Category Archives: Humanities

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

At It

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Spring                                                             Bloodroot Moon

Still reading through Missing, making notes, trying to integrate beta reader observations and questions.  It’s slower right now because I’m also trying to integrate lessons about description and pacing from Robert Jordan’s amazing The Eye of the World.

The general plan for revision III has begun to take shape.  Some shifting of certain narrative threads to book II or to a book of their own, expanding the ending, putting the climax in earlier, making descriptions beefier, more lush and adding narrative in sections where what I wrote was, as Judy observed, outline like.

How long will it take?  I have no idea.  As soon as I can finish it, but just how long that is, I don’t know.  Why?  Partly the removal of certain narrative lines will create disruption as well as clarification.  Partly because the climax I have doesn’t satisfy me and I’m not clear what it should be.  Partly because adding descriptive material is a whole manuscript task and a personal style changer, too, since I tend to be spare.  There will be a learning curve.

Closing in on the last few verses of the Jason and Medea early story.  When I’m done with it, before Friday, and have checked and revised my work, also before Friday, I’m ready to go to Book I and begin the work I first decided I wanted to do back in 2008 or 2009.  That’s exciting.

It’s exciting for more than the obvious reason; that is, that I can now do it.  It’s exciting in addition because it will feed a new work, one I will not start until all three of the Tailte novels are finished; but, a work I hope will utilize all I’m learning about writing and about mythology and Latin and Ovid and Rome.  Working title:  Changes.

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Translating Metamorphoses

An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

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Spring                                                                           Bloodroot Moon

In May some docent friends from the class of 2005, a rowdy class and proud of it, will go to
Chicago for a time with the arts scene there.  Like my visit to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago this too will be an exercise in part in discovering how to keep the arts active and alive in my life.

One of us has decided to offer a mini-tour on an object at the Chicago Art Institute.  I decided I would do one, too.  My plan is to focus on methods of analysis, including the praxis idea I wrote about yesterday.

Ever since I got seriously interested in Ovid, my seminary education in biblical criticism has niggled at the back of my mind.  Why?  Well, biblical criticism, the higher criticism in particular, uses scholarly methodology for exegesis.  Exegesis tries first to get at the plain meaning of the text in its context.  It precedes the task of hermeneutics, that is, interpretation of the text for a contemporary audience.  What’s niggled at me is that neither exegesis nor hermeneutics is peculiar to the study of scripture.

In fact, exegetical method can be applied to other texts, whether in a foreign language or not, just as hermeneutics can be applied to the resulting exegesis.  As this thought persisted I kept wanting to create a method for using exegetical tools designed for literature in the service of art history.

Well, that day has arrived.  “Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself.” wikipedia article

Not sure yet whether I’ll venture into the realm of hermeneutics.  That may, in art, best be left to the viewer.

This also raises another profound idea I learned from the philosopher of religion, Paul Ricoeur, second naivete.  Ricoeur developed this idea to explain how a student of the higher criticism might use its critical methods on scripture, then return to the text later with a second naivete, one that includes the scholarly work, or incorporates it, while at the same time allowing the text to speak again as scripture.

My sense is that the idea applies to analysis of art as well.  That is, we can engage formal analysis, praxis analysis, style and methodological analysis, school, content analysis, then step back from all that and return to the piece with a second naivete which allows that work to enrich our immediate engagement with the work.  Anyhow, this is on my mind right now.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Third Phase

Vacated. Returned.

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Spring                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Vacated, now returned, back in my regular work space.  Feels good. 11th and E street, the Hotel Harrington and the Penn Quarter coalescing into memory.  I doubt I’ll ever travel for a particular art exhibition again, though I’m glad I went this time.

Why?  Crowds.  I like quiet time with art, non jostling, personal time.  Time to dig in and look, really look and not feel like I need to give someone else their turn.  Then, too, I like time in between, away from the art, then going back, looking again.  These big shows actively work against close encounters.  I know this from my work with the Louvre, Rembrandt, Terracotta Warriors.

(Lady of Shallot, William Holman Hunt)

The trip did accomplish its purpose.  Remember my OMG am I doing enough entry a couple of days ago?  My purpose was to get a sense of how my life with art might unfold after I leave the MIA for good.  I see it now, at least a place to start.  It means a study program over several years in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the whole Modern(-ism)(-ity)(post-) bundle with the occasional excursion into the history of science and perhaps fin de siecle Europe, all with the intention of integrating my interest in the pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, Symbolists into the larger movements of cultural forces over the Modern and pre-Modern era.  Ambitious?  Yes, but what’s life for?

The trip accomplished a second, unintended purpose, too.  I gotta go on vacation with no purpose at all.  That’s next.

Right now it’s back to revising Missing and reviewing my Latin for Friday.

 

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

the wall

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Spring                                                          Bloodroot Moon

Hit the museum wall today.  No, not neuromuscular, psychic.  Standing, moving from painting to painting, trying to follow the multiple threads in my own inner discourse.  Plus.  Muscle fatigue from yesterday’s long walk, much of it on concrete.

Together, they moved me out of the galleries and onto Constitution Avenue.  Which, I learned yesterday, is a covered canal from an original scheme to move goods throughout the capitol by barge.  The railroad did it in, the canals lost money, a lot of money, and so, they filled them back up.  What Schumpeter would call creative destruction.  Me, just destruction.

(Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810)

A Durer show opened today, too.  Lots of people.  His work demands such close looking that the crowds made it unfruitful.  I imagine they will calm down in the coming weeks.

In looking back over the questions I wrote down here a few days ago my main interests have popped into clear relief.  I’m interested in the history of ideas from the Renaissance on through today, in particular the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernity.  Painting styles interact with these broader philosophical and cultural trends, but in complex ways.

As I move forward in my work with art, I plan to make my history of ideas interests a more central part of my art historical research.  Without going into it at any length I find direct correlations between, say, Romanticism, and my project on Reimagining Faith.  That realization can trigger art historical research.  There are, too, issues of economics and politics at play.

(The-Bard-1774-by-Welsh-artist-Thomas-Jones)

This may be why the museum work had begun to move too slowly for me.  It wasn’t addressing a broad enough range of my interests.  It wasn’t the museum; it was me.

 

 

 

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Media

Collecting

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Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

Tumblr.  Addictive in a sense I don’t fully understand yet.  I’ve selected bloggers on Tumblr, largely where folks post images of one sort or another, who present art.  Over 100 of them at last count.  At any one time only a handful might be posting, so keeping up, or at least staying roughly abreast is doable.  The range of images that folks select is wide, one of  the charms of Tumblr for me, a chance to both get inside people’s heads as they choose images to post and an opportunity to see art that I wouldn’t have found on my own.  In that sense it’s a very eclectic museum.

(folder: architecture)

The addictive part for me is that I’m saving images, image after image, in those files I talked about reorganizing a while back.  Many, many art folders:  art contemporary, art Russia, art Symbolist, artist Blake, artist Matisse.  Cinema and television.  Natural world.  Cities.  War.  Travel.  So on.

Like a squirrel delighted with finding an abundance of acorns, I pluck these images up in my digital cheeks and carry them over to the small holes I’ve dug in my hard drives memory to cache them.  The folders have begun to grow fat with image after image.  Perhaps a hundred images or more in some instances.

(folder, art photography.  the pope’s apartment the night before his announcement about his retirement.)

My question is, why am I doing this?  Part of it is a desire to see again striking images or historically significant images or funny images or moving images.  That’s true, but mostly, like the squirrel, I dig the hole, then go on to dig another hole, often forgetting the one I dug before.  This is what oak trees count on.  How oak forests grow.  Of course, I know where all my folders are and I can open them whenever I want, but my point is that I’m more engaged in stuffing them full than utilizing them.

Utilizing them for what?  My first approach to answering this question will come on Thursday when I start reading the catalog for the Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery.  I have a folder filled with Pre-Raphaelite art and will find images, I imagine, of most of the pieces in the show.  Perhaps I’ll curate them myself, re-organize them in different ways, trying to emphasize different aspects of this 19c phenomenon.  Perhaps I’ll use the images for comparison, for tracing the history of certain themes and techniques.  Or, I might just open the folder and look at them, one after the other, taking in their color, their subject matter.

(folder History England.  a 1920 poster for the tube.)

This is an activity only possible with the internet and large hard drives.  And a lot of time.  It feels important; that’s why I’m writing about it.  But why?  No idea.

Asia, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

Moving forward by taking no action

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

This last week was a bust as far as Latin or the book.  It was spent in the emotional and rigorous task of restoration, order to books, objets d’art, the new furnace.  Hardly wasted effort, but the effect on forward progress was substantial.

You may notice that I’ve added a quote by Lao-Tze over the weather.  In it he advises the way of wu wei, of non-action, or, better of going with the flow, following the path life offers rather than overburdening it with goals, timelines, projects.  It’s not a huge difference from the Dalai Lama’s notion that the world does not need more successful people.  This week I’ve allowed the pace of the week to set my pace.  The result has been less frustration, less impatience.

When the way opens again for work with Latin and the novels, I will be ready to do that.

Though.  There is that tiny, niggling fact that I have northern European roots, not Chinese. Wu wei to my Teutonic ancestors would not have made much sense.  Set the goal, plow ahead, damn the obstacles.  Blitzkrieg.  Dynamite. (Nobel) The onward rush of history, it’s progress through material reality.  These are not the thoughts or inventions of people who follow the Watercourse Way.

Nor, for that matter, is the other ethnic blood in my veins, Celtic.  Hot-blooded, quick to laugh, quick to anger.  Impatient with oppression.  Creative and dreamy.  Living in this world and the other world.  In one case the rational tank rolls over barriers; in the other the emotional maelstrom cooks up revolution and poetry and love.

Wu wei is a corrective, another way of being in the world.  And we need it.  It leavens our energetic attempts to mold the world with a willingness to listen to how the world might mold us.

It’s for another time, but the long run application of Taoist and even Confucian principles have produced a moral and ethical sink in contemporary China.  They are not the whole way.  We need each other.

 

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

Moving Day

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Winter                                                              Cold Moon

A lot of time today going back over translation of Jason and Medea, trying to fix broken phrases, suss out mysteries hidden behind Ovid’s syntax and word choices.  I’m beginning to get a taste now of what the task of translation entails.  I’ve spent three years now levering myself up over the transom; I’m in the room; but, I can’t sit down to work yet.  Too much still to know.  But, I can see myself working in that room in the foreseeable future.

(The Ancient Roman Temple of Bacchus, commissioned by Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius and designed by an unknown architect c. 150 AD)

At the same time I had set today as moving day for all internet related tasks, all tasks requiring good security, all task but writing, really, and even there, the blog moved over to this new(ish) computer.  I’ve had this one for six months or so, but the work required to transfer all those functions over here is, at least for my tech level, significant.

Anyhow, I’ve got most of it done now, all the necessary stuff and I’m writing this entry on the new machine.  In the way of computers this work (the writing) is much the same.  It’s the guts that differ.  A terabyte of storage.  8 gigs of ram.  A bigger screen.  A fresh hard-disk and room to swap another one in when I need it.

[YOUR ALUMINUM FUTURE]

I now have a land of forgotten computers, brave electronic servants whose capacity got left behind by changing times.  This computer, though, I think will last a while.  The PC is fast becoming a less and less expensive door-stop though I still prefer them to laptops.  That’s  in part because I work at home; but it’s also because I love the ergonomic keyboard and  greater capacity for less bucks.

I did encounter one head scratcher in the transfers I did today.  I moved 25 gigs of images onto this machine.  I had them organized in folders.  Folders I understood.  For some reason, undoubtedly a reason of my own making, each image got its own folder on this new machine, meaning I have to sort through and reorganize literally thousands of images.

It’s not all bad. I’ve wanted to cull and reorganize my images for awhile, but I hadn’t decided on now.

Meanwhile Kate’s come down with a cold.  I convinced her to go to bed and try rest and fluids.  These are not necessarily obvious moves to the physicians among us.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Life Long Passion

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Winter                                                            Cold Moon

“A mythology is the comment of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind…”                                                                                                                                            H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

A life-long fascination with mythology and its companion fields, ancient religions and folklore, can be explained by this quote.  We have multiple ways of understanding the world, of asking and answering big questions.  In our day science is regnant, queen of the epistemological universe, but it is not enough.  Not now and not ever.

(Charles Le Brun, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1685)

Science cannot answer a why question.  It can only answer how.  Neither can science answer an ethical question.  It can only speak to the effects of a course of action over another in the physical world.  This is not a criticism of science, rather an acknowledgment of its limits.

Mythologies (usually ancient religions), ancient religions, legends and folklore are our attempts to answer the why questions.  They also express our best thinking on the ethical questions, especially folklore, fairy tales in particular.

Where did we come from and why?  “1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”  NRSV

(edward_burne-jones-the_last_sleep_of_arthur)

Want to live a good life?  Live like Baldr or Jesus or Lao Tze or Arthur.

How can we tell a just society from an unjust one?  Look at the 8th Century Jewish prophets.  Look at Confucius. (not a religion, yes, but functions like one)  Look at the Icelandic Sagas.  Different answers in each one.

I fell in love with these complex, contradictory wonderful narratives when I was 9 years old, maybe a bit younger.  Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinches’ Mythology.  I loved Superman and Batman and Marvel Comics.  I was an attentive student in Sunday School and later in seminary.  Over time I’ve come to recognize this fascination as a ruling passion in my life, one that guides life choices with power in my inner world.

It will not, I imagine, fade.  It means writing fantasy is a work of great joy and a hell of a lot of fun.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Living in Season

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Winter                                                               Cold Moon

Winter is upon us.  Beginning to give more thought time to my Living in Season presentation for Groveland on the 27th.  The short version is this:  learning to adapt your life to the season, rather than the seasons to your life.  I mean this on at least two levels: the literal and the metaphorical.

(A seasonal round.  This is a new idea to me, but I like it a lot.)

The literal can include such things as caring for plants outside during the growing season.  Maybe in a container, a window box.  Maybe in a flower bed or a vegetable garden.  Could be an orchard or a woods.  Maybe a community garden.  Something to synch up at least part of your daily life with the emergence of plants from winter’s fallow time.

It can also include intentionally leaving time in your winter schedule for retreats, inside projects like crafts or writing or visiting friends.

Perhaps in all the seasons hiking might be part of your plan, a liturgical response similar in all seasons but changed by them in profound ways.  If you can’t hike, get someone to help you be outside some amount of time each week.  Yes, even in the dreaded middle weeks of January.

Metaphorical:  first, know which season of your life you are in.  Are you college age, in the still vigorous growth years?  Or, are you in the mature years, the years of the late growing season, the early harvest days?  Or, like me, are you in the days of the late harvest, headed toward the long, eternal fallow time?

Here, too, we can find analogical help from living in season.  When sun and rain and warm temperatures push a plant up, up, up, perhaps that time right around flowering, then it must attend as well to its roots, not forgetting the stabilizing and nutrient gathering powers of those underneath surface parts.  So, for example, when college and the world of work begins to beckon, as graduation nears and your own unique bloom begins to present itself to the universe at large, this may be a time to recall hometown, old friends, family.  Favorite hobbies and pets and places.  It may seem that these people and places hold you back, hold you down, are heavy anchors weighted to yesterday.  But, no.  Instead these are the anchors in the deep subsoil of your life that hold you up, feed those parts of you that remember the child you once were, remind you of the long strengths that balance the new, shiny ones obtained through education.

Anyhow, stuff like that.  More by the 27th.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Humanities. Another post.

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Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

I’ve spent my whole adult life within the ambit of the humanities.  At an early age, perhaps junior high, the notion of a liberal arts education took hold.  An education in disciplines for which an inner passion, a vocation, burns will produce the best person.  Not, necessarily the best job.  Just the best person.

Note, not a better person.  But, the best person possible.  Why?  Our passions call from us the sum totals of our powers, render them available and useful.  Therefore we might reach a peak of human potential, one described solely by our own history and our particular genetics.

Yes, this is a fuzzy idea, full of the wishy washy and the self-indulgent.  Yes, it seems to come down right beside the point of an education, at least today’s education.  Today it seems apparent to everyone that an education should enable you to get ahead.  Get going.  Start maximizing, not necessarily yourself, but your earning potential.

That is a far different thing from becoming the best person you can be.  This is the person as tool, as instrument, sharpened and lubed for the truest fit in the gears of our economy.  Not insignificant and a surprising number of people prefer to be tools, used by managers and companies, getting financial and status rewards along the way.  Even so, tools, like their machines, need to be guided, shaped, aimed.

What is an appropriate, healthful, just, socially useful aim?  Ah, now we have the entered the realm of the humanities.  Weighing the lessons of one historical era against another’s.  Investigating the variety of ways in which we can be human.  Reading the tales and legends and novels and poems of others, so that we might know ourselves.  No bomb will know where it should be dropped.  Or why.  Is the expansion of health care services to a population a wise, just act?  How can we decide whether to go further than our moon?  What brings beauty into our life?  Who creates it?

Should the state interfere with individual’s nutrition?  Exercise?  Only with careful and sustained study of the human story can we make these kind of decisions.  Ethical decisions. Aesthetic decisions.  Social policy decisions.  Even space exploration decisions.

Imagine.  How might we decide as a world to engage a mission to Mars.  Incredibly expensive.  Dangerous.  Exciting.  Adventurous.  I might begin with reading the diaries of Rogers and Clark.  The journals of James Cook.  Zeng He.  The navigation methods of Polynesian islanders.  Examining the archaeological record of human migration.  What do we need to know?  How have we come to know such things?  What are the unexpected results of exploration?  Are they cautions?

Of course, the politics and the economics of the day will press hard upon the answer, too.  Here, too, the historical record, political history and economic history of joint endeavors would prove instructive.

My point?  Neither the scientific feasibility, the economic practicality nor political realities can make us want to go.  Can make us search for a way through the inevitable difficulties and barriers.  Only decisions shaped by our common humanity, in the present and in the past, can guide us.  Can make us decide it’s worth it, no matter what.

I don’t know.  Perhaps this is all special pleading, the sentimental journey of one long committed to a life lived with books, ideas, art.  All I can say is that the ancientrail of the humanities has been a rich vein for me.  For my whole life.  And continues to be.