Category Archives: Humanities

Asia, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Weather +Climate, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

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Summer                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Hot today.  At least by our standards.  85.  Plus a dewpoint of 70.  Not outside weather for this gardener.  I did work outside this morning, weeding in the orchard and checking the trees.  I’m going to need a consultation with Ecological Gardens because some of the stuff they planted, I don’t recognize and I don’t want to remove friendlies out of ignorance.

Kate’s off getting a pre-op physical, having dental work done and nails and hair.  A sort of clean up, paint up, fix up day for her.  Her surgery is a week from tomorrow and can’t come a day too soon for her.  The pain in her hip gives her fits during the day when she walks and at night when she sleeps.  She looks forward to having more than two sleeping positions.  So would I.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has held me for several weeks now, though I’m not reading in large chunks.  It’s a three-volume work about the end of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the three kingdoms of Wu, Wei and Shu.  This period only last for about 45 years, but it holds a position of particular importance in Chinese culture, with many of its figures like Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang and the three brothers:  Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Liu Bei attaining iconic and archetypal significance.

(Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu)

It’s not an exact analogy at all, but it resembles the mythos of the American West, a time when men were men and some men were very good and others were very bad.

If you enjoy political and military tales or have an interest in the logic of other cultures, then the Three Kingdoms may enthrall you as it has me.  If you’re not sure, I recommend seeing the Red Cliffs, the two disc version.  The movie showcases all the main characters and records a pivotal battle, one that has ongoing importance in Chinese culture.  Not to mention that it’s great fun.  Again, if political and military intrigue fascinate you.

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

Cultural Relativism

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Summer                                 Waxing Strawberry Moon

“The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.” – Ruth Benedict

Long ago, back in the Paleozoic 1960’s I majored in anthropology.  Anthropology taught me a lot, shaped my view of the world.  In anthropology, long before it became fashionable enough to merit bashing on the then non-existent Fox News Network, multi-culturalism was an everyday conversation.  Ruth Benedict, herself an early anthropologist and student of Franz Boas, the father of anthropology reflects just that sensibility in this quote.

Anthropologist’s developed the idea of cultural relativism and it was and is crucial to anthropology as a discipline.  Anthropologists do field work using the participant observer method, which involves immersing oneself in the cultural of another, then writing about it.  Boas and the early anthropologists, among them Margaret Meade, had to undergo psychoanalysis as a preliminary to field work.  This was to enable the field worker to grasp, as best he or she could, the difference between something they brought to the interaction and the actual expression of a different worldview.

Cultural relativism meant that much as we might like to believe otherwise (manifest destiny, Hail Britannia) one culture’s solution to the way of surviving and flourishing is as valid as any others.  This is the core idea behind multi-culturalism, not merely a liberal tolerance of difference, but suspension of our own values and beliefs in order to accord respect to the other.

Does this have problems?  Yes, it does.   Critics like Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue, say it represents an essential of Modernism, that is, ethical relativism.  MacIntyre suggests we consider Hitler’s Nazi party or, I suppose, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.  Using the notion of cultural relativism are we not bound to honor their horrific outcomes?

Academics often get caught in the absolutizing of their notions.  It’s either cultural relativism or a solid tradition, like the Thomistic Catholicism that MacIntyre puts forward.  In fact, I think these are more tendencies, ways we lean when assessing data.  Cultural relativism and the thinner soup of multi-culturalism are an inoculant, a vaccine against imperialism, against the unthinking imposition of a more powerful culture on a weaker one.

Tradition, on the other hand, seems an inescapable and therefore most likely necessary ingredient of the human lived experience.  Within in it we learn how to behave as an American, a Vietnamese, a Hmong, a Trobriand Islander.  We come to assume that the tradition and the culture in which we are raised is normative, and, in fact, it is normative in the vast majority of situations which we encounter.  It is when we cross cultures or traditions that questions arise that we may not have considered.

Who says democracy  is the only acceptable form of government?  Who says individual rights always come before the needs of the tribe or the state?  Who says marriage between homosexual couples is wrong, ipso facto?  Who says circumcision is critical?  Who says we cannot execute anybody we want to by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair?

It occurs to me that cultural relativism is a necessary defense against the arrogance of power, just as tradition is a defense against the moral relativism that a global perspective seems to require.  To position these two powerful aspects of human life, culture and tradition, against each other goes too far.  Instead, we need to learn the lesson each has to teach us and apply them both with humility and care.

NB:  Back to Hitler and Pol Pot.  We do not need to accept their violent prejudice as normative even under the notion of cultural relativism. What is necessary in those cases is to go within the culture of Germany and Cambodia, to mine their traditions and to critique them from within their worldviews.  It can be done and can easily be shown to be possible.  Then, we respect culture and yet have an avenue for expression of our deeply held values in a different cultural idiom.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Humanities, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Woolly Mammoths

Into the City

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Summer Solstice                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

The Woollies gathered tonight at Charlie Haislet’s place in the Rock Island condos, just north and a bit east of downtown.  We gathered, our numbers shrunk by various summer activities to:  Charlie, Warren, Frank, Scott, Bill, Mark and myself.  The conversation went on as it does, checking in on how folks are, what’s going on, but Charlie turned the conversation toward Father’s day.  It seemed to  me, as I listened, that we have all rooted ourselves in family, our nuclear and extended families, and, further, that as we have grown older, those connections have grown richer and deeper, occupying the central spot in each of our lives that the voice of tradition has suggested they might.

Charlie’s 7th floor (top) condo overlooked downtown; the waxing strawberry moon hung over the glass and stone cityscape, the dying sun reflecting in the mirrored surfaces of the IDS, the Northwest Building and all the modernist architecture there.  I’ve been critical of it as lacking flair and imagination, but tonight, a clear warm summer night, the reflections and the twilight, then the advance of night and the reflections of lights was glorious.  It looked like Oz, as I think of it when I turn on Hwy 610 heading south and see it far away, maybe 15-20 miles.

Before the meeting, I arrived a little early and took advantage of the time to walk through the neighborhood, a now populous community that is no more than 20 years old.  There was a couple with a young boy in a stroller and a dog, a young man with his white shirt half out, tie askew with his dog, a couple with a puppy, all walking, off work and at home.  The buildings were brick, a few old, like the Rock Island and The Creamette, but many new.

Some had iron barred and locked fence doors protecting patios which anyone could easily vault onto from the railing.  There were signs: no walking on the grass, dog waste here, guest parking only, towing $260.00.  The green space that existed had a manicured and distant feel, as if its purpose was to recall, to remind rather thanto be.  The windows had blinds and shutters; thanks to air conditioning almost none were open, so the few people I encountered while walking were all I could see other than tailored walls and well hung windows, the odd bit of decor.  It felt, not empty, but not lively either.

Putting myself there as a resident, I tried to decide if this would work for me.  It has the advantage of being near to the main library, downtown, the shopping around University and Hennepin, the Mississippi and its parks.  There would be neighbors aplenty and the urban feel has a certain up energy to it.

These days, though, when many folks I know have moved or want to move from the burbs into the city, I’d have to say I surprised myself.  It felt too confining, too many neighbors, too many shared walls, too many signs and restrictions.  Too little room to plant, to have dogs run, to exercise a horticultural or apicultural inclination.  It surprised me because I consider myself a city boy, wedded to political work and aesthetic work that require the urban environment for their realization.

I’ve changed.  I’m now an exurban man, grown used to the quiet here, the open space, the land on which we can grow vegetables and flowers, have a bee yard, a honey house and a separate play house for the grandkids.  When I drive by Round Lake, I’ve come home.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Summer. It’s About Time.

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Summer Solstice                                      Waxing Strawberry Moon

 

The longest day of the year.  Light triumphant, streaming, steaming.  The darkness held at bay.

Summer Solstice

This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one.  We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

The Celts first divided their year into two:  Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end.  As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes.  Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays.  Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel.  In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time.  This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time.  With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next.  Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality.  That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions.  My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time.  We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now.  What is time?  What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy.  Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees.  It is, today, the Summer Solstice.  Again.  As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space.  another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time.  This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school.  The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over.  These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events.  There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later.  Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next?  Not in my opinion.

I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it.  It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light.  We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark.  We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again.  We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance.  This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me.  That’s the light I have today anyhow.  Let’s talk next year at this time.

Aging, Family, Garden, Humanities

Catching Up

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Summer’s Eve                                  Waxing Strawberry Moon

More weeding along the fenceline.  It feels like I’ve beaten back both the weeds and revealed the now minimal amount of repair still required to bring the vegetable garden area back to where it began last fall.  I planted another round of beans, doing so at weekly intervals.  Took some photographs.  A full morning.

Having put on sunscreen first today I don’t have that slightly queasy feel I got yesterday.  Us Celts have a delicate situation when it comes to sun.  We have fair skin and burn easily.  Might be why I’ve never liked the beach.

Kate planted coleus and marigolds, did some weeding and put in some annual grasses.  All of this work is a little behind for us, but we’ve begun to catch up in the last few days.  I believe we’ll be on top of it by the end of the week.

Greg, my Latin tutor, is in Portugal the next two weeks with his sweetheart, so the Latin will slow down.  We decided I needed to go back over the last two chapter’s sententia antiquae, ancient sentences, and work them carefully.  If I have time, I’ll go on to Chapter 20 which is, in fact, halfway through Wheelock’s 40 chapters.

Family, Garden, Humanities

A Pruning Dervish

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Beltane                            New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

Kate became a pruning dervish this morning, clearing a pathway to our front door, giving the draping yew apruned-old-salvia hair-cut and generally wrecking havoc with weeds and overgrown shrubs.  Yeah.  Now I’m moving the detritus to a resting place where the grape vines, columbine and raspberries will grow over it and make it a productive part of our property instead of a house-hider.

I have gotten through the perfect passive system for all verbs, interrogative pronouns, interrogative adjectives and a new  vocabulary.  Later on we’re going to skype with the kids and the grandkids.  How Sunday’s going around here.

Aging, Humanities

Globe Circling Teens

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Beltane                                          New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

A Latin day except for periods outside.  I’ve found doing the chapter of Wheelock that’s next up on Sunday, at least most of it, lets me finish the chapter on Monday or at the latest Tuesday morning.  That gives me Tuesday and Wednesday to work on Ovid.  My tutor says I have to be very mechanical at this point, hunt for the subject, object, verb first.  I have a tendency to get lost looking for meaning in all the wrong places.  Just like life.

Abby Sunderland, the 16 year old girl who would circle the globe, had her main mast broken in nasty weather.  The South Indian ocean, which gets a lot of its weather from the interaction of the cold Antarctic air with the warmer air from the tropics has a nasty reputation among sailors.  Jessica Watson, the 16 year girl who did circle the world, passed through the Southern Indian Ocean about a month ago and she had rough weather there, too.

To say that 16 year olds should not be allowed to do this kind of thing is stupid.  Perhaps most 16 year olds, or nearly all 16 year olds, but you have to leave open the option for the prodigy or the merely very competent.  Jessica Watson makes the case.  So does Abby Sunderland.  Having a mast broken would put a stop to any sailor, no matter their level of experience.  Abby did not die.  She had emergency gear and plans.  They all worked.

Might there be a tragedy someday?  Yes, I imagine there will.  Probably already has been.  Alexander the Great was 20 when he set out to conquer the known world.  33 when he died.  How many of today’s risk averse adults would allow their children to set out, even at 20, to conquer the world?  I thought so.

My point is that teen agers are individuals, not cookie-cutter imitations of each other.  Over much of history teen agers had the bulk of the babies, fought the wars and were even leaders of their families and communities.  Our complex cultural environment now trends toward longer and longer periods of pre-adulthood, an article in the paper today said many Gen-Xers and Millenials will not marry, have kids or get started in their careers until they are in their late 20’s or early 30’s.

It does not change the fact that some teen agers–you know who you are–have the capacity to handle individual efforts beyond even most adults.

Aging, Bees, Family, Humanities

Bees, Latin and Learning

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

A sleepy, rainy day.  After a very busy Monday, I settled into the Latin and finished off chapter 18 in Wheelock.  It took most of the day with a couple of instances (well, maybe more than a couple) of head scratching and paging back and forth to find out what I was not understanding.

Kate and I have settled into our familiar and comfortable routines.  She went out today to have her nails done while I labored in the scriptorium.

Tonight is the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association meeting at Borlaug Hall.  I feel both mildly competent and wildly confused with both the beekeeping and the Latin.  I’ve now overwintered a package of bees, made a divide into parent and child colonies and hived a package of bees by myself.  The smoker stays lit for the duration of my work in the bee yard and I have not repeated my various stings event.

Yet.  When I pulled the frames from the parent colony and moved one to the package colony and one to the divide, I felt very unsure of what I had done.  Still am.  I look at the frames and I can tell the pollen filled cells from the honey filled cells.  I know what larvae look like and I can identify a drone cell and its unique domed structure.  Queen or swarm cells are also apparent to me.  Even so, I cannot tell healthy frames from troubled ones.

I get addled about what I’m doing because of the bees buzzing around and forget what I’ve done like I did yesterday with the reverse of the parent colony.  I have no clue about what to do with the honey the bees are making, I’m just imagining that I’ll learn about that in time to do it.

In the Latin I miss obvious things and pick up on some obscure ones like word meanings, verb forms and case endings for nouns and adjectives.  I have two index cards filled with words, mostly adverbs and conjunctions, that I can’t remember.   I puzzle over a translation, no luck, no luck, no luck, then a bright light.  Ah ha.

Learning has this daunting vulnerability to it.  Without placing yourself in a situation where you don’t know what you’re your doing, you cannot learn.  It keeps a guy humble that’s for sure.

Asia, Garden, Health, Humanities

Better…And Not

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Beltane                                   Waning Planting Moon

I’m still deep in the The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, following the exploits of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei among many, many others.  Still not a third of the way done with it.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll do more weeding. Weeding and pruning.  Those are the main tasks at this point in the gardening year.  That and finding some weedless straw for mulch.  It’s hard to find.

A week and a half past my colds onset I feel pretty good, back to normal with the exception of  remaining sludge.  I feel like an engine in need of an oil change.  I even went back to the ramped up work outs  today and had no repeat of the dizziness and nausea I experience a couple of weeks ago, the last time I did this workout at the new pace.

Feeling a bit of a let down, not sure why.  Maybe it’s just the push, push of garden, Latin, dogs, food or, more likely, it’s just a cycling through of a bit of melancholy.  Whatever it is sleep will help.

Cooking, Holidays, Humanities

A Holiday Sunday

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Beltane                                       Waning Planting Moon

What the hell, I thought, I’ll just cook a chicken.  And I did.  With onion, walnut, Paul Prudhomme poultry seasoning and sesame  oil.  It’s cooling off on the rack right now.  I also cooked up a pot of wheat berries.  Both are moves from the Brenda Langton course I took on healthy eating.  She had a few tips for the week.  One, pick a meat and use it for several meals.  So, you bake a chicken and have it as a meal.  That’s today.  Later on for sandwiches or in a salad.  At the end the week you through the carcass and left over meat in a soup pot and make some sort of potage or the other.

The wheat berries go into cereals, smoothies, ontop of waffles or salads.  Can be eaten alone, too.  She also recommends having nuts around the house for use as condiments and snacks.  None of this is rocket science but it is nice to have a framework.  Add in fruits and veggies and there’s a healthy week of meals.

Had to go upstairs to let a dog out and had some of the chicken.  Moist with a crunchy skin.  Delicious.

Got part way through ch. 17 in Wheelock, too.

Finally, I watched the last of the Indiana 500 mile race.  This race and high school basketball have as much to do with being a hoosier as the lakes do with being a Minnesotan.  Danica finished at #5.  Ashley Judd looked cute running down pit row, clutching her straw hat and trying to keep her sun dress decent.  Her husband, Dino Franchitti, just won his second 500 and she seemed very happy for him.