Category Archives: Myth and Story

Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History, Writing

Writing

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Started reading Erich S. Gruen’s, “The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.” This 1974 work challenges preceding understandings of the fall of the Roman Republic.  Until Gruen, scholars focused on the conflicts, tensions and undercurrents in the period just before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Gruen chooses to look at those elements of the Roman Republic that remained intact even after the civil war.  It’s a big book, heavy. But readable.

Over the years I’ve focused on Mexica, Celtic and Northern European gods and culture in my novels. There was one side excursion into chaos magic and another into contemporary iron range, boundary waters culture, but I’m headed now towards Rome, especially Augustan Rome, the time of Publius Ovidius Naso. I’m not sure where this journey will take me, though the translation of the Metamorphoses will inform it, as will the trip to Romania and Constanta.

What will happen to the Tailte novels I can’t say right now. If I start getting nibbles or a bite on Missing, they remain available to me with about a third of the second novel already written. As I wrote a while back, I don’t want to invest the years it will take to finish the trilogy if there’s no interest in the first book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently at another point.

That means I have the book about our property here, the Roman work and a couple of other novels part way done. One, Superior Wolf, a werewolf story set in northern Minnesota, still draws me back from time to time as does a story about witchcraft.

In light of the process before productivity thinking I described a few posts ago, I realize the writing itself, the process of creation defines me. The products, finished novels and short stories, are in fact byproducts of a relentless curiosity. A further byproduct, publication, is pretty far removed from the journey. Journey before destination.

 

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase

Between

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Beltane                                                                            Summer Moon

Janus. The two faced god, one face looking to the past, the other toward the future. Hence, January. “…the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, passages, endings and time.” Wiki  The door to Janus’ temple stood open during war and closed to indicate peace.

Got to thinking about Janus this morning in light of  Bill Schmidt’s comment about liminal spaces. Janus is presented as the god of liminality, of the time between war and peace, beginning and ending, inside and outside. But. As I thought about the image of Janus, he looks back into the past where lie regrets and failures and loss. At the same time he looks into the future where there is anxiety and hope and maybe despair. The one thing he is not is the god of liminal spaces. No, he’s the god of regret and worry. That thing that he cannot do is see the present, be in the now, for he is eternally fixated on the flow of time past or the onrush of time future.

More. As Bill suggested, to live is to be in liminality, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow, this project and the next one. We can define, interestingly, liminality as the now since the now we inhabit has a position after a moment and before the next one.

The Celts reserved a special place for the liminal, seeing it as a magical time. So Celtic magic often happened at dawn or as evening fell. But in the understanding I’m presenting we can work our magic in the liminal space we inhabit. Right now. This is not an idle metaphor, but an expression of the magical reality of the now, of inhabiting liminal space always.

Whatever it is, we can bear it for this moment. At least for this moment. We may not have been able to bear it a moment ago and we don’t know whether we will be able to bear it in moment, but, right now, in this fleeting doorway where we stand poised between then and the future, right now, we can marshal our resources and get through the moment. With practice our capacity to live in this space between becomes usual, ordinary and we know in our body that regret is gone, in the past, and that anxiety is of the future, not yet.

As Stewart Brand puts it so nicely, we live in the long now.

 

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Inspiration

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Beltane                                                                 Emergence Moon

The Inferno Ballet and the courage it took to tackle the project has inspired me. I have an Ovid/Metamorphoses novel in me, one that excites me. I’m not ready to write it and won’t be soon, too much translating and reading yet to do, but I’ve decided that unless or until Missing gets representation and sells, I’m going to work on the Ovid novel.  Who knows how much time any of us has as we move toward what friend Tom Byfield calls the Great Perhaps.  Once the little Medicare card goes in the wallet you know the sand will run out. Not might. But will. So, I don’t want to die not having tried to tackle a big, the big, project I have in me. And that’s how Ovid feels.

(Turner, Ovid Banished From Rome)

I’m still going to work on the short stories, revising and submitting, and I’m still going to go back and revisit other novels, revising those that seem worth it and submitting them, too, but from now on my primary creative energy has a Roman stamp on it. This will create synergy between my Latin work and my writing, a synergy I wanted way back four years ago when I started learning Latin. Now I’m able to make it hum.

 

 

Art and Culture, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

1001

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Spring                                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

Usually I would do Latin in the afternoon after the nap since I spent the morning on the America Votes meeting, but instead today I began to nose around in another favorite locale of mine, the 1001 Nights.  I’ve read two different translations of the tales of Scheherazade, both entertaining, but I’ve learned through two new books in my library, “Stranger Magic”by Maria Warner and “The Arabian Nights-A Companion,” by Robert Irwin, that both of the translations have significant flaws.

So I found two new translations, one with only 271 tales but the other, with an introduction by Irwin himself, that is three volumes long.  When I finish up with Malcolm X, I intend to get back into the Arabian Nights.  Between Ovid and the Arabian Nights the tales are endless and well told. There’s something profound in the types of stories a culture folds into itself, makes significant through reception. The same is true, I suppose, of individuals. I’ve had djinn and Dionysus running around in my head since high school.

Then there’s that whole matter of the biblical stories, too.  The narrative lenses through which we come to understand our lives and the lives of others.  Those three: Bible, Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights are more key to me than most of the greats of Western literature, perhaps with the exception of Kafka and Hesse.  The other work that stands with these in my own inner world is the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

This is the way my life goes lured by political change, entranced by stories of the divine and the magical, enfolded in the life of plants and dogs, wrapped up in the world of art. There are worse ways to live.

GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Emergence, Complexity and Augustan Rome

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

Two projects are pushing themselves forward, aspects of work already underway.  After reading a recent batch of articles arguing against a crass materialism and insisting on looking at the world not only through reductionist goggles, I have decided now is a good time to reimmerse myself in the world of emergence.  Emergence is a concept that identifies emergent properties, things not predictable by the sum of a thing or processes immediately preceding a particular phenomena.

(Garni_Gorge Symphony of the Stones carved by Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.)  wiki, emergence

The example that is most familiar to me is culture.  Culture is that society based phenomenon that weaves language, place, kinship, food choice, divisions of work, art, music and play into a whole that shapes the individual, makes them part of something, a culture, larger than themselves.  Culture does not follow from an examination of an individual or even a small group of individuals, it only begins to emerge in a larger group over a period of time.

Another and easier to grasp emergent phenomenon is the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Am I a butterfly or am I a caterpillar dreaming I’m a butterfly?

This also relates to the complexity movement in science.  Science proceeds by breaking things down to their most basic components, then discerning law-like behaviors.  Physics is the paradigmatic science in this respect.  But there are many phenomena, like emergence, that appear not as things are reduced to their simplest parts, but as things combine to create more and more complex materials and organisms.  Science has historically ignored those areas because they are difficult to quantify and/or difficult to study using usual scientific methods.

I’ve flirted with learning these two areas:  emergence and complexity theory, but have never devoted the necessary time to it.  It’s time.  This fits in my reimagining my faith project.

The second is broadening the scope of my learning about Ovid, his time, the Augustan period, other tellings of the same myths Ovid works with, and Augustan poetry more generally.  This is in service of the commentary/translation I plan to begin in earnest after this growing season ends and of a big novel still forming itself.

 

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Writing

The Ifrit

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Spring                                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Entering the edits and revising the Ifrit took longer than I expected.  Sigh.  When touching a work, I can’t resist fiddling with it.  Still, I finished before noon.  Then, I began to search my sources for short story markets.  I found several, but following their submission requirements will require some time, so I only submitted to one, a contest for emerging writers that had April 15th at 5 pm EST as its deadline.  Since that was only an hour and a half from when I found it, I decided to prioritize that one.

This is in service of building writer’s credentials, as well as selling/getting work out there, too, of course. I admit I’ve not done this stuff as well as I could have (hardly), but I pushed myself over the hump before I left for Tucson and I find myself with increased vigor around it.  Submissions still send a shiver of fear down my spine (Will I survive constant rejection?  Answer: of course, but tell that to my spine.), so I wouldn’t call it easy or routine, but I’m trying to get there.

Gives the old guy something to shoot for.

(Angels bow down for newly created Adam, whereas Iblis (Satan, dark, right) refuses. Islamic Persian miniature from before the 19th century.)  Ifrits are djinn that serve Iblis.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Repopulating the Earth

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

Had a down few days, not really sure why, maybe just chemical tides among the synapses, but they seem to be receding now.

The morning was with Ovid, pushing almost to the end of the Deucalion and Pyrrha story, the repopulating of the earth after the flood.  The stones which this pair threw over their backs have now begun to soften, become supple and transform into the bodies of men and women.

Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla_-_

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

During the Deluge: Ovid

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Spent today reimmersing myself in Ovid.  Pleased to see that I could get in and start swimming right away in spite of the two week’s absence. Preparing for my Friday tutoring session with Greg so I’m back in the beginning of the deluge:  Book I, 262-312.  Here’s a great, long image from the beginning.

(flood-anne-louis-girodet-de-roucy-trioson)

264b …The South Wind flies on water-soaked wings,

265  he covers his terrible visage with pitch-black gloom,

266 his beard heavily laden with violent storms, water streams from the hoary white hair of his head,

267 clouds rest upon his brow, his wings and breast shed water,

268 with his hand he pressed wide the hanging clouds,

269  a crashing noise is made:  here the dense violent storms

270 are poured out from the sky.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase

Three Lifetimes: What to Do?

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Spring                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

The process of reintegration begins now.  These intensive journal workshops mark an end to one period of life and the beginning of another.  That’s by design.  The period I was in when I got to Tucson began when Kate retired, when I left Tucson I had begun a new period, her retirement in the past, and what’s in the present and future is life in the third phase for both of us, together.

BTW:  A big aha on the idea of the third phase which came while listening to a cd by Ira Progoff (Intensive Journal creator) speaking about the process of the journal’s development.  He noted that in society’s not all that long ago, the average lifespan was thirty to forty years.  At some point in that life a death/rebirth ritual would occur and the initiate would emerge an adult member of the society with a particular role to fill.

In contemporary civilization two realities make that clear process difficult, not impossible, but difficult.  The first is the secular nature of society.  We have stripped away the culturally specific religious practices by uprooting ourselves from the context in which those practices had unquestioned authenticity.  So the ritual elements of traditional culture simply has no weight in the modern psyche.

The second reality is the one that directly bears on the third phase.  Progoff notes that with modern life spans an individual might live two or three of the lifetimes available to a member of a traditional society.  Each full lifetime requires a death/rebirth ritual to adjust/reconfigure the image the self carries as its primary identity.  We’ve created two fundamental images for the first two phases:  student and worker/parent.  We have no fundamental image for the third phase, or, in Progoff’s analysis, our third lifetime.

One of the key tasks in the intensive journal workshop itself is to come up with an image for the next phase of your life.  I’m not sure I have it yet, though the Greenman has come to me.

The Celtic triskele (see above) can serve as symbol for this tri-fold life that each of us now is heir to.  The bottom two spirals are the beginning pair:  student and worker/parent. The third life, the third phase, sits atop the first two, growing out of them, but beyond them.