Catalonian Fantasy

Here's one worth more than a thousand words.  Found here.

Barcelonan children in 1936 play at things happening around them.  The seen is really one of cheerful innocence - they don't appreciate what it is they are imitating, and their surrounding communities haven't yet imposed that experience on them or their families.

Misunderstood Genius

Tom Huddleston describes the work of prolific animator Hayao Miyazaki:

Some filmmakers build their great artworks with blood, sweat and toil. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki seems to sprout his from seeds, planting them in good earth and patiently watering them until they burst into bloom.

Perhaps true genius comes from making things look easy.  From his essential book Starting Point here's Miyazaki himself describing the price of mastery:

You want me to talk about my family?  That's a problem for me.  I'm hardly ever at home.  Last night I got home at 1:30 AM, the night before it was 1 AM.  It's not as if I go out on the town.  I'm a father who works too hard and returns home late at night six days a week.  Usually I repeat, "I've got to go now", several times as I eat breakfast; when I have the rare day off all I do is sleep.

It wasn't so bad when I was employed at a company.  But twenty years ago, when I began to produce my own films, this schedule turned into a lifestyle.  Animation work isn't something that is over when a certain amount is done.  One has to pursue it until one is satisfied.

Propriety

In chronicling the depravities of the Emperor Caligula, the 1st century Roman historian Suetonius makes a revealing statement. From Robert Graves' very readable translation:

Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, he made advances to almost every well-known married woman in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn while they passed his couch, as a purchaser might assess the value of a slave, and even stretch out his hand and lift up the chin of any woman who kept her eyes modestly cast down.

Whether it happened or not, here's a culture with its contradictions on display when the biographer interrupts a tale off incest and mass murder to primly note that the Emperor also treated wealthy matrons as if they were slaves.

Masters of an Arcane Art

This from The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England.  After describing the theories of medicine built around the bodily humours, the author attempts to explain why these abstruse and mostly worthless medical principles were popular for two thousand years:

All very straightforward, you might think, even if somewhat misconceived.  However, "straightforward" it certainly is not.  One of the reasons humoral theory continues to hold such sway is because it is so involved and complex.  Its numerical harmony (the four elements, the four humours, etc.) allows for endless refinement and invented complexity.

I would add to that the power of certification.  Whether it's young men attending academies to learn principles that set them apart from the public, or the divine who cultivates a privileged understanding of spiritual verities, there's a benefit to being accorded a position where your opinions cannot be challenged.

I see the same mixture of nonsense complexity and appeal to authority in the economists of today.  They are the high priests propagating the special, liquidity-based healing that they say our economy needs.

Take That George Lucas!

"He's a three P-O," they say, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from declasse substances.

So says Frank Herbert in Heretics of Dune, and the reference is obvious:


So is the insult.  When Star Wars came out in 1977, the similarities were abundant and generated some commentary.  Interestingly, Herbert wrote another Dune book, God Emperor of Dune, after Star Wars came out and made no mention of the Lucas' successful doppleganger, only inserting this jab after 1983's Return of the Jedi.  Apparently Jabba the Hutt was too on-the-nose an imitation of the God Emperor Leto.  From Justine Shaw:

Freude Schoner Gotterfunken x 10,000

Rather than me quote all of Schiller's masterpiece, you can listen to it here, as sung by 10,000 Japanese.  Apparently an annual New Year's Eve community event in Osaka, something like this has been done every year for quite a long time.  They make everyone in the audience a part of the production.  Here's the scene from New Year's 2012 (gotten from this source):

The soloists are professionals, clear and very sharp, as are the orchestra and conductor.  Speaking of the conductor, at the end of the performance he looks like he's been through the war, and no wonder - any chorus of 10,000 will be hard to manage, even if comprised of professionals.  And these folks are amateurs, some old and some very young.  The chorus is a big, lurching, heaving beast, reliably a note behind the orchestra.  Such a dispersed group could hardly expect to stay together, and it hardly matters.  There's something deeply impressive about a performance where there is no audience.  And for this song, in particular.  No one is passive, all are singing about the universal effects of joy and amity.  There are no listeners, or rather everyone is a listener, and the small sing right along with the great and all are contented.

Watching the Watchers

This charming image is from a National Geographic photoblog:

Kids still like watching airplanes today, but the gawkers furthest down the sidewalk don't appear to have any with them.  Those lumbering beasts were novel enough to inspire fascination, and air travel still had a mystique.

Very different today, where air travel is uncomfortable, tedious, and fraught with frightening police state theater.

I also like that they felt free to pull over to the right lane of an expressway to relax and watch.

The Wrong Kind of Socialism

In the 1960's, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie attempted to write an unofficial dictionary of Latter-day Saint doctrine.  Not meant to be authoritative, the results were somewhat uneven though the effort was sincere.

One blind spot was regarding politics.  Here, in the "Signs of the Times" article, McConkie described the famines, depressions and economic turmoil supposed to precede the Second Coming of the Savior Jesus Christ:

Because of iniquity and greed in the hearts of men, there will be depressions, famines, and a frantic search for temporal security--a security sought without turning to the Lord or obeying his precepts.

So far, so good.  But things take an odd turn here:

We my expect to see the insatiable desire to get something for nothing result in further class legislation and more socialistic experiments by governments.

As if "socialistic experiments" were any problem at all right now.

How Re-Enacting Started

Wow this got to me.  From Confederates in the Attic:

Veterans bivouacked at actual battlegrounds, donned their old uniforms, and occasionally performed mock versions of the heroic deeds of their youth.  In 1913, hundreds of geriatric rebels rushed as best they could across the field they'd crossed during Pickett's Charge, toting canes instead of muskets and greeting their erstwhile foes with handshakes rather than bayonets.

War is the Enemy of Art

Enemy of real art, not propaganda disguised as such.  Hermann Hesse, in an essay just after the start of the Great War:

Among our writers and men of letters there are, I believe, few if any whose present utterances, spoken or written in the anger of the moment, will be counted as their best work.  Nor is there any serious writer at heart who prefers Korner's patriotic songs to the poems of Goethe who held so conspicuously aloof from the War of Liberation.

Hesse remarks further that the "super-patriots" really do hold Goethe quite out of favor in their militaristic atmosphere, which is very much the point.  War ruins art and the warlike mentality degrades our ability to appreciate it.

Security in the White House

He saw the men ahead.  There was no way to avoid them.  The guards could not seem to keep them out, and many of them slept in the White House hall.  The word had passed that he was coming, and so they were on their feet and smiling.  Each of these wanted a favor...In four years of living in the White House, Mr. Lincoln had become accustomed to the morning vultures.  He could do little to be rid of them...
There was no way around them...Some men, desperate or arrogant, grabbed the crook of his arm and held him until the President pulled himself loose and said: "I am sorry.  I cannot be of help to you."  Some spoke quietly and swiftly, their heads swinging to follow him as he kept walking.  Some wept.  A few muttered threats and departed.

That's on the first page of Jim Bishop's bestseller The Day Lincoln Was Shot.  Quite foreboding the lack of security, too, for the title tells us what happened to President just a few hours later.  This atmosphere at the White House registered quite a surprise - it's a tremendous contrast to the armored fortress that the White House has become since.

Until that day, the 14th of April 1865, no US president had been assassinated.  Security is usually reactive, and people don't often assess threats realistically until the threats have been proven.  But the nation was just finishing a calamitous civil war, and lots of people had animosity for its author, and the Administration knew it, "talked about it...worried about it and...counterplotted against it."  Steps were taken, but (then and now) it is difficult to protect the life of a public figure from the truly determined.

Mr. Lincoln's philosophy was that he could be killed at any time by anyone who was willing to give his own life in return.  Now and then, the President discussed a violent death, and, in this, his attitude was one of sadness and resignation rather than fright.

That must wear on a person.

Jobs for Ex-Servicemen

From Jonathan Shay's thought-provoking book Odysseus In America.  Excerpted in the New York Times:

For which civilian careers does prolonged combat prepare a person? Let's look at the strengths, skills, and capacities acquired during prolonged combat:
• Control of fear.
• Cunning, the arts of deception, the arts of the "mind-[expletive]."
• Control of violence against members of their own group.
• The capacity to respond skillfully and instantly with violent, lethal force.
• Vigilance, perpetual mobilization for danger.
• Regarding fixed rules as possible threats to their own and their comrades' survival.
• Regarding fixed "rules of war" as possible advantages to be gained over the enemy.
• Suppression of compassion, horror, guilt, tenderness, grief, disgust.
• The capacity to lie fluently and convincingly.
• Physical strength, quickness, endurance, stealth.
• Skill at locating and grabbing needed supplies, whether officially provided or not.
• Skill in the use of a variety of lethal weapons.
• Skill in adapting to harsh physical conditions.

Shay answers his question later in the chapter.  It's a rather obvious conclusion:

A career that war exactly prepares veterans for upon return to civilian life is a criminal career...

This problem has been around for a long time.  In other times and seasons whole societies were affected by soldiers trained to violence and then abandoned by their employers.  From Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century:

Outside Paris the breakdown of Paris was reaching catastrophe.  Its catalyst was the brigandige of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years.  These were the Free Companies who "write sorrow on the bosom of the earth" and were to become the torment of the age.  Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after Poitiers by the Black Prince, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment, they had acquired in the Prince's campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder...They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants' barns, killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as enforced camp-followers and men as servants.  As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.

Fever and exaggeration surely there were, but Tuchman also provides inadvertent hints at other explanations: these freebooters were looking for patrons, people to pay them to fight in actual battles, or not to fight at all.  By that measure, the bigger effect they had on commerce and production the more motivated wealthy lords might be to buy them off.

It's a long-held theory that more than one of the Great Crusades was motivated, at least in part, to get these brigands to practice their brigandage somewhere else and hopefully have their population thinned by attrition as well.

The 20th Century surely has had more soldiers than any other, perhaps all the others combined, and almost all of them did not continue in military work after the big wars ended.  In the US, the G. I. Bill was intended to provide privileges and opportunities for returning soldiers to find something to do with their lives other than the killing and madness of great military operations.  Their new jobs were a tremendous contrast to their old ones.  This photo taken in 1951 (found on a National Geographic website) are a group of former soldiers learning how to decorate cakes:

Handmade

From Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop:

The Episcopal residence was an old adobe house, much out of repair, but with possibilities of comfort...The thick clay walls had been finished on the inside by the deft palms of Indian women, and had that irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

That's what I like about handmade things.  Every one is different and reflects the skill, thoughts, and even moods of their creator.  Creativity, actual creativity, doesn't require materials, it requires thought and time.

By such a measure, our most productive places are also the least creative.  Factories are cold, full of motion but absent of life and vitality - machines building machines designed by machines. No creativity there.  If any human should find themselves on the factory floor, it is to play a part that humans can still play more cheaply than the best designed robot.  They are judged by how well they perform as machines.

And what about our homes?  Our clothing?  Our furniture?

Our art?  Machines have understood language, image and composition for decades; when will they take over the production of art?  If art becomes a constricted matter of process and form, they probably could no problem.

That was a crucial part of the nightmares in Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 - the only purpose of art was to prop up the powerful or distract the populace.  A machine could easily generate such art.  Here's 1984:

There was a whole chain of separate departments [in the Ministry of Truth] dealing with proletarian literature,  music, drama and entertainment generally.  Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs that were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. 

And Julia describing the books they produce in "Pornosec":

Oh ghastly rubbish.  They're boring really.  They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit.  Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes...

Could people tolerate such things?  I think we already do, whether they are machine creations or not.

Let me have handmade words.

Feet

All writers are part of an historical milieu, including writers of what we now recognize as scripture.  Thus they were inclined to use symbols and ideas from their surrounding culture to get their point across.

I read this in the Iliad yesterday.  Speaking is Phoinix, older foster brother to pouting Achilles, trying to convince him to come back to the fight.  From Rouse's translation:

Do not despise the feet of those who bring good tidings.

This is very much a part with the famous verse from Isaiah:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!

Rouse is cheating a little bit; his version of the line seems to be consciously drawing a parallel to the Biblical verse.  Other translators like Fagles and Pope do not talk about feet at all.

However, the original does.  Consulting an interlinear source we see that Homer is referring to the feet, in particular, of those who bring the tidings.  Stringing together the sense of the Greek words, you more or less get: "not you, at least, my spoken words nor my foot put to shame".

News didn't travel so fast back then, and honor was eagerly given to those who cared enough to travel the distances to bring it.  It wasn't enough to have a voice - feet got you close enough to communicate.  In Greece, again, the fellow whose grand, sacrificial effort brought news of the victory at Marathon twenty-six miles to the people of Athens is still honored today as we call our races marathons and set racers to run that peculiar distance.

The idea translates rather easily to a gospel setting.  The news of faith, love and salvation in the home of God has been passed on with great labor and enthusiasm, and has been received in the hearts of many with joy and gratitude.  As for my church, the idea was picked up by Book of Mormon writers as well, and became a sort of leitmotif for the passing on of the Good News.

Parables

This is from John 21:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

I find it charming that he sums up the record using the name of his friend, instead of one of Jesus' many titles in His role as Savior of the world.

We get John's point - there's lots that the Savior did and said during his life that wasn't recorded, or was recorded and then lost.  This raises an interesting question - if further works or teachings of Jesus Christ came to light, should they not be studied and pondered and applied to our lives?

I should think so, enthusiastically.  Though there's the challenge of identifying what might have come from the Savior.

In 1945 a work called The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in Egypt.  It purported to contain many statements made by the Savior during his lifetime.  The claim is substantively true, for many of the 114 sayings match Biblical sayings very closely.

There are many that aren't in the Bible, however.  This parable, teaching 97, is fascinating:

Jesus said: The kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking [on a] distant road, the handle of the jar broke (and) the meal poured out behind her on the road. She was unaware, she had not noticed the misfortune. When she came to her house, she put the jar down (and) found it empty.

Blatz's translation.  Original and translation found here.

I haven't done enough to know whether this is true or not, but I like it a lot.  It feels like something the Savior would have said.  I don't know that I can make a stronger statement than that about it.  Very close in style to the parables we are familiar with in the New Testament.  The wide range of applications is significant, too - a people carrying along a heritage, or the results an individual expects from their labors.  Awareness of surroundings, attention to important details, the consequence of slow and steady losses, and a key irony that turns productive labor into useless toil.  It also has conflicts and details that promote further thought - for example, how could the lady not know her jar was empty?

My LDS religious tradition has encouraged open-minded study of non-canonical teachings, the Apocrypha in particular.  Doctrine and Covenants 131:

Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you concerning the Apocrypha—There are many things contained therein that are true, and it is mostly translated correctly;
...
Therefore, whoso readeth it, let him understand, for the Spirit manifesteth truth;
And whoso is enlightened by the Spirit shall obtain benefit therefrom;

While I believe the LDS people to be more studious than the average, not many Latter-day Saints avail themselves of this particular opportunity, myself included.  Missed opportunities.

Becoming Evil to Better Fight Evil

Some fine themes in the Lord of the Rings books were neglected or even reversed in the well-known film based on the story.  During a parley before their last big battle, and emissary of Sauron, a splendid character who styled himself "the Mouth of Sauron" came out to the heroes to bluster and intimidate.  In the book it went like this:

...he mocked, turning to Aragorn with scorn.  "It needs more to make a king than a piece of elvish glass, or a rabble such as this.  Why, any brigand of the hills can show as good a following!" 

Aragorn said naught in answer, but he took the other's eye and held it and for a moment they strove thus; but soon, though Aragorn did not stir nor move hand to weapon, the other quailed and gave back as if menaced with a blow.  "I am a herald and ambassador, and may not be assailed!" he cried. 

"Where such laws hold," said Gandalf, "it is also the custom for ambassadors to use less insolence.  But no one has threatened you.  You have naught to fear from us, until your errand is done.  But unless your master has come to new wisdom, then with all his servants you will be in great peril."

The ambassador is later allowed to retire from the field, humiliated but unharmed.

Here's how it goes in the movie.  The opposite outcome - unprovoked violence against an unarmed noncombatant, followed by a joke.  Thus the "good guys" become more like the wicked enemy they are seeking to master.  If the bad guys weren't so ugly, you wouldn't be able to tell the sides apart.

Objectivity Is a Difficult Objective

Wendell Berry, in People Land Community:

Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. 

Prophetic Pound

"An Object" by Ezra Pound, published 1912:

This thing, that hath a code and not a core,
Hath set acquaintance where might be affections,
And nothing now
Disturbeth his reflections. 

He manages to describe computers (and people who turn themselves into them) many decades before their introduction.

Priests and Their Duties

Excerpt out of The Visitation of a Collegiate Church by Archbishop Odo of Rigaud, in November 1266.  From The Portable Medieval Reader:

Also, we found Lord Gilbert called Barrabas, priest and rector of the parish of St. Stephen, ill-famed many times; for he said that for many years he kept and still keeps his own niece and had begotten children by her. He did not have the letters of his ordination; he could not tell by whom or through whom he had been ordained; he was also ill-famed of trading; he celebrated [mass] insufficiently, was too solitary, being known to few.

Odo was doing the rounds around his diocese to check up on how things were going, and was pretty disappointed at what he saw in Rouen, St. Stephen in particular.  I find the account about Lord Gilbert interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is how he lists Gilbert's infractions in order of descending importance.  I find that the opposite is more logical, and better storytelling, too, building up to what seems to me the biggest - turning his niece into a concubine "for many years".

It's like if you were to list the legal consequences for some crime or other:  "Penalties for jaywalking include death by firing squad, sale of children into slavery, and an eleven dollar fine."  Seems graceless, right?  You hit the climax early and the rest of the sentence is rather small beer.  Odo apparently wasn't trying to tell a compelling account - he was more worried about keeping priests like Gilbert in line.

The other thing.  The last item, whatever its importance, highlights the role of the parish priest as the most visible representative of the universal church in the lives of millions in western Europe.  It was essentially a social occupation, and Odo's concern about Gilbert's teaching and getting to know the people of the parish shows that he cared about how the church was fulfilling a purpose in peoples' lives.

For the most part parish priests were a humble and unprepossessing bunch, and (Gilbert notwithstanding) many of them were holy souls, devoted to the instruction and well-being of their flocks.  Chaucer, skeptical about other roles in medieval society, nonetheless made a humble parson one of the good guys in The Canterbury Tales:

His parishioners devoutly would he teach.
Benign he was, and [wonderfully] diligent,
And in adversity [fully] patient,
And such he was proved often [truly].
...
Wide was his parish, and houses far asunder,
But he never [neglected] [any], for rain nor thunder,
In sickness nor in mischief to visit
The farthest in his parish, [rich] and [poor],
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staff.
This noble example to his sheep he gave,
That first he wrought, and afterward he taught.

(I have updated the spelling and changed some of the more antique words.)

"The Function of Knighthood"

Sometime in the 1100's John of Salisbury wrote a treatise entitled Policraticus.  Here is an excerpt, from J. Dickinson's translation, included in the anthology The Portable Medieval Reader:

For soldiers...are the more loyal to their prince in proportion as they more zealously keep the faith of God...

A cynical view of culture is that it exists to justify the position of the powerful.  At different times in history even the religious principles of the socially disruptive Christian faith have been turned to that end.