Daily Archives: October 24, 2012

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.