I'm deleting you from facebook, cha cha cha

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East Portland Blog directs us to a long overdue rejection of various facebook lunacies from somewhere in Spain.

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The vanilla bean pod story

I went to the Whole Foods at California and Franklin on Saturday in quest of a vanilla bean pod. Not knowing where to begin, I inquired of three store employees where such an item might be located. Three times I had to explain what a vanilla bean pod is, since none of the workers had a clue. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that although everyone is familiar with the flavor, no one seems to be aware of its botanical origin.

I loaded some other stuff and headed for the cashier, a young woman to whom I explained my problem. Success: she knew exactly what I required, disappeared for three or four minutes and eventually returned with a little glass jar containing a single vanilla bean pod doubled over inside it.

At $9.99 it was a total rip-off, and I've meanwhile learned you can buy the bean pods en masse for a couple bucks on eBay, but at least I went home happy.

Why was I looking for a vanilla bean pod? Because I'm making my own ice cream and have been advised that beans taste better than extract (which can be made cheaply by soaking the beans in vodka).

How did I get started making ice cream? I was standing in line recently at the Safeway complaining vigorously to an older African American lady behind me about how packaged ice cream is full of candy for kids and you can't get the real stuff any more, etc, etc. She said, listen, if you want good ice cream, the only solution is to make it yourself.

Something clicked in the back of my head. I bought a Cuisinart ice-cream maker at Amazon.com for $40 and was soon on the path to perfect ice-cream. I will never return to the pathetic commercial junk again. Substituting Splenda for sugar, I have with patience created the perfect vanilla, to go on top of the currently fresh organic California strawberries. Soon I will master the perfect chocolate. In July, when the black cherries are in, I will commence production of my favorite flavor, Cherry Garcia. In the fall I shall move on to beer ice cream (add Guinness Stout in place of milk), and the next holiday season will find me luxuriating in exceptionally  high-proof home-made rum raisin. With golden raisins and first-rate booze.



THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM


Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem*
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


from Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream, 1922.


* Let appearances become reality

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In Tibet, 1987

After studying Soto zen for a year at a sub-temple of Ehei-ji and teaching at Fukui University, I left Japan in the fall of 1986. I spent several weeks traveling around China, a major highlight of which was my visit to Zhenru Temple, a Chinese zen monastery where I interviewed the Abbot Yi Chen, later published in various Buddhist journals.

I next left China for Tibet, my best trip ever, outranking a spectacular journey over the Karakorum from Kashgar in China to Gilgit in Pakistan, about which more at another time.

It was a perfect time to visit Tibet. Because China had opened to tourism only in 1979, little had been done to provide an infrastructure for visitors, so that you could mix freely with the Tibetans and stay at the Tibetan-run Snowlands hotel in Lhasa for a dollar a night, join in with the pilgrims circumambulating the Jokhang Temple, drink your chang and eat your momo’s at an outdoor Tibetan food stand, etc.

There was minimal attention paid to visitors by the authorities; and you could travel inside the country virtually wherever you wanted if you could find a way to get there This usually meant bribing a Chinese truckdriver or creating an ad hoc expedition by joining up with other backpackers and hiring a mini-van and driver from the Chinese tourist agency—a preferable practice since it didn’t cost much and it could get really cold in the back of a Chinese army truck.

There were only two obstacles to impede the intrepid Western tourist: nobody spoke English, so the best you could do was vibe with folks, and then you had to deal also with the Tibetan sanitation standards, which were nothing short of catastrophic.

The lack of governmental supervision disappeared  a couple years later and the P.R.C. started getting uptight about backpackers, who of course did not drop enough bucks to make their presence profitable, and who handed out deeply-appreciated pictures of the Dalai Lama to the locals and were consequently suspected of inciting same to riot and rebellion.

I feel hugely fortunate to have visited Tibet in this period, and I have never forgotten those distant mountains, plains and rivers in the Buddhist kingdom (theocracy) so close to the sky.

 

Potala from the Chakpuri

Coracle taxi on the Kyichu

Temple in Lhasa

Chinese restaurant in downtown Lhasa

Norbulingka entrance

Norbulingka entrance

The Southern Temple at Sakya

Sakya

Sakya

Sakya

Sakya prayer wheels

At Gyantse

Gyantse

Gyantse Kumbum

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Mnemosyne

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing  in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:


Mnemosyne
                                   (Third version)


The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.


But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?


My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.



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The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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Anal fire

Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Codex bibl. fol 23: folio 94v

I had been puzzling for some weeks over this picture in the Stuttgart Psalter (Paris, 820-830 CE) which illustrates Psalm 77, Verse 66:

Et percussit inimicos suos in posteriora: obprobrium sempiternum dedit illos. (Vulgata)

And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts: he put them to a perpetual reproach. ((KJV) 

Were these butt-rockets dispensed by the Lord for sodomitical transgressions committed by the victims? What other anal improprieties could have incurred the Lord's displeasure?

The answer came to me immediately from the opening pages of Jeffrey Cohen's Medieval Identity Machines, which reference King Alfred the Great's problems with hemorrhoids. These hellish afflictions may have been more common in the Early Middle Ages than we have supposed. Or perhaps the artist, similarly afflicted and lacking Preparation H, postulated an act of divine retribution.

In modern times, piles of course were the subject of a very popular Johnny Cash song entitled "Ring of Fire."

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The corpse flower

Amorphophallus titanum, Indonesia, 2003

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In the cave of forgotten dreams

Chauvet Caves:  Four horses with fighting rhinos

Acting on an enthusiastic recommendation from Francesca Rosa I went with Bruce Boone to see the excellent Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a remarkable excursion through the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which contain the oldest pictures in human history. The 3-D presentation was flawless and in fact completely necessary to show how the rock art images merged plastically into the shifting planes of the limestone walls of the cave. Herzog also left plenty of time for the viewer to simply gaze at the works themselves without acoustic intervention, returning to the same images from time to time seen from different perspectives.

The film was in every sense of the word an anabasis into the collective unconscious of humankind, down to the ancient-most layer of our own species-memory that we can access. Why did these cave artists portray animals and not trees and flowers, or geographical features like mountains and rivers, or other humans? Were they interested only in imaging the food supply in motion, or did they understand themselves as part of an animal spirit-world, and the creatures as fellow beings in the commonly-shared ancestral environment?

Assuming that the human population in the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was tiny, and the variety and number of animals running around as dense apparently as on the plains of Africa, the engagement with them must have been extremely intense. Perhaps the fact that the animals are almost always pictured in profile from their sides, in the way we would photograph grazing animals today, demonstrates the angle at which they were also able to be hunted—you don’t see their faces shown head-on, which would permit you to make eye-contact and get personal with them.

A brief excursus was made into the well-known, chubby Paleolithic female figures categorized as “Venuses” and given the common interpretation that these symbolize fecundity. I remain skeptical, remembering that Hawaiian and Polynesian royalty were once esteemed according to their body-weight, and that obesity functioned socially as a Schönheitsideal. Perhaps when food is scarce or difficult to obtain, body fat becomes desirable.

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More pictures of the Chauvet caves at the Bradford Foundation website. 

Chengdu, P.R. China, 1986

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ΝΕΑΝΙΑΣ

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Kanellopoulos Museum, Athens -- Boetian, 5th-6th c.BCE

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Ladegast organ in Schwerin

I'm not a fan of 19th century organs or of those composers who wrote for them, but a huge exception for me is the Ladegast organ (1871) in Schwerin (capital of the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).

The instrument itself is a masterpiece of romantic neo-Gothic design popular throughout the 19th century in Germany, and looks like it would be equally at home in a Caspar David Friedrich painting or a Hermann Hesse novel. It has a huge sound, and if you have a few moments, have a listen to it right here.

This performance of Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H by Hans-Jürgen Kaiser is terrific; he is wisely concerned less about displaying his own virtuosity than managing the darkly brooding energies and the continually modulating harmonies within an abolutely gargantuan acoustic space. Surprisingly, the effect is audible through even the crappiest of computer loudspeakers.

Just imagine being there and hearing it in person, or indeed in any of these ancient and massively buillt North German cathedral churches (Lüneburg, Lübeck, Rostock, Stralsund), all of which are equipped with towering organs.

Schwerin Cathedral in winter, thanks Wiki Commons

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Joy of the soprano recorder

Nathaniel Hone, The piping boy, 1768.

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O father, my father

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This tombstone from a colonial cemetery in Boston has interested me more than all others. The barely legible inscription reads:

W.P. 

O MY FATHER, MY FATHER, 

THE CHARIOTS OF ISRAEL, 

THE HORSEMEN THEREOF. 

1658

I think it unlikely I shall discover the identity of W.P., but since Boston was founded in 1630, he must have been in the first or second generation of English settlers in Massachusetts. (It's difficult for many folks to understand there were things that went on in America between 1492 and 1776, but poking around Boston gives you a certain cognitive edge.)

The inscription puzzled me for years -- obviously a verse from the Old Testament, but from where, and what was the context? Not until Google was invented in the late 90's was I able to find the correct citation in 2 Kings 13:14:

Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof  he died. And Joash the king of Israel came down unto him and wept over his face, and said, O my father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof (KJV).

What was this all about? Several Bible commentaries I looked at are hardly in agreement, but the idea seems to be that when Joash the king of Israel learned that the prophet Elisha was dying, he appeared and had some kind of  future vision, or perhaps past memory, of Israel's military victories.

A bit later the chronicle continues:

20 Elisha died, and they buried him. Now the bands of the Moabites would invade the land in the spring of the year. 21 As they were burying a man, behold, they saw a marauding band; and they cast the man into the grave of Elisha. And when the man touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet (New American Standard Bible).

OK so now maybe we have a Jewish, pre-Christian resurrection parable on our hands? Is this why these words, more than 2000 years old, are inscribed on a colonial gravestone in Boston? Or is it rather that W.P. enjoyed a successful career as a belligerent or a military hero of some sort?

What an appropriate mystery for 17th century Boston, cloaked in patriarchal imagery and advertising itself as the city set upon the hill* to be approved by all, like Gilgamesh looking out from the walls of Ur.

The motto on the seal of the City of Boston is from 1 Kings 8:57 and is no less patriarchal: Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis -- "The LORD our God be with us, as he was with our fathers."

* John Winthrop, 1630, "...for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us." See also my paper Political Themes in the Reformation of John Calvin.


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Other times, other lives

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King's Chapel Burying Ground, Boston

Capt. Thomas Lake aged 61 yeeres an eminently faithfull servant of God & one of a publick spirit was perfidiously slain by Indians at Kennibeck August 14 1676 & here interred the 13 of March following.

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