Monthly Archives: February 2013

Commentary on Religion

Too Pooped to Pope!

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Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

Cybermage Bill Schmidt held the hot hand tonight in Sheepshead.  He just kept winning.  And came out ahead, well ahead for the evening.  The card gods blessed him in his coming and in his going.  My cards were middling.  In the black, but barely.

Since this is three ex-Jesuits, a very engaged Catholic layman, and me, a former clergy, talk turned to the Pope.  One guy thought the headline for Benedict’s resignation should have been:  Too Pooped to Pope!  Great line.

The Vatican has always fascinated me.  Partly the mystery and secrecy, the Vatican library for example.  Partly its nation-state status inside the city limits of Rome.  Partly its peculiar prominence among the world’s religions.  Partly the long history and partly its long reach.  Partly the great outfits.  Surely the great art.

Kate and I sent the thank-you notes for our wedding, penned over the Atlantic on a Pan-Am airliner, from the Vatican Post Office.  We also first had what we call Popeteria salad (mozzarella and tomatoes with basil and olive oil) in the cafeteria of the Vatican Museum.  When we were there in March of 1990, the Last Judgment was still in the process of being cleaned, but the rest was, well, pristine.  Ha, ha.

Michelangelo. Raphael. Bernini. Great and illustrious names in Italian art decorated–decorated–St. Peter’s, the chapels, apartments and even the hallways.  The Vatican is a great monument to the power of the Western artistic vision as well as the power of the papacy and the curia.

Sede vacante.  The chair is empty.  Now the inside ball, politicking without politicking.  Running without running.  Men in cardinal soutanes and small cardinal berettas file in and begin a centuries old tradition, an oligarchy of the church chooses their monarch.

Set aside the metaphysics, this is just plain interesting from a human and organizational and historical perspective.

 

Travel

Falling in Love

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

“I really fell in love with that part of the world,” says Cynthia Hopkins of the Arctic, where she journeyed with other artists in 2010. “I also fell in love with the boat we were on.”  author of This Clement World opening at the Guthrie

My promiscuity.  I shamelessly fall in love over and over again when I travel.  Bangkok’s quirky Chinatown, especially on the weekend with all those restaurants set up on the sidewalks and folks walking in the densely trafficked street.  Angkor in all its viney, scorpion infested, land-mined Hindu strangeness.  Inverness and its smoky river, walking there with Kate.  Why do we ever have to leave?  That little restaurant, Crispie’s was it, just down from the Internazionale in Rome.  The Ringstrasse in Vienna.  The left bank in Paris.

(oh, yeah, Romania.  A more recent love.)

Then there was Ushuaia, that frowsy scamp of a town as far south as you can get in the Americas.  And, god, just before her, those Chilean fjords.  Let me off the boat.  Give me a small house, an internet connection and forget about me until, well, forever.  Montevideo, too.  Friendly, beefy, colorful.  Old world European with a Latin twist.

I suppose I’d have to mention those old, first loves, too.  Chicago, city of roast beef sandwiches, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, Hyde Park.  D.C. and all its power, its monuments and museums.  And yes, like so many before me, I had a brief fling with San Francisco, but she’s so expensive, a real high-maintenance gal.

Of course, there are a few I keep, stable-like, harems of places that I visit like a ghost Sultan, flitting in and out, but always returning for one more time.  Lake Superior, especially the true north shore, the part in Ontario.  The Georgian bay of Lake Huron.  Those rocky mountains lying just at the limits of my home turf here in the U.S.  All majesty and purple.

Savannah and Charleston, yes.  The south is a guilty pleasure, that one with the dark desires, visited always with an eye to the road back north.  New Orleans, oh yes.  Dark queen of the south.  I’m sure I could return to the Okefenokee swamp.  And I confess to two trips to Red Cloud, Nebraska.  Those Grand Tetons.  Yes.  Cody, Wyoming. Yes.  Ely and the north woods.  Yes.

You see, I’m the tramp really.  Letting my heart go, letting it all go.  Loving this place and that.  I’m easy, I guess.

Memories

The Band

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

Listening to the Band, The Weight.  One of my favorite bands.  Up on Cripple Creek.  The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.  I Shall Be Released.  The back up band for Dylan from 1965-1968 when he went on his Electric Tour, they played together until 1976, ending their touring days with the wonderful Martin Scorsese film, The Last Waltz.

Music congeals around it auras and memories, the mental flavors of a time, a moment in personal history.  Our song.  That song they played.  You know the one.  The music now known as psychedelic or acid rock cannot be heard by someone in the Movement during the ’60’s and early 70’s without instant transportation back, old Army jackets, pot, dope.  Looking out for the man.  Gettin’ back to the land.  Stopping the war.  Youth done up in  neon colors and lived to the Jefferson Airplane, Led Zepplin, the Doors.

Think of the Big Band era and World War II.  Glam rock and bubble gum.  Punk.  All have their devotees and their memories.

Magical memory tours.  That’s an important thing music offers.  I don’t go there often enough.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

After the Swede saw, lunch and a nap followed by another sentence, 6 verses long, in Ovid’s retelling of the Jason and Medea narrative.  When I have a week off from translating, or almost a week, like I had when I spent time rearranging and reorganizing, I wonder if I can still do it.  Sometimes I convince myself that what I’ve learned has dropped away and I’ve wasted all the time up to that point.  Silly, yes, but real nonetheless.

(Medea, Batumi, Georgia)

As a result, it is a relief when I return to the work and find myself able to translate.  This time in fact I managed a translation of a clause without looking up a word.  Something is seeping into the lower crevices of my brain.  Language work, at least for me, is slog, slog, slog, plateau.  Plateau, plateau, plateau.  Slog, slog, slog, slog.  Plateau.  So on.

Right now I’m gaining facility at recognizing words and verb forms and sussing out grammatical forms, though I’m wrong as often as I’m right.  That’s without Perseus (the online classics web engine), without Anderson (the scholarly commentator on Ovid) and without Wheelock (the grammar text).  There’s the plateau.

I can only advance part way into the text without the books.  With the books now I increase my facility by maybe another 25%.  So a lot of the time I can translate the literal sense of Latin correctly, but at least a quarter of the time, I’m lost.  That’s where my tutor comes into play.

(Ovid, Constanta, Romania, 2012)

He unsticks me from my stuck places and has been invaluable as a role model for tactics and strategy when approaching unfamiliar text.  He also guided me through the initial learning phase, about two years, when the grammar and vocabulary were still largely alien (foreign) to me.

My personal goal is to be 90 to 95% successful on my own by the end of this year.  Then, I imagine, I’ll use Greg (my tutor) less often and then as a backup.  That’s unless we decide together to get back on the commentary track.  That still sounds fun to me.

 

Bees, Garden

Removing Roadways. Of the Treekind.

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

In two separate deconstructive moves the squirrel arboreal highway into our orchard disappeared.  First, last fall, the small ash that had a branch brushing the fence came down; the first tree felled with the new Gransfor Burks ax.  Today, the Swede saw cut off a long limb which also dangled invitingly near the fence and, literally, a hop and a jump away from our Honeycrisp tree.  This four-inch thick oak limb had to come off now to avoid the possible of oak wilt getting transmitted through the wound.  That could happen if the cut were made even in early spring and any time from then until the end of the growing season.

Now the little buggers will have to scale the fence, grab an apple, rescale the fence with the apple, not so easy, and carry the apple up a tree trunk to get into the branches.  Again, not so easy.  But, as we are well aware, hardly impossible.  Squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys and dogs all create serious problems for the exurban gardener, problems to which they, I’ve discovered, no permanent solutions, only barriers that can restrict to our moveable feasts of fruit and vegetable.

Also, sadly, I checked the hive that had live bees back in January.  They are now dead.  My management practices were not the best last year, so I imagine I didn’t help them much, but it’s still disheartening.

 

Great Wheel

February

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

February has come down to this, 2 days.  This short month, even at its most expansive still the shortest, ends on the 28th.  Then March.  The spring equinox, another magnet for the human urge to celebrate astronomical events, coming up.

We still have some weeks of winter yet, maybe as many as 4, since we have a deep snow cover, though not as deep as many years.  The deeper the snow cover, the more muted the temperature changes even though the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky as we put a lot of space between us and the orbital moment of the winter solstice.

I’m glad the change will come slowly since I’m still in winter mode, not ready yet to shed the coats and the cozy feeling of the cave.  That will come.

Today I’m happy to have snow outside the window, cool air and a long poem to translate.

Aging, Third Phase

Third Phase Path on the Sea

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Imbolc                                                               Valentine Moon

 

Life offers moments when our primary ancientrail seems to run out, fade off into a meadow surrounded by a forest or stopping at a rocky cliff, leading into the dark waters of a great lake.  Entry into the third phase is such a signal  moment.

The paths of education, family and career no longer extend into the distance, rather they can be seen now from trail’s end, a looking back at how knowledge came, how the children grew, the winding journey careered until it no longer mattered.

Ahead is a dark forest, or a sheer wall of Ely greenstone, a watery path like the one in Anthony Machado’s Pathmaker, “…there is no path, only the wake on the sea.”  No wonder then that the third phase can force relationships to alter, to find new footing.  Nor is it a mystery that the kind of doggedness and ambition so characteristic of life’s first and second phases turns into a short sword for hara kiri.  This time insists on, no, demands a new ancientrail and the trail head  lies hidden behind rock or fire or under water or deep in an unknown forest.

How can we proceed?  This is a time for stillness.  For quiet listening.  To the Thou with whom you walk in your inner garden and the Thou with whom you walk in your outer life.  This is a time for adventure.  Risk taking.

This might be a fairy tale where a magic doors opens right into the heart of the rock.  Or a mermaid awaits to guide you under the lake.  Perhaps a Vergil will find you in the dark wood wandering and take your hand.  This is no time to be shy about learning from the other, the Thou; this is no time to be shy about opening your mind beyond what seems obvious, like the imperviousness of rock.

Look for the faint letters written in Elvish, which you find you can speak.  As you say them a door appears.  Don’t waste time on how or why, just walk through the door and close it behind you.  Away you go.

Family

This, that

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Imbolc                                                                        Valentine Moon

The snow remains.  16 as I woke up this morning.  There will be no early spring this year.  And I’m grateful for that.  I’m not ready to get out and do serious gardening.  Not yet.  I’ve got books to write.  Latin to translate.  Rooms to clear before I sleep.

A bit of pruning, yeh.  That’s the right stuff for this season.

Went with Kate to her annual physical so we could then go on to Chanhassen and have lunch with Anne, her sister.  She turns 64 this year.

A long day.  Chanhassen lies almost 45 minutes to the south though it’s well within the metro area.  We often drive distances within the metro that would have required real planning when I was a kid.  A difference in perception and habits.

General
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Imbolc                                                                    Valentine Moon

News stories that will only grow.  The Chinese hacking scandal. (or is it an act of cyber cold war?)  The momentum, still building, for gay marriage and the full civil rights that will flow from its realization.  Asteriods that may impact earth.  The brain investigates itself.  Water.