Category Archives: Humanities

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

A Paradox

May 29, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

Groceries. Bees. Check in for cruise. That’s my day today. Well, I might watch a bit of the 500, just see how it goes.

It Broke From Within (see post below) is based on a quote from a p.r. piece for an early Walker project that read: Remember France? It broke from within. That can happen here.

It goes on: We can only protect our own country within by making more of us more understanding of each other’s freedom and each other’s work and possessions. We must learn to place a high value on the things that we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution. Nothing is more important to us than those civic institutions, of which the art center is one, that create a broader appreciation of our common bonds–our homes, our work, and our personal expressions.

At first I read this as an artist’s statement by Goshka Macuga and wrestled with its obviously conservative tone, especially in the sentence: We must learn to place a high value on the things we have created and built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution. The first we here seems to encompass all, all Minneapolis, all Twin Cities, all Minnesota, all USA while the second we encompasses those who build and create, mostly the upper classes, who then, the third we, stand to lose things during a period of disunity and social revolution.

Then I realized that, no, it was not an artist’s statement, but a statement from the Walker Art Center fund drive brochure in 1941. Oh. Well, it makes sense then. However, in that time between first reading it and realizing it was a fund drive brochure quote, I did consider a conundrum, a paradox that dogs my thinking and my working life.

It is this. Since the mid-60’s I have considered myself a political radical, willing to act outside the law if necessary to protest and resist unjust laws and unjust governmental or corporate actions. I’ve not only considered myself a radical, but have, on many occasions, been a direct action activist. What I’m saying here is that my political sympathies and my political work lie considerably left of center and left of liberal.

Here’s the rub. I love art. I love being around art and talking to other folks about art. Especially in the context of a museum. I love the outdoors and mother earth. I love being outside and talking with others about being outside. I love the garden and growing things, working with bees. I love my family, keeping them close and supporting them. I love the classics in literature and music, too. I love them enough to learn Latin and translate a 2000 year old Latin text. These are all conservative impulses.

Art in museums and the purpose of a docent lies in admiring and sharing the work of artists over thousands of years and vast spans of geography. This requires, quite literally, conservation and an appreciation for the past. Working on behalf of mother earth and our great outdoors, even gardening and beekeeping, are, by definition, conservative. That is, they act to conserve our natural world through good stewardship. Loving family is a time honored conservative theme, because it too, quite literally, preserves and conserves our species. Even religion, which has been an important part of my life for a long time, entails conforming ones life to an often ancient code and deposit of tradition.

So. There it is. Radical leftist in politics. Conservative in many of the areas about which I’m most passionate. What’s that? They’re categorically different uses of the word? Well, maybe, but I think the underlying theme suggested in the Walker Brochure tries to argue for a universal conservative impulse, one oriented toward stability and fear of social chaos, yes, but also toward preserving the best of what we have learned, of what we have come to believe important.

Here is my current thought. While I love art, nature, and family and will and do act to protect and nourish them, conservative intuitions, I also recognize that not all folks have equal access to art, to the natural world, even to stable families. Those of us who have “created and built” must understand that all wish to do so. That the culture and the families we love must see to it that others have that privilege, too.

We also must recognize that while we cherish certain institutions and achievements, others have them, too, often ones we have not recognized. Jazz is a good example. So is the native american’s delicate dialogue with the natural world. So is the rich extended family life of the Latino culture. They wish to conserve the things they have created and built just as much as we of the middle-upper and upper classes want to conserve ours.

It is this tension between what could be and what it is that drives the difference between the radical and the conservative. And ever will.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Politics, US History

How Might We Lose Our Freedoms?

May 27, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln

The tea-party folks and all those ronpaulites must love this quote from Lincoln. I just did a quick search trying (unsuccessfully) to find its source. The line came up on such webpages as: Patriot Watch, The RightWing News, Gunforum, Overkill, Professional Soldiers, SpearFishingPlanet and ChristianSoldiersCross.com among many others. Until this search, I hadn’t realized a pernicious part of the search technology; that is, it’s capacity to put quotes out of context into everyone’s hands. I’m sure most, all?, of these folks are confident Lincoln said this. I don’t know for sure and couldn’t find the source in a quick search. Context matters. He may well have meant the apparent plain meaning of these words; he may well not have said them at all; or, he may have said them, but their meaning is different from the apparent meaning due to context.

This is just a specific instance of a general phenomena the web unfortunately promotes, an uncritical acceptance of information and attributions. If you do not have training in critical thinking, it does not come naturally, you will not consider the possibility of false or inaccurate information; neither will you consider the possibility of attributions made in error, out of wishful thinking, out of malice, out of mistaken information.

Having said that. Lincoln. Well, of course, this quote represents nationalistic thinking on the level of the three year old. Why? It’s magical thinking. (like Ayn Rand, see below) It should read, “I hope America will never be destroyed from the outside.” Forever is a really long time. Who knows? Canada and Mexico may form a Norte Americano Hockey league and decide to invade. OK, that one’s easy.

With the next sentence I agree. Please note, all right wing admirers of Lincoln, he did not say, “If we raise taxes, we will destroy ourselves.”

Hell, I’m not even sure he said this in the first place. But let’s pretend he did until we know one way or the other.

How might we falter? By restricting the freedom of others. Who? Gay and lesbian citizens, who pay taxes, vote, fight, raise children come to mind. The people here first, now often consigned to the least desirable plots of land on land once their sole possession, come to mind. All the Mexicans fighting to get across the border onto land that was once under their nations sovereign control come to mind. Who are the true illegals here?

How might we falter? By refusing to honor the compassionate wisdom of our primary faith tradition, Christianity. Here are few quotes from the New Testament that show what I mean. Feed my sheep. Let the little ones come unto me. Again, I tell you it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, 1⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

If you have a country where the rich get rich, richer, richest and the poor recede from economic sight, is that just? If we are to feed Jesus’s sheep, don’t food stamps and aid to families with dependent children put our culture on His side? What might be good news to the poor? A job. Affordable housing. Decent medical care. Food.

Do you see where I’m going here? It’s possible, even probable, that Lincoln, who hated slavery and loved the nation would, if he had lived, have created a number of government programs to assure the reconstruction of the south. Instead thanks to Booth we got Andrew Johnson, friend to the south and enemy of reconstruction.

We will lose our freedoms when we lose the compassion that has made us great, the compassion that opens our borders, feeds the starving and gives people a hand up and a handout when necessary. We will lose our freedoms when a spirit of meanness triumphs and generosity withers. We will lose our freedoms when we become the money grubbing, power hungry country many in the world already believe we are.

We will lose our freedoms if the narrow vision of the far right wing comes to dominate our land. It is not taxes that is the issue, or the nature of the constitution, but the character of our country. Much that is good here has its roots in New Testament Christianity. That’s the same New Testament read by right wing religious folk.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Humanities

Anco Impari (I’m Still Learning. Goya)

May 27, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

We continue sliding toward summer, a cool, moist descent, not at all like the sudden, blazing ascension we often see, usually full on in place by now, with sun screen and hats and pitchers of lemonade set out on patios. At some point it will warm up, at least I think it will. There have been years without summer, years when the weather remains much like what we have now, days cool in the morning, warming in the afternoon and falling off to cool nights. Could be this will be one of those summers.

I’ve worked this morning on Pentheus, the first few verses proving difficult for me, almost as if I’d entered a different text altogether though it’s only 300 verses away from Diana and Actaeon and in the same Book, III of XV.

Something captivates me as I get into the Latin flow, the world tunes out; the text and I begin this tug of war, me digging, using dictionaries and online aids, the text resisting, remaining stubborn, not allowing its meaning to emerge without a struggle. The tension between the text and me lies in the language of an ancient people and my learning, a tension requiring both, learning and the language. Without some knowledge, there would be no tension. If I had no learning, the words in Latin would sit immutable as stone, as strong a barrier to me. If my learning were to the level of fluency, the text would not be a barrier at all, I would read as I do in English. Instead, I’m in a middle place, knowing and learning at the same time, so the text became enticing, pulling me further into the journey, not only of Ovid’s texts, but of the others: Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Martial, Tacitus, Horace, Seneca.

The feeling reminds me of how I reacted to serious study of art history. At first there was so much information, so many different aspects that I felt overwhelmed, as if I could never get my head above the surface of this great ocean of learning. As time passed, as I walked the halls of the museum, read texts and looked at more and more art, a shaky gestalt began to form. There was a rough chronology, even a global chronology. There were styles and forms and methods and instances of all three. At some point the Song Dynasty became separate from the Tang and the Han, just as the early Buddha images became distinct from the later ones of Tibet, Thailand, China. Neoclassicism and impressionism began to tease themselves apart and appear as separate, thought related movements. Beckman and Kandinsky and Monet and Barye and Poussin and Church and the master of the embroidered foliage sorted out into times and influences and basic tenets.

(of course, like most of us, I’m a combination of autodidact and schooling, but since college, the autodidact part has definitely taken precedence.)

Now I have a scaffolding on which I can hang new learning, it fits in a large gestalt, which, while far from comprehensive, at least describes the outlines, the places where there are gaps and the places where some new learning easily fits.

Right now Ovid and his Metamorphoses are my teachers, aided by my tutor Greg Mambres and my own reading, learning. My scaffolding is up, but it’s very shaky. I have verb forms, conjugations, nouns, declensions, adverbs, participles, clauses, imperatives, word meanings, poetic forms but often I revisit and revisit the same learning, still not seeing with clarity where on the scaffold something belongs.

It was the same with the garden, first flowers and then vegetables and is still now with the bees. Large tracts of unknowing papered over by fragments of knowledge. In bee-keeping for example I look at cells. Hmmm. Those look like drone cells but maybe they’re queen cells. Or maybe not. Is it time to put on the second hive box? Or, is it too early? Should I use full-sized hive boxes or should I switch to honey supers to keep things lighter? In gardening. Just try planting garlic in the spring some year. Won’t work. It needs to over winter for a late June harvest. Want a colorful spring and early summer? Plant in the fall. In the orchard I’m practicing IPM, integrated pest management, which means at this point, killing bugs by hand.

What I’ve learned is that knowledge accumulates. New knowledge needs a scaffolding, a chest of drawers, a memory palace so that it can become integrated.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Writing

I Shrugged

May 26, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists … it is real … it is possible … it’s yours.” – Ayn Rand

Sounds pretty good at the start, doesn’t it? Don’t let your fire go out? Even the hero in the soul could be an archetypal reference, one that is pro-Self. Then, Rand goes completely off the rails. Lonely isolation because the life you deserved has been beyond reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists and so on. This is the most specious sort of pseudo-logic.

First of all. Life you deserve? Oh, who said? There is no metaphysical realm filled with wonderful fulfilling lives created especially for you and your desires. That’s simply a happy talk version of heaven, the old pie in the sky idea, just not when you die, but delivered now, right now. Fast food, fast destiny. Delivered to your home.

A world you’ve never been able to reach? So. If you haven’t reached it yet, why not? Because you haven’t believed in it enough? Because you don’t have the right gender, color, sexual preference? Could it be that the life you want and don’t have is one fed into the culture by vapid self-help gurus like Ayn Rand? Who says you can have whatever you want? What’s good about that? That’s the adolescent girl screaming at a rock concert or an adolescent boy watching hockey or football, pumping his fist and imagining. Is it possible that the dream you have is not your dream, but the dream of a culture with achievement as its number one value?

I’m no stranger to this thought. I dreamed of becoming a published author, admired for my prose and my inventive fiction. I wanted it. I haven’t got it. Is my life over because I don’t have what I dreamed? Far from it. My dream, and others I’ve had like it, came into my Self via a male focused culture, one that said, Be all you can be. You can do anything. B.S.

I can’t, for example, run a 4:00 minute mile. I can’t, for example solve Fourier Transformations. I can’t paint the next great American painting nor am I able to put on a white coat and figure out what’s the matter with you. Would I like to be able to do these things? Sure. Is not desiring them what puts them beyond my reach? No. It’s my limitedness, the peculiar package of skills and abilities I had from birth and have accrued over years of life experience.

We each have limitations; they make us unique. The trick is not desiring a life you “deserve”, it is finding the life that only you can live, the peculiar, one-off life you have to offer to the world and to the rest of us. The big difference here is the inward look goes toward self-knowledge, toward humility, toward knowing what only you can do. This boot-strap, Horatio Alger, American mobility notion only pulls you further and further away from self-knowledge. Instead, your life becomes an attempt to shoe-horn yourself into a cultural vessel, one not designed for you, not at all, but one designed to keep the culture moving in the direction it knows.

You are different. You deserve nothing. The hero in your soul will not perish in lonely isolation because you don’t get what you deserve. The hero in your soul perishes when it uses its power and energy to cram you into somebody elses version of what you deserve.

In summary: I don’t like Ayn Rand.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Writing

Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.

May 25, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia. She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.

Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth. Gilgamesh. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The fragments of the Pre-Socratic. Jewish texts. Christian and Muslim texts. The pyramids. The parthenon. Rome. The pantheon. Fra Lippa. Giorgio. Botticelli. Michelangelo. Da Vinci. Petrarch. Erasmus. Francis Bacon. Titian. Brueghel. Boccaccio. Chaucer. Beowulf. The poetic eddas. Ovid. Turner. Poussin. Rembrandt. Barye. Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Singer. the Baal Shem Tov. Racine. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven. Brahms.

And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.

Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education. Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries. In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.

So. If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable? Obviously. If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars. No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.

Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now. The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today. No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.

It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities. It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training. Institutions focuses change over time. Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.

It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities. Let the music department perish. Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too. Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology. Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go. Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.

Why don’t these changes bother me? Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists. Work is. Literature, too. Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them. No writer writes because there are good writing programs. Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments. Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture. Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music. Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education. Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments. They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.

The humanities are of, by and for humans. Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support. Will they be poorer? Probably. For a while. But not for long. We need music to fill our souls. We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human. We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can. We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.

We need all of these things; they do not need higher education. It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.

What might happen is this. After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other. An idea will occur to them. Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught? An institute, maybe. A gymnasium. An academy. Or, maybe something new. A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.

Out of these experiment might grow, what? I don’t know. Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art. Could happen.

Dogs, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Busy Friday

May 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

Finally. One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version. That’s Book III:138-250. My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting. The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds. As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself. It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director. We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session. This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

Came home, ready for my nap. But. Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight. No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home. She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow. She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.

Aging, Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

What Get’s You Up In The Morning?

May 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

Several years ago, maybe twenty, I sat down with my friend Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker cafe, a table overlooking downtown Minneapolis and the Sculpture Garden. Lonnie, I said, I could die now. I feel good about what I’ve done with my life and would have no regrets.

Lonnie looked at me, thought a moment, then asked, “But Charlie where’s your passion?”

Oh. Yeah. A passionate man would not declare he was ready to die, he’d be asking, what’s next!

Now, at 64, I can honestly say, “What’s next!” Not sure what was going on at that moment in my life, but I think I’d hit a caesura, a pause in the melody of my life, a rest stop on the way. While there, I mistook the rest stop for a destination, rather than a place to catch my breath, consider what direction my path now lead.

Older now and several caravan serai of the soul moments later, I welcome those times when life ceases to press with urgency, when the TV or a novel or a long vacation beckons. These are moments of consolidation, a time perhaps to welcome the god Janus for a good look back and a strong gaze forward.

It feels like one may be coming. Last night I finished my literal translation of Ovid’s story of Diana and Actaeon. The legislature ends this session (we think) on May 20th or so. The touring season begins to loosen as schools close down for the summer. Then I’m left with the bees and the gardens, the novel, too, of course.

These kind of moments when the pacing changes dramatically often yield breaks. Often, as I’ve looked back over my life, I’ve responded to these breaks with melancholy, a drifting down, moving into a sense of purposelessness. What do I do now? I might die. That would be ok.

Probably where I was that afternoon long ago having lunch with Lonnie.

The melancholy is ok, too. It’s an old friend, one I’ve come to appreciate as a gathering in, a time to be with myself, in myself. The melancholy slows down my appetite for life, forces me to pay attention to subtler, inner things, so when I reemerge, I’m ready for another road on this one-way trip.

So, if you talk to me a month from now and I seem a bit distracted, maybe a little down, you’ll know I’m really just resting, getting ready to come out of my corner. Again.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Humanities

Love, Sex and Scandal

May 12, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

Love, sex and scandal tour tonight. We went from the Venus figurine, made 20,000 years ago, to the erotic work of Balthus, covering, in between nymphs and satyrs, heroes and centaurs, a raped Roman matron, a satirized French actress, a beloved 5th century Chinese singing girl and the Little Girl of Otto Dix. The basic theme was the enduring nature of love and sex, probably scandal, too, thought that’s hard to read in the archaeological record.

The most controversial pieces were the final two, Little Girl and The Living Room. The one we decided was not pornographic though it appeared that way, the other was pornographic though it does not appear that way. The mutable nature of art. Along the way we spoke of the shadow museum, things we own, but do not display like shunga, the erotic prints from Japan, that our idea of propriety still carries over the Victorian sensibilities of now three centuries and a millennium past.

We spoke openly about these things and, I think, surprised each other. In a good way. I enjoyed the group and the tour.

Humanities

Sickle Moon

May 6, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

That last frost sickle moon hung in the western sky as I drove home from sheepshead last night. The sickle’s always seem to have somebody sitting on them when I look up. An old woman with a conical hat and a skirt filled with stars. A boy dangling his legs. Or, as in one meditative state long ago, Moses on one side and Jesus on the other. These moons are pregnant with possibility, with the dreams and the hopes littering our lives, just waiting for fullness. It will swell, grow fat. May your dreams.

Those card gods that have been so good to me over the last few months abandoned me last night. In the first four hands I didn’t have enough total trump to pick up the blind and play. A night of 7’s, 8’s, 9’s and the occasional 10. Two decent hands the whole the night. As Ovid points out over and over, the gods are fickle.

Today Latin. I’m down to line 228 on the Diana and Actaeon story. I still need to watch those words separated from each other but with the same endings. I also need to watch the situation which Greg, my tutor, analogized to fixing a car and having a part or two left out. I translate sentences and from time to time I have a word or two left over. Hmmm.

We’re just getting to the good part where Actaeon’s own dogs tear him to pieces. That’ll teach him to to see naked goddesses.

Leslie and I had our next to last meeting and she encourage me to attend an event at UTS for those of us who have been mentors. A tough sell, but I decided, for Leslie, that I would go.

Afterward had to drive back into Minneapolis because I forgot to pick up fliers for the mining conference I’m attending in Duluth tomorrow.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Beltane 2011

May 1, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane (May 1) Waning Bee Hiving Moon

A bit about how I got interested in the auld religion, the ancient Celtic faery faith and from it, the Great Wheel.

23 years ago I left the Presbyterian ministry and wandered off into a life I could never have anticipated. The writing turn I took then led me to investigate my Celtic past, the heritage of my Welsh and Irish ancestors. I learned about Richard Ellis, son of a Welsh captain in William of Orange’s army who was stationed in Dublin. After his father’s death, his mother paid Richard’s fare to America, to Virginia, where he was to become heir to a relative’s land, a common practice at the turn of the century since children died so often. This was 1707.

Also a common practice at the turn of the century was a ship captain’s larceny, stealing Richard’s fare and selling him into indentured servitude in Massachusetts. Richard went on to found the town of Asheville, Massachusetts and become a captain in the American Revolution.

My own other Celtic ancestors, the Correls, were famine Irish, part of the boat loads forced out of Ireland by the failed potato crop, or an Gorta Mór it is known in Gaelic, the great hunger. (Incidentally, this was due to planting potatoes as a mono-culture, much like we plant corn, soybeans and wheat today.) They came to this country in the mid 19th century.

I did not go into the history of Wales at the turn of the 18th century, nor did I investigate the an gorta mor and its aftermath. Instead, I went further back, into ancient Ireland and Wales; in fact I looked at all the Celtic lands, Isle of Mann, Scotland, Brittany and Galicia as well. What fascinated me then, and still does now, was the auld religion, the Faery Faith, as represented in The Fairy Faith by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, more famous as the translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Not long after leaving the Presbyterian ministry I packed my bags for a week + at St. Denioll’s, a residential library in Hawarden, Wales. While there I wandered northern Wales, visiting holy wells, castles and Welsh villages. There was also an extensive collection of Celtic material at St. Denioll’s. Continue reading Beltane 2011 →