• Shang, Zhou and Kam Wong’s

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  bar steady 30.13 6mph NE dewpoint 28  Spring

                            Full Moon of Winds

    After a morning among the bronze vessels of the Shang and their piece-mold casting technique, Kate and I went out to Kam Wong’s.  Kam Wong’s is a local Chinese restaurant.  It was here when we moved to Andover fifteen years ago this July and has survived the arrival of more Oriental restaurants and chain restaurants.  I like to eat there to support local, non-chain food.  The food is the usual Americanized version with lots of chop suey, chow mein and egg foo young.  It is interesting, though, that one of the serving dishes, the one with the foot and a bowl on top with a cover, is a direct descendant of one of the Shang dynasty ritual bronze vessels.

    Up stairs for a nap, then into the Zhou dynasty bronzes.


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  • What Do the Shang Kuei and the Zhou Kuei Have In Common?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    39  bar falls 30.21 7mph NNE dewpoint 14

               Full Moon of Winds

    Warren Wolfe handed out a sheet at the Woolly retreat, a project development sheet that involves identifying a project or activity that compels us in some way.  I missed his presentation since I left early for Hawai’i, so I have to fill it out now.  The answer that keeps coming up for me is the permaculture work Kate and I plan here. 

    The whole notion of working with our land so that it grows healthier and we gain more foodstuffs from it attracts me, as I’ve said earlier.  With Warren’s notion I can keep this work both before a group who can help me with my accountability and have a built in audience, too.  I’m writing about it here to let those of who read this know.  You can enter my circle of accountability, too, if you wish.

    As the notion becomes clearer, I write here, on the Permaculture page, what exactly we intend to do for this year.  I don’t know enough quite yet to put down objectives, but I imagine they will mostly be preparatory.  There are projects from last year that will get finished anyhow like the firepit and converting most of the raised beds to vegetables.  There are two that will get some work done on them this year, but will probably not finish:  the grandkids playhouse in the woods and the root cellar.  The Permaculture work is in addition to these already planned projects.  

    Still deep in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, trying to decide how to present a large collection of bronze vessels that can be daunting for first-time viewers.  I’ve made a couple of decisions.  We’ll start in the Neolithic ceramics, the 1st case in the ceramics gallery and move to the Bronze Age ceramic case before we head over to the Bronze gallery.  This will place the development of bronze squarely in the material culture roots from which it sprang.  It will also show the mutual interaction between bronze vessel design and ceramics.  Bronze imitates ceramics at first, then, later ceramics imitate bronze. 

    The Shang and the Zhou get equal treatment in my mind so far, but I haven’t selected actual objects.  The Shang kuei and hu, the Pillsbury owl (tsun), the ritual bell, the ting all seem likely to make the cut.  But, we’ll see.  Many more pages to read and objects to see.


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  • Back to the Shang Dynasty

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    31  bar rises 30.24 4mph ENE dewpoint 13

                 Full Moon of Winds

    A visit to the dermatologist.  Oh, boy.  Talk about quick.  He looked at my elbows, looked at my knees, looked at my face.  He said don’t use the steriods too much–I never do–and give yourself a week vacation from them every three weeks–new information–and come back in a year.  Good-bye.  Wish all medicine was as clear and effecient.

    I’ve begun my reading on Chinese bronzes.  I’d forgotten that the early bronzes imitated ceramic shapes and decoration and were then superceded by painted lacquer and, eventually, stimulated ceramic imitations. 

    Received an invitation to the Chinese New Years dinner that the Chinese CIF folks put on each year.  I love to go because it gives me a chance to reconnect with my CIF friends.  This year I hope to get a tutor in Chinese pronounciation from among them.

    This event will be in the Lauderdale City Hall.  Lauderdale is a blip on the geography of the Twin Cities located between 280 and the UofM golf-course on Larpenter.  And it has city hall.  Imagine.

    Well, back to the Shang dynasty.


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  • Tea Master for a Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  bar falls 29.96 3mph NNW dewpoint 25

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Last night the moon of winds cast shadows on our yard, elongated dogwoods, thick oak trunks and thin lines of multiple raspberry canes.  This point in the seasonal change is delicate.  Thin ice forms a lattice over the snow while tiny drops of water gather along the roof line ready to plummet the final distance to the earth.  Snow and grass play encirclement with grass spreading outward from trees and shrubs while the snow holds its own over the lawn, the hills and prairie grass.  Here there daubs of photosynthetic green have begun to appear.  Rosemary beneath the steps.  Tufts of grass up close to the house.  It is a gradual change for the moment, but soon the earth will leap and shout, fly flags of bright colors and clothe itself again in verdant splendor.

    Tour today with students, 6th graders, from a Muslim school in Fridley.  As near as I could tell, the kids were mostly Somalia, all born here, but there parents emigrated.  I had the boys, David Fortney had the girls.  We circled each other for half an hour in the Islamic gallery as these children drank in the physical objects of their cultures, linking themselves to the Seljuk Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals of India.  After half an hour we went into the Weber Collection (Japanese traveling exhibition).  I asked them to become tea masters selecting objects for a tea ceremony for persons unfamiliar with Japanese art.

    We saw Hotei reach for the moon and a Zen monk’s ordination festival.  We learned wabi from the Negoro ware with its faded red lacquer, worn and used; we learned sabi from the tea wares, especially the lumpy and imperfect mizusashi.  I read them a Daoist poem and its conversion into a Buddhist poem by the extraction of only one line, spun downward in a flowing cursive script.  Time went fast and at the end they picked objects for their tea ceremony:  8 Views of Xiao and Xiang, the delicate miniature Song dynasty-like landscape, the Negoro spoon, the tea caddy with a silk cover, Oribe teaware and a few dishes for tea food.  Then we were done.

    Afterward I copied and copied and copied, even to the end of the toner cartridge, material on Chinese bronzes.  I have a tour on Saturday that will focus only on our Chinese bronzes.  I chose them because I wanted to go deeper into the world of early Chinese dynasties like the Shang and the Chou and the Han.


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  • Imaginal Cells and the Afterlife

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    37  bar steady 29.86 k0mph WNW windchill 37  melting.  it’s melting!

         Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    At times the days go by with little more than random patterns, but in these days after my return from Hawai’i there has been purpose in each one.  Today I worked with Transcendentalism and finished a brief summary using annotated links and edited my presentation, Transcendent Thinking, for this Sunday at Groveland. 

    This Sunday happens to be Easter.  Imagine my surprise as I edited this piece and noticed that it ended with an image entirely appropiate to the Easter concept.  I say surprise because I wrote Transcendent back in mid-January before my trip to Hawai’i and only recently learned this was to be Easter Sunday.  This is as early as Easter can be or within a day or two, so I hadn’t tumbled to it.  Here are the closing paragraphs:

    Death, though, is not the only truth, or perhaps better, it’s not the whole truth.  All faith traditions wrestle with the question of an after-life, not surprising since most anthropologists and historians of religion peg the development of spirituality-the inner world of faith and wonder-and religion-the outer, institutionalized world of beliefs and rituals-to questions about death. What was it?  What happened?  What did it mean?

    The mythopoetic stories of dying and rising gods like Osiris in Egypt, Jesus in the Middle East, Mithras and Attis represent a grappling with the question of life and after-life in terms of vegetative symbolism.  

    During the winter, more than once my thoughts turn to the daffodil bulbs, the tulips, the iris, the hemerocallis, the true lilies, the bug-bane, hosta, maidenhair fern and lady fern, peonies and bleeding hearts as they rest, buried beneath soil and snow.  Some, the garlic in particular this year, lie also beneath six inches of straw.  All this life adapted to winters during which the air temperature drops to -18, even -38 (three or four years ago). 

    There are so many miracles.  The sun shines, our heart beats and these hardy plants pull themselves in for a season.  Instead of wasting the cold months by feverishly working to stay warm or hunting for shelter outside themselves, they cast aside their above ground parts: stem, leaves, flowers and seed pods, leaving them withered in the face of harsh conditions. 

    The plants retreat inside their own, individual root cellars.  In them they have laid by sufficient nourishment to catch the wave of warm air when the soil around them rises in temperature enough to wake them from their slumber.

    When I think of this my heart goes out to the bulbs, corms, tubers and rhizomes.  As I often feel for my own sons and grandchildren, I feel a fondness for them that radiates joy in the durability of my offspring.  This is not some spring nostalgia at work; no, this is simple appreciation for the millions of years of evolutionary work that has preceded this winter and adapted these wonderful, colorful livelinessess to grace our land.

    It is not a stretch to consider death in the same way.  We wither and cast aside our above ground parts, the body, then go to some unknown equivalent of the soil to rest for a period, to wait until conditions are right for our return.

    If the advocates of string theory have it right, there are multiverses, multiple branching realities based on alternative outcomes to our daily lives.  It is possible that one of those multiverses is the metaphysical realm, literally a realm beyond our physics, beyond the reach of our senses, where the seed of our life goes, where it may blossom and grow and live in a form quite different from the one we now know.

    Here’s another way to think about it.  Go out into your garden this fall and find a wriggly caterpillar happily consuming your favorite flower or vegetable.  Watch that caterpillar over the next few weeks as it spins a cocoon.  What goes on inside?

    Here’s an explanation:

    The Imaginal Cell Story

    The caterpillar’s new cells are called ‘imaginal cells.’
    They are so totally different from the caterpillar cells
    that his immune system thinks they are enemies… and gobbles them up.

    But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. More and more of them!
    Pretty soon, the caterpillar’s immune system
    cannot destroy them fast enough.
    More and more of the imaginal cells survive.
    And then an amazing thing happens!

    The little tiny lonely imaginal cells start to clump together
    into friendly little groups.
    They all resonate together at the same frequency,
    passing information from one to another.
    Then, after awhile, another amazing thing happens!

    The clumps of imaginal cells start to cluster together!
    A long string of clumping and clustering imaginal cells,
    all resonating at the same frequency,
    all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

    Then at some point,
    the entire long string of imaginal cells
    suddenly realizes all together
    that it is something different from the caterpillar.
    Something new! Something wonderful!
    …and in that realization
    is the shout of the birth of the butterfly!

    Since the butterfly now “knows” that it is a butterfly,
    the little tiny imaginal cells
    no longer have to do all those things individual cells must do.
    Now they are part of a multi-celled organism-
    A FAMILY who can share the work.

    Each new butterfly cell can take on a different job-
    There is something for everyone to do.
    And everyone is important.
    And each cell begins to do just that very thing it is most drawn to do.
    And every other cell encourages it to do just that.

    A great way to organize a butterfly!”

    *Adapted Version of Nori Huddle’s story from her book, Butterfly

    These considerations lead me to an agnostic position when it comes to the afterlife.  The ancients may have known something we find difficult to approach with our highly rational, often scientistic take on such matters.  They knew the miracle of the grain that falls on the soil and springs to life, birthing a plant quite unlike its size and appearance.  And what a miracle!

    The ancients did not have string theory to propose multiverses, but we do.  It does not have to answer questions about the after-life, but it could.

    The ancients did not know about imaginal cells, but we do.  What if death is a process to ignite our imaginal cells, creating a flame version of  ourselves burning bright in another time and place?


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  • Snow, Snow, and Then, Some More

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33 bar steady 0mph ESE windchill33 29.85   a buncha snow

             Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    We got socked after I came home from Frank’s at around 10.  Maybe 4 or 5 inches of wet spring snow.  All the leaves, rocks and beginning to peak through patches of grass are white again.  Tourney snow we called it Indiana.

    Gotta get out and see if the snowblower can take it.  Often, at the beginning of the winter and especially in its last gasps the snow is so heavy and wet that it plugs the chute of the snowblower.  Then, I just wait for the grand snow remover in the sky to work his solar wonder.

    Allison sent me this note after the docent book group discussion.  I think she caught the sense of the meeting. 

    Charlie,

    I enjoyed the discussion meeting today.  I want to thank you for your efforts.  I think we were chasing something elusive.  And also feeling each other out-on some pretty big subjects.

    Personally, I think Dale phrased his initial question rather awkwardly.  

    However, Sharon intrigued me with her question which was “Why doesn’t contemporary religion seem to make better use of art?

    So between the two of them we are left with something corresponding to “what came first the chicken or the egg?”  Did art lose its need for religion or did religion lose its need for art?

    I would have liked to have the team fill out your worksheet and plan a tour.

    Speaking of your tour ideas, it would be great to get some serious discussions going on a tour.  You need the right people to show up for that to work.  


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  • Up At 5AM and Hard At It

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33  bar steep fall 30.11  6mph N  windchill 33

        Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Boy is my sense of time screwed up.  Got up at 4:30AM for the bathroom.  Went back to bed.  No sleep.  Waited.  Still no sleep.  So at 5AM I got up, went downstairs, opened by John Weber collection catalogue and tried to figure out what to do next.  This was difficult because I had put my notes for the tour in the carrier I take when I go into the museum.  That location didn’t occur to me until ten sleepy minutes had gone by shuffling this paper and that trying to locate the item I needed to finish the tour.  Those notes.

    But I did find them.  As a quiet spring snow began to fall outside in the dark, I entered again the world of the Heian poets, the Shining Prince Genji and the floating world of courtesans, no theatre and elegant costume.  Japan and China are strange and distant cultures for most Westerners so entree into their world does not come without some struggle, some setting aside of preconceived notions. 

    Over the last three years in particular I have worked hard to get a handle on the historical context in both Japan and China.  I’ve worked harder on China, but Japan has had some time from me, too.  As so often happens in the life of the mind, eventually the heart begins to follow and somewhere along the line I went from interested to captivated. 

    It was easy then to begin comparing poems used in the poetry competitions, mythical contests in which cultured Japanese matched poets from different eras, then matched two of their poems that seem to have resonance.  The competition was not between the two poets in question of course, but among the Japanese who created the matches.  It would be like, say, putting Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” against one of Emily Dickinson’s darker pieces, Wallace Stevens and Coleridge. 

    So it went for two hours until the dogs began to whine and I let them out of their crates, fed them and began my own breakfast.

    After breakfast I caught another hour and a half or so of sleep, then drove into the Common Roots Cafe where the docent book club gathered to discuss the (apparent) lack of religion/spirituality in contemporary art.  I guided this discussion, but I’m afraid I didn’t conceive a way to do it fruitfully.  We had a lot of conversation, though, and I think we may have gotten greater clarity from it than was immediately obvious. 

    It was Tom Blyfeld’s 80th birthday.  He celebrates his 56th wedding anniversary on Friday.  He mentioned the doctor who delivered two of his children, a man 90 something who has great-great grandchildren. Amazing.  He will celebrate his 65th wedding anniversary.  These are numbers unattainable by most of us in the divorce generation.

    Tonight is the celebration of St. Patrick’s day at Frank Broderick’s.  He bought the meat last Friday.  His table always groans with meat and potatoes and cabbage.  I look forward to it each year.


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  • Are You Still Waiting for Your Special Purpose?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26 bar steep rise  30.39 2mph ENE windchill 26

             Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    “Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.” – Alfred Adler

    Adler was one of the big three:  Jung, Freud, and Adler, though his name does not ring a bell in the larger public mind anymore.  If Freud was about sex and death, Jung about archetypes and the collective unconscious, Adler was about power.  He was a birth order guy and believed that how power dynamics worked out in relationships and within our own psyche determined our mental health. 

    Just checked up on my knowledge about  Adler and discovered a fascinating twist to his point of view.  He believed that each of develops a more or less submerged final goal, a goal that creates significance for us.  This goal compensates for feeling of inferiority.  Don’t know about you, but the feeling I was here for something special, nurtured by mom and dad and reinforced by teachers and friends has cost me big time in life’s journey.  Like alcoholism this striving wastes time and pushes us away from the Tao.  

    At this point I am a recovering alcoholic and I feel good about my now 32 years of sobriety, though not overconfident. It’s still a day at a time in reality.  I have stripped away most of the vestiges of fame seeking, break through idea hopes and now seem to have little left in the way of the old drivers that Adler names.  Not none, it’s difficult to let go of the vague, perhaps magical idea that someday, somewhere things will change, but I try to put it context if it arises and then to let it go.

    Note from Mary that she’s working away on the revision of her dissertation.  Her advisor is on her case, she says.  Oh, boy, am I glad I’m not doing that.

    Kate and I went through our calendar through July.  Next month will be busy for me.


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  • Art and Religion

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  bar steady 30.06 1mph WNW windchill 30

         First Quarter Moon of Winds

    When I woke up, Kate was long gone.  It was 9:30.  I missed my nap yesterday and I picked the sleep time this AM.

    The rest of the morning, what there was left anyhow, I used looking over my notes for the religion and contemporary art discussion I will lead on Monday.  This topic follows two ancient trails I have followed for many, many years.  I would not characterize myself as an expert in either one, though I know enough to guide conversation.

    The result of this work has convinced me that there are several interesting tours at an encyclopedic museum like the MIA that do not follow either the cutesy or the artworld insider glimpse that most of our tours use.  With tours like love and scandal or chocolate whatever we give a cutesy turn to looking at art. It gets some people into the galleries I suppose and and the works themselves have many different facets, so these tours are not vacuous at all, but they don’t focus the mind.

    The other category of tour:  On Dragons Wings, a Taste of Asia, Art of the Americas, Art of the Ancient World give tour goers an insiders tour, a short glimpse of the world of art history, connossieurship and curating offered through a slice of an encyclopedic museum.  Nothing wrong with this either, though I often wonder about the value of this brief an introduction to six to eight objects.  It may spark interest that tour goers will pursue on their own.  I hope so.

    The kind of tour topic this religion and art material suggests could offer a third type of tour, one that takes a point of view and pursues an argument through use of various objects.  The relationship between religion and art has a long history with many chapters and in some senses the most interesting chapters come last in the world of contemporary art.   The MIA has a much better collection for pursuing this topic than, say, the Walker because we have art as old as the Lady of LaMouth and art as recent as Hirsch’s, Death of St. John.  Other interesting tours along these lines would involve the relationship between literature and art.


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  • Aramaic and the Democratic Primary Race

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    28  bar rises 30.06 5mph N windchill 28

        First Quarter Moon of Winds

    Yesterday I had tours with a group of 4th graders from Hastings and 1st graders from Apple Valley.  Though these tours don’t race the intellectual engine, they are fun.  These kids are thoughtful, attentive and excited about the art that they see.  It refreshes my eye each time I do one of these tours because the kids see things I don’t see and make conjectures about the works that don’t occur to me. 

    An example of the latter is a discussion I had with the kids from Hastings about the Fanatics of Tangiers.  Delacroix painted a Sufi sect as it engaged in an ecstatic dance to reach the wisdom of their saint.  (BYB-Fanatic is ethnocentric, not to mention xenophobic, but it is the name of the painting.)  The kids looked at the sect and imagined that the group surging foreward through the streets (the sect) might be being chased by animals; or, perhaps the people who stood around had sent an army to the crowd’s village and chased them back here. 

    Another great thing about tour days is the opportunity to connect with docent classmates and to make new friends from among the docent corps.  Today Stacy, Careen, Annie, Sally and Wendy were there.  They reveal, among them, the infinite variety our species takes, even among those who appear so similar.  All white, all well-educated and with one exception upper middle class at least, these women vary a lot in their personal details.  Stacy’s husband runs and owns a business recharging ink cartridges while she works at a Lutheran church in various capacities.  Careen is a Quebecois, an architect and a physician’s spouse like me.  Annie’s husband is from Lagos, Nigeria and contracted malaria while there.  Annie’s adopted.  Sally is a retired trainer and organizational development person whose daughter almost drowned in a ferry sinking off the coast of Thailand not too long ago.  Wendy has bright kids, and married an Italian.  She’s works on her conversational Italian for trips to the see the in-laws.

    Lunch with Frank.  We went to the Black Forest where we were the only customers in the dining room except for a couple at the very far end next to 26th Street.  We both had sausages and we both knew better.  We talked about travel, serious illness, Aramaic and the silliness, if it weren’t so damned serious, of the late stage Democratic primary race.


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