Category Archives: Humanities

Colorado, Humanities

Library Begins to Emerge

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                             Settling Moon II

Organizing goes well. I have an ancient history and the classics bookshelf, two American Studies bookshelves, a climate change/nature writing bookshelf, several art bookshelves, a poetry/spirituality/renaissance/depth psychology bookshelf, an Asian studies bookshelf and a literature bookshelf. The art bookshelves include books on Romanticism, Modernism and the Enlightenment. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that I’m going to end up several feet of bookshelf short. This does not come as a surprise, but it does mean something other than the ikea shelving and the regular bookshelves will be needed. I’m leaning toward built ins, but we’ll see what Jon says about how hard they would be to build. (maybe something like the above)

The bending over, lifting several books, then moving them to a new place, bending over and shelving them, which seems innocent enough, puts my back under strain. Which, perversely, I like. Since I’m not getting exercise right now on the treadmill, this kind of stooping, lifting and walking has to be enough.

 

Colorado, Humanities, Third Phase

A Library Out of Chaos

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                                 Settling Moon II

One bookcase almost filled with its new content: Latin texts, texts about Latin and Greek authors, ancient history. That may fill it up. I had wanted to fit mythology and religious studies on that shelf, too, but that’s part of the fun of organizing. Bunching books together in new ways, ways that might spark new thinking.

Another example is the United States section where I’m putting everything I have that touches on any aspect, from the geological to the theological, of the U.S. experience. American identity, the American landscape, regionalism and American literature are especially interesting to me.

Art books will fill up many shelving units but that’s a category that already had its own section of my library. In addition to the Latin and my own work, I hope to spend much more time with this broad subject, focusing initially on aesthetics. Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, was not a part of the MIA docent program education. One question in particular fascinates me: what is art? Said another way, how do you know art when you see it?

Right now I’m carving out a bookshelf for poetry. When I unboxed the books, I put them up with little regard for their content. Now I’m moving books from the bookcases and the floor into intellectual families according to my own interests. That means taking books off of bookcases, leaving some them there, then carrying others to the bookcase. Sounds like a lot of shuffling around and it is, but the process gets easier the more I do it because I recognize where small caches of, say, poetry are.

Of course there are, too, all those file boxes. Then, the art.

Family, Humanities, Latin, Memories, Third Phase

A 50 Year Old Habit

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                                                  Settling Moon II

Yesterday, after some bookcase assembling, I got an attack of the Sundays. This is a torpor that hits after noon on the seventh day of the week, perhaps only for those of us of a certain age. Our parents took us to church followed by a restaurant meal or a big home-cooked meal. The effect was like a weekly Thanksgiving dinner, a slowing as the body took in more calories than it usually had to absorb.

So I read Moon, the book I mentioned a couple of posts back, then watched some TV. Not vigorous, more calmed and quieted by a habit created well over 50 years ago.

Today has seen the book cases assembled as far as I can take them until I find more shelves. So I’ve started the really fun part, the organizing of my library. The bookshelf next to the computer will contain ancient history, Latin, mythology, material focused on the world of classical antiquity and its predecessors. Another large section I’m filling up now contains books related to art. These will stand next to a broad section on the United States with literature, history, religion, anything that helps fill out the current gestalt of our nation.

Right now that’s as far as I’ve gotten, but other sections will emerge as I move more books.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Sport

The Dawn Wall of Human Insight

Leave a comment

Winter                                                      Settling Moon

 

The Dawn Wall climb completed by Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell yesterday collided with some reading I’ve been doing in a book by Arthur Danto titled, What Is Art?

In a later chapter of the book Danto referenced this work by Piero della Francesca, painted in 1460, “The Resurrection.” I knew the painting so the image immediately floated into consciousness and attached itself to Caldwell and Jorgeson emerging at the top of the Dawn Wall, a climb realized by using only their hands and feet. Ropes attached to them were there only to prevent a fatal fall, otherwise this was a human powered, human body only effort.

In Francesca’s painting the human body has failed the guards placed at the tomb. They were there to prevent grave robbers from stealing Jesus’ body and declaring him resurrected. But they fell asleep. Even with the guards asleep it takes a supernatural force to circumvent the tomb.

This all occurs, as we can tell from the pale light creeping up over the hills on the painting’s horizon, at dawn. Countless are the number of sunrise services held to celebrate just this moment.

Coldwell and Jorgeson started at the base of El Capitan on its face that has greeted that same rising sun for aeons, at least 100 million years. Imagine their climb as the literal embodiment of the human spirit rising, on its own terms, to the top, to the summit, of this wall that celebrates the rising sun, the first time this wall has been climbed using hands and feet in 100 million years.

Now imagine El Capitan as the sheer rock face of our human attempt to understand this absurd world into which we were thrown at birth and let the summit represent adequate insight into that question, adequate to guide a life.  Supernatural metaphysics posited that we humans must hoist ourselves to the top using pitons and ropes supplied by the supernatural being of our choice. In this analogy Caldwell and Jorgeson represent the humanist, the pagan free-climbing the Dawn Wall of human insight, using only the tools granted to them at birth.

It was this notion that flashed across my mind when reading Danto and considering their feat. Their emergence at the summit of the Dawn Wall overlaid Francesca’s beautiful painting, putting these two climbers in the place of the risen Jesus while blinkered humanity lay asleep below or clung to the cliff tangled up in the ropes of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity.

 

Humanities, Third Phase

An Intellectual Magpie

1 Comment

Winter                                                    Settling Moon

As my books see daylight, they reveal my interests. So many interests over so long a time. Writing, art, Latin and the classics are at the core for me and still are, but history, religion, depth psychology, poetry, Asia, China and Japan in particular, the natural world, the West, environmental issues, Modernism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and politics, are there, too.

Libraries are a Rorschach for at least the intellectual journey of their owners. And in this case it is a psychometric self-administered and evaluated as each book heads toward the shelf.

Maybe I’m an intellectual magpie collecting interesting bits of knowledge and threads of thought, then putting them in my nest all higgelty-piggelty. There is certainly that element to me.

Anyhow the nest on Shadow Mountain is still under construction.

Colorado, Dogs, Family, Humanities, Third Phase

A Frenzy of Dogs

Leave a comment

Winter                                                 Settling Moon

Kate’s been fighting off a feeling of dis-ease. A couple of naps and a very reduced activity level seems to have her on the mend.

Vega got bit, by Kepler I think. We tried to put staples in it (yes, we happened to have some lying around in a sterile package. Doctors.), but Vega resisted. Teeth and muscle are a strong argument so we only got in two.

The bite was during a frenzy to get outside and solve some doggy territorial matter. Everybody was squirming, lunging, snapping at each other. I imagine Vega got a nip in at Kep and he repaid her. Not very significant  in the world of canines.

The book box opening proceeds, but not at a rapid pace. Unboxing them and stacking them on bookshelves is the first step. I love it, touching each one, remembering why I bought it, what I hoped to learn. That emotional response though makes doing too many at one time difficult. It’s going to take a while, perhaps longer than it took to pack them.

There is, though, no rush. There is no deadline, no race. Yet I look forward, very much, to the day when the books have found their new homes. Then my library can once again be the resource it has always been.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Worthy

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

 

Finished the article on Why I Hope to Die at 75. The more I read, the more I felt it revealed an uneasiness about worthiness. We are worthy only if we are productive. If we can be remembered as vital and incisive. If we remove ourselves from our children’s lives, quit being their shadow. If we don’t use resources better focused on the young or the demented. If we are not ill. If we are not disabled. If we are not operating at peak power.

This is what Christian theologians call works righteousness. You can only be saved if you do good works and abstain from bad ones. It was Luther who said, no, we are saved by grace alone. We cannot earn worthiness through good works.

Translated to this secular argument, I would say that we are not worthy because of our potential, our health status, our role as parents-no, we are worthy as a result of our humanness, because of our unique and precious life. Worthiness, in other words, is the wrong category to bring to the table. We live and have worth because of our existential situation. No one else, ever, will be the human that you are. No one. In this case I stand by analogy with Luther, we are worthy by the gracious act of our creation and remain so up to and even after our death.

 

None of this is to say that Ezekiel Emanuel can’t decide to refuse therapeutic medicine after 75. Of course, he can. Might be the right thing to do for him. I don’t know. I only know that his worth will not be any less because he’s no longer in the office at U Penn. His worth will not be less to his children and family because he may have a faulty heart. His worth will not be decided by others, nor, in fact, by himself. It was decided at the hour of his birth.

 

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

Scottish Independence? Yes.

Leave a 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.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Powerful, Scary Ideas

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                                          College Moon

Reading an important document, a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on authenticity. Kierkegaard, the essay says, defines the self in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself…” A pioneer in the concept of authenticity Kierkegaard defines the purpose of life as “becoming what one is.”

This definition of self and of life’s purpose make sense to me. Heidegger, the inventor of the term authenticity, makes a similar point with his concept of dasein:  “…human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are.” from the same Stanford essay.

What both of these northern European thinkers suggest is that the idea of Self is dynamic and by definition relational, somehow linking our past with our present and our hope or anticipation for the future. This means that our notion of who we are-and therefore who we can hope to become-lies in a web of feelings and thoughts connecting experiences in the external world and our internal understanding of them, with those experiences occurring only in our interior world and their relations with those stimulated by the external world.

Thus, in Heidegger’s terminology, what we are is always at stake. The choices we make and the experiences we have and the past we carry with us are always in vibrant collision, shaping and reshaping our Selves, second by second. I suppose you could see this as daunting, but for me it is exciting, meaning that my Self is not fixed, not bound to the past or to any particular future, and not only not fixed, but malleable. That is, I can make choices now, right now, that affect my Self. I can even alter the past by recalibrating the frames through which I view it.

As we discussed in the Nietzschean conversations below, once we understand this fluid, vital nature of the Self, we cannot help but live dangerously. Why? Because in every action, in every moment of contemplation, even lurking in the past are events, experiences, thoughts that change who we are. And who we can become. Powerful, scary ideas.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities, Myth and Story

Live Dangerously

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                      College Moon

A friend told me this quote from Nietzsche has been clanging around:  “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously”. Wondering about context, I located the source, Nietzsche’s book on poetic inspiration, The Gay Science, specifically, section 283.

These lines follow the quote: “Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius!  Send your ships into unexplored seas!  Live in war with your equals and with yourselves!  Be robbers and spoilers, you knowing ones, as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors!  The time will soon pass when you can be satisfied to live like timorous deer concealed in the forests.  Knowledge will finally stretch out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!”

It was in The Gay Science that the following claim appeared for the first time.  It would make Nietzsche famous and/or infamous 84 years later when Time magazine ran its cover querying the death of god:

After Buddha was dead, people
showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a
cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead:
but as the human race is constituted, there will
perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which
people will show his shadow.—And we—we have
still to overcome his shadow!  —§108

We have lived into that dangerous time which Nietzsche prophesied, when there are those whose knowledge includes the death of the transcendental, but whose lives are under attack by those still living in the caves where the shadow of God persists.

One response to the rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism, of Hindu fundamentalism, to the now receding tide of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. and to the various nationalisms and xenophobias which mimic them is to follow these folks back into their caves where homosexuality is wrong, where men are right, women subservient and the unbeliever not only heretic but apostate and worthy of death. Where the U.S. is exceptional and for whites only.

But that is not the way to a fruitful and satisfying life. That way lies in continued resistance to the cave dwellers and in continual fealty to knowledge wherever it may take us, no matter how risky, no matter how dangerous.