Monthly Archives: October 2012

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

China Rising

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Fall                                                                    Fallowturn Moon

Walk through with Yang Liu today for the Terra Cotta warrior exhibition.  Using the terra cotta term to shorthand this exhibition does it a significant disservice.  Yang Liu visited many provincial museums as well as the museums associated with Qin Shi Huang Di’s tomb complex.  He chose objects from 16 different museums in all, the bulk of them intended to the story of the rise of the Qin.

That means including Spring and Autumn period bronze ritual vessels and bells, plus a sword (looks more like a dagger to me) made of iron!  This same sword has a pure gold hilt done in sinuous rectangular shapes, dragon motif, and inlaid with turquoise.  The Qin began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period, 770-476 BC, grew strong during the warring states period, 476-221 BC, then, for a brief but centrally important 15 years, unified China and invented many of the marks of empire that would follow:  standardization of weights, currency, script, chariot axle widths, a pyramidal style government with the emperor at the top and a bureaucracy to support it.

The story this exhibit tells is of a region at war with itself, splintering into multiple states, each vying with the other for land, resources, power.  It is a long period because it runs from 770 BC to 207 BC, but it is a critical, perhaps the critical period for understanding the rise of China, many of its concepts still intact even in today’s People’s Republic.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, World History

Warring States

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Fall                                                                         Fallowturn Moon

Today begins the journey to Shaanxi, the province of the Qin state as it emerged during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, a peripheral state on the frontier.  In the lecture today I learned that there is some debate on the origin of the Qin state.  Did it emerge from the barbarians to the west?  Or, did it have, at least in its ruling family, linkage with the east coast?

Yang Liu, Curator of Chinese Art and Head of Asian Art Department, acknowledged this debate, then said, “Why is it important?”  The problem is this.  The Qin unified China and Qin Shi Huang Di is a national hero.  Dynastic China as we come to know it after the Qin has its roots in many of the reforms of Qin Shi Huang Di.  What would it mean if that founding state was not, after all, Chinese?

This show is going to be a big deal, a very big deal.  Schools have already booked nearly all the available slots between now and the show’s end.  The museum has asked docents to sign up for additional tours.

What Yang Liu wants to do is place the tomb, its guardians and other wonderful burial objects like life size water birds and half-size bronze chariots, in the context of the rise of the Qin state during the Eastern Zhou in the Spring and Autumn period, then its emergence as a powerful state during the Warring States Period.  Only then can this massive tomb complex, of which the warriors are, after all, only a small part, be understood in its full historical significance.

Over the next few days I’ll post research I’ve located and things I learn at the Qin dynasty symposium over the weekend.

Travel

A Year Ago Today

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Fall                                             Fallowturn Moon

posted on this day, 2011.

Fall                                                                                        New Moon of the Southern Cross

We will spend the next lunar cycle south of the equator so I’m choosing the iconic southern constellation, the Southern Cross, to name its moon…

Thoughts on cruising. Think of a really nice hotel in which you have stayed. Not five stars, but maybe 4. Good food, attentive staff, interesting public areas and a good gym. Add to that several swimming pools, a theatre, a casino, a library with comfortable chairs, clothing, liquor and jewelery stores, a basketball and tennis court, a quarter mile wooded track. Now float all of that on an ocean. That’s a cruise ship. The hotel, a nice hotel, remains constant no matter where on the journey you are.

Now add in the ocean as a constant companion, 11,000 or feet of it where we sail right now, north of Ecuador headed south. The ocean gives the hotel experience a special character, changing it from very nice to special. That, too, is constant.

Also, the hotel moves from port to port and from country to country, culture to culture. Here the advantage lies in the number and variety of countries and cultures experienced, not the depth of the experience. I’ve now been to Santa Marta, Colombia and Panama City, Panama, both places about which I knew virtually nothing and came away from them realizing I would enjoy seeing them more. I also have a fleeting sense of their culture, their daily life, but a fleeting sense rooted in concrete experience rather than travel books or documentaries.

From this point forward Kate and I will collect similar impressions of six more countries: Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, with multiple stops in Ecuador, Peru and Chile. At the end we will have, I’m sure, a gestalt of South America. It will be fungible and impressionistic, but it will have its roots in on the ground experience.

Cruising of this sort, then, provides an overview of a continent, say, with all the limitations of an overview, but with the utility of a solid overview, too.

Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Myth and Story

Downright Ancient

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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.

 

Travel

A Year Ago

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Fall                                        Fallowturn Moon

The Mother of All Locks

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Charles

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

At 4:30 am the Veendam had a small tug pushing it toward the south to better position it for entering the Gatun Locks. An upside down sliver moon hung in the sky and the smells of a large oil refinery floated on deck from a brightly lit facility on the north shore of the canal’s entrance.

(frigate birds watching the ships go by)

Out in the ocean, behind us, were numerous ships, all brightly lit, all waiting for their turn in the long canal connecting the Atlantic basin and the Pacific.

Lockmeister Odegard would find this a fascinating journey through the Mother of All Locks. The Gatun can take ships up to 996 feet long and 110 feet wide. Even those generous dimensions long past feel outside the girth and length of the true ocean going monsters, mostly oil tankers, built so big that it still made economic sense to round Cape Horn. That problem with the Canal has a remedy underway, largely financed by the Chinese I think. It will build a third set of locks with capacity to handle these huge super ships on their journey from the oil fields of the Middle East to the oil hungry nations on the Pacific Rim.

The day is warm, though not so warm as the first time Kate and I made this journey. Starboard, our side, has the good fortune of facing north as we sail east to west, so our deck chairs have good shade.

Right now we are in Lake Gatun, the big artificial lake that provides the 51 million gallons of fresh water needed to step a ship up or down through the massive locks. These locks still  use the same massive doors and valves put in place in the early twentieth century.

Dogs

On the Table

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Fall                                                                        Fallowturn Moon

Heavy fog here this morning.  Made driving through the leaf scattered roads and past our lakes scenic and atmospheric.  On the road with Gertie, taking her over to Foley Boulevard Vets for her ACL surgery.  She did not want to go with the vet tech, so I had to walk with her to the back.

She should be done around 12:30 pm, come home around 6:00.  This is a 6 month rehab and a long stint with a bandage.  Dog’s are not so good with bandages.  That is, they like to tear them off then lick, lick. lick, lick the wound.  Does not help healing.  She may have to wear an elizabethan or e collar.  Clumsy things to have inside.

Kate’s off to pick up her antibiotics and pain meds.  We will give her a series of shots, 8 in all, at home after the surgery.  These are to attenuate possible arthritic complications from the knee trauma.

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Myth and Story

Old Timey

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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.

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

They Can’t Afford the Dues

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Fall                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s tonight.  This was our first regular meeting since Regina’s death so our conversation focused on Bill while Bill, St. William as Tom called him, kept turning the focus to Regina or to us.

Bill places his hand over his chest and says he prefers to live life from there, rather than here, and he taps his head.  He says we can all live from the place of love.  “All men could have this in their lives.” He spread his arms to include those of us in the room.

“Yes,” Tom said, “but they can’t afford the dues.”  We have a running joke about our dues-zero.

Bill said, “Exactly.  They feel like they can’t afford the dues.  And they’re high.”  We meet at least twice a month and have an annual retreat for four days.  We work at maintaining our relationships.

Those dues pay off in nights like this.  We can gather in a living room with our hearts open to a friend and he knows he can count on us.  And he can.

Family, Myth and Story, Politics
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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.