Art and Culture, Humanities, Weather +Climate

PostModern? Oh, Yeah? Prove it.

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Spring                                              Awakening Moon

It’s been a long, long dry spell.  We’ve had no appreciable rain or snow since ()  and the garden has begun to show it.  The daffodils have come up a bit stunted, many still in the ground would have popped long ago if they had the moisture.  Our irrigation system doesn’t start up until late April.  I may give’em a call and see if we can move it up, but that means I have to fix the netaphim Rigel and Vega chewed up at the end of last growing season.  Gotta be done anyhow.

Until Now has me cranked up into steep learning curve mode.  I’ve had the first two lectures, another one comes up next week as do walk-throughs for Art Remix and Until Now.  Before then I have to get my head into the new artists and the new art, read a good bit.  Look at the art.  Read some more.  Write a little. Peck a little.  This should be fun, a new universe of art and artists to explore, many of them working with enlightenment ideas, especially the idea of the modern and the so-called post-modern.

That’s another rabbit hole I’m going to drop into again.  Post-modernism.  I started getting into when I did my D. Min. thesis back in 1990.  Since then, I’ve read a good deal about post-modernism.  The content of the term still eludes me.  Perversely, it has made me very interested in modernism.  That happened because I decided I needed to understand modernism to understand what folks claim about post-modernism.  Seems logical, but I’ve begun to suspect that post-modernism is camouflage for other ideas, especially an assault on the nature of truth claims.  Bet you can’t wait to find out what I learn.

Into the MIA today for two tours, both highlights.  I did a highlights collection of things I already know well because this was a busy week for me.  Besides, I’m putting my energy now into the Until Now/Art Remix.

Art and Culture, Family, Health

And Then Again

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Spring                                     Awakening Moon

OK.  Turns out I had read the numbers right.  No sudden shower of wealth.  No happy Buddha of good fortune.  Also, no tears.  We have enough, more than most.  We have each other, family, the dogs, our property, our friends, our creative work.  And our Latin.  None of that changes, so the amount of money is just what it is.  Still, that brief interlude when we thought we had an unexpected windfall made us realize that we could absorb any amount of extra cash.  Big surprise there, eh?

In for my 6 month eye exam.  A space invaders day with visual field dots and the clicker.  The machine thought I pressed the button too frequently, but I just followed the tech’s suggestion to press the clicker when I thought I saw something.  My pressures are normal, my nerve unchanged.  Jane West, my eye doc, said, “Someone else might look at this and say its physiologic.”  How’s that?  “That you were just born with unusual nerves.  Still, they’re round and they stay the same from photograph to photograph.”  They took portraits of my retina’s every once in a while.  Physiologic, eh?  Explains a lot.

Home.  Reread my e-mails.  Oops.  Education for an exhibition I’m touring, Until Now.  So, brief nap, back in the car, back into the city.  I spent an hour after the education wandering the museum, looking at the Art Remix objects.  I have a Remix tour on May 6th.

I also checked out two print shows, The Wild Things and Old Testament prints.  These are well worth catching.  Prints are the ephemerals of the museum, their sensitivity to light means their exhibition has limits.  They can’t be exposed to even dull light for very long.  So they come up, like daffodils, hang out for a brief time, then they’re gone, often not to be seen again for years.

Kate went to see the back surgeon today.  He thinks her right hip pain may well respond to a hip replacement.  I hope so.  This has gotten pretty bad, too.  It’s not as bad as it was, but before was really bad.  More tests.  More doctor’s appointments.  Still, perhaps a little hope at the end of the tunnel.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

En-Theos

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Spring                                      Awakening Moon

If you know me, you know I have enthusiasms.  Two or three years in astronomy.  Two years of close study of Jungian thought.    9 years of touring and two and a half years of education in art history.  A full years home study course in horticulture.  We’re now in our third year of converting our property to a permaculture environment for vegetables, fruits and nuts.  The most recent instance, though one of long standing in my thoughts, is Latin.

As I finished my first four lines of the Metamorphoses the other day, it struck me that art history and Latin suit me pretty well, better than politics and the church.  I said this out loud to Kate and she said, “Well, philosophy and anthropology were more masculine.”  I guess that’s true and I guess the same certainly goes for politics although that’s changed a lot since the 60’s.  The ministry is a more mushy profession gender wise, especially for liberal protestants, but since I always did politics and consulting, probably not so for me.

The thing is, I don’t think art history and Latin were options that were even visible to me.  It wasn’t, in other words, that I rejected them in favor of philosophy and anthropology.  Nothing much more to say about this than that I have them in my life now and I’m not about to let go.

I have wondered about political action, long my baseline activity, the self-authenticating act.  Has its time passed for me?  I’m not sure about that. Will take more thought.

Aging, Travel

Life Is a Cabaret

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Spring                                                         Awakening Moon

When we drove over to our financial consultant this morning, I looked up and saw a crescent Awakening moon tucked in behind three wispy rows of cirrus clouds.  The moon, faint and slightly out of place, added a moment of mystery.

It was an omen.  Ever had a really pleasant surprise?  I had one, Kate and I had one this morning.  We sat down with Ruth, our consultant, and began going over this and that as we always do.  She got caught up on matters personal and physical like Kate’s back surgery and asked questions about Kate’s impending retirement at the first of next year.  That was why we were there, to make sure about our resources after Kate leaves full time medicine.

We tossed ideas around and looked at a 2011 budget Kate and I did last week.  It was,  in my view, tight but manageable.   Ruth made a comment about the amount of money we had coming in from social security and pensions and then how much more we needed from money in Kate’s retirement account.  Wait?  What was that?

We add the money from the retirement account to the social security and the pension?  My mind went blank for a minute as parts of me processed what this meant.  It meant I’d viewed our post-retirement budget from a very restricted perspective.  I had, for reasons I no longer understand, folded the our social security and pension payments into the total from the retirement account rather than adding them all together.  This means our available cash after Kate retires just went up by about 50%!  50% is a big number.  That means our budget goes from being adequate to pretty damned good.

A pleasant surprise, indeed.

Afterward, we ate lunch at Spoonriver, Brenda Langston’s place by the Guthrie.  I saw Brenda there and complimented her on her class and the restaurant.  It was a great, healthy and damned expensive lunch.  But, what the hell?  We can afford it.

Aging, Cooking, Health

Class A Brenda

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Spring                                        Awakening Moon

Another Brenda Langston class under my belt literally and figuratively.  Literally:  we had a smoothie (it had brown rice in it.), an egg and kale and rice dish.  Breakfast.  Next, for lunch we had a red lentil soup with some whole grain bread.  Dinner was salmon with nutty crust and walleye with sesame seed topping, a leek/broccoli steamed veggies and a brown rice patty on a nori fold.  Tapioca showed up last as dessert.

Brenda was in good form tonight.  The kind of person you’d want to take home to mom and say, Brenda is my friend.  She’s funny, passionate, expert, opinionated in the gentlest of ways.  Her approach is tricky because she has done what zealots always decry; she has discovered the good in many, maybe all cuisines and says the best thing is to quit worrying, start making better choices and enjoy healthy food.  Makes sense to me.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters

A Long Journey’s First Step

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Spring                                                     Awakening Moon

The weather has turned cooler and the sky gray.

I’m proud to report that I have almost completed translating my first four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Of course, there are thousands of lines in the complete work and my translation is far from poetic, but this journey is underway.  When I feel a bit more comfortable with it, I’ll post it.  In fact, I’ll post the whole thing in progress on its own page.

Today is the birthday of cybermage, William Schmidt, ex-Jesuit and sheepshead connoisseur,  a combination of attributes that makes him in turn interesting, resourceful and a card shark.

For Mammoths reading this, I have added the Wandervogel entry to my webpage about Nick.

(Pygmalion by Gerome)

Among other top news items today:  Madonna laid a brick (in an African orphanage) and McNabb held up a Redskins jersey while Tiger was honest in a press conference and earned credit for it.   Meanwhile back in the real world health care reform continues to make news as does a 7.2 earthquake that struck southern California and drug cartels to the south.

I think I’m gonna go back to the first decade of the first millennium, no madonna there.  Well, ok.  The Madonna, but you know what I mean.

Humanities, Letters, Woolly Mammoths

Liking Latin

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Spring                               Awakening Moon

Didn’t go into the Woolly restaurant meeting this evening and feel mildly guilty.  I didn’t have a good reason not to go, I just wanted to stay home.  Showing up is important.  Anyhow.

How about this?  I’m really liking Latin.  Not quite sure why.  It has a puzzle aspect I find enjoyable and, of course, there’s the learning curve which I find challenging–a good thing for me.  The key reasons are two, I suspect.  First, I’ve never finished studying a language, have never gotten to a point where I felt like I had a good grasp of one.  A bit of French, some Greek, some Hebrew, some previous Latin, a disastrous semester of German, but no focused, positive experience.  I feel like I’m headed toward a good grasp of Latin.  Second, I have a particular goal, translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses for myself.

There’s a novel in there, too and I’m excited about that as the language comes more and more easily.

I also like having a tutor.  This one-to-one learning works well for me.  Kate’s taking it has ramped up my learning by the joint working through of chapters after we finish the assignments separately.  So, there’s that together aspect to it, too.

Tomorrow I’ll finish the ancient sentences, translating from Latin into English, then a bit of Cicero, but I’m most excited about a paragraph of Ovid I’ll translate, too.

Aging, Family, Garden, Great Work

This Day, So Far

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Spring                                       Awakening Moon

As the awakening moon wanes, its work done, life has begun to take on its growing season rhythms here at 7 oaks.  I’m hunting for weed free straw, leek transplants and onion sets.  Gotta lay down some bulb fertilizer because bulbs need extra help as they blossom.

It’s been a productive day.  Kate and I finished our budget work for 2011–retirement budget.  It has lots of unfamiliar factors in it:  COBRA for me,  Medicare part B for Kate, shifting to checks from our retirement account, social security.  Some unknowns.  But, we look pretty good right now.

We had lunch.  Now.  A nap.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities

Is there life after birth?

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Spring                                            Awakening Moon

Resurrection makes sense on a day like today; as it happens, Easter Sunday.  66 degrees, green popping out all over, pachysandra continuing its green invasion (planned) of the third tier of our perennial gardens, daffodils in bloom and many, many throwing up their green spears toward the sun.  Tulips and garlic and parsnips.  Buzzing bees.  Dogs running and jumping.  The air moved around with light, warm breezes.  Who says the dead don’t come to life?

In spite of the easter bonnets, the died eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow ducks this is the key event in the Christian liturgical calendar.  With no resurrection the other claims are nothing more than interesting two-millennia old ethics and culture.  With resurrection all the other claims take on a sacred aura, through them you too can participate in the life after death.

This is such an odd thought, once you step outside the hermeneutical circle.  Not so much that a God could bring the dead back to life, I mean, God, right?  Not so much that people could believe it, many strange things are known with or without philosophy, after all.  No, for me, the strange thing, in retrospect, is that the club has so many convoluted rules.

A loving God who retrieves his own son from the ferry and returns him to life.  OK.  A loving God who promises the same thing to others.  OK.  A loving God who seems convinced that many won’t make it and end up either vanished or in gehenna, the burning waste dump outside the city walls?  Geez.  Of course, His game, His rules.  Yeah. But why go through the motions for only a few, a select few. That’s not only weird, it seems perverse.  We can’t understand God’s logic?  Boy, is that true.

Anyhow, enough about Him.  Me, I’m in for the resurrection that comes from mixing my essential elements back into the soil, providing a little food for the fungi and micro-organisms in the soil, the soul?  What if that’s what the after life really is, our souls collected in the mass grave that is this earth to become food for the worms?  Works for me.

It’s possible, of course, and I like to entertain the idea that death is a process like the cocoon, a time of incubation when our cells become, like the butterflies, imaginal.  They reshape themselves into a new think altogether, a Swallowtail from a caterpillar.  It happens here.  I’ve seen it.  Or, maybe we’re like water, in this shape in this state, but in a gas or a  solid, something related but different.  Or, and this  one seems the most plausible to me, the many worlds hypothesis turns out to be true and we pass from world to world, inhabiting this body, perhaps another, on and on and on until last syllable of reported time.

Resurrection is so important a possibility, is my point, that it shouldn’t have a morals clause or be dependent on what we believe.  If it is, it just is and we will be swept up into something new, something different and have another go.  I like that idea.

Cinema and Television, Politics

Movin’ On

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Spring                                    Awakening Moon

Kate and I watched Precious tonight.  Kate found it an uplifting story.  I found it tragic.  Whichever view you take, this is a fine movie, capturing the fantasy that can keep us alive, the brutality physical and emotional that can keep us down and the complex network that captures each one of us, shapes us and spits us out whole. This was a bitter, intimate, too close look at a world so many do not even know exists.  It is a strange celebration of the often maligned networks that buttress our countries most neglected and abused.  A social worker looks good here.  A halfway house has a positive impact as does an alternative school and a teacher in it.

Precious gets up, falls down, gets kicked, kicked again, yet keeps moving forward.  That’s the positive note, the uplifting part.  The tragic part is the vast sea of girls and boys in similar circumstances who stop moving forward, who never get past the street, the labyrinth.

Kate works tomorrow, as a Jew she tries to work the Christian holydays.  I plan to dig into the declutter project yet one more time.  Again.  Still more to do, more places to clear.  Also, some Latin.  Maybe a bit of outside time.  Maybe a bit more on Romanticism.  We’ll see after the decluttering.