Category Archives: Humanities

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Aurora

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Well. The dogs have encouraged me to see another dawn. No, this is not some heroic clawback from the edge of terminal illness attained by the promise of canine companionship, rather it’s occasioned by canine demand for outside and food. So, here I am posting an Aurora just after a Nocturne. This might not be unusual for many, but for me, it’s downright odd.

The front page of the three papers I read consistently all feature the Malaysian Airlines disaster. The New York Times follows it with a long story about preparation by Israel for a ground assault on the Gaza Strip. Grim news from a part of the world that has been and continues to be a flashpoint for international conflicts.

Crimea, a major part of the Ukrainian/Russian violence, has featured in many wars and as part of the Great Game, the struggle between Great Britain and Russia for control in Central Asia. The Middle East, not far away, and its oil resources has become more prominent of late, particularly since the partition of Israel and Palestine. No one covers themselves with glory in any of these disputes and the politics are intractable, the product of ancient grudges coupled with the very modern demand for oil.

The ancient grudges often have their roots in this region’s other primary export, monotheistic religions. Though there were many polytheistic faiths in cultures there-from Babylonia to Assyria to Persepolis-it was with the Abrahamic covenant and the Egyptian diaspora of his descendants that monotheism began its ascendancy. In sequence came Christianity, then Islam both variants of that original turn toward one god.

The bitter soup concocted from petroleum and theological certainty, endemic to all three faiths, has bloodied nations and peoples over the whole globe. Where will it end? Oddly enough climate change might bring a peace of sorts in both central Asia and the Middle East. As the world backs away from its dependence on carbon based fuels, the relative importance of the oil rich regions and their conduits to markets (much of Central Asia, with pipelines headed toward China and toward the West) will decline.

Could be.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Ovid and Quilting

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Summer                                                                    Most Heat Moon

Latin has begun to feel similar to Kate’s sewing. In her sewing she can work for a bit, accomplish a small part and still feel she’s made progress. Now, I can work for an hour or so at a time (about the limit for me) and move my whole project forward a few verses. At the same time, like Kate and her sewing, I reinforce my skills and reaffirm them, giving me a sense of mastery. The aim is to put many shorter sessions together to make a whole quilt, or an entire translated story.

More and more I’m feeling like I may be on my own by this fall. An exciting and fulfilling feeling.

(Apollo_and_Daphne, Antonio_del_Pollaiolo_)

Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Long Projects

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Summer                                                      Most Heat Moon

In regard to work on a new food crop as a part of our move. I want to find a native plant, native to the eco-region of our new home, then work toward domesticating it with as much help as I can get from the academics. As I wrote this, I recalled that there is a Spitler apple, named after a great uncle who developed it. Maybe botany has a gene.

(a possibility, Creeping Thistle)

A pattern for translating the Metamorphoses is emerging. I will translate individual stories whole.  For example, the one I’m working on now, Daphne, is in Book I:452-566. The preceding story of the Python was Book I:416-451 and the next one, Io. Argus. Syrinx., Book I:567-745 and the story of Phaethon ends Book I, running from 746-778.

Here’s the method I see from how I’m working right now. I will continue translating a few verses (4-7) a day, hopefully increasing these numbers somewhat over time. While doing these translations, I will consult my usual resources: Perseus, the commentaries, grammars and occasionally the consensus Oxford text going to the english translations only when I’m confused and find myself unable to move forward.

Once I get a story done, I will set it aside for a day to a week while I continue translating into the next story. At some point before a week passes, I will pick up the story from the preceding week and using my notes, retranslate it without reference to the translation I created. If I believe I have as good a literal translation as I can make, I will then proceed to trying for a more lyrical prose translation, one using the best english I can muster. Again, I will proceed by using the resources mentioned above, but not check the english translations.

Only after I have created my best english translation, and then only after letting it sit for a couple of weeks, a month, will I then work with my translation in light of other english translations, resolving conflicts and improving my translation where I can.

I’ve not yet decided whether I want to try to make a commentary or not. It’s a big, big project, but much of the work will be done already and I’m still a naive learner, therefore able to see what another newcomer might most appreciate or need.

When I put together the classics and art history, I find myself where I belong.

 

Commentary on Religion, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Theogony

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Summer                                                             Most Heat Moon

“Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.”      Iliad opening lines, Fagles translation 1990

Let’s see. What I was trying to say in the post below was this: political life and our opinions, our proclivities do not have to be all one thing or another. We confuse ourselves and others if we pretend it is ever other.

We make a similar error with individuals (and with ourselves). We define people based on what we see of them, usually just a small slice, and that is true of even our closest friends. We imagine that the clues, the defining moments we know of, adhere in a package that makes some sort of sense.

No. People are not one thing or another. They are as Walt Whitman observed of himself, “multitudes.” To say it philosophically we are one, we are many. I’m not identifying a psychological pathology here, rather stating that even the most rule bound of us violate our own rules and sense of duty, probably daily. The least rule bound among us may stagger through life from one interest to another, one opinion or another, one activity to another. And all this is usual, normal.

Coherence is a naive tool for understanding. We have our reasons, yes, we do, but our reasons often contradict each other. We know this when we are honest with ourselves. And our emotions. Well, they come unbidden, sometimes riding us like storms, other times calming us in periods of upheaval. Notice, too, that we try to guide ourselves both by reason and by emotion, when in fact these two faculties are not two, but one, or if not exactly one, then inextricably woven together, woven so closely that we cannot without great effort separate one from the other.

It is no wonder, when we consider these complexities that there is the saying, African I believe, that when a person dies, so does a universe. What I take from all this is to be easy with myself, forgiving, since the universe that I am does contain multitudes and at times this version of the universe holds sway, at other times this one.

It may be, probably is, that such an observation reveals the origin of the gods. There are those within us, anger for example and its more intense cousin, rage, that can take control of us, organize our lives in ways surprising to ourselves and to others. (see the opening lines of the Iliad above.) Or, grief. Or, love. Or, fear. Or, vengeance. Or, delight. Or, abandon. Or, control. Or, poetry. Or, thought. To go against Hillman I would say not that we meet our gods in our pathologies, but in our inner selves.

(Banquet of the Gods, Frans Floris)

In Voudoun the practitioners talk of being ridden by the god, an enraptured state brought on by intoxication and dance and openness. I say we are ridden by gods and goddesses all the time. To our great joy and our great sorrow.

To paraphrase Whitman, “I contain within me many gods, I am a pantheon.”

 

Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History, Writing

Writing

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Started reading Erich S. Gruen’s, “The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.” This 1974 work challenges preceding understandings of the fall of the Roman Republic.  Until Gruen, scholars focused on the conflicts, tensions and undercurrents in the period just before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Gruen chooses to look at those elements of the Roman Republic that remained intact even after the civil war.  It’s a big book, heavy. But readable.

Over the years I’ve focused on Mexica, Celtic and Northern European gods and culture in my novels. There was one side excursion into chaos magic and another into contemporary iron range, boundary waters culture, but I’m headed now towards Rome, especially Augustan Rome, the time of Publius Ovidius Naso. I’m not sure where this journey will take me, though the translation of the Metamorphoses will inform it, as will the trip to Romania and Constanta.

What will happen to the Tailte novels I can’t say right now. If I start getting nibbles or a bite on Missing, they remain available to me with about a third of the second novel already written. As I wrote a while back, I don’t want to invest the years it will take to finish the trilogy if there’s no interest in the first book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently at another point.

That means I have the book about our property here, the Roman work and a couple of other novels part way done. One, Superior Wolf, a werewolf story set in northern Minnesota, still draws me back from time to time as does a story about witchcraft.

In light of the process before productivity thinking I described a few posts ago, I realize the writing itself, the process of creation defines me. The products, finished novels and short stories, are in fact byproducts of a relentless curiosity. A further byproduct, publication, is pretty far removed from the journey. Journey before destination.

 

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Right Now

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,crane engineering generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.

Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.

Here’s Popova:

  1. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”

The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.

I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.

The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking.  This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.

That’s what I understand right now.

Humanities, Letters, Science

Border Patrol

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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.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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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.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

Light’s Victory, Dark’s Begun

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We’re close to the Summer Solstice. Those crazy Scandinavians are getting ready to get naked and dance around bonfires. I figure it’s all those long cold dark days in winter. I wouldn’t want to try it here. Imagine all those mosquitoes biting you in places no mosquito had ever found on you before. Still. I admire the abandon, the ecstasy these rites release. Dancing sky clad (as the Wiccans have it) honors the bond between earth and fire, person and sun, light and dark.

The Solstice celebration is an astronomical holiday, not one legislated in the halls of Congress or Parliament or the Diet, nor is it a day celebrated solely for a religious or cultural reason. No, it marks an actual celestial event, one with consequences here on earth. Since the Solstice marks the moment when the sun is at its highest (69 degrees here) and therefore pouring down more energy on a given square yard of earth than at any other time, this is the moment of greatest solar strength throughout the year. Due to a lag in warming, June is the coolest of the summer months, but the increased solar energy will begin to demonstrate itself in July and early August.

I’ll comment more on the Solstice on Saturday, but here I want to note my contrary reaction to it. The signal moment of the Solstice for me is the beginning of the sun’s decline in height, heading toward its nadir on December 21st. Just as the Winter Solstice can be seen as the moment when the light begins to return after long months of increasing dark, so the Summer Solstice can be seen as the moment darkness begins to return after long months of increasing light.

If you’re a child of the dark half of the year, finding the cold and solitude of the winter months, especially on that sacred night, the Winter Solstice, inviting and nourishing to your soul, then you might join me in rejoicing at its return.

 

Aging, Colorado, Friends, Humanities, Politics, Sierra Club, The Move, Third Phase

Young

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Beltane                                                               Summer Moon

How do they get so young? Had my meeting with the organizer for the Franken campaign. She graduated this spring from American University. 20 years old if that. She wanted to know how I got involved in politics. So I told her my story, watching the Stevenson-Eisenhower returns in 1952. She was born in 1994 or 1993. The time difference would be the same for me for an event in 1906/1907. Hmmm.

We chatted for about 45 minutes. She was energetic, hopeful, trying to be realistic and tough, yet still eager. A hard combination to pull off. She’ll get there though, I imagine.

The interaction taught me something. Probably something I’ve learned several times, but I’m learning it again. It was fun and revitalizing to meet someone new, to talk about stuff I care about, to get out of the house in the evening.

One real downside of living up here all these years, with few places where folks just go to hangout (none, really) and with no folks to go hangout with anyhow, is the tendency to get in a rut. Stay home, watch tv in the evening. I love Kate and watching tv, winding down in the evening, is a pleasant and even important part of our time together. Our lives during the day have the garden or sewing or writing or Latin or the dogs, never boring, fulfilling.

But. What I’m reminded of is the need to engage others, new folks, on a regular basis. When we move to Colorado, I’ll see to it. Politics. Art. Gardening. It does highlight a criteria for our new home (a favorite parlor game for us these days. Oh, and it should have…) I came up with a couple of weeks ago. A community where we want to be.

Andover’s not bad, it’s just not much at all. And politically it’s very conservative. Political leanings are not everything, of course not, but they do speak to a wider range of compatibility and I’d like to have at least some of that where we live next.