• Tag Archives Cicero

  • In A Dark Wood Wandering

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                               Bloodroot Moon

    Another Latin session with Greg finished.  We went once a week for about two years, perhaps a little less, then shifted to every two weeks, the pace we continue to follow.  At first we followed lessons in Wheelock, the grizzled Latin classic, updated, but following in the original’s historic pattern.

    (Ovid)

    About midway through it Greg said he felt I was a global learner, more like himself, and we switched to work with the Metamorphoses itself.  I translate as best I can then we go over my translation when we meet.  By phone.  All of my lessons, every one, has been done over the phone, not skype, but over the old fashioned landline telephone.  At least in my instance.  Greg uses a cell phone.

    It was my passion for learning what lay behind the English translations of Ovid’s masterwork that started me on this path and Greg felt I’d learn best following it.  He’s been right.  It means I encounter things I don’t know from time to time, but that provides an opportunity to learn and not only that but to learn in context, not in the abstract as a textbook does.

    (The Young Cicero Reading, Vincenzo Foppa, 1464)

    At first I wandered through the Latin like I was lost in a briar patch.  I’d come up scraped and raggedy with sentences to match.  As I have put more reading behind me, it has been more like following an ancientrail through a strange forest.  I can follow it, even if I don’t always know where I’m going.  And, at times, I turn down the wrong path and have to find my way back or, if I can’t do it by myself, Greg shows me the way.

    At some point, I think after I finish the story of Jason and Medea, a long one, I will return to the start, Book I, and begin to work my way forward.  At some point, too, I want to read some other authors, follow different trails through the Big Woods that is ancient Rome.  But for now Ovid is enough.


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  • They’re just being Republicans

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                          Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    Latin.  Subjunctives, indirect questions, tense sequences.  Done in a bit of a fog, almost like school.  The verb conjugations still have not taken full root in my mind, though at this point I have had exposure to all of them, for all four tenses.  I’ve had exposure likewise to five noun declensions, comparatives, superlatives, pronouns, interrogatives, adverbs, adjectives, ablative uses, dative uses, participles and participial clauses, and subordinate clauses of several types with more  to come.  I’m almost three-fourths through Wheelock and have now translated  75 verses of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

    As unintended outcome, I have found myself metamorphosed, changed.  Just how, right now, is not all clear, but it has something to do with facing a challenge, a language, and coming to grips with it, incorporating it into myself.  Just why I waited until I was 63, I don’t know; fear, yes, time, yes, but the largest barrier was lack of purpose.  When I began to want to know what was behind the translator’s veil, and, in particular, when I wanted to know what was behind the translations of Ovid’s master work, the purpose emerged and a teacher appeared.  There is no time when we stop growing, learning.

    Later in the day I prepped for and ran the Legislative Committee for the Sierra Club’s weekly meeting.  This political season will not be kind to our lakes and rivers, our forests and wildlife, our prairies.  The burden will be laid at the foot of the Republicans, but really, they’re just being Republicans, giving political expression to the wills of those who support them.  No, the burden lies squarely at the feet of those of us who want to see our forests, rivers, moose, wolf, prairies and lakes healthy and whole now and into the future.  We have not fought with the same passion today as the Tea Party folk or the Christian Right or the Libertarians.

    Over the retreat at Blue Cloud I read two novels focused on the political life of Cicero.  At the end of a brutal period for his political perspective he said, “All regimes come to an end.”

    I agree.


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  • Hail, La Nina

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                New (Bloodroot) Moon

    A while back I asked John Harstad, then the naturalist at Cedar Creek Nature Center, a wonderful place run by the University of Minnesota and only about 15 miles from home, about first signs of spring.  His answer coincided with a local master gardener, “Bloodroot blooms.”  Since that should happen within the waxing and waning of this moon,  I’m choosing Bloodroot Moon for its name.

    The snow began to come down this morning and has some legs.  The sky has turned sheet metal gray and the wind blows in from the northeast.  If I recall correctly, such wind direction can foretell deep snow.  Not predicted though.

    This is the half-way point in my stay here at Blue Cloud.  I’m feeling it, too.  I’ve been working almost twice as long each day as I usually do when I write at home.  Though I love it, I’m getting tired.  Might be another 10 am nap coming on, too.

    Conspirata, a novel about Cicero’s life, has been my casual reading.  I’ve finished 60% of it; I know this because the Kindle gives you a percent read number for each page since you don’t have the sense of the book’s length but its heft.

    The other reading I’ve been doing is Livia Kohn’s introductory text on Taoism.  As with most things that interest me, I find as I get deeper into it that my opinion begins to change, split along certain lines where my own sensibilities face challenges.  In the instance of Taoism I find myself drawn more and more into the mystical, physical aspects:  the Dao, the exercises, meditation practices and pushed further away from the political implications, or wuwei (inaction) applied to political affairs.

    This doesn’t bother me as I’ve learned, quite a while ago, that I don’t have to swallow the whole message to be enlightened by a school of thought.  Part of the creation of dogma comes as an institutional base emerges around any school of thought.  The dogma supports the creation of certain organizational structures, then the structures become a conservative force clinging to the original dogma, thoughts most often far removed from what Max Weber called the original “charisma.”

    Thus, by the time most of us enter into a body of religious or philosophical thought the original genius behind it is hidden by layers of defensive structure and dogma hardened over time, often hardened against the danger of the original charism.

    And so forth. Time to pick up the tablet and get to work.  Bye for snowy now.


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