Category Archives: Great Work

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Work

The Heart of What Ails American Culture

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75  bar steady 29.84  0mph NE dew-point 68  Sunrise 5:50  Sunset 8:59pm Summer

Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

A Deborah Madison recipe I used this noon called for tomatoes, beet greens, oregano, olive oil and garlic.  The beet greens came from the golden beets I picked just before the lunch.  The oregano from Kate’s herb garden.  We had a couple of dried garlic bulbs. I thought they had not differentiated. but I decided to use it as it was.  When I peeled back the white, papery layers over the bulb I found cloves.  This meant  two things.  I had enough garlic for the recipe and the garlic in the bed could be harvested now.  The dish was great, but the cloves excited me.

There is no reason why growing garlic bulbs with cloves should excite me so much, except it entered my head early in the gardening season–last September.  They grew throughout the winter and were ready to harvest in July, just as the cultural recommendations for it said.  Their taste is more intense and more sweet, at least this variety.  I planted three.

In the furnace room, hanging from green gardening twine are four bunches of garlic bulbs.  Set aside from them are the largest 2 bulbs from each variety.  They will go in the ground in late September or early October to produce more garlic for next July.  Kate will take a large head from each bunch out to Jon and Jen so they can have garlic in their garden.  They too will be able to harvest the largest heads and plant from them.  This chain of living things, nurtured and in turn nurturing, is the true great chain of being.

Watched 10,000 BC on the recommendation of a friend.  Well, the anachronisms were many: iron, boats, buildings, captive mammoths and the story line fed on coincidence.  On the other hand the Woolly Mammoths and the Sabre Toothed Tiger were very real.  A mish-mash of times, cultures and continents.  Just what I thought when I was the first ads.  In fairness, the same friend watched There Will Be Blood on my recommendation.  He thought it was too violent and the lead character, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, a poor guy with whom to spend a couple of hours.

There Will Be Blood is a mythic movie of great power.  It speaks to the heart of what ails American culture and it speaks the truth.  The truth is neither pretty nor easy and the film knows it.  It is uncomfortable, but that it is different from bad.  10,000 BC is an entertainment and it works sometimes and not others, but it is not mythic, either in truth or in story.

Great Work, Memories, Politics, Writing

The History of Ideas

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75  bar falls 29.90  0mph ESE dew-point 60 sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The mayfly lives only one day.  And sometimes it rains.    George Carlin, RIP

Freud, Marx and Hegel expelled from school.  The article to which the first sentence here links refers to the strange disappearance from the college curriculum of these three seminal thinkers in psychology, economy and philosophy.

Here’s an e-mail I sent to its author:

Hello, Mr. Jacoby,

In 1965 I began the study of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, moved onto Plato and Aristotle, and then on toward the present.  The early study of philosophy excited me so much I chose it as my major.  The methodology, the history of ideas, has remained with me as the most important intellectual tool I have.  When I switched schools, I entered a school dominated by logical positivists.  The most important and interesting questions of philosophy, questions which mattered to individuals and to public discourse did not matter to this department.  I left philosophy behind, sad that it refused to engage matters of ontology, values and beauty. 

I write to you because I felt then what the gist of your Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests is a contemporary problem.  It is a problem with its roots, I believe, in the logical positivist and linguistic analysis movements which tried to align philosophy with the scientific method.  There would have been nothing wrong with this as an adjunct discipline, but the arrogant dismissal of metaphysics, for example, for reliance on what I would call a shallow epistemology gutted philosophy of its humanist core.

This same attempt to bring economics and psychology into the scientific realm, and sociology too for that matter, has identical problems.  The quantifiable in these disciplines is fine and produces important insights, but, again, the core of these disciplines, with the possible exception of economics, is humanistic, not scientific. 

Your article reminded me of those long ago days when I moved on to anthropology.  The dismissal of historical perspective leaves us with the need to reinvent all those old arguments and to approach their resolution without the aid of some of humankinds most creative thinkers.  Too bad.

As I grow older, history looms ever higher and higher in my intellectual pursuits.   As I said in the e-mail to Mr. Jacoby, the history of ideas, learned during classwork for my philosophy major, has informed everything  I do.  I gravitate naturally at this stage of my life toward the historical record.  Where did that word originate?  How has it been modified over time?  Where did this artistic movement come from and what questions did it try to answer?  What are the roots of the so-called New Age thinking?  Why are not its current proponents interested in its intellectual history?  What is the source of liberal and conservative political thought and how does their history help us modify them to fit present needs?  Why is the issue of climate change such a problematic one?  What in the history of humanities relationship to the natural order created such a situation?

These are the questions that get me up in the morning, that drive my decision making about what to do with my time and how to direct my own work.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Six Degrees Can Change the World

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66  bar rises 30.07  2mph NNE dew-point 56 Sunset 7:22  Summer night, cool and clear

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

National Geographic Channel had a program called Six Degrees Can Change the World.  Geez was it depressing.  A lot of the early stuff was material I’d heard before, but as it went on from 1 degree to 2 degrees, then to 3 degrees with the Amazonian rain forest becoming a scrub land and the Greenland ice sheet melting down and other very nasty stuff, I began to feel powerless, a victim before the inevitablity of increasing energy consumption which will drive the very worst scenarios into being.

Those of you who know me well know I don’t like victim status.  A passive victim does not act, but allows reality to act on them.  Not my way.  So, once I got over the feeling of powerlessness, I reminded myself that I have made several distinct decisions related to effecting change.   The Sierra Club work.  The optimal suburb/exurb home.  Keeping the red car intact.  Our plan to purchase a hybrid or all electric when Kate retires.  Growing vegetables.  Turning off the computer at night.  Working over the next few years to find even more ways major and minor that we can reduce our carbon footprint and encourage alternative energy.  I am not a victim, nor do I want to be a rich world antagonist of mother earth’s.   The struggle of our time.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Literature, Politics, Writing

Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

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78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Writing

A Novel Realization

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68  bar rises 30.02  2mph NE dew-point 59   Summer, cool and pleasant

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Again this morning off to the Cities to the Sierra Club for help with a mailing and to make some phone calls, drop by the MIA.  This is three trips in two days and feels like too much.  I scheduled all this myself, too.  Hmmm, gotta speak to the person who keeps my calendar.

After finishing 48 lectures on the history of English literature yesterday, I had an odd realization.  Over the 15 plus years I have been writing, I have spent time in serious, sustained study of astronomy, liberal religion, art history and the classics.   When I say serious, sustained study, I mean time frames of years.  In the case of liberal religion over a decade.  But.  I have not devoted any appreciable and no sustained time to the study of the novel, the very form I have chosen as my own.  Strange.

So, my dream for the next stage of my life entails concentrated study of the novel, its history and craft, as well as reading more novels.  I want to write a serious, literary novel, not my next one and perhaps not the one after that, but soon, one informed by the insights and craft of others.  I might even take a college course in literature.  When in college, I refused to take literature classes, saying I could read on my own.  I have, too.   Now, though, with a different intent, I might well find literature classes instructive.

Gotta sign off and get to the Sierra Club.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Writing

Even Though It’s Still July

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71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

Full Thunder Moon

The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

“We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Holidays, Writing

Tending to Plants and Animals, So They Will Tend to Us.

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79  bar rises 29.79  0mph WNW dew-point 64   Sunny and warm

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Finished The Thief of Baghdad last night.  This movie, a 1940’s special effects pioneer, has its roots, loosely, in the Arabian Nights.  Just occurred to me that the same title might be used for a documentary on the Bush years in Iraq.  It is an engaging story,  though the actor playing Ahmed, a co-star with Sabu, who plays the thief,  Abu, didn’t seem heroic enough to me.  My favorite character was the Sultan of Basra (this movie has many contemporary reference points), who has a Wizard of Oz like persona.  He loves mechanical toys.

I bought the Criterion Collection discs.  This is all in my hit and miss attempt to educate myself as a cineaphile.  I have a small library of books on cinema.  It has books on theory, history, technique and genre, but I’ve done little with them as a group.  The most I do now is watch the occasional old movie, like the Thief of Baghdad.  My 60th birthday present was 50 films chosen by the Janus Corporation as the most influential art films distributed by them in the last century.  I’ve watched 4 or 5.   I have to figure out a routine for watching more movies and I find that difficult because it interferes with my TV jones.  Problems, problems, problems.

Don’t know about you, but some residual collective memory got triggered by the photograph of folks lined up outside the IndyMac bank to withdraw their savings.  A bank run signals danger to this child of depression era parents, a danger sign I didn’t know existed until I saw this picture.  The older man sitting on a metal folding at the front of the line, thick soled black shoes, gray trousers and a white shirt, worried look.  Ooff.

Kate’s in food preservation mode.  She bought a pressurized canner to complement her older, hot water canner.  She’s been busy making jams and preserves, canning green beans and in general wiping her hands on a calico apron while waving a wooden spoon in the air.

As the crops begin to mature, we are both more focused on how to preserve what we have grown and the lessons we have learned from this year’s crop.   Fewer onions next year, for one.  Do not know why I got so carried away on planting onions.  More beets and carrots.  About the same on beans and peas.  Garlic again, descaping this time.  Add some crops, though what, I do not know.  Harvest is the fun part.

On August 1st we celebrate Lughnasa.  This is a first fruits festival that provides a festival around the time of the first maturation of crops.  There are three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa, Mabon (Fall Equinox) and Samhain, the Celtic New Year on October 31st.  A full quarter of the year has the harvest as a dominant theme and idea.  An old acknowledgment of the value and necessity of tending to plants and animals, so that they will, in turn, tend to us.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Healthy Garden

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79  bar steady 29.84  2mph E dew-point 57  Summer, sunny and warm

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The garden.  When I refer to the garden in these posts, it is a term of compression.  It would be more accurate to refer to the landscaping, the woods, the perennial gardens in back and those in front and, finally, the vegetable garden in raised beds.  I give a lot of thought and care each year to the plants in all of these places.

While I try to do things in an aesthetically pleasing manner, my various efforts never achieve the shine of the  gardens in the newspapers.  I’m not a perfectionist, so the weeds here and there, the plants that have overgrown their neighbors do not bother me.  There is time to get to them and I if I don’t get it this year, then next year.

I do care, a lot, about the health of the individual plants.  In my gardening world a diseased or dwindling plant gets a lot more concern than the niceties of the border.  As a result, our garden tends toward the lush, the verdant, but not always the well-conceived, artful display of blooming varieties carefully placed for height, leaf texture and color.  I’m impressed with folks who can achieve that and on some days I wish I were one of them.  But I’m not.

Gardens and landscapes and woods work on many different levels.  In my case the chance to think about the plants, to place them and nourish them, to reconfigure the whole when shade has outstripped light or the soil needs amendment satisfies me.

When Kate’s 60th birthday was on the horizon and she warmed to the idea of a purple garden, I had a great time assembling various purple flowering plants, amending the soil in each one of our beds and replanting everything, established plants and the new ones.  It tickles me now that the purple garden is in its fourth year and that it comes into its own in August, the month of her birthday.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here.  I’ve just been outside pruning, spreading some mulch on areas I missed the last time around and I feel a little sheepish about the unplanned, somewhat haphazard look of things.  On the other hand, by my own standards, the garden looks fine.  One of those endless loop deals where the stuff you do is fine with you as long as you don’t compare it to anybody else’s.  Yes, I know.  Comparing is foolish and mentally harmful.  Yet it creeps in from time to time anyhow.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Work, Woolly Mammoths

Undercurrents and Subtext

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74  bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49  Summer, sunny and pleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

A party.  Kate and I are not party people.  We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids.   Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in two weeks for Japan.  She’s going to Kyoto prefecture to teach English as part of the JET program, a government sponsored ESL that places applicants in the Japanese school system.

The backyard party at their 4900 block Colfax Avenue home in Minneapolis had many people we did not know, but Stefan Helgeson and Lonnie were there.  Stefan, Paul and I represented the Woolly Mammoths.

Such parties have, like family reunions, undercurrents and subtext.  The lines of relationship, for example, the casual observer would assume ran strongest among Paul, Stefan, and me.  Only partly true.  Lonnie and Sarah (Strickland) were friends of mine for a couple of years before their husbands pulled me into the orbit of the Woolly Mammoths.

There was Kate Strickland’s closing of this chapter in her New York life.  Why?  Unsaid.  There was Lonnie’s recovery, less than a month along, from cancer surgery.  A rare great outcome.  No chemo or radiation needed because they caught the uterine cancer at its earliest stage.  Paul’s work, entangled with his across the alley neighbor, is in uncertain times.  Stefan has had a come to Jesus moment with Lonnie’s cancer surgery, “I find it difficult now to not do the things I want to do.”

Overhanging the whole is the generational tide sweeping those of us over 60 toward years of a new time while our kids go to Japan, have their own children, become 2d Lts in the Air Force, head off to college, or graduate from college.

This event was in no way unusual in these subtexts and undercurrents and I’m confident there were more, perhaps darker ones, about which I know nothing.   Any time we human beings gather we bring with us the scent of our current life and the trail on which we have walked to get there.  As social creatures our scents intermingle creating a perfumed community while our paths (ancientrails) intersect and deflect, generating paths of a slightly different direction than the one we were on before.  This is life as we live it, as we must live it.

Running through my mind today has been a bumper sticker I saw years ago during the controversy over the Boundary Waters.  I was in Ely and noticed a local pickup truck.   Plastered on the gate the bumper sticker read:  Sierra Club, kiss my axe.  That was redolent of a real debate, an actual conflict between parties with drastically different visions.  Politics and its cousin the law are the arenas in which, in a democracy, we slug out conflicts without, hopefully, violence.  I like conflict and the clash of ideas, the taking up of the sword in defense of an ideal, a vision.  Being back on the battlefield brings sparks to my eyes.  Fun.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Say a Little Prayer for the Miracle of Mother Earth

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70  bar steep fall 29.80  6mph NW  Dew-point 62   Summer, a thunder storm watch until 6PM.  One’s already rolled through our area.

First Quarter of the Thunder Moon

The Thunder Moon has seen its first storm even before it became gibbous.   When I went downstairs today to shut off and unplug the computer, as I always do before a storm, it made me think.

In cities it is possible to live a life pretty isolated from the natural world.  Yes, you get wet when it rains if you can’t drive from covered parking to covered parking, but it’s usually a short term experience.  Out of the car.  Dash across the parking lot or sidewalk into the shelter of a building.  Yes, up here in the northland you can’t avoid the snow and the cold, but there again, unless you go outside with snowshoes or hiking boots, your exposure does not interrupt your day very much.

Out here in the exurbs, where the cities reach has become tenuous, houses have 2 acres, 5 acres, 10 acres between them.  When the thunderstorm looms, it looms over you.  A lightning strike on or near the house would send a surge throughout our circuitry blowing out sensitive devices.  The computer holds so much of my life and work that I protect it.  But, from what?

Yes.  Mother nature.  She’s whimsical and unpredictable.  No matter what we do somewhere the river rises.  Electricity coming in a storm carries a voltage of 100 million to 1 billion volts.  It can reach 50,000 degrees fahrenheit.   Four times as hot as the sun’s surface.  A hurricane generates unbelievable power and as they intensify they endanger increasing amounts of our wealth and health as a country.

Just think back over the last couple of months.  The cyclone in Burma.  The earthquakes in China.  The worst natural disaster in our history, Katrina, was not long ago.  These events kill and or disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.  The earthquake in Pakistan or the Kobe earthquake in Japan.  Huge, nation altering events.  The tsunami in the Indian Ocean.  We remember these not only for their human suffering and property loss, but because they remind us that we are not in control of the planet.

Our own little apocalypse, death, comes from the evolution of life.  Life comes with a sell-by date.  We are not in control even of our own lives.  This is either frightening or invigorating.

I choose invigoration, so when I head downstairs to shut off the computer I say a little prayer of thanks for the miracle of mother earth and my chance for a brief stay here.