Category Archives: Humanities

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities

Unthawed.

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Samhain                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

So beautiful.  The moon floats above our cottonwood trees, a thin sickle, its horns pointing to the east.  I’ve never seen any art object that can compare to the sleek curves and understated lighting of a sickle moon.

When I ran out of sleep a couple of days ago, up for a while in the morning,  I set up today.  After my two tours at the MIA, I’m worn out, tired, a bit dejected.  Losing sleep fiddles with my emotional monitor, I become more sensitive, less able to assess accurately how I’m feeling or doing.

The Thaw exhibition has proved a puzzle for me.  I don’t seem too good at touring it and I can’t quite figure out why.  I base this on the flatness of all three tour’s responses to my guiding them, a flatness that is out of character for most of my tours.  I love this show and the objects in it.  They fascinate me and they shine with a fierce enthusiasm, witness to the powerful visions of people who live close to the land.  But somehow what I’m doing doesn’t convey my excitement.  I may approach this show too analytically, too much absorbed in the art historical arguments about native masterpieces and how to view native art.  Maybe.  I just don’t know.

As I said, when I’m worn out, like today, the negatives surface with ease and have more endurance, that may be an aspect of this problem, but it’s not all of it.  Perhaps I need to reconstruct my tour on different grounds, use different objects.  Maybe I need to develop actual questions for each object, something I resist doing because I prize the conversational atmosphere, just folks walking through the gallery sharing what we see and what we know.  That usually works well for me.  Not this time.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Winter’s Loon

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Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s the best time of the year.  Ring a ling, ring a ling, ring a ling.  Yes, because the woods are lovely, dark and deep.  And because we have promises to keep.  It’s the best time of the year.

I’m no Christmas curmudgeon.  The lights and the cheeriness lift my spirits, too.  Yet it is not the lights toward which I drift, drawn in Frost’s New England sleigh pulled by a draft horse black as the snow falling is white.  I wander toward the woods, the dark and the deep.  In there, amongst the trees, far from city lights lies the reason for the season for me.

Each night for the last week or so I’ve heard my favorite sound of the season, the hooting of a great gray owl which lives in our woods.  I’ve never seen this bird and this may will be the child of the one I heard years ago.  The bass voice declares a confidence in the dark and the cold, an embrace.  The rhythm and the solitariness of the sound captures the winter dark as a loon’s cry distills the summer sun setting on a northern lake.

This is the carol for which my heart yearns; strange, in its way, since the great gray is the apex predator in our world, excepting, of course, the humans.

So, as you drink your Christmas cheer, crack the window a bit, listen. You might hear the voice of the woods, lovely, dark and deep.

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Humanities, Myth and Story

Sticking It To The Man

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

File under sticking it to the man:  Wikileaks.  File under government mad, pouts, hunts down bad man and charges him with anything they can find.  Come on, guys. I’m no Rand Paulite and even I can see big government blaming somebody, anybody else for the mud in their own eye.  Let Assange go and quit acting like spoiled children.  Transparency is a good thing.   Even if it forces short term changes.  Face up to it and move on.

File in the already fat folder:  Science fiction comes true.  A private corporation put a capsule into space and brought it back to earth safely.  Well, to ocean.  Scenes from 2001 floated before me with weightless passengers on a Pan-Am flight drinking Coca-Cola served by in-flight attendants dressed like Twiggy.

Finished up verse 46 of the Metamorphosis.  If I did my arithmetic right, I am now one third of one thousandth of the way toward my goal.  Of course, this probably inflates the quality of my early attempts which a more adept me will have to redo.  Even so.

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton

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Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Back up at 8 am for an 8:30 conference call with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership.  This concerned information we may use when defending against roll backs to current environmental policy.  The sound quality was poor, but the information, presented in power point slides via a webinar website, had a lot of good data.  I can’t discuss it, but it was far from discouraging.

Here’s good news just posted at the Trib:  Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton.   A tip of the hat to the state Republicans.  They read the state right; we’re weary of recount wrangles.  Perhaps we can begin a more bi-partisan approach to Minnesota’s future.  I’d like to see it.  Bi-partisanship is good for environmental issues.

We will probably spend more time on administrative and rule-making work for the next two years than we have in the past. We being the Sierra Club and our allies.

In between I looked up Latin words in preparation for translating lines 40-45 of Book I, the Metamorphosis.  It’s something about water and the sky and sun, but I have yet to put it together.

Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

While The Cyber River Closed

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Samhain                           New Winter Solstice Moon

Midnight  12/6/10

Writing this on Word since I’ve had no internet connection for a few hours.  My limited number of tricks have not produced a link and I don’t have the patience for navigating so-called “customer service.”  George Orwell would be proud of the internet and internet services industry.

Kate’s cold continues with little sign of progress.  She suffers, complains about not liking to be sick, but otherwise Norwegian’s through it all.  She takes illness as a personal insult, something to be shrugged off if possible, if not, to work through and last something that requires rest and chicken noodle soup.  She’s in the latter mode right now.  Good for her.

We skyped tonight.  It’s Hanukkah so the grandkids had various gifts from doting grandparents and uncles and aunts.  The literal hit of the evening was an inflatable t-ball set.  Ruth took swing after swing, often swinging from her right shoulder and leveling at the ball.  She’s co-ordinated for 4.  Or, rather 4 and ½.

Her blond hair swirls, ringlets tumbling every which way as she performs couchnastics, a living room form of gymnastics that replaces gym equipment with the normal living room furniture.

My Latin is still here spread out on the desk beside me.  This Ovid requires slow, laborious work.  Look up words.  Figure out forms.  Check usage possibilities, verb tenses, noun declensions.  A lot of back and forth with books and pages of help.  I realized tonight that it’s a hobby, something I’m doing for fun.  Weird, huh?

Winter has snugged us up in the house, the furnace and insulation our best friends just as the AC and the insulation are our best friends in the summer.  I like winter because it provides all this darkness for desk work, darkness in which there are no outdoor chores.  Therefore, no guilt.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story, World History

Heed The Oracle Well, Boy. Heed the Oracle Well.

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Samhain                                                 New Winter Solstice Moon

Fourth week A.V.  No, not audio-visuals, but after Vikings.  I find my life just fine without the consummate misery of watching our various teams implode, year after year, often at the most heartbreaking moment.

So, again, in the spirit of decline and fall, I will spend Sunday working on my translation of Ovid, using him and his work as a window through which to view Roman culture and life at the turn of the first millennium of the common era.  I hope to include more Roman reading in Latin, too, but my focus for now, and for the foreseeable future, lies with learning the language and the Metamorphosis.

After several months of fiddling–hey, amateur here!–I have the TV, tivo, blu-ray and cd player all functional through the amplifier and therefore through all of our speakers.  That means I can read in my red leather chair while listening to jazz, beethoven or dvorak or whatever else we have on our increasingly antique cd collection.  Last night Beethoven’s late sonatas played while I read Herodotus, the story of Croesus.

Croesus did an empirical study of the oracles available to him before deciding to go to war with Persia.  He sent messengers   throughout Asia and Greece, asking them to inquire of the oracles what he did on the one hundredth day after they left his capitol.  Only two, the oracle at Delphi and of Amphiaraus, saw that he took a tortoise and a hare, cut them up and cooked them in a brass pot with a brass lid.  He chose this combination for its unlikeliness.

Upon learning of their accuracy he put together elaborate gifts and sent them to the Oracles, asking this time about a possible war with the Persians.  The reply from Amphiaraus is not known, but the one from Delphi stands as an example to future seekers.  When you go to war against Persia, a great empire will be destroyed.  That’s what the Oracle, the Pythoness, said.  And she was right.  Only it was Lydia, Croesus’s empire, that fell.  Oops.

After I finished with Herodotus, I turned off the lights and listened to the music.  A calming transition to bed.  And I did not wake up again until morning.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, World History

Big History

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Samhain                                                         Waning Thanksgiving Moon

The temperature has stayed above freezing so we’re having a significant rain event, but little snow.  I found a snow removal guy yesterday.  Prices varied wildly from $25 a time to $50.  All the same snow.  Not sure what the deal is.  We went with $25.

The Medtronic event went by rapidly with only one hour available for folks to mill around and look.  As often happens, though, we docents had the same hour when the guests arrived, had cocktails and mingled.  As with any group, they checked in with each other, took the temperature of the room and few wandered.  With the exception of CEO Bill Hawkins who remembered the singularity of the T’ang Dynasty blue horse ming ch’i (spirit object).   We discussed it and the meaning of tomb objects in general.  Other than a brief conversation about Ming dynasty blue and white ceramics, that was my evening.

On the way in I started a fascinating new lecture series from the Teaching Company called Big History.  This takes history’s starting point as the big bang and moves in increments from there:  birth of suns, creation of elements, creation of earth and the solar system, the origin of life, humans, agriculture, the modern revolution.  The guy who’s teaching this course happens to be the guy who conceived of Big History as a discipline, basing it, as I suspected on Braudel’s notion of the longue duree, seeing history from longer and longer durations of time.

Tomorrow and Wednesday will consist largely of interviews at the Sierra Club.  We’re hiring a policy staff person.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Black Friday

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Samhain                                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Kate had to tell me, again, what black Friday means.  Apparently (and you probably already know this) it’s the date retailers calculate they slip over from being in the red to being in the black.  When I have trouble remembering something, it’s often because I have another association clogging up the rememberer.  In this case black Friday has a theological tinge in my brain; it takes me to a day of lost hope, ultimate despair.  As a result, I have trouble associating it with anything positive.

If I consider the number of people camped outside (one woman since Wednesday night at a particular BestBuy), and, if I consider the reason many of them are in those lines, my association seems closer to the mark.  Our emphasis on extravagant gifts to celebrate the birthday of a man who wanted us to declare freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind has always revealed the dark side hedonism which we let loose at Christmas, but the pitiful sight of people braving cold and inclement weather as blind captives of our economic system.  Well…

A very positive note is the number of scientists now willing to engage in reasoned debate on the topic of global warming.  Understanding the science behind global warming takes careful attention to several different lines of reasoning and a dispassionate explication of those various strands works best from within a scientific rather than a political frame.  Perhaps, as an article in the paper said, we will be able to move beyond this debate and onto the question of what can we do.

We are not saving the earth; the earth will be fine no matter what we do.  We want to preserve an earth fit for human habitation; that’s what’s at risk here.  Can we learn to live on this planet lightly enough that it can carry us, feeding us, watering us, disposing of our wastes, providing materiale necessary for our habitations and our economies?  Those are the stakes.

Aging, Humanities

Discipulus

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Samhain                              Waning Thanksgiving Moon

An eternal schoolboy.  I sit with my legs crossed, feet tapping while I work on my Latin, that inferior position of student working its way into my 63rd year, an anxiety that I have charlie-3rd-gradetrained myself to use to my advantage, to push myself beyond my comfort zone.  So, in spite of stopping earlier, I came back down and finished translating the section from Virgil on Laocoon Speaking Out Against the Trojan Horse.  Guess what Laocoon says in this passage.  Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

I like the feeling of wind and snow outside while I work here at my desk, Wheelock up on my reading desk, yellow pad to the right and my grammar and word aids to the left.

Kate’s home from work now.  Gonna go upstairs.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.