Yearly Archives: 2013

Cinema and Television, Family, Holidays

How Much Is Enough?

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Winter                                                   Winter Moon

Kate and I both read a zine called the Tablet.  It’s a hip Jew commentary on whatever.  It contained this today:  “The Hebrew year is 5774 and the Chinese year is 4710. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years.”  We follow, as I wrote before, Jewish tradition by going to movies and eating Chinese on Christmas.

Today we stayed close to home, eating lunch at the Mandarin Buffet, greeted by r challenged waiters and waitresses who greeted with holiday cheer anyhow.  After that we saw the Desolation of Smaug, the second of the Hobbit trilogy.  It’s a non-stop action flik with Evangeline Lilly as an action elfess, as beautiful here as she was all those seasons on Lost.  The time went fast as the dwarves escaped the Wood Elves in barrels, road coal and metal carriers to escape Smaug and Gandalf seemed to be defeated by Sauron.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a lot of fun.

This was at the Andover Cinema and our second choice, Hunger Games II, had just ended its run and we didn’t know that.  So, we had to decide on a second movie on the spur of the moment.  We chose Wolf of Wall Street. This is a more difficult movie to parse.  First, it’s too long.  Could have stood 45 minutes worth of cutting.  It’s a Martin Scorsese movie so he apparently got the cut he wanted.  Second, I hope, as Kate imagines, it’s broadly drawn.  I’ll explain that in a bit.

Wolf’s great strength is its unflinching look at what happens to people who cannot answer the question, what is enough?  If you make money and power the focus of your life, they will become your center of value, what H. Richard Niebuhr called your God.   With them in the center of your ethical system your value choices will not be about people or beauty or justice or the natural world, but how about how you can get more.  More money.  More power.

You will not be able to answer the question, how much is enough, because the amount of money and power you need will always be just a bit more than you have.  This is ambition. This is greed.  This is eagerness to have positional authority.  This ultimate honey trap gets strokes by the culture.  We lionize billionaires and barely recognize the teachers, doctors, mechanics, nurses, clerks, postal workers who do the important work in our culture.

I’m not, this time, trying to make a political point, but a theological one.  What you place at your center, your center of value, shapes all the decisions that you make.  It’s a critical decision and it is just that, a decision.  You can choose to have other people, the natural world, beauty, health or justice as your center; you can also choose money and power.

In Wolf we see the terrible personal and social cost of choosing money and power.  Other people are tools.  Stocks are, as Matthew McConaughey’s character, Mark Hanna says, “Fairy dust…they exist for one reason.  To take money out of the clients pocket and put it our pocket.”  The only yardstick for success is money and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods:  Armani suits, Ferrari’s, yachts, estates, drugs, whores, planes.

Kate saw it as drawn broadly.  That may be, but the motive force, the need for more and the sense that life has no moral limits characterize so many striving folks.  Not just Americans.  Chinese, too.  Singapore.  Mumbai.  This movie is, at bottom, about seduction and shows what few people ever realize.  We don’t need the devil.  We seduce ourselves.

 

Health, Latin, Tea, Writing

A Warm World

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Winter                                                                   Winter Moon

Those words, Winter/Winter Moon, above the posts signal the cozy world I inhabit right now.  It gets cold and snowy outside.  I turn on the green gas stove, sit down at my computer and find out what Ovid meant or what it is I will mean when I write Loki’s children.  My yixing teapots fill up and drain, infusion after infusion, Yunnan White Needle or Master Han’s Looseleaf Pu’er. One clear and flavorful, the other dark and rich.

(pu’er tea)

The light fades and I prepare to workout, that 45 minute to an hour moment of very physical activity.  I enjoy it, miss it when I don’t do it, but all the same I wish I didn’t need to do it.

After that there’s supper, some TV or a book, or both, with Kate, then later bedtime.  Over night the study cools down and the next morning I get up and turn on the green gas stove. It’s winter, cold and snowy outside.

Writing

The Story So Far

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Winter                                                       Winter Moon

Working in Dramatica this morning.  This software forces me consider aspects of story I’ve not paid attention to in the past, at least not intentionally.  Much of storytelling, of course, is a product of having read and listened to stories for a lifetime, but when creating one it’s natural to overemphasize certain aspects and neglect others.  Though Dramatica seems overly determined at times, it’s emphasis on structure and plot throughlines has me imagining different ways to get my story out to the reader.

Let me give you one example.  My main character, John, begins Loki’s Children with one book’s work behind him.  He spent that book working through landing on another planet, in another solar system and in the body of a different person.  He was missing and by the end he has been found.

In Loki’s Children, on the other hand, he will struggle with whether he is alien to Tailte (the new planet) or a citizen.  His answer matters because Tailte is about to undergo a series of shocks, tests of its resolve to maintain life as it is known.  John can be the key figure in Tailte’s struggle with these tests or, he can succumb to nostalgia and focus on trying to get back to Earth.

(Thor in Hymir’s boat battling the Midgard Serpent Johann_Heinrich_Füssli  1788)

Having this level of clarity about John in Loki’s Children, before I wrote my way into it, is very new for me.  And it feels positive.

Weather +Climate

A Cold Start

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Winter                                                               Winter Moon

-16.  That gets my attention.  The study was down to 56 degrees.  The gas stove has begun pumping out heat but we’re only up to 57 so far.  That will change.  This has, so far, been a Minnesota winter of old, snow and cold.  May it continue.  Paul Douglas said, “It reminds us that we’re really a distant suburb of Winnipeg.”  True.

I was going to go into the MIA today but decided it was too cold.  Besides, I had a very good day yesterday with Ovid and got some decent work done on Loki’s Children.

weather story 12 24 2013

Art and Culture, Asia, Tea

Yixing Teapot

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Winter                                                                      Winter Moon

My holiseason present came today.  It’s a yixing teapot from the Chinese Teashop based in Vancouver, British Columbia.  That brings my collection to three:  one for black and pu’er teas, one green and oolong teas and one for white teas.  Eventually I’ll have a yixing teapot for each of the varieties of tea, but it takes a while to get there since they’re not cheap.

My gong fu cha chops have increased over the last few weeks and sitting above me and to my right are these teas:  Master Han’s Looseleaf 2004 Shu Pu’er, spring harvest Laoshan green, Phoenix Mountain dancong oolong, Wuyi mountain big red robe, Qilan Wuyi oolong, Silver Needle.

This tea journey I’m on now is another ancientrail, a side path from an interest in Asian art and culture.  It allows me to have a bit of Asian culture right here, on a regular basis.

With gong fu cha I infuse tea leaves for times ranging from 4 seconds to the very longest 25 seconds, pouring hot water over the teapot while the tea infuses, a different temperature for each variety of tea.  This requires a teapot and my Zojirushi.  The Zojirushi holds three plus liters of water at 175 degrees.  It’s perfect for white and green teas.  The teapot gets water to the 205-208 degree temperatures best for the oolongs, blacks and pu’ers.

There’s a good deal of puttering with it, fussing and that’s all part of drinking tea.  It takes me, at least for a minute or two, into a world of long ago and far away.  When I return I have about half a cup of tea, which lasts a good while since I drink it out of my Chinese teacups, smaller and shallower and wider than the tea cups we use.

Having added it to my working day gives uniqueness to the beverages I drink and links me to a worldwide culture of tea drinkers.  It’s a hobby, I guess.

Cinema and Television, Humanities, World History

Hannah Arendt

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Winter                                                                       Winter Moon

Hannah Arendt.  Here’s a movie that will challenge you.  It takes a particular moment in the life of this famous philosopher, the moment when she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, and opens it out into the massive controversy that followed.

It was in her coverage of the Eichmann trial that she coined the term “the banality of evil” based on her observations of Eichmann as an ordinary man.  The controversy that embroiled her ensued with the publication of the New Yorker Article.  It contained 10 pages in which she points to Jewish leadership as implicated, by omission, in the Holocaust.  She was damned as a self-hating Jew and a blamer of victims.

This movie shows her as a courageous, thoughtful and brave intellectual, unafraid to speak her own truth and unflinching in her analysis.

A difficult movie in some ways and certainly not thrilling, but important.  I recommend it.

Art and Culture

Those Odd Days Toward the End of the Year

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Winter                                                   Winter Moon

Looked at my calendar and found basically nothing on it until after the first of the year. I like that.  In times past it would have caused some consternation, not now.  Now I see it as fertile time that I can use as I need.

Doesn’t match my feeling of the moment, however, which is, ho hum, let’s watch a movie. Which I just may do.  We got Hannah Arendt in the mail Thursday and I haven’t seen it yet.

The Winter Solstice has come and gone, followed by this period of little to do as everyone goes about holiday and end of year scurrying.  A while back I discovered the Maya considered the five days at the end of the year as bad days, days when it was best to do nothing since the omens weren’t auspicious.  I modified that and decided to use these last days for idiosyncratic projects, things I might not do otherwise.

(Edouard_Manet The_Reader)

One thing I have planned is additional organizing of all the image files I’ve collected over the years.  This will include pulling some files off an old hard-drive and getting them on this computer as well as creating new files where old ones have become too full.  An example would be the file, Art French.  In this file I have Bonnard, Chardin, Poussin, Manet and several others of note.  Early on I created Art Monet, Art Cezanne, Art Gauguin and Art Matisse and now I have enough files to create separate files for each of these other artists, too.

(William-Adolphe Bouguereau “Art and Literature” 1867.)

This work will include some primary pics posts featuring my favorite images.  I love looking at these images and this is a good excuse to dive into them.

There’s a sort of torpor that descends on me at this time of year, a sense that the old year has grown fainter and fainter with the vigor of the new year still to come.  I try to have fun with it.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

At Home

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Winter Solstice                                                           Winter Moon

The long night continues.  Kate and I had our bonfire together.  All three dogs came out and sat with us for a bit before taking off for doggy business barking at something deeper in the woods.

(Lorraine_Williams_Rainbow_Serpent_Dreaming)

The silence has fallen and will stay with us until morning.  Then the sunlight will wake up the birds and the newspaper deliverers and those who work on Sunday mornings.  And the long trek into darkness begun last summer in June trades places with an equally long ancientrail of light.

These are not opposites, not poles of a dialectic, but two sides of the world, entered through dawn and twilight, and with us every single day of our lives.  I’m still intrigued with the notion that the darkness may be our brains normal state and all this waking activity is clever misdirection by the dreamtime.

This will bear more thought and reading.

I do know this.  The ancientrail of darkness is katabatic, like Persephone’s or Orpheus’s or Odysseus’s.  That is, it is the trail which leads to the underworld, the dark places within us and that it has always drawn me more than the journey toward the light.

Let me say exactly what I mean here.  This is a bodily sensation, a sense of familiarity and comfort, a feeling of spirituality and it correlates to the increasing darkness.  It becomes most intimate this night, a night that is different from all other nights. Yet, the same.

It’s not that I reject the light or feel oppressed by it.  The garden, the growth of plants and the chance to wander outside easily has its joys, certainly.  It’s just that for me the darkness is richer, takes me further.

Does this have any correlation to my depressive or melancholic or dysthymic states? Maybe.  Does that mean it’s bad in some way or counter productive?  I don’t think so.  It seems to me that this is descriptive, not prescriptive or proscriptive.

My guess is that our bodies and our early life experiences give us a tendency to lean more toward the dark or the light.  My guess further is that since waking activity has a natural though not necessary linkage with the day, in particular work and school, that we privilege those who tend more toward the light, perhaps even suppressing in ourselves a tendency to favor the dark.

At any rate I’m of the dark persuasion and this is the moment in the year when I feel, as Tom Crane suggested, at home.

 

 

Great Wheel

Winter Solstice 2013

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Winter Solstice                                                                    Winter Moon

It’s here!  It’s here!  No.  Not Christmas.  The Winter Solstice.  It’s my favorite holiday of the year and one I anticipate with eagerness.  We hit the solstice moment at 11:11 am here, the time when the tilt of the earth begins to move ever so slightly back toward the sun, a move that, at the end of the next six months will once again light up midsummer.

A friend, Tom Crane, has an interesting take on the Winter Solstice.  He sees it as a form of the story of the prodigal son.  For him we return “home” each year to this spot, this fulcrum between light and dark, and receive a glorious welcome from what he refers to as our high-self.  The high-self bids us come inside for a feast.  At this feast, Tom goes on, we dine on the fatted calf of our own gathered treasures.

Yes.  A recurring feast in which we invite our multi-form selves to dine on the wonders of which we have become aware in our own home.  This is a life-affirming read of the Winter Solstice, one that takes the eternal return and gives it a personal meaning.  More.  The personal meaning it gives acknowledges the positive accomplishments within, not the material achievements without which carry their own reward.

And, let me add a bit.  An important transition for me has been metaphysical.  That is, I began a long while ago to push away spirituality based on the transcendent and sought it in immanence. That’s a move away from God above and without to incarnation.

In this incarnational understanding spirituality comes from within us and from the world around us.  So, patching together the recurrent astronomical event, the Winter Solstice, with the notion of the high-self inviting us to dine on our own gathered treasure, is a ritual acknowledgment of the move from transcendence to incarnation.

And such an understanding is not without precedence.  The Christmas story is, too, an incarnational story, the story of the divine found and acknowledged in one just like you and me.  It is such a story pegged in recurrence to the Winter Solstice.  At this level of understanding I celebrate Christmas, too.  Of course, the Christian version links the divine within to a high god without who has to validate our divinity, then save us when we deviate from it.  That seems unnecessary at least.

The high-self (I like that formulation.) is the sacred within us and it always invites us to celebrate the richness that we are.  We are our own Three Kings, magi–that is invokers of magic, who bring the gifts that we then offer to the world.

So this long solstice night I invite you to go down and in, find the inner sanctuary and within it, the inner banquet table, and sit down to a feast of the very best that you are and that you have to offer the world.  The high-self welcomes you home.

 

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club, US History, Weather +Climate

On the Margins

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Samhain                                                                  Winter Moon

We’re in the dark period of the year, the time when the Winter Solstice stands out even among long nights as longer and deeper. Tonight, all Solstice eve, it’s 4:30 pm and twilight fell a while ago.  Snow comes down, adding to an inch or so to what we got over last night, all accumulating on top of the snows of early December.

Let me demonstrate how odd my religious situation is.  When my doctor, Corrie Massie, asked me what plans I had for Christmas, without thinking, I said, “We’re Jewish.”  Now we’re Jewish in that I support Kate’s Judaism, but what I really meant was, “I don’t celebrate the Christian holiday.”  Didn’t want to start with the whole theological narrative in my doctor’s office so my unconscious answered.  Not a lie, just not the whole truth.

No elevator speech for following the rhythmic cycles of nature, for celebrating not transcendence but immanence.  No quick way to say I’m an outlier here, too, standing on the margins of religion.  So often I find myself in conversations where I just don’t want to go through the whole analysis to explain myself.

Yes, too much carbon dioxide is, will be a problem. The unseemly gathering of wealth threatens the fabric of our culture.  No, I’m not really a Democrat and am planets away from Republicans.  Tea Party?  Different universe.  No, I don’t use pesticides.  Yes, we grow a lot of our own food and keep bees.  Oh, and I have a son in the Air Force who now has aspirations to become a general officer, to make sure authentic folks have their say.  No, mining minerals on the border of the Boundary Waters Wilderness does not make sense.  Socialism and single-payer health from Mark Odegardcare?  Sign me up.  I’m glad China and the rest of Asia have begun to grow strong.  I love the U.S.A.  Cable television?  Cut the cord.  That sort of thing.

I guess I’m at an age where I’m living the life I chose and choose, yet no longer have that evangelical zeal for my decisions.  Maybe because I recognize more and more how many right answers there are.