A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had in the bank…but the world may be a better place because I made a difference in the life of a child
– Forest Witcraft –
Coaching for the third act of life. 65+
– Forest Witcraft –
First, in case you are not acquainted with Orion magazine, allow me to introduce you. If you enjoy reading high quality essays and viewing excellent photographs with no advertising interruptions, and exploring relevant information about our natural world, then I urge you to subscribe to Orion or find it in your local library. If you subscribe, then pass it on to friends or leave it in your favorite coffee shop to enlighten your fellow latte drinkers. This is a thoughtful and high quality publication worthy of your attention and support. I don’t find many of this calibre available for public consumption these days.
This 2001 article by Barry Lopez, a naturalist who lives in Oregon and who has penned many worthy books and essays, draws an interesting distinction between religion and spirituality as he discusses his role as participant in Nature rather than mere observer. I think you’ll like this.
As an “old guy,”I am absolutely blown away by magnitude of the changes I see around me when I compare American life and culture in 2013 with what I remember of say, 1958, the year of my college graduation. Never mind contemplating life in 1776 which I only experienced as a historian through diaries and other primary sources.
In this NY Times op-ed piece, Krugman has put his finger on several of the most obvious differences, and they are certainly notable. It’s hard for me as a semi-aware and mostly “with it” Senior not to feel increasingly out of date and irrelevant. I wonder which, if any, of my ancestors might have felt this way.
I’m going to try and think seriously about that question in the weeks ahead as I make use of my Apple devices to explore the universe through the orbiting Hubble telescope controlled from Baltimore and Munich, appreciate art in the Louvre, listen to original concerts by Dylan and the Beetles on YouTube, do research in the Smithsonian, learn how to make Lemon Tarts from culinary experts in Scotland, watch House of Cards and the 2012 Broncos at Sports Authority Field, keep my ancient mind flexible by trying to solve the puzzles on Lumosity, check on the weather in New England where my daughters live, investigate what might have caused the train wreck in Spain or what color little Prince George’s hair will be, find out what my friends are eating and reading, and even locate and see a photograph of the grave site of a distant ancestor in a cemetery in Royal Tunbridge Wells south of London.
And all this while not moving more than my fingers to stroke the alphabetical keys on a composite keyboard (made of rare metals from all over the world), designed by adolescents in California, assembled in China, and shipped in a Japanese container ship powered by shale oil from Canada.
And that’s but a microdot of the change that’s around me. No wonder I’m feeling out of it!
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Britain: Church to Fight Bullying of Gays |
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SUMMER SHORELINESFree Dinner in the City: It Comes With a Catch, of Course |
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DOT EARTHA Song for the Fallen on Independence Day |
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DISUNIONThe Wounded Lion of the Union |
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ARTSBEATFounding Fathers Go Electric |
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MUSIC REVIEWMilitary Brass, Civilian Strings |
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Opera/Classical Music Listings for July 5-11 |
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ARTSBEATWrist Injury Sidelines Marin Alsop |
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1980s Child Sex Case Is a Cause He Cannot Drop |
Here are a couple of words that cause me to grit my teeth and mutter under my breath. So please add them to my previous post on this topic.
Rock used as a transitive verb, as in “you really rock that sweater” or “I rocked the SAT’s” or “I sure rocked that pizza.”
Channel is often used as a verb that apparently draws on its roots in the psychic or fortune teller world. “Obama is channeling Bill Clinton” or “Def Leppard is trying to channel the Rolling Stones.”
Chops appears to be something you earn, not eat or demand from your barber, or do to liver. Rather it appears to refer to technical expertise, particularly (not always) in music, as in “he doesn’t have the chops to try that solo” or “she earned her chops while working as the baker’s assistant.”
Even writing this blog is giving me a headache, so before I start down that slippery slope, please pass me an Advil or pain reliever substitute.
This is an incredible piece of interpretive writing by Chris Hedges who, in the recent past, has spoken more consistently, bravely, honestly, and articulately about the greatness and ills of America than any other observer of the contemporary scene. Here, Hedges uses Melville’s classic story of the great white whale pursued relentlessly the obsessive captain Ahab to provide us some insights into the character of America and Americans today. Through Hedges eyes, the American “voyage” is plagued by Ahab’s character faults, suggesting that the end of the “hunt”may, like the Pequod, not be a pleasant one for our country. Everything in me resonates with Hedges’ interpretation. This makes me deeply sad because I see the symptoms of our malaise all around me every day–as well as ever-present in myself.
As you read, I hope that you will stay open to the insights contained in this article. I only wish that I could be sitting around a seminar table with you using this piece as the source material for a discussion class in American History.
Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.
Ahab, as the historian Richard Slotkin points out in his book “Regeneration Through Violence,” is “the true American hero, worthy to be captain of a ship whose ‘wood could only be American.’ ” Melville offers us a vision, one that D.H. Lawrence later understood, of the inevitable fatality of white civilization brought about by our ceaseless lust for material progress, imperial expansion, white supremacy and exploitation of nature.
Melville, who had been a sailor on clipper ships and whalers, was keenly aware that the wealth of industrialized societies came from the exploited of the earth. “Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans,” Ishmael says of New England’s prosperity. “One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.” All the authority figures on the ship are white men—Ahab, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb. The hard, dirty work, from harpooning to gutting the carcasses of the whales, is the task of the poor, mostly men of color.
Ahab, when he first appears on the quarterdeck after being in his cabin for the first few days of the voyage, holds up a doubloon, an extravagant gold coin, and promises it to the crew member who first spots the white whale. He knows that “the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man … is sordidness.” And he plays to this sordidness. The whale becomes a commodity, a source of personal profit. A murderous greed, one that Starbuck denounces as “blasphemous,” grips the crew. Ahab’s obsession infects the ship.
“I see in him [Moby Dick] outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it,” Ahab tells Starbuck. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
Ahab conducts a dark Mass, a Eucharist of violence and blood, on the deck with the crew. He orders the men to circle around him. He makes them drink from a flagon that is passed from man to man, filled with draughts “hot as Satan’s hoof.” Ahab tells the harpooners to cross their lances before him. The captain grasps the harpoons and anoints the ships’ harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo—his “three pagan kinsmen.” He orders them to detach the iron sections of their harpoons and fills the sockets “with the fiery waters from the pewter.” “Drink, ye harpooneers! Drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” And with the crew bonded to him in his infernal quest he knows that Starbuck is helpless “amid the general hurricane.” “Starbuck now is mine,” Ahab says, “cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.” “The honest eye of Starbuck,” Melville writes, “fell downright.”
The ship, described by Melville as a hearse, was painted black. It was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes, a “cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a “red hell.” Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son who has fallen overboard.
Ahab is described by Melville’s biographer Andrew Delbanco as “a suicidal charismatic who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose—an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon.” Ahab has not only the heated rhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internal security force on the ship, the five “dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.” Ahab’s secret, private whale boat crew, which has a feral lust for blood, keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they mark those on Melville’s ship. C.L.R. James, for this reason, describes “Moby Dick” as “the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.”
And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab’s maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool did in Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Ahab warns Pip of Ahab. “Lad, lad,” says Ahab, “I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. … If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.” A few pages later, “untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven. … From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” Starbuck approaches him. Ahab, for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuck of his “forty years on the pitiless sea! … the desolation of solitude it has been. … Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?” He thinks of his young wife—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck”—and of his little boy: “About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
Ahab’s thirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction, however, overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatred wins. “What is it,” Ahab finally asks, “what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time. …”
Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s “impious end.” Starbuck, “while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.”
And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.
Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship’s descent collapses, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Flickr/Pete Simon
“Moby Dick” book cover illustration.
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This essay was shared with me a few weeks ago by Treva Oocha, a resident of my apartment building who is adding to her education by taking classes from time to time. Professionally she’s a successful telecommunications saleswoman, but in her “spare time” she has been working on her writing. Now and then she asks me to help her with her compositions.
Treva wrote the following piece to fulfill an assignment for a writing class she’s taking. The assignment required her to use the alphabet as a structure for an essay on any topic. I’ll let you make your own decision about the writing’s merits, but I was deeply moved. I asked Treva if I could publish her work in my blog, and she reluctantly agreed because she didn’t feel her efforts merited sharing with the public. She also reminded me that this is a draft and not a finished product.
Tom West would have appreciated this. I do too…. a lot!
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A BOSTON MARATHON PRIMER
If only I could speak the Truth with the accuracy and pathos of an Irish poet.
As I pursued my vocations of teaching and writing, friends and relatives occasionally suggested that what I was doing for a living could not be considered really “working,” as if the label “work” could only be applied to activities involving intense physical efforts that literally produce callouses and sweat-soaked shirts. Even today, in the minds of some folks, the appellation “work” is associated only with physical labor.
My father sold life insurance and went to the “office” to do his job every day. However, I grew up knowing that he worked, even if there were no half-moon sweat stains on the armpits of his shirts. As an adult I also have worked in a similar way, expending my efforts dealing with abstractions. I confess that it is sometimes difficult for me to see what I do as ‘worthy’ because my job is not concrete and has few results that are measurable at the end of the day.
Consequently, I was glad to read in the blog of Silas House (http://silashouseblog.blogspot.com), a fellow Kentuckian, teacher, and writer, Seamus Heaney’s poem that gave me an insight into (and modicum of solace about) how to view my chosen work even as I observe others laboring in more traditional ways. I almost envy Heaney’s father who digs a row from ‘here to there,’ creating piles of potatoes and sod.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
– from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
To the following words and terms assembled by a college group in Michigan for the years 2012 and 2013, I would add a couple of my favorites: play at the next level, or play or compete at a higher level. And, going viral. How about dude and yo? And, I still see and hear comments being made about thinking outside the box and getting traction..
Then there is like. In a conversation with a very intelligent and well-educated college graduate the other day, in the course of five minutes while discussing a serious topic, I heard her like use the word like at least like 100 times like automatically, like you know! So how about you know itself?
The following lists are fun and can be the beginning of like a like curated collection if you like choose to like create one of like your own. Or you can, like, eliminate them all from your working vocabulary and communicate on a higher level. Like, you know.
Read more at http://hotword.dictionary.com/worst-words-of-2012/#KOORi0q2mHc74oox.99
Read more at http://hotword.dictionary.com/banish-in-2013/#l2rjlM6T6u8VzReh.99
This is a really interesting article that tries to inject some sense into the ‘gun ownership and control’ controversy that is roiling around in the Congress and among various easily spooked citizens throughout the country these days. I am particularly impressed with the article’s assertion that there is “an alternative to blood, force, and suffering. It’s called democracy.” Why? Because I am equally disturbed by the hysteria and paranoia being generated by the NRA and other spokespeople from the Right who employ effective, but deceptive rhetoric that is intent on engendering fear in the citizenry.Yes, some of us have “lost our minds” to assertions that try to make us believe “as real and possible” that a revolution is pending in the streets, that government collection, confiscation, and prohibition of all firearms is on the verge of happening, and that we need to arm ourselves with automatic weapons to protect hearth and home on a daily basis against impending invasion!As for me, I’d prefer a more democratic approach to issues that avoids armed revolution by pursuing rational and civil discussion and compromise to settle issues before we need an AR-15 or Bushmaster ACR in every home in the land. The question for me now is whether our politicians are noble enough–embued with sufficient old fashioned statesmanship–to put public policy ahead of seeking partisan gain with every issue that arises.
FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013 7:29 PM UTC
BY BILL MOYERS AND MICHAEL WINSHIP