Category Archives: Humanities

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

Still At It

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Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

I’ve picked up the pace in translating.  Not a lot.   But I have.  My intention is to time myself from now on, figure out how I can increase my speed.  That will be important, as I said before, if I’m to translate the whole Metamorphoses.  (Ovid)

You might ask, why?  A few years ago I decided to read classics for a whole year.  I read the Koran, Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Metamorphoses among others.  As I did this, I also read commentaries and essays on these works to give myself a broader and deeper perspective.  When I got to the material on the Metamorphoses, I realized it stood at a critical juncture between ancient Greek religion (and, I imagine now, the Egyptian influence on the Greek) and Western civilization in the common era.

During the Renaissance it was Ovid’s work that moved Greek mythology into the mainstream of Western intellectual life.  The older sources were either unavailable at the time, as yet undiscovered, or simply missing.  That’s why the versions of the mythological corpus you know are most often Ovid’s version.

(Banquet of the Gods-Frans Floris)

If I could imprint Ovid’s stories into my brain, then I would have a vast resource, one with deep resonance in the entire Western literary tradition.  How to do that?  I had always wanted to learn a language but had told myself I couldn’t.  How about learning Latin, then translating the Metamorphoses? It could vanquish a self doubt, allow a peek behind the curtain of translation and help me absorb these wonderful stories.  All in the same project.

It’s not been, nor is it now, easy.  It is hard part of the time, difficult the rest.  But I’ve learned to enjoy that.  There are new insights often and results that I know are mine.  I’m learning the stories and advancing towards the skill level I need to go the distance.  This is the fourth year of learning and translating.  Many more to go.

BTW:  There is, somewhere in this, the novel I want to write.  A big one, a fantasy, because that’s how I think when it comes to fiction, but one deep in this material.  What it will be like, I don’t know, but I keep looking for fleeting images as I work.  Perhaps behind the story of the golden age?  Philemon and Baucus?  Medea?  Pentheus?  Perhaps in Ovid himself?  First century C.E. Rome?  All of these?  I don’t know.  But it’s the Moby Dick I’ve set sail to find.

Art and Culture, Humanities, MOOCS, Poetry

A Skull Expanding Moment

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Can you hear that streeetcchhhing sound?  It’s my 20th century, 2nd millennium mind trying to shoehorn in some new ideas.  Not only the New York School poets, for whom Allison gave some appreciated homework help (locating the 5 spot and some info on O’Hara and Larry Rivers), but this afternoon I’ve finished the reading on Unbending Gender and another one on reflexivity*.

We’ve entered the realm in both these courses I most looked forward to, the section on post-modernism.  I’ve never been able to get straight in my head what post-modernism is, or is supposed to be.  I had the same trouble with dew point for a long time so I think there is hope.

Reflexivity is a key aspect of modern art as I now understand it and modern poetry, too.   The poem and the art work both are works of art and commentaries (self-reflective) on the act of art-making.  This is clear when painting turned away from realism and toward cubism and abstraction, collapsing perspective into 2-d, the act of painting itself commenting on the acts involved in producing the very painting in view.

A Pollock action painting is clearly 2-d, makes no attempt at 3-d perspective and the action of dripping the paint on is clearly evident.  In commenting on this point Michael Roth, teacher of the Modern/Post Modern class, made an interesting comment, referencing someone else:  The surface in these paintings, though bold, are fragile.  I understood this immediately, though I don’t know whether I could explain it.

At some point along here I’m going to synthesize my understanding of post-modernism. To see if I can put it out there clearly.  (that may not be very post-modern though)

*wiki  Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that does not render both functions causes and effects. In sociology, reflexivity therefore comes to mean an act of self-reference where examination or action “bends back on”, refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination.

To this extent it commonly refers to the capacity of an agent to recognize forces of socialization and alter their place in the social structure. A low level of reflexivity would result in an individual shaped largely by their environment (or ‘society’). A high level of social reflexivity would be defined by an individual shaping their own norms, tastes, politics, desires, and so on. This is similar to the notion ofautonomy.

Aging, Humanities, Latin, MOOCS, Third Phase, US History, World History

Anco Impari.

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon
T. S. Eliot       Little Gidding V

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The hurry of last week has receded and today is an outdoor day, raspberries and fertilizer. It’s chilly out there, but physical labor adds its own heat.

The end is in sight for both MOOCs, Modern/Post Modern with only two more weeks and ModPo with four.  Like the course I took last year on Greek Myth both of these have been excellent.  The interactive discussion forums and the video lectures in small, accessible chunks work well for the at home classroom.  The reading in all three has been challenging, definitely college and post-grad level material.  Did I mention that they’re free?

The Great Course’s cd and dvd classes, taught by professors of proven teaching ability, are excellent, too.  The lectures in these courses are longer and in more depth, but I have not found the spur to do the reading as I have in the MOOC’s.  That’s me, of course.  And, there is no interaction at all.  An advantage is that you can do them over any time frame and in multiple venues.  The MOOCs require a computer screen.  These are not free.

Though I am at heart an auto-didact and can develop my own reading plans, I appreciate these compressed experiences where an expert in a field alerts you to current issues and literature.  They’re a quicker way in to a broad foundation in a discipline and for an overview of what might have additional interest.

Over the years I’ve pursued in particular the history of ideas, ancient history:  Rome, Egypt, China, mythology, philosophy and literature.  In literature I’ve tended to focus on the classics and on the classical tradition.  These broad areas have fascinated me for a long time.  I plan to challenge myself over the fallow time with calculus.  Kate’s promised time as my tutor.

I suppose I could gamble or drink or run naked through the streets, but, hey.  Each to his own?  Right?

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Latin

The New Way

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Fall                                                                              Samhain Moon

Latin today, a good lesson.  I forgot basics, stumbled around, thought I had it when I didn’t.  So why keep banging my forehead against the solid wall of the Roman language?  There’s no reason, no necessity.  Just like the MOOC’s I’m taking are not necessary.

When Kate pressed me on taking two MOOC’s at once, I replied, “I never took less than 18-20 credits a quarter in college.  Graduated with way more credits than I needed.”  She looked at me. “You’re not in college anymore.”  There’s that.

In my defense I did set one aside, so I only took two instead of three.  That’s progress, right?

No, there’s something deeper going on here, I know that.  Learning keeps my mind vital, alert, attentive.  It helps me jump out of ruts into new territory.  I’ve always been curious what’s beyond the limits, the city limits, the college rules limit, the religious limits, the limits of the universe.  Liminal spaces are my favorite, places where two worlds intersect, a little blurry, mostly undefined.  In the past, the now distant past, I used to get there chemically, now books and movies and essays and thoughts and the shovel and the quiet mind and the open heart, they get me there instead.

I want to stand on the shore looking out, stand on the peak looking over the valleys, stand at the mouth of the cave looking in, then follow my gaze.  See what’s beyond safe ground. I hope I never lose that desire.  In fact, I hope I have it when I’m facing death, wondering what’s just beyond the safe ground of life itself.  But not, as my ENT doc said, for a long time.

Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Expert or Master

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Moving fast this week.  Still working outside, in particular the orchard and broadcast fertilizer.  Two MOOCs presented a lot of reading.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault x2, poems by poets who challenged modernism:  communists, harlem renaissance, Frost and the Formalists.  Finished up Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  Assessing four essays for ModPo.  11 verses so far in Ovid.  Enough things to do, but not too many.

Been thinking about that learning curve graph I posted a couple of days ago.  It is, I suppose, a graph of mastery, a graph of, according to Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of work.  Not sure about the time frame in hours.  Seems a bit facile to me.  By that measure I suppose I could say I’m a master reader, a master politician and maybe a master gardener. Probably a master student.  Still seems inadequate, both as a term and as a process.

(Edouard_Manet_-_The_Reader)

I like the graph better.  Steps.  Progress.  That makes sense to me.  Not hours. By that measure I would say I am an expert reader, perhaps an expert student.  So, I’ve become expert, not in a field or a craft, but in the tools of learning.  Worse things to focus on.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin

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Fall                                                              Samhain Moon

Back in the SPQR.  Translating Metamorphoses this morning, 6 verses and I didn’t pull my hair out too often.  That’s because, of course, there’s so little left.  The Latin has had me going this way and that.  It’s too much, takes too much time.  Maybe I’ve gotten from it what I want, what I intended.  Then, but I’ve invested 3 + years at it.  Finally, ok, I’ll try it again for a while.

Then, this morning. I had a great time.  Always wise to suspend judgement until some data is at hand.

Art and Culture, Humanities, MOOCS, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enlightenment’s Dark Side

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Fall                                                                                  Samhain Moon

It was wet and chill, but the red and gold fruit warmed me as it slid off.  The raspberry canes grabbed at me as I moved among them as if wanting me to stay awhile longer, to chat or linger.  Once in a while I threw an over ripe berry over the fence to Rigel who watched my progress with head moving up and down, patient, waiting.

Before the berry picking I spent a couple of hours reading 34 pages, the introductory chapter to Adorno and Horkheimer’s, Dialectic of Enlightenment.  As this MOOC moves toward the end, we come closer to the current time and to thinkers with whom I’m familiar not through academics but through the politics of the 1960’s.  Adorno and Horkheimer are part of the Frankfurt School philosophers, most of whom emigrated to the US during WW II.  I was most familiar with the work of their colleague Herbert Marcuse, but I have come to know the work of Jurgen Habermas, too.

This is dense material and the argument is provocative, far from obvious.  In essence Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the enlightenment has become an instrument of oppression.  Some characterize the enlightenment as a movement designed to make the earth a home for humanity.  Instead of moving toward freedom and liberation the focus on repeatable natural laws and the tools of technology enabled control and domination, both of the planet and citizens of nation-states.  I’ll do better with this at another time, but this is heart of it.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

 

Last night I dreamed of a place where reality could be reconfigured only by imagining.  Though I don’t remember many specifics, I do remember that at the close of the dream I wondered if the same process could put us in different historical eras, not just different places in current time.

This led, after waking, to a continuation of the dream space to the matter of the modern and post-modern, much on my mind these days thanks to the two MOOCs I’m taking. Having read Wittgenstein on language games from his Philosophical Investigations and his attendant critique of the really real as inaccessible at best since words do not hook onto reality, only other words (a paraphrase), somehow the Zocalo came to mind.

Kate and I visited Mexico City in the 1993.  It impressed me then that at the very center of the Federal District, with the National Cathedral on one side and the National Palace on the other was a vast empty space, the zocalo.   The idea of a country with a vast open square at the very heart of its national culture appealed and appeals to me.

Mexicans fill the zocalo often.  On September 15th at 11 pm, the President comes out on a balcony of the National Palace and delivers a grito, a cry that remembers the “grito de Delores” or the cry of Mexican independence first heard in the small town of Delores.  At other times the military parades through the zocalo.  Recently it has been filled with striking teachers trying to turn back education reform.  Each spring equinox Mexico’s ethnic groups, la raza, fill the zocalo with a celebration through which they assert their critical importance to the nation as a whole.

With Wittgenstein in the background and in particular his emphasis that meaning is use, that is, we learn the meaning of our language from the contexts in which we use it, the zocalo and God suddenly merged.  God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

What do I mean?  God is the empty square at the heart of Western religious and political culture.  Over the course of two thousand years various groups from Judaism to Christianity to Muslims and many, many diverse splinters of all these groups have gathered in the square to give their grito.  At the time they fill the square they occupy the center of the culture’s awareness. (Note:  this is not at all, to the contrary in fact, a truth claim about what they say there.)

This same square also receives those who would fill it with alternative metaphysical or anti-metaphysical ideas.  Nietzsche, God is dead.  The square was empty and continues to be empty.  Nature is god.  The pantheists.  Even those who would entertain the world of many gods, contemporary polytheists like Wiccans and Astruans, have to enter the God/zocalo to make their proclamations over against this central Western idea.

This means that God is, for the group occupying the God/zocalo, what they say God is. That is, the way they use the concept of God in the square is what God is to them.  Use gives meaning.  Context gives meaning.

How is this helpful?  It helps me understand that faith, that word I’ve been trying to reimagine over the last couple of years, is not about a transcendental claim at all, but rather is a pledge to walk into the God/zocalo with a particular group and, while there, to abide by their understanding.  Faith is an initiatory passage into culture, not a passageway to the really real.  Said another way faith is agreement with claims about the really real made by a particular group when they inhabit the God/zocalo.

As long as you remain within that group, their language will be useful to you as a shared agreement about what spreads outward from the zocalo.  In Mexico City it is Mexico and Mexicanness.  In the Presbyterian occupation of the zocalo it is the presbyterian form of church government, John Calvin, local presbyteries and congregations, the Book of Order, ordination exams, elders, presbytery meetings, General Assemblies.

 

 

Family, Garden, Humanities

Gotta Get Back to the Garden

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Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

A full day with the garden, spreading fertilizer, working it into the soil, mulching the beds. Also pulled out the tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers while Kate removed the cucumbers, hot peppers and marigolds.  The compost pile looks colorful.

As I worked, I wondered about the significance of our garden for our lives, for the questions around reimagining faith.  At one level it feels like aesthetic statement.  A claim about the beauty of productive land and its products.  At another it embodies our relationship as a joint work, a family project that yields food and time together.  Going against the grain of the modern emphasis on surface and the phenomenal it places us in touch with the under ground, the chthonic and its rich resources.  Too, it puts the natural world into our lives, integrates our life with the seasonal rhythms.  This goes against the modern emphasis on the new and making things new.  Growing food goes back 10,000 years in human history and eating from plants back to the first proto-human.

I wondered today if the post-modern might be a more eclectic era, a time with a willingness to look back into the human past and ahead into the human future with no need for the ideology of reason, fragmentation, the new, yet not being afraid to acknowledge the fruits of scientific reasoning, manufacturing, globalization.  Just putzing as I raked.

Art and Culture, Humanities

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma

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Fall                                                            Harvest Moon

Just back from the Walker and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s unusual theatre piece. As improbable as it may sound, the entire presentation consists of a single phone call in which one of the company members began to tell her life story.  The theater, which gets its name from a Franz Kafka quote in Amerika, has now produced five complete theater pieces which continue this method, that is, each one is a further phone call transcribed and each one represents a continuing part of the same woman’s story.

The piece is 3 1/2 hours long.   The script, or better, the book, because this is a musical, does not change the transcription at all.  Every uh, um, yeah and wait is in it.  And it is all sung.

It affected me on several levels, the most obvious its evocation of childhood and what it was like to remember things from the perspective of a child.  The Nature Theater uses what they call extreme movement, a form of dance that is difficult to describe, but it has the effect of enhancing and expressing emotional content.  The libretto or whatever you would call it is a wonder, giving musical expression to the ums and the yeahs as much as the story lines about her father, the silent strong person or the time she jumped off a fixture in the front yard with a home made parachute.

Both men and women perform, coming on and off the stage at intervals that did not make a lot of sense to me, but they seemed to work dramatically.  Both men and women sing, too, so sometimes the words of a young girl have a bearded bald man giving them voice.

Worth seeing if you have the chance.