Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

Art and Religion

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     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.

Art and Culture, Friends

Aramaic and the Democratic Primary Race

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    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.

Family

A Dull Gray Day

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      First Quarter Moon of Winds

Got to thinking about dull gray days.  Aunt Roberta days, as we used to call them.  Aunt Roberta would always begin her correspondence with, “It’s a dull gray day.”  Aunt Roberta, like my Aunt Barbara and my Aunt Marjorie suffered from bi-polar disorder.  It hit me yesterday or the day before, the day it was dull and gray, that dull, gray days are March days.  They signal a change in the weather.  The upper atmosphere gets filled with water, clouds form.  Later in the month it will rain and not long after, with the snow gone and the ground beginning to thaw, the first green shoots will head toward daylight.  The dull, gray days of March are a sign of a change in the weather, a change for the better.

Granted, the dull gray days of November presage the upcoming winter, but even in that instance the harvest has come in, the plants have died back and we’re ready for the white, fallow season.

Each one of them Aunt Roberta in Arlington, Aunt Marjorie in Muncie and my Aunt Barbara, often confined to the State Hospital in Richmond, Indiana were important to me as I grew up.  Aunt Roberta raised 5 wonderful girls, all my first cousins and I visited them often when I was young.  Aunt Marjorie was a great cook and a long suffering wife, married to my Uncle Ike who was a gambler and a hustler, and a hell of a good guy.  Aunt Barbara gave my Bullfinch’s Mythology when I was young.  She was my Mom’s favorite, I think.

These three women sisters, mothers and aunts affected in a positive way many lives.  Daughters and sons, nephews and nieces, sisters and husbands all benefitted from their love and direction.  No person is their diagnosis.  They are a person first and last. 

Each one of them, in their own way, succumbed to bipolar disorder.  Aunt Barbara lived the end of her life in a world of illusion.  Aunt Marjorie starved herself to death and Aunt Roberta was in and out of Richmond, too, and finally faded away.

I miss each one of them, as I miss my mom.   Yes, they are with me in spirit, but that isn’t the same as in person.  It just isn’t the same, yet it’s no less important.

When the weather turns dull and gray I’ll think of Aunt Roberta and her sisters, but now with the knowledge that after the dull and the gray comes the green or the white.  Glory and peace.

Politics

An Agnostic Bush Administration

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       First Quarter Moon of Winds

On the Daily Show last night Jon Stewart asked Bush’s press secretary du jour, “Why doesn’t the press ask questions about Iraq anymore?  Why don’t we read about it?”  Her answer suggested that things have gotten a lot better since the surge and that was why the war had fallen from the news.

I don’t think so. 

There is a legitimate question that asks why the Greatest Protest generation hasn’t been more vocal during this war.  A part of the answer, of course, lies in our lives.  Many of us have worries about saving money for retirement, putting the kids through college and caring for ailing parents.  War doesn’t seem high on the list. 

An absence of a draft makes this war effort different, too.  Only volunteers in Iraq, so they tend to be folks our educated generation either does not know or chooses not to know.  Complacency and political drift has a place in the void, too.  We no longer march to different drummers, but to elevator music.

The steady drumbeat of mendacity, torture and rhetorical overreach engaged by the Bush administration explains most of it, I think.  In the sixties we could tell that the administrations heard us.  They didn’t always react the way we wanted, but, like God, they always answered in some way, even if it was to display wrath.  The Bush administration seems to be agnostic when it comes to the will of the people.  Yes, they seem to say, there may be an electorate out there, then again there may not.  In any case, we draw wisdom from our ideology, not from the average American.

Continuously unanswered prayer can extinguish faith from all but the most Job-like of spirits.  When it becomes evident that no one is listening, we get up off our knees and head to the ballot box, as millions have done this year.

Garden, Great Work

I May Fire-up the Chainsaw

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    Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

Kate and I developed a plan to repay the extra money we spent in Hawai’i.  It was the first joint trip we’d taken in a long time and we reverted to some old, looser behaviors.

We had our business meeting and planned when to fix the red car, posted for the last three weeks (a pain) and decided how to move money around for the new exercise area TV.

My two tours for tomorrow are put together and I’ve only got a bit more to do on the Weber tour.  Then I should be able to move to the hydroponic set-up and to more careful reading of the Permaculture book. 

The gardener in me wants to get outside and do something so I may fire up the chain saw over the weekend.  There are plenty of buckthorns to trim.  The weed wrench can pluck them out of the ground once the soil thaws.

Cinema and Television, Politics

OK, So Spitzer Is a Hypocrite and an Unfaithful Husband.

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   Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

“The World” is a Chinese movie, a recent one about a theme park in Beijing.  “Give us a day and we’ll show you the world.”  It has smaller versions of such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower, Manhattan skyline, Acropolis and St. Peters.  The movie follows Tao, a 20 something dancer, and her off and on boyfriend, Taisheng, through the ups and downs of a love affair.

This is a slice of life film most interesting to me in its depiction of rural folks who’ve come to the Capital to make a life.  The rural to urban story is a global story, retold time and time again in Bogota, Rio, Paris, Athens, Lagos, Shanghai and Minneapolis.  The tentativeness of relationships, particularly among the young, is also a global story, especially among young, recently emigrated urban folk.

Not a thrilling movie, but moving.

OK, so Spitzer is a hypocrite and an unfaithful husband.  And, yes, he drug his wife along to his confession.  The Daily Show did a great piece on that last night, showing several governors with their wives by their side as they confess sexual dalliance.  They could have added evangelical preachers and congressman.  They did include Bill Clinton.

The implication I don’t find helpful is that because he paid money for sex he was not a good prosecutor.  The guilt or innocence of the persons on Wall Street that he prosecuted are not less or more responsible for their crimes because he’s a schmuck.  The quality of his prosecution does not depend on his sexual fidelity any more than it depends on his perfect health.  

Someday, America, we’ve got to get over this fascination with sex and public people.  We need pay much greater attention to the policies they pursue and not so much to their bedrooms.  And, yes, I even believe that’s true of Larry Craig, although his mendacity following his arrest has put him in a different category altogether. 

Garden, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The Sons of the Soil

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   Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

 

Below is a reply to my brother Mark about this e-mail he sent to me:

Charles, This is pretty amazing. It really needed to happen. Mark ** Penang abandons pro-Malay policy **The Malaysian state of Penang says it will no longer follow a government policy favouring ethnic Malays.< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7289509.stm >In re:  the sons of the soil.  When I was in Hawai’i, I learned the natives call themselves kama’aina, literally children of the land.  Businesses offer a kama’aina discount and there has been some effort to get civil service preference to kama’aina.  In Hawai’i, where the indigenous population has experienced considerable oppression (plantation slavery for sugar and pineapples) and marginalization (numbers cut by 90% thanks to disease), it seems just.

It made me think a lot about this notion of belonging to a land, or a place.  The problem with identifying one ethnicity or one particular population as sons of the soil is its ahistorical nature.  That is, at some point in time, virtually every population on earth, outside of a miniscule group in Africa, emigrated. In other words, kama’aina is not a permanent characteristic, rather it reflects an acquired relationship, one that reflects a love for this place.  Others, too, can become kama’aina.  That is the essential injustice in the Malaysian situation.It is, too, an injustice in Hawai’i, if Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and white inhabitants cannot, at some point, also be kama’aina.

 

As I thought more about it, I realized I am kama’aina of the American Midwest, the heartland of the North American continent, yet I am also a son of immigrants.  Am I less wedded to this land than the Annishinabe or the Lakota?  I don’t think so.  My life depends on it. When I return, I see home in its lakes and forests.

In fact, the whole notion of an ecological consciousness comes down to seeing ourselves, each of us, as kama’aina of the planet earth.

Anyhow, thanks.  I agree, amazing and hopeful. 

Politics

Hillary Needs to Quit

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     Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

Hillary Clinton got an e-mail message from me tonight asking her to quit the race.  She can’t win, the mathematics of the upcoming races don’t allow it.  No matter how you feel about her it’s time for her to get out, unify the Democratic party and get going to whip McCain. 

This does not have to be her only year, nor has her campaign been in vain.  Ever after this year a female candidate for office will be a serious contender if they have the political credentials and more and more women do.  She has proved that women can run presidential campaigns.

Obama is not so much a better candidate, as an acceptable candidate who has done what the primary process demands, collected votes.  The differences between them are not great and the hair-splitting over who would be better on day one comes down hard beside the point.  The point is, who has convinced the Democratic party faithful that they are the candidate for this race.  Obama. 

Has he done it in an overwhelming manner?  No.  Praise be to God we have two candidates with good qualifications.  In that case the method of choosing between them is just as it was when we were choosing among them, go to the voters and follow the process.

In a political campaign the voters decide the outcome, not prior expectations or the hopes of any one constituency.  This primary season has had the most excitement and genuine campaigning I can recall since I became aware of politics at age 5. 

Art and Culture, Great Work

A Tea Master Selects Objects

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     Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

The snow mass has begun to recede.  Our north facing property retains snow longer than our neighbors, but the snow over the firepit area has shrunk below the top rail of the fence.  The temperature today gives us the general trend, though we may have a “major snow event” next week.  These late snows don’t last.

The gardening season will begin soon and I’m ready to go to work.  Check on my baby trees, finish the firepit, begin the permaculture planning. 

Had a break through on the Weber Collection tour.  I will use the notion of a tea-master preparing a tea ceremony for guests unfamiliar with Japanese art and its long traditions.  Together we will choose items that will give each of us a once in a lifetime experience together.  Let’s wander through our collection of possible tea objects and decide what will work best.

The Great Work is many small works.

Family

Serial Monogamy

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   Waxing Crescent of the Moon of Winds

Today is our 18th anniversary.  At the 15th we passed the total time I’d been married before, 5 to Judy and 10 to Raeone.  Now we’re pressing forward to the 23rd when Kate will pass her years married to David.  This is arithmetic that, it seems, our generation has to calculate more than any other.  It was turbulent times for marriage between 1969 and 1995 or so.  My impression is that divorce has declined in recent years, an impression buttressed by the Family Law Center on the internet.

It’s an odd sensation to have practiced serial monogamy after learning about it in Anthropology in 1968.  Even stranger is the fact that this marriage seems to blot out the others as experiments, or missteps.  Kate and I have developed an intimacy and collegiality that I had hoped for before, but not found.   The level of joy and comfort that comes from having her in my life grows with each passing year. 

So, in the end, I’m not sorry I took so long to figure out who I was and what I needed in a relationship because it brought me to this wonderful woman in time, in time for a life together and in time to grow old together. 

Looking forward to 18 more plus a few.