Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

By A Dam Site

November 12, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Once in a while it’s bracing to throw yourself in the deep end and I did that today. I went to a conference titled Experiments on Rivers: the Consequences of Dams. I realized how little consideration I’d given to dams by the end of the day. I’ll just give you one example and it came in the first three minutes of the conference in a presentation from Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, headquartered at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, location of the conference. After four slides and a technical explanation, Efi told us that of the 40 large river deltas in the world surveyed in a recent scientific study, 27 of them had much less sediment than the same deltas had before the construction of dams begun largely in the 1950’s.

What’s the big deal? Well, it turns out that all deltas are subsiding, that is, sinking. The thing that keeps the deltas and the land forms dependent on or within them from getting inundated is the build up of sediment; sediment now significantly blocked in 27 cases by upstream dams. Think global sea level rise, then put the two together. Efi’s crowd predicts that without solving the sediment deposit drought New Orleans (why does everything focus on the Big Easy?) will be gone by 2100. Whoa.

I’ll drop other information in throughout the week so I don’t overload ancientrails with dam related topics.

The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory*, created in 1938, has run continuously since then, churning out (ha, ha) hydraulic studies for dams, transportation studies and much, much more. The tour of the wind tunnel (also a from of hydraulics), delta modeling and stream and river bed modeling was worth the time to attend the conference. This is real science done with made up tools, including a pipe cleaner forest and a wooden and plexiglass model of downtown Minneapolis.

*SAFL is the world’s only fluid-mechanics laboratory that uses a natural waterfall as its prime water source. For over 70 years researchers from around the world have been visiting our unique location on an island in the Mississippi River to conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water resources, and energy-related problems. We would like to extend our warmest invitation to visit our facilities and talk with our research staff and students.

Asia, Great Work, Politics

Dams

November 12, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Headed out early today to a UofM Institute for Advanced Studies conference on dams. The focus is on dams as an area of study, but the sub rosa agenda covers the problems dams pose, not only ecologically I learned yesterday at the keynote lecture, but also politically and “extra-scientifically.” Extra-scientific refers to the ways good science gets bent by political objectives into motivation for or rationale for something motivated by other factors, often geopolitical in nature.

Gotta write here about my tour yesterday for the Rochester Friends. I kept losing folks as the tour went on and I didn’t feel I connected with them. Left me in a down place, but determined to do a better job on my next Thaw tour.

A winter storm watch posted for Andover, 6″ of wet snow. About time.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, US History

A Tour Knocked Together

November 10, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Finished initial work for my tour of the Thaw exhibition. Some new information will come on Thursday during the Friends lecture focusing on Blackhawk and his ledger book, Elizabeth Hickox and her finely crafted miniature baskets and Maria Martinez, the renowned potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo. I’ll meld that into the work I’ve just done.

I’m starting on Thursday in the Plains gallery with Judith Fogarty’s martingale and medicine bag for which she won the 1988 best of show at the Santa Fe Indian Art Festival, a prize of distinction in native american arts. From there we’ll look at the honor shirts and Blackhawk’s ledger book, still in the Plains collection. The Woodlands gallery, our home region, contains a wonderful bag, probably part of the kit of an Anishinabe shaman of the Midewiwin Society. In the Arctic and Sub-Arctic I’ll take the group to the Yupik masks. In the Northwest Coast region we’ll look at the frontlet of Raven-who-owns-the-sun and the bulging sided bent-wood bowl for serving fatty fish. We’ll end up with a Maria Martinez pot and an Elizabeth Hickox basket.

This is a wonderful opportunity to see the very best of native art covering broad geographic regions. A rare chance. Hope you’ll be able to come.

Great Work, Politics

Coping With Change

November 8, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

A meeting with lobbyists and politically minded folks this morning, trying to suss out the impact of the Republican wins in the elections. The energy in the room was good, nothing energizes political folks like a solid enemy. enemy

I did not get a ticket this time. My patience was at guru on the mountain top level, except for that one s.o.b. The road passed underneath me as a calm ribbon of stability in a changing world, something strange like that.

I still don’t know these folks well enough to participate much and my knowledge level about the ins and outs of state legislative and administrative politics confines me, too. Won’t last forever.

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

November 7, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news. This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA. No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down. Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs. As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one. Why? Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow. And they wanted to control as much of it as they could. Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident. This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost. As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology. Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.

Family, Great Work, Minnesota, Our Land and Home

Grounded

October 16, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waxing Harvest Moon

As many readers know, my sister and brother live in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok. It’s different for me. Kate and I have lived in Andover, in the same house with potato670050210 the same land, for 16 years. I’ve driven the same car for 15 years and Kate’s driven the same truck for 10. I’ve now been married to Kate much longer than the total of my first two marriages: 22 years versus 15. I’ve lived in Andover longer than anywhere else: Oklahoma-2 years, Alexandria-15 years. I’ve lived in this house far longer than any other residence.

This came up today when Kate and I headed out to lunch. I feel a part of this land, as if it’s part of me and I of it. But. I don’t feel the same about Andover. There’s no here, here. I have no memories of school here or my children in school. My political involvement has been limited, recently to being an election judge. Andover doesn’t feel like home to me, though 3122 153rd Ave NW does.

You might say I live a grounded life, if not close to the soil, certainly in partnership with it. Perhaps the uncertainty and turmoil in my late high school and immediate post-high school years lead me to seek some stasis, I don’t know. What I do know is that with Kate and with this land I have made a home. And I’m glad.

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

Let There Be Darkness

October 9, 2010 Charles 1 Comment

Fall Waxing Harvest Moon

Let’s try darkness again. In Taoism the familiar Taiji makes my point about the essential and complementary nature of light and dark. Taoism gives equal weight to the yin and yang* represented in the taiji, the small circle of yin within the yang and of yang within the yin, emphasizing the Taoist belief that all things contain their opposite to some degree. So, one part of my argument simply notes that light and dark are both necessary, necessary to each other, nothing apart from each other. In the Taoist taiji they represent the dynamic movement of heaven to which all things must conform.

In our Western cultural tradition, though, light has taken precedence over darkness, both in a physical and in an ethical sense. Jesus is the light of the world. Persephone goes into Hades and the earth mourns her absence until her return when it blossoms into spring. Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve her. Dante’s Divine Comedy finds Dante wandering, lost in the dark wood of error, before he begins his descent, guided by Virgil, into the multiple layers of hell. The traditional three-story universe also reinforces these ideas: Heaven above, earth, and the infernal regions below. Milton’s Paradise Lost follows the rebellion in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer, the Morning Star, into hell where he builds his enormous palace, Pandemonium. Our common sense understanding of death involves hiding the body beneath the earth. Why?

Coming out of the spiritualist tradition represented by Camp Chesterfield (see below) death involves a transition into the light, the spirit world. Ghost Whisperer, a TV program, uses the trope from this tradition, as dead souls are led into the light. It is, perhaps, no wonder that darkness, night and the soil come off badly in our folk metaphysic: up and light is good; down and dark is bad.

I wish to speak a word for the yin, symbolized by the moon, the female, the cold, the receiving, the dark. The moon illustrates the taiji perfectly. In the dark of night, the moon, yin, reflects the sun’s light, yang, and offers a lambent light, neither yin nor yang, but the dynamic interplay between the two. So we could look for art that features the moon as one route into the positive power of darkness.

Also, any seasonal display in a work of art, whether of spring, summer, fall or winter can open the question of each season’s value, its role in the dynamic of growth and decay, emergence and return. This can lead to a discussion of the importance of the fallow season, the season of rest, the earth’s analog to sleep. This can lead to a discussion of sleep and its restorative powers.

Art work of mother and child, or especially, mother and infant, can stimulate a discussion, in this context, of the womb, of the fecund nature of the dark where fetuses and seeds develop before their emergence into the world of light.

Similarly, death focused works of art can open up a discussion of birth and death as dynamic moments of change, yin and yang of human (or animal) development. This could lead to conversation about the Mexica (Aztec) belief that life is the aberrant condition and that death is the vital, regenerative moment; we are here, goes one Mexica poem, between a sleep and a sleep.

Winterlight festivals represent a western imbalance focused on the light, the yang, and a tendency to cast the yin in a negative light, something to be avoided or eliminated or held in check. As I said previously, this is understandable given the pre-historical science which made the return of the sun doubtful and therefore terrifying. Many of these festivals are, too, our favorites: Christmas, Deepavali and for a different traditional reason, Hanukkah.

In my own faith tradition, roughly pagan, I look forward to the dying of the light and celebrate as my most meaningful holiday, the Winter Solstice. Of course, I also celebrate the return of the light that begins on that very day, but first I immerse myself in the long night, the many hours of darkness. This affords me an opportunity to acknowledge the dark, to express gratitude for its manifold gifts. In this way my idiosyncratic faith has a ritual moment that honors the taiji, utilizing the cues given by the natural world.

To find art that emphasizes this aspect of darkness I plan to walk the museum from top to bottom, searching for images and objects that can help our visitors understand that when they celebrate the festivals of light that darkness is the reason for the season. I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas.

*In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles in nature. Yin characterizes the feminine or negative nature of things and yang stands for the masculine or positive side. Yin and yang are in pairs, such as the moon and the sun, female and male, dark and bright, cold and hot, passive and active, etc. But yin and yang are not static or just two separated things. The nature of yinyang lies in interchange and interplay of the two components. The alternation of day and night is such an example.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

A Voice At The Table

October 8, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall New (Harvest) Moon

Just back from the Sierra Club. A real dilemma for me resurfaced here. I manage the legislative process for the Club, as I said, and in that role I organize the legislative priority setting process, its fine tuning and the work of the committee and the lobbyist while the legislature is in session. This means I do not have to have a very deep knowledge of the particular issues since my role has a mostly administrative/managerial focus. Thus, in a meeting like the one this morning with a legislator, where ideas get floated and possibilities discussed about a particular matter, in this case, broadly, energy issues, I simply don’t have the details and background necessary to contribute.

As Kate said, I like to participate and have intelligent things to say, but in this context, I didn’t feel like I had a anything to say. This is disempowering for me. The obvious solution, to learn more about each issue, runs into my other intellectual pursuits, like art history and Latin and liberal thought. Dividing time so I have enough to do solid work in those three areas has not left me with enough left over intellectual energy to dig into the scientifically and often politically complicated waters of particular issues. The fix here is not obvious to me and has me questioning my role. We’ll see where this goes.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story

Photocentrism

October 7, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall New (Harvest) Moon

OK,I made this up. Photocentrism is a focus on the virtue of light that, by implication, puts darkness in a negative or bad relative position. Just because I made it up, however, does not mean I’m joking. The context: the docent annual meeting today and the presentation of a new December of the month called Winterlights. I agree that Winterlights is a complex noun that has a rich associative feel. I even agree that the celebrations in what I have long called holiseason–Thanksgiving to January 6th, the traditional 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany (visit of the Magi to Bethlehem), and the date for the celebration of Christmas in the Eastern Church–offer an unparalleled opportunity to learn from other cultures about matters deep in the human psyche: Thanksgiving, Advent, Deepavali, Hanukkah, Posada, Winter Solstice/Yule, Christmas, Western New Year on January 1, the 12 days of Christmas and maybe Kwaansa, though its constructed nature makes me a bit shy of it. Eid al Adha, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Hajj by celebrating the Irbrahim and Ishmael story, falls in November this year, but not within holiseason itself, so I’m going to leave it out of this discussion.

The festivals or holidays of light, in particular Deepavali, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice (although is a special case as we shall see) and Christmas (more for what it replaces, Saturnalia, than what it celebrates itself) do have a common thread. Deepavali, Winter Solstice and Christmas all relate to the despair felt in subsistence agriculture communities when the light of the sun seemed as if it would wink out and perhaps disappear altogether. This fear, of the Sun’s final rising, put its mark on well-known pre-historical landmarks like Stonehenge, Chichen-Itza and the great Newgrange dolmen in Ireland. Without a knowledge of the physics and celestial mechanics of the earth’s orbit and the sun’s central place in our solar system, it was frightening to consider the possibility that this time, this winter, the gradual diminishment of daylight might proceed all the way to an apocalyptic darkness. No light for the crops. No crops for the animals. Cold all the time.

What to do? According to theories of sympathetic magic, like produces like, so the logical response to oncoming darkness was a bonfire, a torch, a brave manifestation of light and heat in hopes that the sun, since it is like light and heat, will either be rekindled or seduced into rising again. And these practices work. Each time the bonfires were lit, the torches paraded, the sun did not disappear, but returned to once again start the growing season and stave off starvation and freezing for another year.

All of this makes sense, granting the scientific understandings of these early peoples. As cultures grew more sophisticated and astronomical knowledge became a bit more advanced, however, it did put out the lingering fear that the darkness would one day come and never leave. So holidays that focused on light, especially, but fire, too, became integral parts of the cultural and religious traditions of many peoples.

They all leave out one important thing, though. The virtues of darkness. I first became aware of the following arguments when I began to research the goddess, the great mother goddess. I won’t get into here the debate surrounding the contention by some that a great mother goddess preceded the monotheistic, patriarchal deities of the Abrahamic religions, though I’ll tip my hand enough to say that I don’t find the evidence compelling.

What I found out about darkness surprised me and changed my mind about how I view it. Darkness is as necessary as light. Seeds start growing in the dark soil, away from light and even after they penetrate the surface, their roots continue to press their way into the surrounding nutrient-filled earth. Mammal babies live their first few months of life in the moist, nourishment rich environment of their mother’s womb. (OK, not in the marsupials and the platypus and the echidna’s instance, but you get the drift.) Darkness creates the time of rest and restoration for us and for many animals. It is when we sleep and when we dream. Darkness is the natural condition of space, attenuated by billions of stars only in what amounts to a small total area of the vastness of the universe. Light itself requires a degree of darkness to create vision. Anyone who’s ever been in a whiteout where snow and sky mix to create a vertiginous world with no up and down, no distinguishing characteristics understands the problem well. Or consider a bright, very bright light and its affect on your sight.

This argument can be cast as a feminist one in which the light represents patriarchy and the darkness the creative agency of women. It can also relate to anti-racism work in that we tend to equate darkness, blackness with evil, with corruption and decay. This denies the regenerative, restorative and generative nature of darkness and narrows our conceptual world in literally dangerous ways.

How could this relate to Winterlights? Without this kind of background the celebration of light has a sinister side as well its assumed positive one. The celebrations of light only make sense in terms of the deep cultural background and when we go there we need to understand the fear that created these holidays has also unbalanced our appreciation of the other state, darkness. I’ve not given it any thought, but I imagine there works of art that make darkness a central theme, that could be used to help put the other holidays in a balanced perspective.

Hanukkah is a special case here in which the focus does not seem to be on the Winter Solstice but on a cultural achievement by the Maccabees, the expelling of the Greeks. It does however beautiful-darkness share a darkness dispelling theme with the others.

There is more to say here, much more, but I’m hungry. Catch you later.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Booming One More Time

September 30, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waning Back to School Moon

Metro Lounge Union Station

This is the first class lounge, folks who’ve bought rooms. My next trip to Lafayette had no rooms, but I convinced the lady here to let me in since I had rooms on the Empire builder both ways.

Old folks pass by, some in the early years of aging, like me, others in the thin, papery skin and tottering walk phase. How many of them in the former, I wonder, marched in Washington, fought for student rights, worked hard to end the Vietnam war, protested to achieve civil rights for African-Americans? Age and accommodation hide the former marks of my kind, the long hair, the frayed jeans, the combat boots, the green book bags, the peace symbol pins,the flower print dresses and plaited hair.

We walk past each other, joined by other links, the cane, the gray hair, balding pates, bum knees, expanded middles. Makes me think of another addition to symbolic logic: the law of the expanded middle.

One of our own, Tom Brokaw, wrote a book, the Greatest Generation, talking up the folks of the WWII era as saviors of our culture. Maybe they were, I don’t know, history is difficult to judge; but, the next spate of articles and books focused on how the Baby Boomers are not the Greatest Generation. Somehow we have failed to live up to pundits self-made expectations of us. Balderdash.

An article this month in the Atlantic offers a guide as to how we can retrieve our lost promise by solving the economic crisis at home. C’mon. A minimum sized group of greedy bastards almost sunk the American economy, a breed that, like the poor, has always been with us. It is the chattering class that needs to fix the economy and they’ve worked at it in fits and starts. The economy never was our forte.

No,we fought our battles for change at the level of the personal,the local, the national foreign policy level, not in the canyons of wall street or the board rooms of the Forbes 500. We challenged US military policy so successfully that a generation of military leaders has vowed never again to make the same mistakes as Vietnam. We supported the African-American community among us and Lyndon Johnson in a push for civil rights. Women and men of our generation took the gender controversy into our private lives, struggling for a just place for women one bag of garbage, one diaper and one sink full of dishes at a time.

We have had our share, more than our share, of brilliant scientists and innovative artists.

Where we still have a big opportunity is not in the stock market or its ancillary phenomenon like the Department of Treasury. No, our opportunity lies in the self same area we did early work in during the 60’s when we took the advice of such gurus as Scott and Helen Nearing and tried to go “back to the land.”

Climate change, local food, energy independence, forest and water health, these are the areas where our generation can still act and act forcefully, this time for the future of the unborn generations who will suffer from the profligacy of our time. We know how to use the levers of popular power. We know how important it is to speak truth to power and to use our personal lives as leverage in the pursuit of deep social change.

I hope we take the challenge and begin to acknowledge each other in the metro lounges and streets and lobbies and town halls and legislatures of our country.