Category Archives: Humanities

Humanities, Letters, Literature

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

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Beltane                                                                  Early Growth Moon

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?  NYT article you can find here.

I’ve read great literature off and on my whole life, starting probably with War and Peace as a sophomore or so in high school.  I’ve also read a lot of not great, but not bad either literature and have even written some myself.  And, yes, I’ve read some distinctly bad literature, but not on purpose.

A formative experience in my reading life occurred in my sophomore year of college when I took a required English literature class.  Before taking the class I had given serious thought to majoring in English.  Then I had whatever his name was for a professor.  He told me what the books I read in his class meant.  He also claimed, proudly, to read Time Magazine from cover to cover each week as a form of discipline.  (That would have been discipline for me, too.  Punishment.)

Whether he represented English literature professors or not I don’t know, and I suspect now that he probably didn’t, but at the time I decided I could do the work of an English major without putting up with anymore of that kind of instruction.  I would read.  And I did and I have.

(Greuter Seven liberal arts  1605)

[That’s how I ended up in Anthropology and Philosophy for a double major.  Though I did have almost enough credits for a geography minor and a theater minor.  The theater credits were almost all in the history of theater, which I found fascinating.  The geography business came about because I was interested in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser exent then, China.]

Has reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Singer, Hesse, Austen, Mann, Kafka and all those others made me a better person?  Hell, I don’t know.  In the article quoted above I think the writer refers to an argument about liberal arts in general; that is, that studying the liberal arts makes one more able to think critically in a complex world and, therefore, to act with a higher level of moral sensitivity.

That the liberal arts and reading great literature teaches critical thinking is, I think, established.  They do this by the comparative method, familiar to students of anthropology and philosophy and literature and theology.  How does it work?  In the words of blue book essay tests since time immemorial, you compare and contrast.  By comparing this culture to that one, or this writer to that one, or this book to that one, or this period of philosophy to that one or this theological perspective to that one, a sensitivity to the variations in argumentation, in problem solving, in abstract analysis becomes second nature.

This sensitivity to the variations does not, I think, breed a more moral person, but it does produce a more humble one, a person who, if they’ve paid attention, knows that this solution or that one is not necessarily true or right, but, rather is most likely one among many.  This humility does not cancel out conviction or commitment, rather it positions both in the larger reality of human difference.

So, in the end, I don’t believe the case for reading great literature is to be made in its efficacy or lack of it in creating moral sensitivity, but rather in great literature’s broadening of our horizon and in the concomitant deflation of our sense of moral righteousness, perhaps, oddly, the very opposite of creating a more moral person.

 

Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Roots

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Beltane                                                                                  Early Growth Moon

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
Simone Weil

 

 

Not surprising this is an unrecognized need because for most people for most of human history being other than rooted was not an option.  You were born within the sound of a church bell or a muezzin or a farm dinner bell and never got beyond them.

(Jean-Léon Gérôme. A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer (1879)

It is only as the world has begun to urbanize that we have had to consider our roots, or the lack of them.  In the US only 5% of the population lived in cities in 1800, but 50% did by 1920.  80% do now.  This trend is global.  In 2008 for the first time in history over 50% of the world’s population live in cities.  Interestingly one website on urbanization made this point, since no more than 100% of a population can live in cities, urbanization will come to a foreseeable end.

It is, though, this great hollowing of rural areas that underlines our need for roots just at the point when we realize we no longer have them.  Or, rather, it is this realization that makes the need for roots evident.

Let’s stick to the vegetative metaphor.  Roots say where we are planted, where we have pushed organs for receiving nourishment deep into the soil, even into the subsoil of the place where we live.  Yes, you might want to talk about relationships and regular shops and schools and sports teams, yes, those things are part of a broad understanding of the metaphor, but I’m wanting to stay closer to the plant.

(I worked in this factory when I was in high school, 1968.  Johns-Manville)

If we eat local food, our bodies themselves become literally one with the earth in a particular locale.  Knowing where we are, not only in terms of street names and legalities, but also in terms of trees, food crops, fish, game, local meats, birds, flowers, grasses, even the so-called weeds is also part of having roots.  Embracing the weather, the local changes, as in part defining who you are, that’s having roots.

It is, I think, these things that disorient us the most when we move away from our home.  We think it’s the people or the customs or the new boulevards and highways, but in a deeper place, in the place where you know you are, it’s the Indian paintbrush that no longer shows up, the alligator not waiting in the pond,  the summer that fades too soon or lasts too long, these things make us not only feel disconnected from the place where we are; they are in fact the evidence of our disconnection.

(fall harvest, 2011, Andover)

If we have roots, we usually don’t know it; if we’re missing them, well…

 

Art and Culture, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

An Ancient Memorial Day

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Beltane                                                                      Early Growth Moon

Once in a while.  Once in a very great while.  Tonight was one of the times.  An Iliad, a one person, Stephen Yoakam, long time Guthrie actor, show.  This was a play that distilled the Iliad’s core story, Achilles’ rage and its consequences, especially the death of Patroclus and Achilles killing of Hecto and Hector’s humiliation, then spun the story into contemporary cloth, going back and forth between the age of heroes and age of road rage.

In fact, the play compares Achilles’ rage to road rage, a visceral always with us ultimate anger that can transform men into killers.

And the story line with its compelling contemporary moments are good, but Yoakam was better.  He gave these words flesh.  In a bravura performance extending almost two hours Yoakam never leaves the stage, barely pauses in his dialogue with nothing but stagecraft to help him shift scenes, characters, times.  His body language and use of his arms were a masters class in non-verbal acting.

This was in the Dowling Studio, the replacement for the old Guthrie lab theater where Kate and I saw several good performances.  The Dowling space is even more intimate, fewer seats and closer to the stage.

Here though is what put this whole evening over the top.  It’s Memorial Day weekend.  In the age of heroes the hope of immortality lay in the words of the poet.  The  Iliad and the Odyssey are both Memorial Day poems for ancient warriors and their stories.  Both give testimony to the gritty horrors of war, describing with often gruesome detail, say, a spear entering below the jaw and piercing through the soft palate into the brain and to the remarkable men who lived and died in these wars.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Memories, Third Phase

The Numinous

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

One of the problems with the Self model I proposed yesterday is that it is sticky.  When the ego has its way, which it wants to do all the time, feelings and thoughts gum up the mental works, a problem that zen and other meditative disciplines can correct, or, at least, diminish.  Example.  Waking up at 4:50 am this morning, then running through the evening at Tom’s 35th anniversary gig.  Nothing in particular, just this thought then that thought, which might lead to an emotion which can careen off in another direction.

This not unusual for me, neither is it usual.  It happens.  Rather than eliminate the self to control the ego I choose to say, it happens.  And not worry the matter beyond that.  Then I can move on, albeit with less sleep than I might desire, but I can always–and always do–take a nap.

At 10:30 I see John Desteian, my analyst (Jungian), of long standing and we will discuss the numinous.  At least that’s the question for the day:  what is the essence of the numinous?  I’ve had some time to reflect on that since John and I last met.

Rudolf Otto invented the term numinous in his book, The Idea of the Holy.  In this book he wanted to get at the non-rational aspects of religion, the holy and the sacred being the usual terminology for it.  He felt these words had a lot of baggage and had gotten confused in the up take of rationalists who wrote theology, did historical criticism of biblical texts and generally tried to shoehorn the  whole of the religious experience into the reason paradigm forcefully advanced by Enlightenment thinkers and the newly regnant science.  Otto wrote in 1909.

The numinous is his word for the dimension of the holy and the sacred not touchable by reason, yet crucially important to their lived reality.  Jung, born in 1903, came to Otto’s work with a deep respect for the small r religious life and adopted the numinous as critical to his understanding of psychology.

Thus, the question, what is the essence of the numinous?  As I see it right now, the numinous is an affective response to an experience of the other, an example of which would be the ego experiencing the Self.  The ego, as the command and control center of the psyche, believes it has full authority for advancement of its priorities, but not so.  The ego works best and accomplishes the most when subservient to the overall needs of the Self.

That is, the ego wants to arrange matters to optimize the survival and flourishing of what it perceives to be me, the sense of I that has the most developmental history, and also the sense of I most invaded by cultural or personal expectations that may not advance the interest of the Self, but may try (too often successfully) to bend the Self toward the goal of career, ambition, money, fame, power.  This bending or truncating of the Self in service of needs defined by externals–the culture or persons influential in the individual’s history–leads to deep unhappiness, a sense (and the reality) of betraying one’s Self.

The power of the numinous comes in its ability to challenge the mundane priorities of the ego.  Note, the ego’s priorities are not bad or wrong.  To the contrary, they are in line with the need to survive and, within limits, to thrive.  Those limits are, interestingly, the places where the needs of the Self conflict with received expectations, either cultural or from your personal history.  In other words, the unexamined ego will take me down the path of whatever expectation hollers loudest.

When the numinous, the whole Self, (or God, or Brahma, or shunyata) intervenes, it enlists the ego’s powers of organization, protection and survival and marshals them in a more holistic direction, that is, fulfillment of dreams and hopes that connect the individual to the collective, not in the sense of overpowering it or coming to dominate it, but in a manner that synchronizes the gifts of the individual with the needs of the many.

This change of direction can be terrifying, can seem like abandonment of everything mom and dad taught, of those very things the culture says are most desirable, and such a direction threatens the individual with isolation and failure.  The most familiar direction seems safest and an experience of the numinous challenges it.

 

 

 

Humanities, Politics

Bell, Book and…Gun?

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

So, I went into the St. Louis Park Public Library, looked around for the session on literary agents (see below) and noticed an armed and uniformed policeman talking with a librarian. When I left, the same policeman was still there.  I didn’t ask if this was part of the NRA initiative to make all schools safe by putting police with guns in them (and, BTW, arming teachers and administrators, too), but a part of me retreated at the sight, a sanctum of my childhood, and there was, in fact, a boy of maybe 8 or 9, pulling books off the shelves and examining them, invaded by guns and police.

Police powers and the rights of free speech and learning live an uneasy balance, one that needs to be uneasy, one that should not be thrown off balance by seeming to grant police powers the right of access to a place devoted to freedom of thought.  This is inappropriate to the young one hunting for just the right book, the immigrant hunting for clues to American politics and the radical hunting for information for their arguments.

Police presence has a chilling effect on freedom of thought and freedom of action, as, of course, it is meant to have, but in the street, at the bar or the broken in house or where shabby accounting practices prosper, but not, I would go so far as to say never, in a library.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Like Attending My Own Funeral

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Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin and Art

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Beltane                                                                 New (Early Growth) Moon

I passed some kind of milestone this week with the Latin.  My copy of Anderson, the commentary on Ovid’s first 5 books in Metamorphoses, fell apart.  I went online and found a hard back version, something that can withstand the repeated referencing, turning back and forth, putting my placeholders across it.  That this should happen just as I decided to begin work on the translation/commentary seems fortuitous.

(Daphne and Apollo)

In celebration of beginning the translation I have posted a Translating Metamorphoses page on the site where the most recent work will go up.  At some point I may begin posting work on the commentary, too, but that’s a ways off.  Right now Greg and I have just begun to note stuff down as we move along.

Translating in this manner is harder work than what I’ve been doing up to now, which has been essentially learning through translating Ovid.  Now I want to produce idiomatic English that is still faithful to the Latin text.  Also, I want to know more about the problems and content that I encounter.  That’s why I’ve begun reading the Ovid texts I’ve collected over the last year or so.  This is close reading, a different animal from just translating to learn.

At the same time I’ve created a new page, Art: A Journey.  This page will be the repository for my work on and with art following my time at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The first published material there, two sheets of questions answered by me about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, represent an attempt on my part to use exegetical techniques I learned studying the Old and New Testaments on art.

This draws me firmly into the realm of hermeneutics, a discipline about which I believe I may have some things to say.  We’ll see.  I’m still reading there.

GeekWorld, Humanities

Why They Lectured In the First Place

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Beltane                                                                             Planting Moon

I have begun reading various books I have collected about Ovid.  In Ovid Recalled, a book I started today, I found an odd piece of random knowledge that really made me stop.

In giving an example of outdated practices that persist in cultures the author, a Cambridge don, used the university lecture.  The lecture began as a work around because texts were not readily available in sufficient quantities, nor were they affordable.  After publishing became commonplace, the rationale for the lecture no longer existed.  My guess is you sat through as many as I did.

Now this made me think about the recent hooplah about massive open online courses or moocs.  One criticism of moocs from various university faculties is that they ruin the interactive nature of–you guessed it–the lecture.  All this reminds us that there is nothing fixed about professors and lectures and classrooms on physical campuses.  It just represents the most convenient to deliver education based on one set of assumptions; that is, gather students physically then disperse them among classrooms.

We can and should rethink all these assumptions.

 

Humanities
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Spring                                                                    New (Planting) Moon

Hegel, from the preface to his Philosophy of Right.

“Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”

Art and Culture, Humanities, Politics

So Poor

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Spring                                                                            New (Planting) Moon

I heard for as long as Kate worked at Allina about corporate culture taking over medicine.  The MIA is not alone among museums in taking a “dynamic, new approach”, DNA, which involves wringing more dollars out of the visitor’s “museum experience.”  Major league sports underwent their corporate take-overs years ago.  When I worked for the church, business oriented members would often explain how it needed to be run more like a business.

A general economic malaise, largely created by two strangely related forces, the anti-tax intransigency of Republicans and the illegal manipulations of debt-related securities, has formed an environment in which non-profit institutions have become starved for cash.  Though a non-profit does not, by definition, have making money as its first or even second or third reason for being, all non-profits do have to balance the books somehow.

It is this need that makes them vulnerable to the inroads of corporate cultures for which making money is not only the bottom line, it’s the only line.  This leads to medical clinics defined as revenue centers, sports departments milked for their ticket income and docent lead tours to become big ticket items for museum special exhibitions.

The need for a non-profit to have enough income to offset expenditures is nothing new.  What’s new is those who make this need the primary objective of a medical group, or a university campus* or a museum department.  It’s at this point that the health needs of patients or the educational needs of students or museum goers get shoved down the list of reasons for a doctor or a professor or a teacher or a curator or a docent to do what they do.

You could argue, as many urging corporate style make overs of our most important cultural institutions do, that this is merely correcting an aberration, that these kind of institutions should always have had a sharper pencil, more attention to the time honored counting of beans.

It is not.  What this emphasis on corporate objectives does is negate, yes, I would go that far, negates, the long held belief in this country that some communal matters are too important to put at risk of creative destruction:  education, performing arts, art museums, science museums, medical care and spiritual welfare chief among them.

This prop 13 mentality has successfully challenged much of the fabric of our communal life, turning us toward the libertarian ideal of one for one and all for none.  This is individualism and liberty used not as instruments of freedom, but as wrecking balls.

This is not the country in which I want to live, nor is it the country in which I want my children or grand-children to live.  My oldest son and his wife are teachers.  My wife is a physician.  My youngest son is a captain in the Air Force.  All of them dedicated to the welfare of the communal whole.  All of them putting their own time and chance of capitalist success aside for a purpose, a reason for being that has nothing to do with the profitability of the school, the clinic or the military.

You could argue, I suppose, that what I’m saying here is special pleading and I would agree.   It’s a special pleading on the part of those who believe communal needs come before private ones.  I am one such person.

 

*  The University Will Not Be Sold (Chronicle of Higher Education for April 9, 2013)

“Public universities are not corporations. They are not sports franchises.

…The corporate vision of Rutgers’s president, Robert L. Barchi, and his associates centralizes sports branding as an income-generating strategy, clearly at the expense of our student athletes and potentially at the expense of academic excellence…

His administration’s embrace of a corporate vision has led President Barchi to behave like a corporate raider against his own university: He has treated Newark’s campus like a thriving company subjected to a hostile corporate takeover. His administration attempted to underfinance Newark and milk its profits (tuition). Next it plans to strip it of its assets (most-profitable graduate programs). We know how these hostile takeovers usually end—the raided “company” ends up on the junk heap.”