Category Archives: Myth and Story

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

Let There Be Darkness

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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.

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

Photocentrism

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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-darknessshare a darkness dispelling theme with the others.

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

Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Miracles.

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back to School Moon

Nap.  Off to Ace Hardware for chemically resistant gloves.  Really.  Why would I use anything that required them?  Normally, I wouldn’t.  But the varroa mites compromise the divide’s ability to survive the winter and the U says to do this until IPM begins to work.  If I didn’t have a strong recommendation to go ahead from people whom I know share my overall perspective on medication, I would just chance it.  Kate made shims for me to put on the hive boxes to give bees enough space to walk around and get in the Apiguard.  She made them in plenty of time.  I forgot to take them out with me.  Sigh.

I have to go out again tomorrow and put them in place.  Didn’t realize I’d forgotten them until I came inside and saw them still there on the dog crate.

The garlic is in the ground.  This is the first year I’m planting only garlic I have grown.  In previous years I’ve always bought a few bulbs of a variety I haven’t tried.  The planting of garlic grown here both naturalizes the plant to our locale and gives me a sense of a circle closed.  Satisfying.

Dug potatoes, too.  One row of three.  Not as productive as last year so far, but not bad.  I planted these at ground level in the oldest of the raised beds, one almost flush with the garden floor.  I will not do that again.  Way too much bending over.  Still, the thrill of digging a potato out of the loose soil constitutes a miracle as far I’m concerned.

The older I get the more I have the opposite problem from the early advocates of higher criticism of the Bible.  They thought miracles were problematic in the biblical narrative and went about finding natural explanations for them or chalking them up to mythologization.  Not me.

Miracles are everywhere in my world.  Those pale yellow roots against the darkness of the soil.  Edible!  Planting garlic in the fall so I can harvest it next June.  Cooperating with insects to produce a sweet, delicious liquid that I can share with friends.  How about that!  Being part of a young woman’s search for her vocational path.  A person mutating from young adult to a professional.  Getting up in the morning with energy and eagerness for the day.  Greetings from Vega and Rigel with tails thumping and bodies quivering.  Knowing that we get our food from the energy of a star 93 million miles away from us.  Having a modest grasp of quantum mechanics.  The absolute, dumbfounding miracle of love between Kate and me, our kids, our grandkids.  Friendships that have endured for years and years.  Life is so full of miracles I have to fight through them to get to breakfast.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

What is Analysis for?

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Lughnasa                                   New (Artemis) Moon

This month is the Artemis moon because Artemis is the goddess of honeybees and the name goddess for our hives.  Why this month?  Because the end of August is the usual time for honey extraction among beekeepers in our area.  Our brand new extraction equipment is in en route to us from Dadant Bee Supplies in 5 boxes of approximately 34 pounds each.  Some assembly required.

The honey labels, designed by fellow Woolly and graphic artist Mark (LockMan) Odegard, are spectacular.  Literally.  You’ll have to see them.  I’ll post an image when I have a photograph.  Odie offered to do this design work because he always wanted to keep bees himself.  His work displays  long study and careful craftmanship.

A short bit on a longer topic.  Analysis.  A New York Times Magazine piece, My Life In Therapy, raised a question I’ve pondered many times.  That is, does therapy accomplish anything? The author, Daphne Merkin, seems to say no, or mostly no; but, her criteria, character change, is, I think, precisely the wrong measure and gives rise to the dilemma that haunts her piece.

Ms. Merkin started in therapy early, at age 10, and has experienced several therapists, most of them Freudian if I read between the lines.  I didn’t get started so early, age 24 or so, but I saw therapists and counselors from several schools:  existentialist, bumbling pastoral counseling, Adlerian until I hit the big hole in my therapeutic road, treatment for alcoholism.  My month long stint in a Hazelden outpatient program spelled the end of my bouncing from this to that trying to sort out the unusual strategies I had for getting in my own way, many of them, near as I could figure out, related to grief over my mother’s sudden death at 46.

Getting sober made a lot of things come clear that had been foggy.  Without the medication and confusion of drinking, a lot of my life snapped into focus.  Not fast enough however to have prevented a second marriage while I was still drinking.  That marriage, like the first one, ended up in the divorce courts.

Raeone and I parted ways in 1988, but not before I sought therapy once again.  This time I landed, and I don’t recall how, in the offices of John Desteian, a Jungian analyst.  John himself and the Jungian paradigm in particular fit me.  Exploration of dreams, the linkage between imagination and self-knowledge and Jung’s special attention to the creative combined to move me forward on that most ancientrail of all, self-knowledge.  John encouraged me and forced me deeper in my self-exploration, helping me see the very real boxes I constructed, boxes that prevented me from getting to the core of my self and my true pilgrimage.

It took a long time, maybe 18  years off and on, perhaps mostly off, but at certain points weekly for a couple of years at a whack.  Over the course of time I did not go through a character change.  I went through a dramatic change in self-acceptance.  Those melancholic mood swings?  Yes, probably somewhat related to my mother’s death.  Now though they presage a return to creative activity, an ingathering of energy and self collecting itself for a push forward.  The ministry?  An aspect of my three-part self certainly– scholar, monk and poet–but not well related, since the monk is a meditative, solitary archetype for the religious life and the ministry has an extroverted, communal structure.  A better fit?  Writing, solitary work.

The writing has not been a royal road to success, measured in the externals of publishing and money-making and those are real measures.  It did, however, let me focus on creativity, on the domestic front:  cooking, husband, father, gardener and now bee-keeper and on the inner work of the religious or faith pilgrimage.  It’s not that I’ve not written, I have. Six novels.  Many short stories and essays.  This blog and many handwritten journals.  The shift did allow what I call my Self to lead me rather than the demands of the culture or my own ratocinations based on expectations from childhood.

No, I do not believe the goal of therapy or analysis is character change, a goal that may not be achievable at all.  Rather, I see the goal of analysis as the clarification of self, stripping away the accretions of fear, role, pleasing others, traps which cause us to shut some or even all of our self away as unworthy or unnecessary or unwanted,  and in that clarification coming to design a life congruent with the Self, one that nurtures and explores its unique possibilities.  This may mean dramatic role changes; it did for me, moving from the ministry to the study.  This may mean accepting parts of your self that seem unacceptable, for me melancholy and introversion and my need to write, all of which felt unwanted at one time or the other.  This may mean moving from a place of external success to a place of internal satisfaction.  It has for me.

Analysis with John Desteian, using the insights of Carl Jung, helped me achieve a goal I didn’t even know I had, becoming more like who I already was.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Memories, Myth and Story

An Entrance to Faery

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Summer                              Waning Strawberry Moon

My cards were good.  I won some hands.  But.  Boy, did I screw up when I took a chance on a hand where winning would have offered double points, but losing, as I did, with below a minimum, quadrupled the penalty.  Ouch!  Sigh.

The night was glorious.  A warm summer night, a clear sky, the kind of night when everyone is a child, just waiting for the other kids to come out, to play one last game, perhaps wave a sprinkler around or sit down and talk.

A night much like the one I experienced in New Harmony, Indiana when I walked down a lane past the only open air Episcopalian church in the country, designed by Phillip Johnson.  This astonishing church is on one side of a lane that runs back into a woods.  Just across the lane, behind a wonderful small restaurant, The Red Geranium, is a grove of conifers planted on small drumlins.  Inside a modest maze created by these trees lies, improbably, the grave of one of the 20th centuries finest theologians, Paul Tillich.

It was just after dusk, night had come softly, but definitely.  The lane only ran for no more than half-mile on past the church and Tillich’s grave.  As I wandered back, moving away from the main street and toward the woods that lay at the end of the lane, I began to notice the fireflies.

Right where the lane met the woods, fireflies congregated, blinking off and on, creating an arc of bioluminescence.  Then others began to blink, further back in the woods.  There were thousands of them and as the ones further in began to blink they created the effect of a tunnel of light, blinking on and off.

(this pic is similar, not the night I describe)

Walking toward this between two holy places, the possibility that this was an opening to faerie seemed very plausible, even likely.

I stood there for over a half an hour, neither entering the woods, nor leaving the lane, captured as I was by the sense of a veil between the worlds opened where I was.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

What Time Is It?

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Summer                         Waxing Strawberry Moon

A bit more on time.  Cybermage, Woolly Brother and sheepshead player William Schmidt begs to differ on the notion of cyclical time.  He references the geology of Minnesota and, I imagine, the information about the evolution of the universe which he so wonderfully makes understandable with lights and rope.

It is difficult to understand the two apparently conflicting ways of understanding time, the cyclical view that I suggested yesterday over against the deep time recorded in our genes,  our own earth’s mantle and the red shifted lights in the heavens.  Let me see if I can be a little clearer about what I think.

Instead of time as a characteristic of the natural world, that is, an experience of things occurring in sequence:  t1, t2, t3, t4 out there, beyond the reach of our sensory apparatus, I see it as a means of ordering that same sensory experience, a means imposed on it by our mind’s need for order, order that can have a useful meaning for us.  In other words, time and space, both, in this view, exist to help us survive in a world of chaotic events happening in overwhelming numbers.

They create a sort of mental short hand that gives us a way of predicting, in a probabilistic manner, the outcome of things we perceive as happening outside us, things important to us as an animal:  will that animal be beyond that tree when I shoot this arrow? will the arrow actually travel through the apparent intervening distance and strike the animal?  how long will it take me to hike to the berry patch?  Or, contemporary equivalents:  do I have enough time to go to the grocery store after work and before the kids get home?  Can I fit in a round of golf before the rain predicted at 3 pm?  how long does this flight really take?

Does this a priori understanding of time and space invalidate deep time?  I don’t know.  Does cyclical time invalidate deep time?  I don’t know.  I admit there is one part of me that says, Oh, come on.  The earth is 3 billion years old or so.  The universe 13.5 billion years.  Whatever those words mean, they mean the beginning of  both was a long, long time ago.  Yet, another part of me, ascendant right now, wonders if our conclusions about the passage of time mean what we think they mean.

This much I know for sure, on this planet, at this latitude and longitude, in 365 + days, we will spin around to the summer solstice again.  This I can experience as a non-linear mode of time, a mode of time that relies on the cycles of the natural world rather than on the progression of anything through vast stretches of the  past and on into the infinite future.  This cyclical mode of time I can referent, whereas the notion of yesterday and tomorrow seem to me to be no more than place markers, file cabinets for data.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Summer. It’s About Time.

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Summer Solstice                                      Waxing Strawberry Moon

 

The longest day of the year.  Light triumphant, streaming, steaming.  The darkness held at bay.

Summer Solstice

This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one.  We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

The Celts first divided their year into two:  Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end.  As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes.  Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays.  Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel.  In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time.  This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time.  With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next.  Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality.  That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions.  My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time.  We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now.  What is time?  What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy.  Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees.  It is, today, the Summer Solstice.  Again.  As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space.  another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time.  This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school.  The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over.  These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events.  There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later.  Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next?  Not in my opinion.

I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it.  It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light.  We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark.  We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again.  We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance.  This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me.  That’s the light I have today anyhow.  Let’s talk next year at this time.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

One or Many?

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Beltane                           Full Planting Moon

Finally.  A morning with no other responsibilities so I can go out and plant the remaining veggies.  After that, it’s time to get to work on all the things I’ve neglected, the flower beds.  We have more flower beds than we do vegetable garden, so I’m talking a lot of stuff to do.

I’m not yet feeling great, but I feel better.  Sluggish, tired, but not wasted.  The sun will feel good.

Here’s a weird idea.  It may have no basis, but it flitted through my head the other day.  I’ve been reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most popular books of Chinese classical literature.  The Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West are two others, both on my list and in my house.  This is a long book, really long and its narrative style takes some getting used to, not to mention the Russian like propensity for having way more names than this guy can recall easily.  But. It does show a clear thread of Chinese culture, that is, obedience to the state is the norm, the heroic “side” in a conflict.  If you’re a rebel in the Three Kingdoms, you’re a bad guy.  If you convert from being a rebel to being a loyal follower of the Emperor (the last of the Hans in this case), then you’ve taken a step toward redemption.

I’m reading this literature to get a sense of the Chinese geist, the recurring themes that define and shape their sense of themselves.  Chineseness, I guess you could call it.  This has been a long project, lasting many years for me, and engaged in a very unsystematic way, but I have covered a lot of history, film, art, literature including poetry and even a tiny bit of language.

OK.  Let’s juxtapose this rebel bad, obedient good theme to a consistent thread in American film and literature, that is, rebel good, obedient bad.  Our founding story after all is one of rebellion, foisting off the cloying grip of mother Britain.  Think of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter where Dimsdale pales morally when compared to Hester Prinn.  An anthropology professor of mine, David Scruton, said Americans are infracaninophiles, lovers of the under dog.  Unions against big business.  Slaves against masters.  Women against men.  Incumbents versus challengers.  Rebel Without a Cause.  Twelve Angry Men.  The American individualist.

This seems to be a fundamental polarity between the Chinese, submit to family and state (a Confucian ideal), and Americans, the rugged Individualist, Self-Reliant, Don’t Tread on Me types.  Right?  I’ve always heard it put something like this.  Admittedly these are sweeping generalizations, but that’s what I’m after here, the broad stroke that has some anchors in culture and history.

Here’s the weird idea.  What if the broad strokes mean exactly the opposite of what we take them to mean?  In other words, the Chinese emphasize in literature, film, Confucian thought and political rhetoric obedience to the state and family because the Chinese are, in fact, a nation of rebels, individualists.  I know this seems like an odd position, but it comes from a surprising encounter I had with MingJen Chen about a year ago.  Jackie Chan had just said that he thought the Chinese people needed to be controlled.  I asked Mingjen about this and she surprised me by agreeing with Jackie Chan.

What if American’s emphasize individualism in literature, art, film, novels and political rhetoric because we are, in fact, a nation of conformists who use the veneer of rugged individualism to cover a submissive spirit, one that will not struggle with what Emerson called the establishment.  Or, at least, won’t struggle so hard with it that it fears its foundations in jeopardy?

A weird idea, I know, but perhaps a useful one nonetheless.

This idea comes in part from the Jungian notion that we often emphasize in our reading, our writing, our attempts to interpret the world those things that are missing in our life, the thing we would like to live towards or into.  It also comes in part from the realization that, like most things, the notions of individualism and collectivity are not unrelated, isolated realities, but ones that bump up against each other in everyday life.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Politics, US History, Writing

Staying Within My Skill Set

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May 22, 2010              Beltane                    Waxing Planting Moon

While reading an article about Trevor-Rope, a British historian,  I learned that Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall in an attempt to answer the problem raised by the Enlightenment’s idea of progress.  This triggered, for some reason, an echo of the talk by Siah Armajani at the MIA a couple of weeks ago.  A successful artist and philosophically inclined Iranian, he said, “I don’t know how to make legs. [this in response to a question wondering why there were no legs on the figure he said represented himself in an installation currently on display at the MIA in the Until Now exhibition.]  I try to stay within my skill set.”

I’ve not tried to stay within my skill set in that I’ve lived what I call a valedictory life, one typified by reaching to another skill, like say, beekeeping or vegetable gardening or becoming a docent, rather than following the trail laid down by my more obvious gifts:  scholar, poet, writer, political activist, monk [that is, a person oriented toward the inner world].  That’s not to say I’ve abandoned them, I haven’t; but I keep myself off balance by continually being on what I love, a steep learning curve.

This lead me to wonder just what my skill set is and what I would be doing if I chose to remain within it.  A notion came to me, though it’s not the first notion along these lines that I’ve had, but I thought some about what it would mean to stick with it, see it through to the end.

My study contains stacks and shelves of books arranged because they speak to a general interest I have:  the Enlightenment and modernism, the Renaissance, Carl Jung, American philosophy, matters Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian and Indian, Poetry.  You get the idea.

Ian Boswell, a recent Mac grad, and pianist for Groveland UU, said he loved my presentations because they presented a “clear stream of ideas.”  I said, “The history of ideas.”

There is a core skill set:  I have a decent grasp of the history of certain big ideas in Western thought and a much less comprehensive, but still extant, notion of the history of certain ideas in the East as well.  I can communicate about these ideas in a manner accessible to most.

So.  Put that together  with new definitions/understandings of the sacred, the reenchantment of the world, an earth/cosmos oriented approach to the inner life, an historical and ecology examination of Lake Superior, Thomas Berry’s Great Work, a long immersion in the Christian and liberal faith traditions, a now substantial learning in art history, an awareness of and some skill in the political process and work on translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, an idea begins to present itself.

A series of essays, monographs loosely tied together through a historical, ecological and political look at Lake Superior might use the Lake as a particular example.  It could be the thread that held together thoughts on emergence as a redefinition of the sacred, a symbol reenchanted in another {this is where the work on Ovid could play a role.], a place where the Great Work can focus in another [this is where the political would be important], a look at the history of ideas related to lakes and nations, placing Lake Superior in an art  historical context by examining photographs, drawings, paintings, poetry and literature related to it.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Art and Culture, Garden, Myth and Story

Burn your bag, boy?

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Spring                                          Awakening Moon

Two stories from the world around us.

Michele Yates, a docent colleague, toured a group of second graders last week.  At the James Ensor expressionist piece, “Intrigue”, a little boy raised his hand, “Look, you can see the paint.  It’s still wet.”  Turns out this young art connoisseur believed we had a basement filled with producers of art, crankin’em out every so often for the delight of the viewing public.  A time when it would have been delightful to be inside his mind and see the imagined works underneath the museum.  I see trolls and gnomes and dwarfs hard at work.  How about you?

(Frejya and the dwarfs)

An l.e.d. sign for onion sets drew me off  Highway 35E and put to Beisswinger’s Hardware Store.  Beisswinger’s is a great old style hardware store with lots and lots of stuff cared for by employees who actually know how to use it all.  When I took my brown sacks of red, yellow and white onion sets inside, it occurred to me that I still need a fence tester for our electric fence; the high voltage pulse knocks out ordinary voltmeters.  I know.  I did it.

Anyhow, he’d never heard of one, but agreed to look it up.  Both of us were surprised when he found not one, but two.  On the way to the electric fence tester aisle, he started this story exactly like this:

“So, Charlie Brown and I were in New Hampshire on my uncle’s farm.  He’s an old guy, over 70, but wiry.  We’re going out hunting [I’m thinking this is a joke, so I’m preparing to laugh whether it’s funny or not.  He seems like a nice guy.] and the old man scrambles over an electric fence.  Charlie Brown steps over it, but gets a jolt.”  In his red Beisswinger store shirt, this guy seems believable.  He goes on,  “The old man hollers back over his shoulder, ‘Burn your bag, boy?”

I had students from Eau Claire and New York Mills today.  Both groups were fun, interested and engaged.