Category Archives: Myth and Story

Slumped

December 3, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Thanksgiving Moon

Still in that post-push slump, keeping myself going, going, going. Then, nothing. Quite a change. I don’t like the feeling though it seems inevitable given the number of times its happened.

I feel unmoored, untethered, directionless. Didn’t get back on the Latin horse this morning, allowed some really piddling difficulties with the Mythology class to distract me. They reinforce this feeling.

Another inevitable part of this process is the gradual reclaiming of energy and focus, the renewal that grabs me as I catch hold again, ready for another swing around the carousel.

Hasn’t happened yet. It will.

Art and Culture, Asia, Myth and Story, Writing

Endings

December 2, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Thanksgiving Moon

Took my final quiz. Graded my five assignments of others. The mythology class is over for me. This week, too, I finished the first revision (not at all the last) of Missing. And, too, it was just this week, Friday, that all the research I’d done prior to the Terra Cotta Warrior exhibition finally came together and created a good tour, maybe a very good one.

That means three areas where I’ve put a lot of energy over the last three months, since September, have all come to fruition and closure in the same week. An accident, I think, but it has left me feeling exhilarated on the hand and let down on the other. Sort of a dip, a consequence of juggling three large balls for a significant period of time, then having them all disappear. What do I do now?

(Hermann-Hendrich-The-Norns-1906)

Well, I know the answer to that. Latin. This whole next week will be focused on translation. Then, the week after that I’ll turn to learning how to print out my manuscript using the new software, making a few revisions of location and joining of scenes–and, I’ll add a scene I realized over dinner that I need to include. A result of a change made earlier.

In the last week of the month, Christmas week, I’ll start writing Loki’s Children, Book II of the Tailte trilogy. Looking forward to that.

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

Challenge a God

November 17, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Thanksgiving Moon

My course on Mythology finishes week 8 Sunday with a quiz on material about Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Over Thanksgiving week we have another 250 word essay due, the final writing assignment. I’ve chosen to answer this question: “In tragedies, the worlds of the divine and the human often come into direct contact, but in different ways in each tragedy. Choose one tragedy and analyze how it imagines the relationship between humans and the divine.” Just weeks 9 and 10 to go.

(Caravaggio, 1595, Uffizi)

Don’t know how many of the 50,000 world wide students have stuck it out, but this is a wonderful way to refresh and deepen knowledge about Roman and Greek mythology. It has also increased my analytical skills for use in approaching any myth, which includes, of course, the Metamorphoses.

In the Bacchae Sophocles approaches the story of the doubter Pentheus, king of Thebes, from the perspective of Dionysus, a god challenged. The same incident occurs in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses and I translated it. My main goal in all this work in the Latin is to embed the stories and the characters firmly in my mind.

While reading The Bacchae, a sudden burst of insight. Here’s the insight: The focus of this myth is how a god demonstrates his/her divinity when challenged. The story of the golden calf in Genesis is a similar story. So is the story of Adam and Eve. Even Job.

This is, if you consider it, an ur-story since at some point every god or goddess had to establish their bona fides to persons who would worship them and so people would worship them. We tend to come at religious life after this delicate and not at all obvious in its outcome encounter has already happened. In the Bacchae and the story of Pentheus in Ovid Pentheus gets the ultimate penalty for challenging Bacchus. He dies, his kingdom perishes and his people go into exile. Powerful demonstration of divinity on the part of Dionysus.

Latin, Myth and Story

Aside November 2, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Fallowturn Moon

Listened to a brief lecture on the Delian Hymn to Apollo, then checked my work for my time with Greg this morning. I’m trying to learn transformational grammar to use as an aid to translating. I don’t have it down. Yet.

Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Myth and Story

Meat

October 30, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Sat down to supper tonight. Beef. Rare. Kate’s a great hand with the steak. Always gets it right. As I cut through a piece, the course I’m taking on mythology flashed to mind. Just before I ate supper, as a happenstance, I listened to a lecture on ritual and religion. A major part of Greek rituals was sacrifice.

The sacrifice was usually an animal and, though piglets, pigs, chickens, sheep and goats could be offered, the very best was cow, a bull or an ox, the bigger the better. Last week we learned about Prometheus and his deception of Zeus which involved wrapping thigh bones in glistening fat and offering them to the gods while the humans kept the meat for themselves. Professor Struck suggested in this case the myth served to justify the odd habit of giving the gods the least of the sacrifice. Could be.

A more cogent argument this week, from anthropology, about why sacrifice animals at all. The sacrifice, commanded by the gods, offsets, according to this line of thought, the blood guilt humans experience when killing and eating animals. This makes sense to me.

Now, we don’t have the ritual context, not even the native american habit of thanking the animal for the gift of their life. My rationale has always involved anthropology; that is, we humans are built as omnivores and as apex predator we eat at the top of the food chain. No blood guilt, just animal nature.

Probably no more defensible than the gods made me do it.

Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Myth and Story

Downright Ancient

October 24, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

The further I go on the ancientrail of aging the more I seem to travel further back in time. Ancient Greece and ancient China right now, ancient Celtic and Roman life, too. Something about the mythic, even the stories of Genesis, Kings, Matthew, Acts. Those misty days when human life and the sacred life reached out and shook hands, strolled together, loved together, fought together.

(source)

I suppose this could be a desire to escape the Obama/Romney symptom of our deep political sickness. Or to dodge the careening environmental disaster that we seem determined to advance. Maybe it’s about setting aside the present for an imagined richer past.

But I don’t think so. To follow the struggle of the Warring States period in China, a time when a hundred flowers bloomed, to know that out of awful violence can come human and humane wisdom. To watch the consolidation of those same states into one and then follow those states as they transform, yet always hold onto the thread of culture. To listen to the epic poets Homer and Hesiod sing the tales of adventure, gods, heroes, treachery, betrayal and vengeance. Rebellion and revolution among the earliest offspring of earth and sky, chasm and eros. To embrace the never vanished sacred bond linking you and me to the land, the stars. To see Gawain as he puts his head down to receive his blow from the Green Knight.

The Roman epic poets Virgil and Ovid, spilling stories onto their pages with extravagance, a flood, a tsunami of narrative, history and myth all laced together. Adam and Eve fled east of Eden. Solomon and David. Jesus at Gethsemane.

These are the foundations of our cultures. The base narratives against which we understand love, war, justice, deceit, fate, doom. The base narratives with which we dance our identities in the ballroom of the cosmos.

(lucas cranach the elder)

To study them is to learn the human language.

Art and Culture, Asia, Myth and Story

Old Timey

October 23, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes French, 1824-1898. Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses Art Institute of Chicago

Moving on in our mythology class to Hesiod and his Theogony, the Birth of the Gods. This is a very different epic poem from Homers though no less beloved in antiquity. Hesiod’s a beginnings and genealogies sort of guy over against Homer’s narrative genius. By our narrative saturated standards the two don’t stand comparison, but in the past Hesiod’s poem was seen as inhabiting an equal but different place.

I think it’s like Genesis compared to the gospels, a grand narrative of beginnings, including the first people and the first important sacred events over against the story of a well loved figure whose life had a distinct arc.

It’s interesting to me since I’m at the same time preparing to tour the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at the MIA. This has me tucked into Asian antiquity, the Chinese branch, especially the Warring States Period, 475-221 BC and the immediately subsequent Qin dynasty, 221-207 BC. The Greek material from Homer and Hesiod is in 700-800 BC range, so deeper back in the Western story, yet it’s all well before the Christian era.

One of the things that really fascinates me at the moment is the cultural continuity in China from the early Shang dynasty in 1600 BC to the present laid over against the more fragmented but equally old Western cultural tradition. In material I study there seems to be a bias that the cultural continuity of Chinese civilization produces a superior civilization. I’m not sure at all that that’s true and I’m also not sure that there is less cultural continuity here in the West.

Another day on this controversial point.

Family, Myth and Story, Politics

October 22, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Talked with the grandkids last night, their parents, too, all frozen on the screen after their computer went black. We had a long distance phone call over the internet, though, of course, it was a phone call in the same sense that a refrigerator is an icebox.

Finished my 4th quiz for the mythology class, the end of the Odyssey material, now we move on to Hesiod and his Theogony. Also turned in my first essay exam in over two decades. A blast from the past.

[Hesiod and the Muse, by Gustave Moreau. Here he is presented with a lyre, which contradicts the account given by Hesiod himself, in which the gift was a laurel staff.]

The last presidential debate is tonight and I say it can’t come soon enough. This campaign began just as the last one ended, it seems, dragging on and on, making our political process captive to so many extraneous influences. The British system, I think, allows for more focus on policy differences, less on personalities, gaffes, external events like the Libyan embassy security.

We have our system, not theirs, so we can only wait through the last fattening of the television companies, then head into the ballot box and hope that, despite the hanging chads with which many of us baby boomers will enter the polling place, our votes will be counted.

Art and Culture, Myth and Story

Saturday

October 20, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

A cold morning has given way to a beautiful fall day. Clear, bright. Still colored leaves on trees and bushes.

We had our business meeting this morning. I’ve spent most of the afternoon on my Mythology course and revising Missing. Listened to two interesting lectures, one on Odysseus’ scar and one on Penelope’s dream.

image: “Ulysses Recognized by Euryclea,” Eustave Boulanger, 1849. Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Humanities, Myth and Story, US History

It’s Science’s Fault

October 18, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fallowturn Moon

Here’s a “timeless principle” I found on Rep. Aikin’s website today:

Timeless Principles

George Washington

“I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see a policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery.” (letter to Lawrence Lewis, August 4, 1797) — George Washington was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States of America

I get the how. But still I wonder about the anti-science perspective that gains traction in an age of vaccines, space flight, electric cars and digital communications. After shock and awe, I wonder about the why of it.

Not how. I know how: 1. Minds foreclosed by religious dogma, which BTW is different from theology which can admit searching and questioning. Dogma are matters of certainty necessary to faith in a particular religious community. 2. Minds wedded to an ideology that functions like a dogma. Doctrinaire Marxists, objectivists and libertarians are examples here.

I’ve been thinking about the anti-science movement since the Sierra Club legislative awards ceremony on Tuesday. You need go no further unfortunately than the House of Representative’s Committee on Science, Space and Technology to find it alive and voting. NASA, the Department of Energy, EPA, ATSDR, NSF, FAA, NOAA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, FEMA, the U.S. Fire Administration, and United States Geological Survey all fall within the partial or total overview of this committee.

Our lady parts ambassador Todd Aikin sits on that committee. (see an example of his website below) Also on the committee from a Georgia university town and a medical doctor: ATHENS, Ga. (AP) — Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior.

An entry on the California Aggie blog adds this: “Sitting with Akin on the affectionately-dubbed “Anti-Science Committee” is Paul Broun, (see above) a creationist who believes the Earth is 9,000 years old, Mo Brooks and Jim Sensenbrenner, both global-warming deniers, and Ralph Hall, who blocked a bill to fund science research by essentially forcing the opposing candidates to vote in favor of pornography.”

This last gem of a politician is, wait for it, the chair of the committee. Chew on that one for awhile.

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