Category Archives: Humanities

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Death

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Lughnasa                                         Waxing Back to School Moon

The thing about death is, it is forever, unlike life.  Once entered there is no return.  It is that one way disappearance that creates the chaos of grief, the sense, the realization that something has been done that cannot be undone.  There is no longer any action to take, no remedy to try, no act of contrition that will change things.  There is here, the living, and there, the dead.

Death comes to humans, dogs, mice, birds, lizards, fish, death comes.  We living things are alike in facing the cessation of our agency, the end of all the striving.

Life has death as its forever dance partner, the danse macabre.  It is a dance like those marathons from the 30’s where the dancers slump along near the end, barely holding each other up as the sun rises and the music slows.  The dance hall begins to take on its daytime character, the cracks in the ceiling come out, the floor has not been mopped, the romance of the contest and the hall slip away and we are left with the one partner who will never let us go.

Death is not life, whatever else it may be.

Tibetan Buddhist thought has a wonderful, I would even say exemplary, way of approaching death.  The photograph here, a partial of a Yamantaka statue, illustrates it iconographically. “Yamāntaka is a Sanskrit name that can be broken down into two primary elements: Yama, the name of the god of death; and antaka, or “terminator”. Thus, Yamāntaka’s name literally means “the terminator of death”.”  This statue shows Yama in cosmic embrace with his consort, thus wisdom and compassion become one.

Meditating on Yamantaka, so I was told by a Tibetan Buddhist, involves imagining your own death in as real a fashion as possible.  The intent of the meditation is to eliminate the fear of death, either in the body or in what Buddhists call the subtle body.  When we achieve an acceptance of our own death, we become free.  This is, if I understand the Buddhist thought correctly, also a path to enlightenment.

Of course, a Buddhist would see this in the context of Buddhist doctrine, with which I am not familiar, but I have embraced this image and this understanding as an important part of my own spiritual journey.

Humanities, Letters, Memories

School Days. Good Old Rule Days.

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Lughnasa                                                    New (Back to School) Moon

See you in September

Have a good time but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love   The Happenings (see current pic, right, at EPCOT)

Mmmm.  Nothing says aging like current pics of yesterday’s bands.

Hi and Lois had a cartoon this morning in which Dot presents to his class on his summer vacation:  “Didn’t do anything much, but that was a lot better than here.”

Made me think.  Lots of cartoons, op ed pieces, jokes, old recollections place school over against summer:  freedom versus confinement, fun versus work, anarchy vs dictatorship, innocence vs real life.  You can add to the dialectics.

Granddaughter Ruth’s entry into pre-school, as I said a couple of weeks ago, opened my eyes to the exceptionally long journey on which she has just begun.  At a minimum for a girl like Ruth, teachers as parents, Jewish, well educated grandparents, seemingly bright, her schooling will last 4 years beyond high school.  That’s 18+ years of interrupted summer idylls, broken off by the sound of school bells, announcements over the pa system (text messages?) and the scramble to buy school supplies.

Like the putative frog in the slowly boiling pot of water most students don’t realize just how long this commitment is until they near the end of it, for some high school, for others college.  I was, for example, in the third (last) quarter of my senior year in college when, over a cup of coffee in the student union, it came to me.  I didn’t have to go to college.  It was a choice, but so little of one in fact that I only woke from the enchantment as the wicked witch of the real world was about to have me for lunch.

Shopping for school supplies.  Loved it.  First day of school.  Eager to be there.  Learning.  Loved it and still love it.  School and its silly restrictions, its teaching to the mean, its lack of imagination.  Hated it.  A result for me was a suspicion of the motivation of people in authority.  They said they wanted to educate me, really they wanted to control me.  I learned many lessons in school, many of them I wish I’d never encountered.

First among them was the sense that true learning was something one had to wrest from the world by main force, not expecting any real help from those who labeled themselves as teachers.  This was a bad, a terrible lesson.  It has not served me well.  I don’t trust mentors, teachers to have my interest ahead of their institutional commitments.  Still don’t.  I probably could have learned to write much better if I had.  Probably would have finished a Ph.D. if I hadn’t graduated from college soured on the whole apparatus of higher education.

This was a wonderful, blessed lesson.  It has served me very well.  I trust my own work, surround myself with opportunities to learn and apply myself to them with vigor.  My thought is mine, shaped only by the minds I encounter in books or in paintings or in movies or of friends.  This has lead to an independent, critical and outsider perspective for me, again, a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is the necessity of creating my own thoughtworld; the curse is the lack of peer interaction around it.

Since I believe with all my heart that life is one choice after another and that we are responsible for the choices we make, no matter the influences of others or institutions, I cannot blame anyone but me for where I’ve ended up.

The educational establishment, however, still has not gotten over its early industrial template of bells, order and discipline, the true goals of the system, not encouraging inquiry, creation and craft as Paul Goodman talks about:  “It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own. ”  This is the job of education, to spark in us the gift of curiosity, the courage to make things and ideas of our own and to have the fundamentals of good work to polish them.

Our school system, contrary to the longing of the Asian educational establishment, does not in fact, stimulate creativity.  The creativity and self-initiative so prized by Asia happens in spite of the cloak of institutional rigor draped over the shoulders of even 4 year old Ruth.  It happens because our culture does allow for outliers, for outsiders, for prophets, for critics–our schools do not.

Do school bells, attendance taking, rigid curriculum, regimented class times, supervised play and little, if any, student input get to the goal, helping students grow up as human beings into a culture without losing nature,  learning how to be part of a sensible and honorable community? I say no, it does not. Paul Goodman, again:  “I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.”

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Humanities

Sitting Back

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Lughnasa                                       Waning  Artemis Moon

The big push on honey extraction, preceded by the push to mulch the orchard and the vegetable garden, has left both Kate and me happy the weather has soured.  She sews, now in the room right above my study, and I tap tap tap away following this lead and that down the cyber rabbit hole.

After reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Blind Descent, I’ve veered off into fiction, a sort of relief has taken my reading and I’ve plowed through 2 1/2 novels this last week +.  None of it so far is noteworthy, just pleasant diversions.

Worked this last week on a project for the office of Learning and Innovation at the Museum.  It involved responding to a new exhibition of heads and masks to be installed in the hallway in front of the antiquities galleries.  It’s part of the Art Remix concept.  Thinking in this way, finding connections between the new installation and other parts of the museum, stimulated me, shot off a spark or two.

Dogs, Garden, Great Wheel, Humanities

For Everything

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Lughnasa                                      Full Artemis Moon

A full day today and another one tomorrow.  Late August through early September are busy times here at 7 Oaks and Artemis Hives.  Kate’s worked like a Trojan, the Norwegians of Greece, pulling weeds, making piles, churning through task after task.  She wears me out.  And she’s older than I am.

Each month has its own qualities, tasks appropriate to the time of year.  August’s tasks include harvest, weeding, ordering bulbs for fall, considering the garden for next year, mulching, honey extraction.  It also includes getting ready for the busy season at the MIA, the school year when students come through the museum in amazing numbers and the special expeditions go up.  This year we’ll have the Thaw collection of Native American Art, Embarrassment of Riches, a photography show curated by David Little and the Titian Exhibition.  The State Fair begins, kids get their last fond looks at the lake or the backyard or the baseball field, and adults take advantage of the heat.  In Minnesota we know that often the best month of the year lies ahead, either September or October.

Just finished a book, Blind Descent, that narrates the search for the world’s deepest cave.  The story line gripped me from the beginning, especially the technical descriptions of work in super caves.  It recounts the culmination in 2004 of two of the most promising super cavers of the current era:  Bill Stone and Alexander Klimchouk of Georgia.  It was Klimchouk’s work in the Arabika highlands that yielded Krubera, the world’s deepest cave, at over 7,000 feet below the surface.  Worth reading.

Vega and Rigel have a new project.  They have dug several holes, some of them deep enough that their heads disappear in them.  I can only assume they’re chasing something that burrows, probably a gopher.  They seem to be doing a good deal more digging than catching.  It was this kind of behavior last fall that led to the two fences that we have now.  Seeing them dig as Kate and I worked in the orchard, inside one of those fences, I was so happy we had them.  Right now Vega barks in her crate, ready to go back and hunt some more.  We’ll wait her out.

Bees, Garden, Humanities, Politics, US History

That Mosque

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Lughnasa                                          Full Artemis Moon

Today the orchard, tomorrow…the vegetable patch and the orchard.  Kate and I will take up the carpet laid down for paths in the orchard (it keeps weeds down and mulch gets distributed over it), clean out the weeds that have infiltrated, lay the carpet back down and add any to spots that need it, preparing the whole for the wood chips delivered yesterday morning.  Tomorrow Kate will guide Ray, our lawn mowing Andover junior, while he covers the paths with wood chips.  Meanwhile I’ll mulch the areas in the vegetable garden that Kate and I cleared out over the last week.

Over the weekend we’ll put the honey extractor together  and try it out in advance of our first full day of honey extraction on Monday.  This should be entertaining.  Mark has shrunk our Artemis label by a third and modified the glasses based on his realization last Monday that the specs he’d designed didn’t quite match mine.  I already have the PDF from him with the new design and smaller labels.  He’s a pro.

OK.  I understand that some people on the right believe the mosque near the old World Trade Center is offensive.  They feel it pokes a finger in the eye of the whole country and especially those who lost relatives on 9/11.  Their line is, “Just because you have the right, doesn’t make it right.”  True enough.  Doesn’t make it wrong, either.  So the question comes to down message.  What message will a mosque near the ground zero send?

Will it communicate rank insensitivity and disregard for injured feelings?  Will it intentionally stir the pot of an already angry public?  Or.  Will it communicate, as I said before, that we know the difference between terrorists who use Islam as an ideological justification and those for whom Islam is a religion of moderation and peace?  Will it show that our First Amendment freedoms, those that developed in light of religious persecution in Europe, persecutions that, ironically, sent the first settlers to Massachusetts, apply today as they have for over 200 years?  I know which message I want to send.

Now, having said that, is there a way to ameliorate the inflamed feelings of those who have been led to see this as a provocation, an insult?  I don’t know, but I would hope there is.  Next year will see the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster, so some concern probably focuses on this upcoming date.  I wish there was a way to sit down and discuss this, acknowledging the feelings of betrayal, anger, incredulity, fear, grief, sharing our mutual dismay at the act and the struggle with the terrorists since then, while allowing the Muslims for whom this was an equal disaster and one compounded by rejection and xenophobic reactions to open up their feelings.

Or, is the gulf between the right and the left so vast that there is no bridge?  Are we so far apart in our partisan camps that dialogue is no longer possible?  If it’s true, and there are times over the last decade when I’ve felt it was, then our country will have succumbed to the terrorists after all because, as Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I’m not trying to get to a kum by ya moment here.  I would relish, though, genuine conversation between citizens of differing views.  How can it happen?

Here’s an excerpt from a CBS report that gets to where I’d like to go:

Society|Thu, Aug. 26 2010 07:59 AM EDT
Some 9/11 Families Show Support for Mosque Near Ground Zero
By Nathan Black|Christian Post Reporter

A group of religious and civil rights groups and family members of 9/11 victims announced on Wednesday the formation of a new coalition in support of an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.

Calling themselves the New York Neighbors for American Values, the coalition stood near City Hall in lower Manhattan defending religious freedom and diversity.

“We share the pain … and yes, even the lingering fear caused by the September 11 attacks. But we unequivocally reject the political posturing, the fear mongering and the crude stereotyping that seek to demonize the project whose goal is to build bridges among the faiths,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“We are committed to resisting the efforts to push Park51 out of downtown and we reject the refrain of ‘freedom of religion but not in my backyard,'” she added.

Talat Hamdani lost a 23-year-old son, a paramedic, in the 2001 terrorist attacks. But she said supporting the Islamic center and mosque “has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with standing up for our human rights, including freedom of religion,” as reported by The Associated Press.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities

Kids, Chinese Heritage and Sheepshead + Buddhism

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Lughnasa                          Waxing Artemis Moon

Whew.  Into the MIA for tours with kiddies from the Peace Games at the park across from the Museum.  I had two groups, one a group of girls mostly who were sensitive, responsive and imaginative.  A pleasure.  The second group was all tween boys who wandered, posed, paused and were harder to engage, though the sword did get their attention.

When finished, I knew I had to return at 5:45 and I had the option of staying, but I chose to drive back home and take a nap.  After an illness, I like to get as much rest as possible.

So, turn around at 5:00 pm and go back to the museum for a tour of the Matteo Ricci map with the Chinese Heritage Foundation.  They were a lively, bright group who could read the map!  That gave more insight into it.  Lots of good questions, conversation.

I left the museum at 6:45 and headed over to St. Paul to sheepshead.  The card gods smiled on me tonight.  After a slow start, I got some better cards.

Then, back home.  A long day.  On the drive I’ve been listening to more of the Religions of the Axial Age lectures.  The ones right now focus on Buddhism.  I’ve never found Buddhism appealing though certain elements seem helpful.  Since I’m a not a big believer in reincarnation or kharma, the Buddha seems to be solving a problem I don’t have.  After listening to the notion of no-self, I began to have a distinct puzzlement.  I don’t get how the notion of no-self and continuing rebirth co-exist.  I must be misunderstanding something.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, World History

Emperor of Ten-Thousand Calendars

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Lughnasa                                     Waxing Artemis Moon

Two very different tours today:  Peace Games with small children in globs of 15 or so for 15 minutes and a Matteo Ricci tour for Chinese folks.  The first one is about fun, questions, seeking treasure and oh by the way this is art.   In the first room I have, a collection of modern Japanese ceramics, not very promising for  young kids, I’m going to have them look for something that looks like it came off an airplane and some flowers.  Then, if they seem interested, we’ll put together a group story.  In the next room there is a very cool piece in which an artist who is under pressure from the law is defended by characters from his prints.  I’ll tell the story there.  In the ukiyo-e gallery, we’ll be looking at netsuke.  The kids will decide which one is most like someone in their life.  In the next to last gallery I’ll tell the story of the Minamoto battles on the big screen, we’ll look at the samurai armor and swords.  If there’s time, we’ll hunt for animals in the last gallery.

The Matteo Ricci is something completely different.  This is an exhibit honoring a Westerner, Ricci, who visited China as a Jesuit, landing in Macao in 1583 and dying in Peking in 1610 while serving as court mathematician to the WanLi emperor.  While in Peking, he created a huge map in six large panels, a map of the world, the first to use Western and Chinese cartography.  Though Ricci had hundreds of these maps printed only 5 survived to the present day.  At least that was what was originally thought.  A London rare maps dealer found this map, the one on display at the MIA, in the collection of a private party in Japan.  It’s discovery caused one map scholar to name it “the impossible black tulip.”  The James Ford Bell Library at the university of Minnesota purchased it for $1,000,000.  It will complement their collection which “documents the history and impact of international trade prior to ca. 1800 C.E.”

It represents an interesting historical nexus, reformation and enlightenment era Europe visiting China in the final years of the Ming Dynasty, at a point when the Chinese had turned away from sailing in the age of sail and had begun to deemphasize foreign contacts just as European traders from the Dutch and Britain began to show up alongside the earlier and better established Portuguese and Spanish.  They were not alone.  It was in the early 1600’s that Japan closed the country to foreign trade and foreign visitors.

The Wanli Emperor, the Emperor of Ten Thousand Calendars, was in the last years of his reign when Ricci finally made it to Peking becoming the first Westerner in the northern capital established by the Yongle Emperor in the 15th century.  The Wanli emperor had started his reign well, executing military matters and administrative concerns with some skill.  He became disenchanted, however, with the infighting and moral attacks back and forth among Neo-Confucian scholar officials.  In response he essentially gave up the running of the country, leaving China with a faction fractured central government compounded by his imperial inaction.  The effect was to remove China from the world scene just as European exploration, commercial avarice and technological advancements grafted itself onto Europe’s own imperial ambitions.  The result of these two forces moving in opposite directions would change the course of world history, a change only now beginning to right itself from a Chinese perspective.

It was into this volatile mixture that Ricci brought European science, mathematics, art and, of course, religion.  Ricci became a literati, a member of the scholar-official class, mastering Chinese and the mores of the governing class.  His acceptance in those circles propelled him close to the Imperial court and found him buried in Peking after his death in 1610, an honor accorded to few Westerners.  He did not, however, convince many Chinese to become Roman Catholics.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Politics

I Sing The Body Electric

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.    “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman

Coming to the end of another round of this summer bug, or rather virus, an intracellular interloper replicating at my expense.  Even though I’ve felt decentered, defocused and dis-eased, my body has gone on working, repelling these bad actors and throwing up barriers to their return.

Do you ever think about the daily miracle that is your body?  All the parts of it that have to work in homeostasis, levels of creatinine, thyroid hormones, testosterone, potassium and the gut with its legion of foreign bacteria working to aid our digestion and the lungs stealing oxygen from the atmosphere which has just enough that we can live and the ear which not only helps us hear but keeps us upright and steady; the nervous system wheeling electricity throughout the body turning this on, that off, moving this muscle, contracting the other, moving my fingers for example in the dance learned long ago in Alexandria-Monroe High School typing class; all that blood moving, moving, moving pulsing, delivering oxygen, energy to muscles and organs, pulsing through the heart, that fleshy pump working night and day, year in and year out, an organ we take notice of most often when it begins to fail or flail; not to forget the only organ connected directly to the brain, the eye with the optical nerve taking information back to the occipital lobe where it converts to actual images of what the eye has impressed upon it.  Amazing.

Let me say thank you to whatever long and distant chain has led from the foamy oceans of mother earth’s origins up through the one-celled, the multicelluar, the strange moving ones who finally made land and who went on to be dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and lions and tigers and bears oh my and me, too.  Each of us sit as the particular and current end-point of one line of protoplasm that could,  if we were god-like enough, be traced to its unique origin in, say, a small amoeba-like creature floating at the time in a place that would someday be called Australia.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Having said that what do you think of Mark Dayton?  I confess, I voted for him, in spite of my doubts, because he seemed the best bet to beat Emmer, a strange duck to have representing anybody except say, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin if they constituted the whole of an odd sub-set of Minnesota voters.  We so need a Democratic governor and legislature over the next four years.  Without them budgets will get balanced on the backs of the poor, just witness the cock-up in GAMC that Warren Wolfe has covered so ably in the Star-Tribune.  Without them budgets will get balanced by trading short term gain for long term environmental degradation.  So, if you’re of the Democratic persuasion, give money, knock on doors, help them.  If you’re a Republican, take a really good long look at Emmer.  He’s a weird one and not right for this state.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Dreams, Humanities

So. You’re Undead. Now What?

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Lughnasa                                   New (Artemis) Moon

What is it with all the vampire stuff around right now?  Those terrible Twilight movies.  The much better Vampire Diaries and the Gates on TV.  The Passage, which I just finished, written by a “literary” novelist.  Not to mention the background of Anne Rice and all those undead erotica books, I don’t recall what they’re called.  Is it about the outs and the ins?  Is it about the saved and the damned?  Is it about the need for mystery and wonder in an increasingly secular age?  There’s even a BBC series called Being Human.

I’ve not read or seen a really good vampire story, I mean really good, since Hammer Films “Horror of Dracula” with the exception of True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I enjoyed the Anne Rice material, her stuff about the Mayfair witches, too.  I also liked Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.  True Blood, the HBO series is among the best ever in my opinion, right up there with Buffy.  I’m not sure what it says, either, that the ones I enjoy most are on TV.  I’m a literary and movie guy at heart, but the small screen does allow for character development and multiple story lines.

There’s a lot of media studies and cultural studies ink that has been spilled about the fascination with vampires.  I’m sure many of you who read this find them quite beside the point.  My guess is that they give us a way of exploring the notion of an afterlife without having to get to close to it.  The evil nature of the vampire prevents idolization, though much of contemporary vampire fiction plays with this received wisdom.

Even so, we wonder, what would I do if I had all the time I wanted?  What would I do?  What would I become?  If the only answer is, feed blood lust, well, that turns out to not be very interesting after a few dead bodies, but the question of love between an immortal and a mortal, that’s juicy.  What about power?  Would you seek wealth and control if you had eternal life on this earth?  What might you do if you loathed the thing being a vampire made you?  Self-loathing is a favorite distraction among teens and adults alike.  This question drives a lot of today’s Dracula derivative stories.

Whatever it is, and it’s probably each of these and more, there seems to be plenty of energy and money for turning out vampire stories.  Even bad ones.

Aging, Family, Humanities, Memories

Memorable

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.  Then stopped and put some pressure on.  Then stroked some more.  Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.  She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.  I’m feeling knot and kink free.  Massage clears out the mind as well as the muscles.  As Katie moved around my body, memories came flooding back.  Mom’s hands on my neck when I had polio.  The Alexandria 4-H county fair.  That afternoon in Bangkok when I let a tiny Thai woman loose on my just ruptured achilles, not knowing what it was.  Steel fingers and pain.  Lots of pain.  Then the night I stepped in the sewer grate while my body moved forward and my right foot stayed in place.  Body memories, unlocked by Katie.

Memories have a fluid, slippery existence, just like Katie’s hands as she followed the process of my spine from neck to tail.  As I write about Mom and polio, an image of stuffing tissues into hardware cloth followed.  The float for homecoming for my class, seniors at last.  Being pulled away from that by who?  I don’t recall.  Then I was in Anderson, 9 miles away, at St. John’s hospital where my mother had been taken after collapsing while serving a funeral dinner.  After that the sculpted green plastic and aluminum tubing of waiting room furniture at Riley Memorial in Indianapolis.  Mom on a gurney, now 7 days after stroke, me riding with her as they took for an operation.  She reached away from me and said, “Son.”  The last words I heard from her.  The painful early morning talk with my father, should we remove the life supports?  Yes, we both decided.  Yes.  Then the funeral.  And the days and weeks and months after where I failed to integrate mom’s death as a powerful life lesson and instead took it as an emotional blast that rocked my very foundations.

Bangkok, stumbling away from the 7-11 and the amulet stand in front of it, hurrying to get to the ATM.  Traffic making me anxious, not careful.  Blinding pain, yet running anyway because of the traffic, the cars.  All the traffic and the cars.  The night air humid as the flashing neon of Chinatown bathed the sidewalk in alternating colors, like the northern lights.

As I know, we change our memories each time we access them, so all of these events, crucial as they are to my story, may not represent the truth at all, at least not the veridical, the actual truth.  But, in a more important way, they are the most truthful of all since they are the truth that has shaped my response to all these things and the thousands more accreted over the years of my life so far.  Even my account of the massage, who knows how close it is?  Yet the feeling lingers.  Good.  Feeling.