• Category Archives Humanities

  • Music. Painting.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                     New Valentine Moon

    We started our Sunday at the Clyfford Still Museum. A chamber music quartet played in Gallery 5. Their audience which carried some nifty aluminum gallery chairs to the room filled the gallery. They were appreciative, too, but, as Kate pointed out, they clapped after every movement. Not the mark of a sophisticated crowd.

    I took the opportunity to wander through this small museum, listening to the music as I tried to get a read on Clyfford Still. A few of his later works were wonderful, brave. A favorite featured a huge, mostly blank canvas, with just a few yellow marks flying up like a flame burning mysteriously, some white, splashes of orange and a few scarlet intrusions from below.

    20160207_142150

    I sat for a while in the gallery next to the one where the music played looking at the painting below. Somehow, I don’t even remember how now, I became a chamber music fan. For seventeen years I went to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, attending most concerts in their season with a subscription.

    I’m not a sophisticated listener from a musical point of view. That is, I don’t really follow the construction of a piece, nor do I understand the intent a composer may have had. Not an impediment. This music reaches inside my rib cage and squeezes my heart. Often, I would sit, eyes closed, watching small sparks, sometimes large ones, dance behind my eyelids, called into existence by a note, a run, a solo performance, a particular melody.

    Other times a profound sense of melancholy would overtake me, followed by jubilation. With Charles Ives’ pieces, he’s a particular favorite of mine, a small crack in the fabric of space-time could open to reveal just a glimpse of what lay beyond this moment.

    I mention this because while I sat in the gallery yesterday, a question, not an original one by any means, came to me: what is the difference between music and painting? Both are art forms. Both with artists engaged intimately. Both requiring tools for the artist. Both appealing to a desire (or need, even if undiscovered) to see or hear the world in a new way, a way not possible in the everyday. Both requiring some seriousness in the listener or the viewer, some attention to the work, some willingness to be vulnerable. Both chamber music and abstract art with long histories.

    Still 600

    Yet the differences were stark. The music floated through the galleries, taking up aural space everywhere, yet visible nowhere except Gallery 5 and even there only the artists and their tools could be seen: cello, violins, viola. One of the wonders of music is that we can see the musicians at work, bow in hand, reed wet, embouchure quivering yet we cannot see what they make. So music is invisible and painting very, necessarily visible.

    Also, music is ephemeral. A painting, with appropriate conservation, can last centuries, even millennia. Once a note, a run from the quartet was heard, it died away and others filled in behind it, the linear drive of the music creating a certain expectation, a sense of beginning, middle and end. Still painted this canvas in 1972. With the exception of some possible changes to the linen and the paint-and I don’t know if there have been any-this work looks now like it did when he laid down his brush. So a painting is in that sense static.

    That static nature of a painting is, in fact, a part of its meaning. We have confidence that we stand before what the artist intended; so a painting provides a moment, unmediated by others, when we as viewers can connect personally with the expressive power of a person often long dead, think Fra Angelico or Rembrandt or Poussin. Still died in the early 1970’s.

    Music, in contrast, requires mediation, at least in chamber music. We hear, usually, not one artist, but many interpreting through their instruments the musical idea of a composer no longer able to comment on his or her intention. And we hear that interpretation, in the instance of live music, only once.

    But, and here was an idea that was new to me, I might leave a concert whistling a melody or a particular portion of a composition. I might remember much of it, be able to recall the work as I go on from the concert hall. But, in the instance of abstract art, it is very difficult to recall what I’ve seen. The lack of representation of things familiar leaves my mind adrift when it comes to recall. This may, of course, be just me, but I imagine not.

    So in this aspect, interestingly, the abstract painting becomes ephemeral, seen, then not recalled or recalled poorly, while a symphony or a concerto or a smaller chamber piece might remain, at least in part, accessible long after being heard.

    In this case the apparent distinctive elements of stability and ephemerality are reversed, music being memorable, no longer ephemeral, and painting being unstable, as impermanent as the music I listened to yesterday in the gallery.

     


    Art and Culture Family Humanities Music

  • Stock Show Weather

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule                                                                                 New (Stock Show) Moon

    The Denver metro has Stock Show weather. Stock Show weather is cold as opposed to snowy, not surprising since the Stock Show runs the three weeks after the first week of the New Year.

    We got 5 or 6 inches of snow overnight. The next few nights will be in the single digits or low double digits, cold by Colorado standards. Just getting cool by Minnesota’s. It rarely gets chilly here, that is well below zero, though it does happen. Still, as I told Greg, my Latin tutor, this morning, I wouldn’t care to visit Minnesota during a chilly period. Not anymore.

    A couple of weeks ago Greg gave me an assignment. Match my English translation against other English translations, then figure out where and why we differ. This means I’m moving closer to the sort of translating I sought when I began this long journey. In order to proceed honestly I still have to translate the Latin first, then check others. This way I don’t engage in cheating, making my translation fit someone else’s interpretation. But, done in the proper sequence this method allows me to begin polishing my language, getting beyond a more literal translation to a more literary one.

    Getting back to regular, that is daily, Latin work has been frustratingly slow. I’ve allowed holidays and illness to intrude. Understandable, not helpful. After this morning’s session though, I have a feeling I’m back at it. Greg said I did very well with the material I prepared. That means, when we sight read the Latin, I easily and accurately translated what I had put through the English translation match.

    With my workouts somewhat regular now, illness and holidays again, it feels as if I’m returning to the productive rhythm I had in Minnesota. Now I need to add writing on a novel and/or the reimagining book. Working out, Latin and creative writing are the three legs to my stool, each necessary in their own way.

    The art will come along, too.


    Colorado Humanities Latin Myth and Story Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. The West US History

  • Marginal

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                       Christmas Moon

    We saw the last of the Brother/Sister trilogy yesterday afternoon at Curious Theater, “No guts, no story.” Marcus, the Secret of Sweet. This trilogy, which used Yoruba mythology heavily in its first two plays, lightens up on that in the last one. It is a complex story, one I’d need to see the whole again to piece it together with any confidence, but the trilogy gives the background, both cultural and mythic, to the coming of age of a young gay black man in Louisiana.

    Though uneven at times in the first two plays, this last play stays focused and gets at the multiple challenges of being different in a community already oppressed for difference. The trilogy is about outliers, about the challenges that face them in daily life, about the deep mythos that can ground them, but often doesn’t.

    Sexuality is, at best, a confused and highly charged aspect of human life. And, that’s for the normative heterosexual experience. Move into the homoerotic and the layering of doubts, fears, joys, ecstasies increase. Place that in a southern Christian African-American community, a community with the history of enslavement as yet another force pushing sexuality to the margins and the burden on one young boy is immense.

    If you get the chance to see these plays, this drama and this playwright will open your mind and your heart.


    Art and Culture Colorado Humanities

  • Having a Moment

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

    I’m having a moment. It’s immediate stimulus has been reading How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. Kohn is an anthropologist who has done significant field work in el Oriente, the east of Ecuador where the Andes go down into the tropical rain forests of the Amazon drainage. But this book is something else. Though it draws on his field work with the Runa, its focus is the nature of anthropology as a discipline and, more broadly, how humans fit into the larger world of plants and animals.

    Thomas Berry’s little book, The Great Work, influenced a change in my political work from economic justice to environmental politics. Berry said that the great work for our time is creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. In 2008 I began working on the political committee of the Sierra Club with an intent to do my part in an arena I know well. I continued at the Sierra Club until January of 2014 until I resigned, mostly to avoid winter driving into the Twin Cities.

    Since then, I’ve been struggling with how I can contribute to the great work. Our garden and the bees were effective, furthering the idea of becoming native to this place. The move to Colorado though has xed them out.

    Kohn’s book has helped me see a different contribution I can make. Political work is mostly tactical, dealing in change in the here and now or the near future. In the instance of climate change, tactical work is critical for not only the near future but for the distant future as well. I’ve kept my head down and feet moving forward on the tactical front for a long, long time.

    There are though other elements to creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. A key one is imagining what that human presence might be like. Not imagining a world of Teslas and Volts, renewable energy, local farming, water conservation, reduced carbon emissions, though all those are important tactical steps toward that presence; but, reimagining what it means to be human in a sustainable relationship with the earth.

    Kohn is reimagining what being human is. His reimagining is a brilliant attempt to reframe who thinks, how they think and how all sentience fits together. He’s not the only one attempting to do this. The movement is loosely called post-humanist, removing humans from the center of the conceptual universe.  A posthuman world would be analogous to the solar system after Galileo and Copernicus removed the earth from the center. Humans, like the earth, would still exist, but their location within the larger order will have shifted significantly.

    This fits in so well with my reimagining faith project. It also fits with some economic reimagining I’ve been reading about focused on eudaimonia, human flourishing. It also reminds me of a moment I’ve recounted before, the Iroquois medicine man, a man in a 700 year lineage of medicine men, speaking at the end of a conference on liberation theology. The time was 1974. He prayed over the planting of a small pine tree, a symbol of peace among the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy because those tribes put their weapons in a hole, then planted a pine tree over them.

    His prayer was first to the winged ones, then the four-leggeds and those who swim and those who go on water and land, the prayer went on asking for the health and well-being of every living thing. Except the two-leggeds. I noticed this and went up to him after the ceremony and asked him why he hadn’t mention the two-leggeds. “Because,” he said, “we two-leggeds are so fragile. Our lives depend on the health of all the others, so we pray for them. If the rest are healthy, then we will be, too.”

    Reimagine faith in a manner consistent with that vision. Reimagine faith in a post-humanist world. Reimagine faith from within and among rather than without and above. This is work I can do. Work my library is already fitted to do. Work I’ve felt in my gut since an evening on Lake Huron, long ago, when the sun set so magnificently that I felt pulled into the world around me, became part of it for a moment. Work that moment I’ve mentioned before when I felt aligned with everything in the universe, that mystical moment, has prepared me for. Yes, work I can do. Here on Shadow Mountain.

     

     

     


    Beyond the Boundaries Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Humanities Mountains Myth and Story Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Shadow Mountain Third Phase Writing

  • Bibliotherapy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                 Healing Moon

    My father’s day present from Kate is a session with the bibliotherapists at the School of Life. I’ll write more about it after I’ve had my session, but I wanted to share here the questionnaire they send out in advance. Later, I’ll post my answers. Meanwhile, these are interesting questions to ponder.

    I’m seeking their thoughts on a reading plan for the next few years. Feels like my reading has gotten chaotic and I’d like to put some more heft in it. We’ll see what the process produces.

    Welcome to The School of Life Bibliotherapy Service.Prior to your consultation we would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to answer the following questions.
    Name: X
    Contact no: X
    instructions: Please send your answers to us at:bibliotherapy@theschooloflife.com

    at least 24 hours before your consultation.
    We look forward to speaking with you. PLEASE let us know 24 hours in advance if for some reason you can’t make your appointment. Failure to do so may result in forfeiting your session.

     

     

     

    About your reading habits
    How would you describe your relationship to books?

     

    		 X
    Did books feature largely in your childhood? X
    Where do you like to read? X
    Why do you read? X
    In a bookshop, which section do you head to first? And then? X
    Which books and authors have loved most? Least enjoyed? X
    Do you like the challenge of a big fat tome or do you prefer something slim? X
    Do you always finish the books you start? X
    In your mind, what constitutes a “good read”? X
    If there were such a thing as the perfect book for you, what would it be like? X

     

     

     

    About you
    How old are you?

     

    		 X
    Are you single, co-habiting, married, divorced? Do you have kids? X
    What do you do for a living? for fun? X
    What is preoccupying you at the moment? X
    What are your passions? X
    What is missing from your life? X
    Where do you see yourself in 10 years’ time? X

     


    Humanities Literature Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • The Blood of the Lamb

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                   Mountain Spring Moon

    There are historic occasions that are of major cultural significance, then there are occasions of historic significance on a smaller scale. Last night Jen  hosted her first seder. It felt good to drive over to their home (see above for the route) for a holiday, especially passover. One of the characteristics of Judaism that has long appealed to me is its emphasis on worship and holidays centered in the home.

    Many of the most memorable holidays like Hannukah and Sukkoth are observed in the home. And, in fact, passover, a key holiday for Jewish identity along with Rosh Hoshanah Purim and Yom Kippur, is largely a home based celebration. I’ve been to several over the years, but none of them were as sweet as this one.

    A Rabbinic Haggadah guides those gathered through this old, old ritual. Traditional estimates place the Exodus, the story at the heart of pesach, or passover, in 1300 B.C.E. Perhaps three thousand years old pesach links each Jewish family and their seder guests to a time of liberation from bondage, making freedom from slavery an essential part of Jewish identity.

    To join family in a celebration with this much history makes my heart glad. Though the metaphysics of Judaism do not appeal to me, the long march, the ancientrail of Jewish identity held constant throughout millennia by these very same observances does. And I felt privileged to be there.

     


    Commentary on Religion Family Humanities Myth and Story

  • Living Large

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                   Mountain Spring Moon

    Over the last couple of days an e-mail exchange between two friends used, twice, the phrase living large. As sometimes happens, this time I looked at it and said, huh? What does that mean? So I looked it up in the urban dictionary and another online slang dictionary. Here’s what they had:

    able to pay for and enjoying a very expensive style of living.  Vacations in the hot spots, a huge apartment in the city, cars, servants – that’s my idea of living large!

    phr. Doing okay. (The response to How ya living?) I’m living large. How you doing?

    Living with an extravagant or self-indulgent lifestyle.

    In a cascade came another phrase: How then, shall we live? then, Peter Singer’s new book: Doing the Most Good. Then, what? And, living well is the best revenge.

    I’ve always been struck by the power of unspoken, perhaps even unknown motivators, things that might have entered our psychic world unnoticed, sort of sliding in under our usual filters. My suspicion is that living large is such an unspoken, often unknown motivator.

    The idea of being able to spread out in your world, to recline at your ease where and when you want underlies many an entrepreneur’s aspirations. It drives many during the long years of getting professional degrees, especially in the law and medicine. Those kids shooting hoops on inner-city asphalt, the rapper with the gold medallion around the neck, even the drug dealers and pimps, all want to live large. And, you might say, why not?

    Yes, there’s the American dream. And, now the Chinese dream. In both cases you might say the dream is to live large in relation to poverty, to the uncertain rungs on society’s socioeconomic ladders. In that original dream the goal is a stable life, one with a home, enough food, savings, health care, education for the kids. And, yes, for many, maybe most of humanity, over most of history that goal would have been unattainable. In that sense these modest dreams represent living large.

    But these kind of dreams have a way of metastasizing, like body builders on steroids, like an unchecked cancer. Instead of being a dream they become a nightmare of needs turned into desires and desires turned into lust. In this, its more usual sense, I think living large represents the corrupting influence of late-stage capitalism, where to gain more becomes its own rationale. Living large is not an aim, it’s a manifesto of unchecked wants that will, somehow, be satisfied.

    Living small. Now there’s an aim.


    Humanities US History

  • Born To Be Wild

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

    In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

    Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

    As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

    One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

    It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

    In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

    I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

    In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

    So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.


    Art and Culture Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Great Work Humanities Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. The West

  • Back At It

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

    I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

    A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

    Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

    This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

    Now, if we could just sell that house.


    Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Humanities Latin Myth and Story Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Translating De Bello Gallico Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • And Then Is Heard No More

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                               Black Mountain Moon

    Let’s paint the same message as below, but with a different brush and color. Gray fading to black dominated the last post. Let’s use blue fading to dark, dark blue here.

    Life is the time between the first rays of dawn and the last, bruised hours of twilight. At its brightening life comes with expansiveness, light revealing first this and then that, all new. These are the hours of Heidegger’s being thrown into the world. We see first a soon-to-be familiar face, then faces. Realize at some point a home, then the home in a particular place. That place is in a larger frame which sometimes takes a while to come into focus. At some point we know that the 1950’s, this time of childhood is neither, say, the the 1930’s of our parent’s time nor is it the middle ages with knights and castles and it is not, either, the future. Not 2000. Not 1984.

    Over the next few years we learn that our unique self will have its hour upon the stage over a certain span of time, not any we wish, but this one and this one alone. Who we are to become, what we are to do must fit into these years, years that have their own shape, their own special challenges, their own significant opportunities. We choose this path, that person, those places. They fit or they don’t. If they don’t, we choose again.

    As the years accumulate and our hour ticks down, the choices become fewer, narrower. Our own history now shapes our future. This is a time of reaping, of being the person you have chosen to be, the unique mixture of your Self and the times into which you have been thrown. When the reaping is finished, our hour is up.


    Aging Faith and Spirituality Humanities Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase