Category Archives: Myth and Story

Humanities, Myth and Story, Science

We Are Like Fish Studying The Stars

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Not often a letter to the editor makes me stop because of its literary quality. However, a letter by John Ball of Huntsville, Alabama to the Scientific American did.

Writing about the quantum world he said,  “We must remember that such representations (wave analogies among others) do not describe the true, alien reality of the quantum world.  We are like fish studying the stars.”

Such an important idea phrased in an arresting way.  The map is not the territory.  It applies, and we don’t often acknowledge this, to our knowledge of other people.  We see only a thin map of their on going narrative, a fluid process dynamic within them.  And we only see that through the filter of our senses and our understanding.

An interesting variant on this idea is our tendency to look for the real, the true nature of institutions with which we interact all the time.  Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist, said that the beginnings don’t matter.  What we perceive as the foundations don’t matter. What matters is how something works now.

Is the government making our lives better?  Then it’s a good government.  If not, it’s a bad government and needs to change.  Are the schools educating our kids?  Do businesses make our world safer, more secure?  If not, they need to change.  If so, let them do their, well, business.

Most interestingly you can run this same pragmatic test on religious institutions.  Does the church make our lives richer and fuller?  Then it’s a good church.  Does it make us guilty, self-doubting, naive?  Then it’s a bad church.  But notice the key move here.  The nature of the church’s foundations, that is, the Bible, its metaphysical claims about divinity and an afterlife, don’t matter.

In the world of religion we are like fish studying the stars.

 

Family, Myth and Story, Travel

Me and My Gal

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Samhain                                                     Thanksgiving Moon

May the Thanksgiving Moon shine over me and my gal.  She’s set out on Federal Highways, Interstatials to Denver, the back of the truck packed like Santa’s sleigh, only in this case it would be Tevya’s wagon with dreidels decorating its wooden sides.  As always, I travel with her as she stays home with me, our lives entwined, sometimes entangled.  This sounds bad in a psychobabble way, I know, but it shows merely and oh so much the degree to which we have become partners, not dependent on each other, no, but relying  on each other.  Love.  What it is.

As she drives south in Minnesota, then into Iowa, heading right at Des Moines and left at the moon, across the bridge across the wide Missouri and the often shallow Platte outside of Omaha, past the home of the Cornhuskers in Lincoln and under the silly arch for the pioneers somewhere near Kearney, she carries us along.  We are now the older generation, the ones closest to the final passage.  We are Grandma and Grandpop, bearing responsibility for our family as we both wish our families had done for us.

I’m thankful for classical music and seasonal subscriptions.  If the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra had been locked out, we never would have met.  Strange.  How many couples will go undiscovered with the pitiful display the Minnesota Orchestra has put on these last few months?

So much in our lives happens by chance.  No intentionality behind it.  Life shows up and we either greet it or miss it, that’s the way it is.  Opening ourselves to the fates, who weave our lives on some misty mountaintop somewhere, makes this the adventure of a lifetime.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Unreliable Narrator–You

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

(Henry and William James)

What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

 

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home

Crossing Over

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Samhain                                                               Samhain Moon

Javier delivered three wheelbarrows of two-year dry oak.  I’ve cut up the ironwood and cedar, split and stacked them.  This morning I cut five four foot lengths off the ironwood’s branches and upper trunk.  They will not be split and will go on the outside of the bonfire. The heat of the fire will ignite them through the bark and they’ll provide a long-lasting flame.

Kate’s gathered together makings for smores, mulled cider and snacks.  She’s also drilled pumpkins with arrows, clever and cute.  She’s also found fall color napkins and plates.  We’ll have bottled water and a warming house, complete with crystal chandelier that used to hang over the piano.

The center piece of the evening will be the fire.  And I’m planning a big one.  We’ve had a wet week so the fire danger is nil.

Doesn’t sound like too many folks can make it. Andover creates a good deal of resistance for city folk, the distance a good ways for an evening out.  We’ve gone low key with this one anyhow, figuring we’d learn what kind of work is necessary to pull one off.  We plan a winter solstice bonfire and one for Beltane, too.  We may skip the summer solstice due to the potential for fire problems.

(welsh holy well)

Tonight the ancestors can move more freely from the Otherworld, as can the folk of faery. At least so my Celtic ancestors believed.  It is interesting to consider that Mexican and Latino cultures also celebrate a similar idea as do some in the Christian church.  The anthropologist in me says that means there’s something here, something the folk beliefs have recognized, perhaps in some precognitive way.

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

Still At It

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Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

I’ve picked up the pace in translating.  Not a lot.   But I have.  My intention is to time myself from now on, figure out how I can increase my speed.  That will be important, as I said before, if I’m to translate the whole Metamorphoses.  (Ovid)

You might ask, why?  A few years ago I decided to read classics for a whole year.  I read the Koran, Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Metamorphoses among others.  As I did this, I also read commentaries and essays on these works to give myself a broader and deeper perspective.  When I got to the material on the Metamorphoses, I realized it stood at a critical juncture between ancient Greek religion (and, I imagine now, the Egyptian influence on the Greek) and Western civilization in the common era.

During the Renaissance it was Ovid’s work that moved Greek mythology into the mainstream of Western intellectual life.  The older sources were either unavailable at the time, as yet undiscovered, or simply missing.  That’s why the versions of the mythological corpus you know are most often Ovid’s version.

(Banquet of the Gods-Frans Floris)

If I could imprint Ovid’s stories into my brain, then I would have a vast resource, one with deep resonance in the entire Western literary tradition.  How to do that?  I had always wanted to learn a language but had told myself I couldn’t.  How about learning Latin, then translating the Metamorphoses? It could vanquish a self doubt, allow a peek behind the curtain of translation and help me absorb these wonderful stories.  All in the same project.

It’s not been, nor is it now, easy.  It is hard part of the time, difficult the rest.  But I’ve learned to enjoy that.  There are new insights often and results that I know are mine.  I’m learning the stories and advancing towards the skill level I need to go the distance.  This is the fourth year of learning and translating.  Many more to go.

BTW:  There is, somewhere in this, the novel I want to write.  A big one, a fantasy, because that’s how I think when it comes to fiction, but one deep in this material.  What it will be like, I don’t know, but I keep looking for fleeting images as I work.  Perhaps behind the story of the golden age?  Philemon and Baucus?  Medea?  Pentheus?  Perhaps in Ovid himself?  First century C.E. Rome?  All of these?  I don’t know.  But it’s the Moby Dick I’ve set sail to find.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Around and Around and Around We Go

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

Interesting convergence.  In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn.  After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden.  Small pellets of snow fell.

(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)

We went into the orchard.  Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil.  While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.

At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium.  We had similar things to do at similar times of year.

The word annum popped up from today’s translating.  You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return.  In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.

When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh.  Born 66 years from this date.  But that’s not what it really means.  It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times.  The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring.  Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.

We then start over again.  Another year as we often say.  Yes, just so.  Another year.  This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard.  As I have this year.  So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new?  Spring.  When the earth becomes desolate and barren?  Late fall.  Happened before, will happen again.  Amen.

 

Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Expert or Master

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Moving fast this week.  Still working outside, in particular the orchard and broadcast fertilizer.  Two MOOCs presented a lot of reading.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault x2, poems by poets who challenged modernism:  communists, harlem renaissance, Frost and the Formalists.  Finished up Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  Assessing four essays for ModPo.  11 verses so far in Ovid.  Enough things to do, but not too many.

Been thinking about that learning curve graph I posted a couple of days ago.  It is, I suppose, a graph of mastery, a graph of, according to Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of work.  Not sure about the time frame in hours.  Seems a bit facile to me.  By that measure I suppose I could say I’m a master reader, a master politician and maybe a master gardener. Probably a master student.  Still seems inadequate, both as a term and as a process.

(Edouard_Manet_-_The_Reader)

I like the graph better.  Steps.  Progress.  That makes sense to me.  Not hours. By that measure I would say I am an expert reader, perhaps an expert student.  So, I’ve become expert, not in a field or a craft, but in the tools of learning.  Worse things to focus on.

Myth and Story, Writing

More on Loki

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Fall                                                                    Samhain Moon

Loki immersion continues.  I only have Loki in Scandinavian Mythology for three more days so I’ve given it priority in my day.  The book sucks me into matters not relevant to my purpose in reading it.

As folklore scholarship, it intrigues me; especially since I see an exact correlation between the higher criticism of the bible I learned in seminary and the folklore study methodology:  textual criticism, tradition criticism, sitz im leben (what role did the story play in its place of origin), redaction criticism (how have editors and/or compilers influenced the text) and work with the original languages.

(Baldrs-death-killed-by-Hod-helped-Loki)

So, instead of following themes that help me flesh out Loki as a chief character for Loki’s Children, I get seduced by the influence of Orphic tales on the Baldr Myth.  Having a limited time to work with the book helps, it has to go back to the University of Minnesota this Friday, no renewal.  Even so.

Overall though the book has been even more helpful than I imagined.  It was the only text solely to focus on Loki that I could find, the only academic text.  It has made forming a picture of Loki, his skills and his character and his backstory, much easier.