• Category Archives Letters

  • Not a vice

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Corona Lunacy II

    Thursday gratefuls: Overcast early morning. Kate, progress. Seoah and I at the grocery store. The clan that gathers on Tuesday mornings. That cool night. The howls. The coronavirus. Reshaping our lives, our history. Other plagues that teach us how to live with this one. History. Eduardo and Holly. Jude. Zeus and Boo. Even the new pine cones, still green on the Lodgepole branches. Pine pollen, tree sex about to get underway.

    Gathering information. It eats up my time. Right now I have 30 tabs open in Firefox. Each tab is either an article or a video or an image I want to both read and collect. Most of them are from this morning.

    Evernote is my enabler since it will save whatever I want. There are thousands of articles, youtube videos awaiting me there. And, I go back to them. I can find that article I remember from a couple of years ago. Or, all the notes on translating Ovid I took in 2013.

    Now that I’m writing about it I look around my bookshelves and see the same inclination. Then, there’s that horizontal file cabinet and all the file-tubs on metal shelves. Travel souvenirs, small sculpture, a collection of snowglobes, art on the walls, stacked against the bookshelves. Some made by me.

    Kate found this perfect space where my collections and I can be together with a view of Black Mountain and the Lodgepole Pines. I can sit inside my own mind, both its external and internal manifestations.

    Started out writing this as a negative, a confessional piece about this vice I have for collecting. As I wrote, I thought, no, not a vice, just my way of being in the world.

    On the Kabbalah zoom yesterday Jamie changed his name to I Am cloaked in a Jamie. When I saw that, I changed mine to Student masque. These are both instances of the Kabbalistic understanding of masks. We put on and take off masks all day, all life, perhaps all eternity long. Life is a mask for the elements held together in the shape of you. Your body is a mask for your neshama, your soul.

    The student is a mask I wear, one I love. I put it on often, when I climb the stairs to this loft, it’s most often the student whose feet carry me. Other masks? Husband. Father. Friend. Nature lover. Pagan. Leftist. Advocate. Grandpop. Museum goer. Traveler. Abandoned boy. Dog companion. Fearful boy. Writer. Reviser. Gardener. Bee keeper. Scholar. Futurist.

    The student loves to learn, to know. He is open, taking in new things, organizing them, saving them for future reference. He’s critical, too, as he has been taught, weighing evidence, comparing sources, looking for holes in the argument or how to shore up the argument.

    Not a vice, just a mask.


    Kabbalah Letters Literature Myth and Story Shadow Mountain Third Phase

  • As Happy As Can Be

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Leap Year Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Bright sun. White snow. Sturdy mountains. Gov. Polis. All workers in essential jobs, risking themselves for the rest of us. Tough decisions, made well. Governors and mayors. Drugs. Rigel, who practiced non-violent resistance last night when I moved her off my pillow. (100 lbs. of limp dog.) Seoah with her spray can of Lysol. Seoah for cleaning and soup and pancakes (veggie, Korean type). Kate for good attitude in spite of, well, all of it.

    Lyrics from a Warren Zevon song:

    I want to live alone in the desert
    I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe
    I want to live on the Upper East Side
    And never go down in the street

    Splendid Isolation
    I don’t need no one
    Splendid Isolation

    Michael Jackson in Disneyland
    Don’t have to share it with nobody else
    Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
    And lead me through the World of Self

    Goofy and I have set out on this quarantine journey. It’s the Mickey Mouse club hike for us older Mouseketeers, now latch key elders stuck at home while the young ones go to work. What kind of mischief can we get up to? Been rummaging around for that chemistry set with the REAL piece of uranium. We can wave at the other seniors through the window. Hey, there, hi, there, ho, there.

    We can also follow Goofy down the yellow-brick road to that ego wizard living behind the green curtains of our fear. Let him/her out. We’re all afraid now. Maybe not quaking or shaking, but definitely concerned. No reason to hide.

    Here’s an elder countryman, speaking of a different time, but also of ours:

    “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated” Thomas Paine


    Cinema and Television Commentary on the news Health Humanities Letters Music Shadow Mountain Third Phase

  • Bound Together

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                  Healing Moon

    I thought they had to do with BDSM, but no. They are a type of type, well-known I imagine to my friend Mark Odegard.

    “In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms”, where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

    By way of example, the common ampersand (“&”) represents theLatin conjunctive word et, for which the English equivalent is the word “and”. The ampersand’s symbol is a ligature, joining the old handwritten Latin letters e and t of the word et, so that the word is represented as a single glyph.[1]”  wikipedia

    just-ligatures-mrs-eaves


    Letters Literature Writing

  • Scottish Independence? Yes.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

    The global market in television programs, which has increased its reach now that aggregators have entered the market, offers insights into other cultures. I’ve found a clue about the English/Celtic divide in one of them.

    Kate and I have converted our television viewing to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime as I’ve mentioned before. A knock on effect (as the Brits would say) has been an increase in watching BBC shows: Waking the Dead, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty and others whose names I can’t recall. We’re currently watching MI-5, a long running show that features Britain’s internal security service, a combination of the CIA & the FBI.

    It’s interesting as drama. They have us on edge at least once during most shows. It’s equally interesting as a reveal of stereotypical British views, especially of other countries. The Americans are loud or devious or arrogant, or, often, all three. The French. Well, they’re French and can be dismissed pretty much.

    The Celts have representation on the show mainly through the IRA which MI-5 portrays as ruthless, blood-thirsty and callous. Which mirrors exactly the Irish attitude toward the English, their long time occupiers. The Welsh show up occasionally and the Scots appear mostly through the Glaswegian accent which I’ve learned to recognize.

    The other night Harry Pearce, head of MI-5, made a remark about the Celts. I’m paraphrasing: Oh, you know there’s no such thing as a Celtic race. Doesn’t exist. This is an ethnocentric point of view, one which posits English culture as the norm (not really a big surprise in that attitude) and uses it to dismiss the cultural roots of the Celts.

    Culture does not equal race, never has. Race, in fact, is a nonsense phrase in terms of the homo sapiens gene pool. Yes, people discriminate on their folk understanding of race as discernible by skin color, but genetically? The differences that do exist (and they are minor) have no correlation to racist typologies.

    One clear marker of culture has always been language. Find a different language from your own and you’ve usually found a different culture. All the Celtic lands have some form of the Celtic language as their historical tongue: Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic chief among them though there are variations on the Isle of Mann, Brittany (Briton) and Galicia (a Celtic province in Spain’s far northwest). Probably Cornwall, too, but I’m not sure about that.

    Then, there is the matter of history. The Picts (Scots), Welsh, Irish, Manx and Cornish were the indigenous people of the British Isles. Yes, they were immigrants likely, too, sometime after the culture that built Stonehenge and before the Roman and Anglo/Saxon invasions, but the various tribes of the Celtae were in place long before the Anglo/Saxons, the direct ancestors of the English.

    The English have a subdue, occupy and rule mentality that did not begin in the days of the British Empire writ global. No, it began, like most good empires do, close to home. The Scots held off the British (and the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall) the longest, succumbing only after a Scottish king, James Stuart, inherited the British throne, but Scotland has a long, long history of self-rule, the longest of all the Celtic lands.

    Harry Pearce of the television show MI-5 had it partly right, there is no Celtic race (no black race or yellow race or white race or brown race either), but the bald attempt to dismiss the Celtic reality, its long and distinctive history and culture, is not, again as the British say, on.


    Cinema and Television Commentary on the news Humanities Letters Translating De Bello Gallico Travel World History

  • A Little Bit Crazy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                    College Moon

    Mircea Eliade’s journals. Abraham Maslow’s journals. A biography of Dickens. A West Point set of maps for modern warfare. An atlas. Then, two. Three. Several Alan Moore graphic novels: V for Vendetta, the Watchman, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Jung’s Red Book. Some egyptology texts. Cardboard mouths consuming my library, eating the books one at a time.

    Tried listening to other sorts of music but outlaw country suits my packing mood. Gotta be a little bit crazy to sort through a collection gathered over a lifetime, especially crazy to jettison some of it. Outlaw country is a little bit crazy and not demanding on the listener.

    As I pack, I fantasize about what I will do with this one, and that one, and those once they reappear, undigested by the cardboard. I’ll finally sit down and just read this one. Learn more about Alan Watts and Nikola Tesla. Tracking down changing national borders and following them backwards through time. Working to solidify my understanding of Egypt’s influence on the Minoans and the Greeks. All those projects, large and small. Touching these tools, not different really from hammer and screwdriver, ripsaw and router. Makes me ache to use them.   (David Roberts)


    Art and Culture Humanities Letters The Move Third Phase

  • They Say It’s Your Birthday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    Great Work Letters Poetry World History

  • Border Patrol

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                          Summer Moon

    A contemporary philosopher and novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, defends philosophy as a discipline whose task is “…to render our human points of view ever more coherent.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2014. In order to do that she says, in the same article, that philosophy must patrol “troubled conceptual borders.” 

    This perspective attracted me. A discipline that walks between worlds, the worlds of physics and that of biology, say, or that law and justice, literature and culture, anthropology and privacy or of worlds within worlds, say, between baseball fans and football fans, or materialist scientists and vitalist scientists. It is, as used to be said, the queen of the sciences.

    Her examples in the article are abstruse, philosophical all, but her point extends well beyond the the lives of the mind and into the streets. Who negotiates the place between color theory as a branch of optics and the application of it by a painter? Who walks along the lines Wagner proposed long ago, those lines attempting to make a wholistic art form, one using music, painting, literature, poetry, acting all in one, a meta-art? Who mediates between the anti-free will and the free will camp in the borderlands of psychology, experimental psychology and neurology?

    Long ago in my college days I found sort of border realm thinking very attractive. I took psych theory, anthro theory, soc theory, philosophy and might one day have gotten around to econ. My interest lay in the roots of these disciplines, in their founding ideas, how those shaped their work, limiting them while defining a discipline’s proper area of study. These areas of thought still fascinate me though I have less opportunity to investigate them.

    Not even sure what I’m saying here, just throwing up a flag that says, hey, I’d like to talk more about this.


    Humanities Letters Science

  • Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

    Got to thinking about the standing on the shoulders of giants meme. It’s a great contribution of Isaac Newton, a quotable polymath and giant like last century’s Albert Einstein. The more I thought about it though the less satisfied I was with it.  [Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (Poussin, 1658)]

    It introduces a necessary humility to any advancement in human thought, emphasizing the debt owed to the past. But. It seems to me a forest works better.

    The giants of the past remain just that. The General Shermans, the Methuselahs of the forest, but they protect the growth of new, younger saplings and smaller giants who grow up among them. They are nourished from the same soil, in the case of Newton and Einstein, western civilization, and they don’t disappear under a long chain of legs and heads and shoulders, but remain in their place, already tall, eternal and the guarantors of the forest itself.

    Too, I can easily imagine my own journeys into these groves, wandering among woodlands growing since the days of classical Athens, old kingdom Egypt, republican Rome, the Renaissance. And consider Newton. Perhaps the mythical apple tree of his life might have been the Islamic scientist Averroes.

    This ancestral forest lies just beyond the edge of this material reality, its sylvan nature dependent no longer on the laws of physics but on the memories of the future. We are its caretakers, responsible for its continued health.

     


    Art and Culture Humanities Letters Translating Metamorphoses

  • Media Diet

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                            Emergence Moon

    My media diet. A while back, maybe 5 years or so, I heard an NPR piece on the concept of a daily media diet. It’s simple. What do you read, listen to, watch during the course of an average day? Yes, it probably changes from one day to the next, but it’s also got some bones that stay in place most days. Since the question of information sources came up at the Woolly meeting-not everyone gets their news from or trusts the NYT for example-I decided to raise this media diet issue again.

    Your media diet is important because it is your intellectual nourishment. What you take in through various media may be grouped: information, news, education, entertainment. In terms of informing ourselves we all need a balanced diet, but research shows that instead we have narrowed our range of inputs, often tailoring them to our preconceived views. This is dangerous and, like a varied diet is good for the body, so is a varied media stream good for the intellect.

    I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. I’m going to put down my media diet in as much detail as I can muster. If you have the time and inclination, I’d love to see yours.

    Daily:  Minneapolis Star-Tribune print, New York Times online, Star-Tribune online, Wired online.

    Magazines(print): New York Review of Books, The Economist, Wired, Dwell, AARP, Funny Times, National Geographic*

     

    Most days: online e-mail subscriptions Foreign Policy Situation Report, Big Think, Brain Pickings, DeLancey Place, Beacon, Gizmag, Chronicle of Higher Education, Scientific American, Tablet, PCMag, Trendland, Nieman Lab, Economic Policy Institute, Think Progress, various other Foreign Policy.* Poem-a-day.

    Most days:  Accuweather, NOAA, MPR Updraft and Paul Douglas weather online.

    Websites:  Cool Tools, Perseus (Latin text of Ovid), various political websites, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Museum, MIA (and others less often like War on the Rocks, Small Wars Journal, USAF Journal, Internet Movie Data Base, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, Slate

    Museums: The Walker, the MIA, rarely the Russian Museum, the Science Museum, the Minnesota Historical Society

    Radio: MPR News, Classical and KBEM Jazz (only when driving and not often then anymore)

    Music: little during the average day except as above

    Television: Kate and I watch a couple of shows on Huluplus. I might pick up one more plus whatever I have on while I exercise.

    Books: I may look at several books during the course of an average day. These days many of them relate to Latin, Ovid, the Metamorphoses and translation. I’m also reading material on emergence, the Arabian Nights and Colorado.

    Usually I read one book for leisure at a time until finished. Right now I’m reading a Brian Sanderson fantasy novel. This kind of reading usually happens later in the evening.

    *Both the subscription e-mails and magazine subscriptions can overwhelm me and my time. It’s a balancing act to get useful information while being able to maintain forward motion of projects like writing and translating and gardening.

    You might have plays, concerts, dance performances, clubs to add to your list. We do occasionally get out to these, but much less often than when we lived in the city.

     


    Art and Culture Cinema and Television Letters Politics

  • Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

    Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.

    The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.

    These are not, of course, exclusive.  The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.


    Humanities Latin Letters Writing