Monthly Archives: December 2013

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Off the Plateau

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Samhain                                                             Winter Moon

Greg says I’m working now at the level of an undergraduate who has finished school. Still a long ways to go.  He also said he was very pleased with my progress.  Nice to hear. I’ve been studying Latin for 4 years now and have become accustomed to the plateau, slog, plateau, slog nature of the work.

Recently it felt like I’d been slogging, not able to lift myself up to the next level.  Then, Greg pushed me to try a new method.  I did and I’m now working faster and more precisely.  Even so, the closer I get, the more the smaller details stick up, stub my toe.  That is, what used to be approximation, close but ok, now has to turn into literal Latin, then idiomatic English.

Somewhere ahead of me is trust.  A point where I can trust my own work without a need to consult Greg.  At least not very often.  That’s more years yet ahead.

Here’s what I would like to achieve with this work:  1.  My own translation of 606Metamorphoses and the resultant embedding of its stories in my memory.  2.  A commentary for certain parts.  3.  The renewal of interest in Ovid at the elementary, middle school, high school and introductory college level.

These are, I know, ambitious goals, but they nest together, one reinforcing the other. Number 3 represents my belief that these stories in their original form are so good that they can easily compete with graphic novels, movies and simplifications.  Hey, who wouldn’t like a good story like Pentheus where a mother literally tears her son apart?

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Repent Or Face Damnation

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Samhain                                                                      Winter Moon

Samhain ends tomorrow with the arrival of the Winter Solstice.  The long fallow season following Summer’s End fades into the coldest months of the year.  Here in Minnesota the coldest days of the year begin on December 1st, meteorological winter; the old calendar reflects a different climate situation in Ireland and Britain.  Still, that calendar and its larger cultural context is the one which continues to influence our holy day practices.  Christmas comes on the celebration of Sol Invictus, the all the conquering sun, a Roman holy time set by the coming of the Winter Solstice.

Paul Strickland heard a Christian talk radio show lamenting the re-emergence of Winter Solstice celebrations and complaining that everyone knows Christmas came long before such pagan holy days.  We all laughed.  Christmas is a late addition to the Winter Solstice celebration collection and not a very important holiday among Christians until the Victorian era.

When Samhain ends at the Winter Solstice, the old growing season shifts from the death and desiccation of fall into decay and enrichment, preparing the way as the light begins to increase.   When Persephone returns to the Underworld to rule with Hades, the active forces of the soil begin their work in earnest, breaking down the fallen, dead and rotting materials into rich nutrients that feed soil organisms and will feed plants when Persephone returns home to her mother Demeter in the spring.

James Hillman said we see the gods today in our pathologies and I suppose that’s true in his sense, but the gods of polytheism suffered their Nietzschean fate long ago and have come again in more than psychological ways.

As Paul Ricoeur suggests, Christian’s familiar with biblical scholarship might return to the texts with a second naivete and see them once again as holy; so, I would suggest that the gods and goddesses of polytheism have long since resurrected, once again ready to offer themselves to us. All we need is our second naivete to see them. They can help us follow the recurring cycles of nature and understand them as powerful and dynamic realities, ones to which we owe allegiance.

Our blasphemy toward the old gods has created environmental havoc. We wantonly pollute–in the religious as well as the chemical sense–Poseidon’s ocean, Persephone and Hades’ soil, Zeus’s sky and even Aurora’s dawn.  Perhaps only Apollo’s Sun has escaped our meddling.

We are heretics to the old religions and we have paid the price.  If we do not repent, it will lead, as the logic of religion suggests, to our damnation.

 

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Samhain                                                                      Winter Moon

Each year around this time I have my physical.  I drive into the Medical Arts Building, park in the ramp next to it, see the doctor, then, after the fast is no longer necessary, I take the elevator down to LL where I dine in Hell’s Kitchen.  Kate went along today and we had a nice apres physical meal together.  Hell was full today with people coming in voluntarily.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories

Selfies

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Samhain                                                                         Winter Moon

Great warmup yesterday, eh?  I think we saw 33 here for an hour.  Take that nosnowbirds.

Off to downtown Minneapolis again today.  Third time this week.  I often go a month IMAG1188without getting there.  My first physical with Cornelia Massie, M.D.  No real concerns, just another benchmark on the road to the big check-up.  That’s the one when check-ups are no longer necessary.

(who’s in there?)

Listening to a lecture by Alan Watts yesterday had me wondering about the self.  As you may know, I’ve been an advocate of the Self, the unique bundle of experiences, gifts, body/mind and personal history that is you.  In my way of thinking, Self=Soul.

But.  I think I may have to balance that with the Eastern view of no-self.  Watts described each of us as the universe being conscious of itself, a game the universe plays.  We float along on the flesh bag that contains us, taking in sensation as it comes, changing, always, with it.

In addition to the high Western individualist Self I can see the Eastern argument, too. When I consider the young boy who ran up the concrete slope of a neighbor’s fence to walk higher than his mom for the length of their lot, I wonder how we can share memories.  We do, I know that.  But his reality, his experience of the world is so different from mine today that it makes him as alien to me as a stranger.  Or, an intimate for that matter.

And, if the child, then what about the adolescent?  Well, there, too.  That guy with the runny nose, a wet handkerchief in his pocket, going from class to class, working hard to keep up his status as the brain.  How about that 60’s radical with a placard in one hand, a joint in the other?  Geez, who was that guy?

And so it would go in a chain up until, well, when?  What about the man who sat with his brothers at the Nicollet Island Inn on Monday?  His time has come and gone, replaced with the one who types now.

Yet, I’m also dragging this ever changing body to the doctor because I feel a duty to it, to make it last as long as possible.  Why?  Well, I’m interested in seeing what the Self becomes.

 

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Sexism and Privacy

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Samhain                                                                        Winter Moon

Snowden did us all a good turn.  I don’t see others saying it, so I will.  It’s no accident that a US Judge for the first time applied the 4th amendment to the NSA’s actions.  Without Snowden’s leaks we would have no idea how far this opaque bureaucracy had gone in eroding our privacy rights.  We could not have a debate about the reasonable limits of super snooping with cyber tools. Though computer surveillance was not imaginable in the Revolutionary era, abuses perpetrated by the powerful were.

Franklin’s famous quip applies here:  “They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  the original quote according to this wiki site.

Also, how about those Catholics?  Did John Nienstedt really touch a confirmand’s butt? Who knows?  What is known is that the Nixon lesson is difficult to learn for those in positions of power.  The cover up is often worse than the crime.  That’s true in this case.

Why?  Well, covering up sexual abuse by priests is on the face not as bad as the act itself; but, when that cover up allows known offenders to circulate through different parishes and ministries with the laity ignorant, then the cover up facilitates the abuser, gives them opportunities to offend they would not have had in a transparent system.

This is an old boy’s club where a wink here and a nod there pass for scrutiny.  Much like the NSA.

One more place where secrecy and male domination protect abusers.  The military.  When rapists know their crimes will go up the chain of command, up the ladder in a buddy system, then the logic of deterrence due to exposure lessens.  A lot.

In all three of these large institutions run by men the rationalizations of the powerful take precedent over the needs of the powerless.  This is sexism in the service of sexual abuse and the erosion of personal privacy.  Considered from one perspective sexual abuse is, too, a dramatic case of the erosion of personal privacy.

Where is the Ed Snowden in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul?  They need to step forward, files and computer discs in hand.  We need them.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

A Bit of Divine Pragmatism

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Samhain                                                                     Winter Moon

Another 6 lines of the Lycaon story.  Sort of.  Lycaon’s story per se ends with the piece I published the other day.  It continues, however, as Ovid recounts how the enraged Jupiter goes from transforming Lycaon into a wolf to plans for a deluge, a wiping out of humans. The other gods are mostly okay with this except they do ask, “who will carry incense onto our altars?”  A bit of divine pragmatism.

Must of been eating my Latin wheaties because the translation is coming faster and faster now, the results of my work most often squaring with the Loeb English translation.  That’s not to say they match but I understand how Miller got his translation and how mine differs in a way that makes sense.  The Loeb’s purpose, as I understand it, is to offer a close to literal reading of the Latin, though once you learn the Latin it’s clear how far from the Latin even the literal readings are.  This is not criticism; rather, it shows the gap between languages and how bridging those gaps is a quirky business, yielding all manner of contraptions from elegant trussed spans to rickety ropes.

This is what I got into it for, yeah these many years ago.  After studying the Bible, written in Hebrew and Greek, you learn the need for careful attention to this work, exegesis.  I never mastered either Hebrew or Greek, but I really wanted to experience the world behind the Wizard’s curtain of the translator.

As a vehicle for that journey, I chose the Metamorphoses because it is the reference text for the entry of Greek and Roman mythology into the Western stream of the humanities. This way I ground myself in mythology while satisfying a more abstract desire.  It’s working.

Aging, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

NoSnowBirds

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

They leave.  This is the time.  Lois, our cleaning lady, poked her head in and said, “Good-bye.  See you in April.”  Mark and Elizabeth leave on the 29th for Grass Valley in California.  Many others are already gone to Florida or Arizona or New Mexico or Mexico.

We call them snowbirds, though it should be nosnowbirds, since they fly away at dropping temperatures and clouds of frozen moisture.  The reasons they go are diverse, I imagine, but cluster around icy roads, slick sidewalks, the uninviting nature of cold air for being outside.

It makes sense.  At a certain age, one I’ve reached, driving on roads and navigating sidewalks slick with ice and polished snow can be scary.  To get outside requires more thought in dress and more intention.  Just going out for a stroll can mean preparation. There is, too, the lure of a different place.  The beaches of Florida, the culture of the Southwest and Mexico.  A way to break up the year, give it a punctuation when work no longer provides it.

Still.  I love the snow, the cold, the quiet, the coming of the inside season.  The holiseason makes a good deal more intuitive sense with distinct seasonal changes, seasonal changes I find crucial to my own spiritual practice.  Putting the garden to bed, letting it rest for a season plus also feels right to me.  I would not want to continue my gardening season past the end of September, early October.

No.  We’ll stay.  Here.  In Andover.

Aging, Art and Culture, Music, Third Phase

.5%

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Last night Jerry, who has a big band show on KBEM, gave us some statistics.  “2% say jazz is their favorite music.  Another 2% say classical.  .5% like both.”  That puts Kate and me into the .5% bracket.

(Coltrane)

Jazz and classical music are an acquired taste.  Rock and roll and the other forms of popular music are, too, I suppose, but their acquisition comes laced into high school, i-tunes, radio.  Support of their sound comes through commercial channels that, though increasingly fractured, still provide marketing and distribution for them.  They also have youth culture on their side.

Jazz still has a certain underground feel, a music played off the main streets of American culture and by the marginal and marginalized.  It is a music that languishes if it becomes popular, witness the fusion era and the cool jazz played on easy listening stations.  Now, with it’s popularity dwindling again, it can regenerate, offer the lure of the hidden, the cult.

Classical music has a dwindling band of listeners, too, graying as are the jazz audiences. Classical music will find itself refreshed as it, too, becomes the province of smaller gatherings, people devoted to musicology, to the repertoire of yesterday.

Neither of the significant aural art forms will disappear.  Yes, the opportunities to hear them may diminish, but there will always be live performances somewhere for both. The availability of recorded and digital music ensures that they will survive until other audiences find them.

(Musical_Instruments  Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677)

So it may be that classical music aficionados will attend trios and quartets in performance more than orchestras, though here the SPCO seems to be on firm footing at last.  Jazz followers will head to clubs and bars, much as they always have, and to the occasional festival.  Performers in both will gain renown in smaller groups, but they will be remembered.  Popularity is not the mark of good art, though you can’t deny its value for paying bills.

Friends, Holidays, Music

On the Eastern Shore

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Down to the river again tonight.  This time not on Nicollet Island but on the eastern shore, connecting to Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York, the businesses of St. Anthony on Main, a place much visited 30 years ago, less so now.  We were at Vic’s, a restaurant with a great view of a lit up Minneapolis sky line, the river running cold and sluggish below.

Irv Williams (Photo: Kevin Brown)

KBEM, jazz radio, had its Christmas party tonight, another, the last, of the years restaurant fund-raising evenings.  This one featured a 95 year old saxophonist, Irv Williams, short with a polished bald head the color of stained cherry.  He was, my Kate told me, Mr. Smooth.  His music wrapped around us as we ate and talked, a quiet tributary of the same great river plyed by John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman.

Warren and Sheryl were there, venturing out after four years in care-giver isolation, still trying to wrap their heads around the freedom they have.  It was a large crowd, maybe 3 or 4 times larger than usual because all the KBEM staff were there.

There will be another jazz noir radio play in April and a restaurant night at the Dakota on January 22nd.

GeekWorld

Cilia Scene

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Samhain                                                          Winter Moon

from Wired. Com

Ralph Grimm, Jimboomba Queensland, Australia.

Subject: Paramecium, showing contractile vacuole and ciliary motion. Paramecium lives in fresh water. The excess water it takes in via osmosis is collected into two contractile vacuoles, one at each end, which swell and expel water through an opening in the cell membrane. The sweeping motion of the hair-like cilia helps the single-celled organism move.
Technique: Differential interference contrast
Magnification: 350x-1000x

Credit: Ralph Grimm / Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®