat that the polar ice has begun to retreat

(at) a loss of 900 cubic kilometers of ice in the last year. That’s 50 percent more than computer models predicted would melt.

A lack of ice is good news for shipping, and oil and gas exploration, but dark ocean water warms the air above more than reflective ice, a “positive feedback” that accelerates warming. Research suggests the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. So what? This warming is nudging the jet stream north, to the tune of 1 mile a year, 18 feet/day. (paul douglas weatherblog)

Predictions of the end times have a 100% failure rating (so far), so I’m not going there, but bizarre times? Yes.

Of all of these, the news I understand least are the three shootings. Like the man here who killed his three daughters, there may be a psychological explanation. Certainly there is a psychological explanation. Has to be. But explanation does not serve. Tracing the inner path to these crimes leaves us with the crime in the end.

I’d like to know, if anybody does know, the incidence of these or similar crimes in other cultures. Are we truly aberrant or is it a statistical phenomenon, a law of large numbers reality?

Of all these, the news that worries me the most comes from the cryosat satellite. This summer was miserable for us and horrific for much of the country. In this case I understand the cause. I drive one. So do you. I use electricity. So do you. We have treated global warming as a topic for next year. For the next generation. Guess what?

It is next year. And we’re the next generation.

Asia

Vikings, JP Morgan, China

May 11, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Beltane Moon

JP Morgan lost 2 billion dollars. Meanwhile a bunch of Viking clad middle class morons jumped up and down excited about the stadium deal as the billionaire recipient of their tax dollar welfare looked on beaming. WTF!

Also, news from China beginning to look problematic on the economic front. China has a multitude of potential problems, big ones: environmental degradation, water shortages in its wheat growing north, a sudden aging of its population with few caregivers due to the one child policy and political tensions from unevenly distributed economic gains. None of us, however, need or should want China to have a weakening economy. It occupies a large and important part in world trade and finance, a part we all need it continue to play.

It’s an interesting time right now with authoritarian, command control systems getting a lot of press for being more mobile, more flexible and less encumbered by the clumsiness of democracy. Arguing for democratic government and laissez faire markets became a lot harder starting in 2008 as US and European economies did a header and their democratic governments floundered as they tried to respond.

If China heads into deep waters economically, then we might all have gotten the dose of humility necessary to start rethinking government and markets for the third millennium. World trade has become so interlocked that we cannot afford to have any large segment of it in trouble.

There is, of course, a bit of schadenfreude if China is in trouble. Each Asian nation that climbs the hill seems to run into trouble. First it was the Asian tigers, then Japan. If China were to slip, too, a certain part of the Chinese arrogance (matched only by our own, so I’m not casting stones in a glass house here) would fall with it. That would be welcome, just as the humbling of the US during the great recession was welcome.

I remain fascinated by the possible friendship between the oldest continuous culture and the youngest ever world hegemon. Think of the places we could go and the things we could do.

Aging, Asia, Friends, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Moon Also Rises

April 22, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Beltane Moon

The second rainy chilly day. Perfect. Tomorrow and Tuesday will be outside days again, planting and other things, but now I have my gas stove turned on, the study is warm and I’m going to have another day of writing, reading and watching movies.

A friend’s mother-in-law, 97, lies at home, hospice care. A Chinese national, born in Canton, she has created a long and active life, filled with calligraphy, gardening, cooking, writing, reading and family.

Another friend went out and stayed the night with her yesterday.

Moon’s decline underscores the transition for our men’s group. Death and serious illness has become common, no longer stories of other’s lives. Perhaps Moon, as well as any other, shows a way to live into the Third Phase.

She did not give up the things that made her who she was. She stayed rooted in her tradition, yet took parts of it and made them her own and, in so doing, transformed them from things of yesterday into things of today and tomorrow. Each of the Woolly’s have our names in Chinese courtesy of Moon. She wrote poetry and a book of hers was published a couple of years ago by her family.

Many were the meals at Scott’s house in which Moon added her touches to Yin’s work. She had a quiet way, yet exuded a person who knew who she was, a person complete and whole, a real presence in the world. No one’s cipher.

Now Moon rises in the night sky. She will not be forgotten.