Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon<\/p>\n
We continue sliding toward summer, a cool, moist descent, not at all like the sudden, blazing ascension we often see, usually full on in place by now, with sun screen and hats and pitchers of lemonade set out on patios.\u00a0 At some point it will warm up, at least I think it will.\u00a0 There have been years without summer, years when the weather remains much like what we have now, days cool in the morning, warming in the afternoon and falling off to cool nights.\u00a0 Could be this will be one of those summers.<\/p>\n
I’ve worked this morning on Pentheus, the first few verses proving difficult for me, almost as if I’d entered a different text altogether though it’s only 300 verses away from Diana and Actaeon and in the same Book, III of XV.<\/p>\n
Something captivates me as I get into the Latin flow, the world tunes out; the text and I begin this tug of war, me digging, using dictionaries and online aids, the text resisting, remaining stubborn, not allowing its meaning to emerge without a struggle.\u00a0 The tension between the text and me lies in the language of an ancient people and my learning, a tension requiring both, learning and the language.\u00a0 Without some knowledge, there would be no tension.\u00a0 If I had no learning, the words in Latin would sit immutable as stone, as strong a barrier to me.\u00a0 If my learning were to the level of fluency, the text would not be a barrier at all, I would read as I do in English.\u00a0 Instead, I’m in a middle place, knowing and learning at the same time, so the text became enticing, pulling me further into the journey, not only of Ovid’s texts, but of the others:\u00a0 Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Martial, Tacitus, Horace, Seneca.<\/p>\n
The feeling reminds me of how I reacted to serious study of art history.\u00a0 At first there was so much information, so many different aspects that I felt overwhelmed, as if I could never get my head above the surface of this great ocean of learning.\u00a0 As time passed, as I walked the halls of the museum, read texts and looked at more and more art, a shaky gestalt began to form.\u00a0 There was a rough chronology, even a global chronology.\u00a0 There were styles and forms and methods and instances of all three.\u00a0 At some point the Song Dynasty became separate from the Tang and the Han, just as the early Buddha images became distinct from the later ones of Tibet, Thailand, China.\u00a0 Neoclassicism and impressionism began to tease themselves apart and appear as separate, thought related movements.\u00a0 Beckman and Kandinsky and Monet and Barye and Poussin and Church and the master of the embroidered foliage sorted out into times and influences and basic tenets.<\/p>\n
(of course, like most of us, I’m a combination of autodidact and schooling, but since college, the autodidact part has definitely taken precedence.)<\/p>\n
Now I have a scaffolding on which I can hang new learning, it fits in a large gestalt, which, while far from comprehensive, at least describes the outlines, the places where there are gaps and the places where some new learning easily fits.<\/p>\n
Right now Ovid and his Metamorphoses are my teachers, aided by my tutor Greg Mambres and my own reading, learning.\u00a0 My scaffolding is up, but it’s very shaky.\u00a0 I have verb forms, conjugations, nouns, declensions, adverbs, participles, clauses, imperatives, word meanings, poetic forms but often I revisit and revisit the same learning, still not seeing with clarity where on the scaffold something belongs.<\/p>\n
It was the same with the garden, first flowers and then vegetables and is still now with the bees.\u00a0 Large tracts of unknowing papered over by fragments of knowledge.\u00a0 In bee-keeping for example I look at cells.\u00a0 Hmmm. Those look like drone cells but maybe they’re queen cells.\u00a0 Or maybe not.\u00a0 Is it time to put on the second hive box?\u00a0 Or, is it too early?\u00a0 Should I use full-sized hive boxes or should I switch to honey supers to keep things lighter?\u00a0 In gardening.\u00a0 Just try planting garlic in the spring some year.\u00a0 Won’t work.\u00a0 It needs to over winter for a late June harvest.\u00a0 Want a colorful spring and early summer?\u00a0 Plant in the fall.\u00a0 In the orchard I’m practicing IPM, integrated pest management, which means at this point, killing bugs by hand.<\/p>\n
What I’ve learned is that knowledge accumulates.\u00a0 New knowledge needs a scaffolding, a chest of drawers, a memory palace so that it can become integrated.<\/p>\n
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon We continue sliding toward summer, a cool, moist descent, not at all like the sudden, blazing ascension we often see, usually full on in place by now, with sun screen and hats and pitchers of lemonade set out on patios.\u00a0 At some point it will warm up, at least I … Continue reading Anco Impari (I’m Still Learning. Goya)<\/span>
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