Orfeu Negro: Black Orpheus

I am watching Black Orpheus, Orfeu Negro, again. Most of the audience may not have seen it, even though it has been around for 50 years.
Orpheus' guitar playing caused the sun to rise every morning.

Music Consciousness

http://news.discovery.com/space/space-music-did-walkmans-kill-manned-space-exploration.html

Space Music: Did Walkmans Kill Manned Space Exploration?

Analysis by Robert Lamb
Wed Feb 16, 2011 06:58 PM ET

I've been thinking about this since a fellow traveler mentioned it over vacation.
"No one wants to go into space anymore," he said. "It all started with the Walkman. The kids all slipped on headphones and retreated inward."
I'm paraphrasing a little there and I should stress that no one's implying that the rise in headphone usage directly links to the public's decreased interest in space exploration. But the notion still keeps kicking around my skull. What changed in us when the Walkman swept across the world?...

 There are behaviors that are "Carriers of Consciousness".
Our usual manner of "Being-There" is Language consciousness.
Music consciousness is totally different. Music is not some soporific drug on the minds of people listening to it; it is a different consciousness. In the article, a quoted expert implies that people listening to music become spectators of society rather than participants. That is a nonsense statement, since the musically adept are active indeed when interacting with their environment via Music; only the musically inadequate - like myself - are passive spectators.
That's why we had Rodgers AND Hammerstein: one inter-acted with Language and lyrics, the other with Music.

Along this line of thought, I was thinking of basketball when I got up this morning. An athlete is interacting with his environment via Patterned Physical Motion; i.e., the moves of B-Ball. When Jordan or Byrd cut to the basket at full speed, leap, catch sight of a impinging arm trying to block, spin, and shot and score... they are not using some sort of wordy analysis to avoid the defender.

They are using the Grammar of the Body, the moves they have mastered, to "speak with" and interact with their environment.
We have different ways of consciousness. I think they are Language, Music, Emotion, Physical Motion, Mathematics, the Holy... I forget if I have forgotten any. They are capable of being combined together, or to remain independent.
And the Mind never rests. When the Carriers of Consciousness are asleep, there is nothing to "carry" consciousness, so we say we're "unconscious". We are not in some dark mystery spot; we just are not interacting with the environment using the right behavior. However, we have still interacted... things happen...  but they do not have the cleanly cut forms of Language and Music, etc. They remain part of the Mind, but they do not have the type of symbolic "handles" that we can easily grasp.

--

sto9ne

Από χώρες μακρινές,
από μακρινούς χρόνους,
Θα επιστρέψω στο σπίτι μου:
Μούσα των φαλαινών!
Ειρωνεία της θάλασσας!
---
from far away places,
from distant times,
I will return home:
Muse of the whales!
Irony of the Sea!

Protests

The Wisconsin Education workers protesting at the State Capitol have compared Wisconsin's governor to Hosnis Mubarak. Interesting. I think this is how it will go: as politicians move to destroy workers' rights, there suddenly will be protesters gathering. When people have had enough, there will be a lot of them, and they will not go away, and we will have our Days of Rage.

Food for Thought

Consider philosophy as a feast.
When I was younger, I gorged myself on Nietzsche's philosophy.
Now, were I to chew some inadvertently, I would go and check in the mirror to see if any dark flecks were sticking to my teeth. And I would grab some toothpicks before going out the front door.

Is History Amoral?

The Egyptian Gazette :
http://213.158.162.45/~egyptian/index.php?action=news&id=14635&title=Impact%20of%20war%20on%20language%20%28115%29.html

Impact of war on language (115)
By Sami El-Shahed-The Gazette Online
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 02:29:43 PM

Vietnam War poetry(iiv) ‘Bone in the Soil’: History,’ Anne Michaels writes in Fugitive Pieces, ‘is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.’ However, it is humans as moral or immoral agents who fashion history.

Michaels indeed highlights the vital notion of moral memory ascribed to and valued in the poems of many American veteran representations of Vietnam.

     These poems are located within personal traumas, guilt, and desires, but they also address the memory and conscience of a nation that continually seems to dismember those harsh and traumatic memories, said Professor Subarno Chatarji, an authority regarding Vietnam War literature (referred to in the previous article of this series.)

I think the point made "it is humans as moral or immoral agents who fashion history" refutes the point made earlier (without proof) that "History... is amoral".
History is as moral or amoral as we make it ourselves. At no time does History become amoral because the tenses of the verbs we use have changed from "we are doing" to "we have done". Therefore, there is no escape from the iniquities of the past, and the sins of the father may indeed be visited (in a sense) upon the heads of their children.
Just as we take pride in the good in history, we must deal with the evil, for I get the impression that Ms. Michael's point was "History is amoral, thus we- the moral agents - must constantly turn our minds to it and deal with it in poetry, writing, debate, etc."  However, this implies we may indeed - if we so choose - ignore it, just as we ignore past genocides here and there. There is a difference between History's crying out for attention, and History's fury and revenge at being scorned. 
I do not believe we have an option to forget: just as body and mind and soul are one entity, so are past, present, and future. We have no option since History is moral and we are moral agents, and as moral agents, we cannot escape the pull of History's gravity, willing/unwilling. If History was not moral, how would one explain right now the fact that moral men and women can come together and create immorality, such as the Iraq War (which is not over yet, in my opinion)? You cannot, and all there is left is a mess of opinions and a constant wondering what to do.

History once again attempted to become amoral in the years 2002 to 2009 approximately. It did not pull off the stunt successfully, just as it did not come to an end as Professor Fukuyama had postulated in the 1990's. 

--

sto8ne

Compro los sueños en la bodega
y están a la venta por 50% de descuento ...
la inflación en el precio de la marihuana!...
y puedo comprar menos sueños

God vs. Atheism

Mr. Dawkins

I was looking at a book by Richard Dawkins. When I was younger, I would either (1) wish to read it to effectively refute the nonsense of religion, or (2) wish to read it to refute its own atheistic nonsense. I have flown the flags of many philosophies. But yesterday I just held it in my hand, looked at it, and felt quite sure it had nothing particularly fascinating in it one way or the other. It's time for me to write my own book.

I might emphasize the power of the Holy. I just might.

So if I were to write such a book, would God pull ahead in the race with Atheism? Would God throw a Hail-Mary pass into the end zone and suddenly win the contest? Would God's team sink a three-pointer at the buzzer?
I think that since so many, many people think of God as a way to Power and Persuasion over the obdurate "real world", more people would like my book than not like it. Sadly enough, the Holy Rollers (my team) would steamroller over the Blasphemous Bandicoots (Dawkin's team) mainly because readers believe in magic: they want things from God, they want to change the world and - having done that - take a rest and maybe tidy up their own lives at their own pace.

In fact, for a certain period of time, it will appear as if everybody loses.

--

Cassini

Cassini will encounter Titan, the moon of Saturn, this Friday in a fly-by (photo) shooting.

Cassini encontrará con Titán, la luna de Saturno, este viernes en un sesión de fotos "fly-by".

The Big Surprise

Are you at all surprised how relatively easy things work out? Not for people in foreclosure and being chivvied from their lodgings by the stalking Banks; they have it tough... but they are in a minority... only a couple million. But for the rest of us glorious bastards, it isn't too bad:

BP dumps millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico... relatively benign. No  biggie; microbes are eating faster than we can seep it out into the water.

Trillions of dollars of asset value disappear in 2007 through 2009... no biggie. We aren't really feeling it, are we?

Get Ready for the Big Show.

Once the spending stops and the stimuli dry up, the balance sheets will - actually! - balance!
We shall feel the effects of the trillions lost.
The Great Impoverishment. ( I think of it like a very large hot-air balloon: we came up a couple trillion cubic feet short of propane to keep the balloon filled; we used some "free" extra propane we made up on the spot, but now we can not continue doing that, and the balloon size is going to shrink considerably... and my life, a spot painted on the surface of the balloon, will shrink also.)
So far, we've been in denial. What are the five stages of death... using "death" as a metaphor for "total impoverishment"?

1. Denial—"I feel fine."; "This can't be happening, not to me."
   Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the individual.
2. Anger—"Why me? It's not fair!"; "How can this happen to me?"; "Who is to blame?"
   Once in the second stage, the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue. Because of anger, the person is very difficult to care for due to misplaced feelings of rage and envy. Any individual that symbolizes life or energy is subject to projected resentment and jealousy.
3. Bargaining—"Just let me live to see my children graduate."; "I'll do anything for a few more years."; "I will give my life savings if..."
   The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay the inevitable.
4. Depression—"I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"
   
5. Acceptance—"It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it."

We are sort of all over the place with these babies.
Since we have defined well-being as "having wealth", we are in for a tough time, except for the wealthy 5%.
I really hate writing posts like this, but we have to start now figuring out the rest of our lives, and it is not going to be like it was ever again.

--

Tough Winter

The Heck with Global Warming! It's getting colder! Any fool knows that! We've had a tough winter all around us (right here it has been - truth be told - an easy slide through winter): the South, The Northeast, the Plains; tough winter!

So it's getting colder...

Or is it?

At January 9, this map of below normal (blue) and above normal (red) temperatures:

 http://eatingjellyfish.com/  

Maybe it's a wash, it all balances out? Yeah! That's it!

Anyway, good article on climate. I don't care one way or the other. I'm like Lot: I'm girding up my loins, making plans, and hoping to get out in a few years. My sympathies for those who are stuck in class warfare!

Let's just call it Global Disruption; we can lump together Climate effects together with our own idiocies, such as the Great Impoverishment, and sit back and relax!

--

sto7ne

Во Владивостоке,
в холодных восточных солнце,
наши желания были вытянуты
по дороге к будущее.

Klimtian Kiss

 

Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss

In my Valentine's Poem ----- and  by the way, I celebrate the day because it is my Saint's Day, one of my given names being Valentine, my great grandfather or uncle having been born on that very February 14... he had a sister named Praxidas......

Anyway, I used the word "Klimtian" to mean looking like the above.

How does one describe Klimtian objects?

Rectangular as an old grandfather clock, yet flexible and floating upon a wave of desire? Braids and cornrows of fragrant hair falling into poppies, becoming part of the flora? Tribes with flags made of masculine quilts impressed with cellular boxes and squares going in and out of order, teased by the circular feminine which overpowers homeostasis? Fixtures and moveables melting into aery gold? 

Is this Geb embracing Nut? Or are the two yet distinct... perhaps Eve is aborning from Adam's side and he is loath to let her depart; the ivy or laurel in his hair balancing the golden ivy emanating from her dress?

After our expression of love, do we relax with chocolate and coffee - the finest in Vienna? Is the coffee roasted dark with fin de siecle essence of Hapsburg; is there a chill in the air, a unseasonally early premonition of autumn and winter? Does the burning cigarette remind us of gun powder and Archdukes? Is this golden moment of combustion that of the Crown Prince Rudolf and his paramour, a self-devouring love whose ripples became the tidal wave which overthrew the Austrian Empire?

--

Pop-Up Books 2

This is my favorite book on Nature. I would like to have a similar one on the Universe where the galaxies and constellations form themselves in stellar array and super-novae melt to re-create the heavy metals that I'm hearing on my headphones.

--
Pop-Up Books 1
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/05/pop-up-books.html
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/03/pop-up-books-where-wild-things-are.html
--

The Future of the City

A somber note...
I did this this morning; I use a very old photo processing software from the 90's. You may have to look closely to see what is going on; those aren't buildings in the foreground.

sto6ne

O amante maravilhosa e preta!
tu entras na minha vida;
vamos voar como
frisbees sobre a Amazônia !

--
O, lover, wonderful and black!
you come into my life;
we will fly like frisbees over the Amazon!

10% of Your Mind

It has been said that we use only 10% of our mental capacity at one time. It has also been disputed as a nonsense claim.

I believe it to be approximately true. We spend 25% of our mental capacity obsessing about things we have not decided to do something about: i.e., weight loss and exercise and good nutrition and stop smoking, hoarding, etc. etc. etc. We think about it, but do not get around to doing it.
We spend 25% of the remaining mental capacity obsessing about sin, guilt, and our overwhelming shame.
We spend 25% in hate, anger, road rage and other hormonal-chemical washes that whip-saw us.
We spend 15% in watching cable TV - an entity which is far dumber than we are! - entertain us with shows about people we think are far dumber than we are!

That leaves 10% to useful enterprises; close enough.

Sin & Guilt

Sin and Guilt are not separate things; they are the same dynamic behavior separated in time. We do not view them at the same time, so we assume they are separate.

The Forbidden means nothing if there is no immediate sense of Retribution. Nothing is forbidden if there is no huge down-side when we are face-to-face with whatever the taboo item is. One of the uses of Myth is to teach us this, so that we do not have to transgress against the gods or the fate or the word of God unwittingly, and suffer the consequences of an act performed all innocently.

If this is so, and we feel Shame when we realize our Guilt, what is Shame, then? Shame is the Thwarting of the Rewards promised by the Attraction and Impulse that we felt back in the past: back when we sinned.
All taboos are the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree in Eden:  no knowledge that is weak and impotent is forbidden Adam and Eve; only the fruit that is exceedingly powerful is forbidden:  the fruit that would give them divine understanding.
Shame is the realization that the fruit was not ripe after all.
What if one truly sins and feels no Shame? What if one commits a hideous act, shamelessly?

Nothing is always filled; a vessel filled with power and knowledge must be replenished at times, something must be emptied in order to receive the new.
To sin without shame is to wither and die, like flowers in the vases of a funeral home where there is no longer any need to renew the water.

--

A Village Divided Against Itself...

Education and upbringing is important; it is incredibly important. I was thinking of my own childhood; there are no innocents, there are only children untutored in the more esoteric and possibly vicious adult occupations.
Consider the phenomenon of children soldiers we have seen in Africa: give a child a gun and teach them to use it, and they will be perfectly good killing machines. Their innocence does not compel them to lay down their weapons. And they return from war just as messed up as their adult counterparts.

There are no "How To" manuals written for children 6 years old for a number of behaviors to which, in our society and world, they are unfortunately exposed and pushed into participation in. Most of our efforts are window-dressing: we focus on the Image of perversity or violence, but not the Fact of it.

The whole village - including the boys on Wall Street and the politicians who are going to cut heat subsidies for the poor - have got to realize that it does not work if half of the village tries to raise the child, while the other half - the wealthier half! - is trying to impede the same child.

A Village divided against itself will not stand!

--

sto5ne

رياح الصحراء الجافة

جعل عيني تبكي...

أو هل هو الحب؟

--
The dry winds of the desert
make me weep...
or is it love?

Budgets, Deficits, And Wars

The Art of War by Sun Tzu was very popular at one time. Sun Tzu, or Sun Wu, composed the book sometime between 500 B.C. and 221 B.C. There is scholarly disagreement as to the exact date. The dates above pretty much correspond to the "Warring States" period, and that is enough of the book's provenance.

Chapter 2
Waging War

Sun Tzu said:
...

(4) When the army engages in protracted campaigns, the resources of the state will not suffice.
Chang Yu [comments:] ...the campaigns of the emperor Wu of the Han dragged on with no result, and after the treasury was emptied, he issued a mournful edict.


(5) When weapons are dulled and ardor damped, your strength exhausted and treasure spent, neighboring rulers will take advantage of your distress to act. And even though you have wise counsellors, none will be able to lay good plans for the future.

(6) Thus, while we have heard of blundering swiftness in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged.

(7) For there has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.
Li Ch'uan [comments:] The Spring and Autumn Annals say: 'War is like unto fire; those who will not put aside weapons are themselves consumed by them.'

source: Sun Tzu: The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963

I think our wars certainly come under the heading of "Protracted". We knew when we started that they would be expensive. We differed in that I said they would impoverish us, the Bush Neo-cons said that Iraq's oil would pay for that scheme, and Afghanistan was a minor thing.
--
reprint

The Muslim Brotherhood

FOX has been trying to equate Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood with Al Qaida. They have pointed to the Brotherhood's influence on Al Qaida.

Nonsense.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a degraded running dog of American Foreign Policy that turned and bit its master, as did Al Qaida. Bin Laden was on America's pay-roll for a long time, and did its bidding as far as it suited his purposes against the USSR in Afghanistan.
Ditto Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran. Scratch a Middle East Hot Spot, and you will sniff the odor of the CIA and my tax dollars!

Al Qaida were dogs.

The Muslim Brotherhood are brave men.

Big difference.

Future Revolutions

 In Al Jazeera:

Arab protests in solidarity with the Egyptian people also suggest that there is a strong yearning for the revival of Egypt as a pan-Arab unifier and leader. Photographs of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former Egyptian president, have been raised in Cairo and across Arab capitals by people who were not even alive when Nasser died in 1970. The scenes are reminiscent of those that swept Arab streets in the 1950s and 1960s.

But this is not an exact replica of the pan-Arab nationalism of those days. Then, pan-Arabism was a direct response to Western domination and the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Today, it is a reaction to the absence of democratic freedoms and the inequitable distribution of wealth across the Arab world.

(Stop here and observe that Al Jazeera English is carried in about three major Cable TV markets in the USA. I think this astounding figure is very telling about just how much "real information"  versus propaganda the American people demand from their Cable servers.)

The absence of democratic freedoms is foreshadowed in the distance by the fact that the USA wages wars all over the globe without a declaration of war by the elected representatives.
The inequitable distribution of wealth is closer and clearer.
The Future is filled with the potential of Revolution.
Even here we shall be demonstrating within 10 years.

Intuition: The Brilliant Way

I believe we all intuit the future as well as we remember the past. What makes it difficult is the clutter of our expectations, belief systems, desires, and just plain nuttiness.
Once we are able to clean all the debris away, we should have a pretty good rough intuition. It takes time and work. The hardest part is getting an internal silence and letting oneself just see. To me it is like finding gems along the highway: there is a "shining" that comes through once you clean things off. Without a "yea" or "nay" your intuition shines out at you.
Why should it not? God did not put us here to stumble in the dark, just as He did not put us here without means of allaying our suffering. Everything is here, we have to use it, and we have made it a difficult thing to do.

It is very difficult to be quiet. One of the interesting things of our age is the constant chatter of public media; the more chatter there is, the less intuition there will be. We shall never find the brilliant way out of our difficulties. We shall never see the unseen signs and guides and helpers... they are illogical and ridiculous! I disagree, for it is our society that is ridiculous!

--

sto4ne

政客的論據
是新的土壤
抗議和想法。

Rosemarinus Officinalis

My rosemary plant is dying. It cannot survive the winter. The attar of its leaves makes me feel good. There are a few things that just make me feel good, just as they are, without any special preparation of artifice. Rosemary is one, ginger another, cinnamon and cloves and cherries; perhaps good oranges not too domesticate and broken beneath the genetic demands of commerce... they make me think of ancient oranges and bergamot of Andalusia in Spain, where they grew in the courtyards of the Fatimid Caliph: the trees were pollarded and held their fruit easily, bright white beacons to the honeybees, bright orange pharos to the thirsty men and women...

I think of Tahrir Square in Cairo; people should gain freedom and liberty in places set off apart from the mundane by the escutcheons and heraldry of noble trees; we gain sustenance and succor from them as they provide for us and guard us.

Our Congress, our Parliaments, Our Allthings should place their deliberations in the confines of orchards and walk and talk together along hills and tors and across bournes of fields. Stop and smell the Rosemary. Discover the uses of all the growing things.

--

Wages of Sin

Egypt is free!
It has shed its tyrant, who was, unfortunately as Der Spiegel puts it, The West's Favorite Tyrant.
The sound you hear is Egyptian citizens celebrating, with a background scurrying of CIA and other covert operatives trying to cover up the evidence. Recall that Abu Omar was kidnapped in Italy and taken to Egypt, where the USA had him tortured by the obliging security forces of Mubarak.

Now there will be some tortured chickens coming home to roost, and some chickens escaped from Egyptian prisons. Will they bear a grudge against the USA? Who knows? But the events that flow from those monstrous acts by Bush and Cheney and the Neo-con establishment will now be paid for. Hitherto, we thought torture was a freebie. Now we may see that there is an excise tax on it.

--

sto3ne

O, Solaris!


Ich sehe die Wiedergeburt der Hoffnung,
Solaris, in der Leinwand, glühende,
und reife, silberne Vergebung
aus dem Judasbaum blühende;
der eisbedeckte Baum.

--

Hilary Clinton's Nightmares

Baysage ("What Powderfinger Said...") had a post a bout the Secretary of State, and she could not imagine life without a war on drugs, feeling that the drugs lords would make more money as regular businessmen selling marijuana legally.

The Wretched of the Earth

The Minister Smith had returned to the Capital in the spring, and admired the bloom of the cherry blossoms. The long black limo came up alongside him, moving slowly, keeping pace with his leisurely stroll. He looked at it from the corner of his eye, once, then twice. After a few moments, he stepped away and turned to look square on. He saw Senator Steele smiling by the window, pushing the door open to make room.
"Come on. We'll drive for a while."
They had known each other for years and had worked together even longer. It was Senator Steele who had requested that he leave his post overseas and return to D.C. at this time for the Sub-Committee hearing. He had resisted at first, but acceded to his friend's request.
After some talk and after another stretch of silent driving, Mike Steele said softly, "I know you did not want to make this trip, but I need you with me now. They're after my hide, and I need my friends."
Silence.
"The knives are out..." the Senator said, and the thought trailed off. Smith had seen the knives of politicians cutting all over the world.

--

We are a Democracy, thus in a sense, we are all Ministers of the Government.

The Knives have been out for us for a long time.
We need our friends with us when the career politicians and  bureaucrats come for us, but the power structure has been able to effectively isolate us into small habitats:  environments as in zoological parks; we are fed by cable TV and conglomerate media empires a nutritious mush, we are amused with our own reality shows: imagine! we find ourselves so infinitely entertaining that we watch ourselves on TV!

Yet this image of ourselves is in the majority an image of troubled, degraded, decidedly odd people; if these shows were the theme of a film, it would have a very unhappy ending. We watch abasement, think it is other dopes being put down, but it seeps into our spirits, too!
We are being Colonialized! O, wretched of the earth! We are being turned into an impoverished race, are we not?!  Just as the Brits turned India into a nation of their own personal Gunga Din-water carriers, so are we being duped into a colonialized mentality.
What is a colonialized mentality? It is a frame of mind which thinks that banks are there to help you achieve your goals; that government is  by the people - such as a government where wars are voted on by the representatives of the people, not carried out by presidential fiat; and where education is to enlarge, not to diminish;  a nation where racism is treated like Original Sin and not something which can be eliminated... racism is thus bad, very bad,  but it springs eternal! So let's make the most of it.
(So much so that the Arts & Entertainment channel is the place for Dog, The Bounty Hunter, where a man given to racist tirades - now reformed and rehabbed - tracks down crack-addled bail-jjumpers after a prayer to thank God for a beautiful day.)

Today there is a rally at Senator Debbie Stabenow's  offices at 4:30 PM to bring attention to the foreclosure industry and how it will not supply any meaningful help for homeowners, will foreclose, will get mortgages paid off by government controlled mortgage entities ( like AIG, Fannie, Freddie... essentially I and you pay for it), then turn around and sell that foreclosed house cheaply, thus degrading the community further.

This will not stop in an age of Exploitative Capitalism unless we stop it. The Knives are out, they have been out, and they will continue to be out; they will cut any government program small folks depend on, while maintaining their own life-styles.

The Politicians have lost confidence in us. They have voted on us, and the Nays carried the day. We await our Gandhi.

sto2ne

Ce soir: avertissement de gel, neige, et la glace;
la semaine prochaine, vendredi, il ferait chaud;
qui se soucie de la météo tous les jours?
changer avec le changement

--

Stone1

 Mary Ellen from the right column had a whirl at something called Stones in  January, and it was a friend actually who started doing a "gem" or "stone" of writing, perhaps poems, perhaps a photo or both... for each and every day of the month.
http://isthereanyoneelseupthere.blogspot.com/

Is This Anyway that "Patriots Act" ?

Disability hearing, two brothers, one judge;
I may go in, so I'm electric'ly surveilled!
Social Security Al-Qaida threats perhaps?
We can never go back!

--

"Ritual" Seen As A Bonsai WiIlow 2

Willow Bonsai

 The original post: 
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/meaning-of-ritual.html
Yet, having spoken of the bonsai willow, we may turn to it and observe that it is itself a thing of beauty; it is tamed and domesticate, true. The bonsai conifers, if properly shaped, will recall the force of the winds and the tempests without actually forcing us to climb a mountain and feel the sting of the wind-blown rain as we search the cliffs for a specimen of hardy pine.
Thus, bonsai ritual is memory and imagination, yet it is also a map for the future, for the only difference in our minds between the future and the past is the tense of the verb we use in our speech: "we did go" versus "we shall go".

I can only disparage the bonsai willow if I do not appreciate its art and its ritual. I never took the time to study this part of Japanese culture. All I know is the dusty and desperate miniature trees I see in tawdry shops or stuck into odd places in big-footprint homes, thus creating an irony wrapped in enigma! Or green curves arranged on flat surfaces in public eateries - unknown whether coniferous or plastic!
I have lost the ability to appreciate ritual. Even worse, the protectors of ritual have lost the ability to present ritual to me.

The paradigm of ritual to me is Christmas. When we speak of the spirit of the season, we are speaking of a short period of time which changes our lives at many levels as we go through the various Christmastide rituals of gift-procuring, gift-giving, communicating by writing cards and making calls, giving parties, baking special sweets and comestibles that are confected at no other time of the year. And there is a spiritual focus that is like no other time of the year.

That is Ritual, and the "high" we get from it... and the "down" as well... shows us what is actually possible by Ritual. And this is what that bonsai willow is capable of, only we are fast losing our ability to interact with it. Our logical and mathematical manner of civilization sees only a small, small tree, whereas a proper appreciation would see many aspects of life's beauties and mysteries.
This reminds me of the story of Jack Wilson, Wovoka, the prophet of the Ghost Dance, who told the story of two men looking into an old black hat: one man saw an old black hat with sweat-stained band; the other looked in and saw the Universe!

Democracy

U.S. public cautious on Middle East democracy: poll

---

By John WhitesidesPosted 2011/02/09 at 11:58 am EST

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9, 2011 (Reuters) — A majority of Americans believe the United States should be cautious about backing democracy in the Middle East because elections could lead to anti-U.S. Islamist governments, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday said.

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre7184ik-us-usa-mideast/

The American commitment to Democracy...

Our forefathers commit treason against a king, while we temporize and seek only our own safety and comfort. Well, why not?

--

Little Green Men

Among mediaeval church carvings we find the heads of men surrounded in foliage, sometimes growing from their mouths, eyes and ears. According to Sir Geoffrey Grigson, this foliage is often recognizable as hawthorn or oak, and the face has an expression of a decided frown, or an expression fit to an unhappy state. (Nowadays we tend to put a smile on his face in pictures.)
Some scholars have "rationalized" these images by explaining that they stand for Easter and Resurrection, or that they are genii of the Spring and the Planting. I find it hard to understand why such a supernatural "genius" would plant hawthorn in its mouth, but I never put forward such "rationalizations".

Such images are the Green Men, the Man-in-the-Oak, or Jack-in-the-Green, who himself is the May King of the common May Day ceremonies of great age, a man who would play King and wreathed himself in leaves and flowers and acted out a death, and then came back to life, jumping up and gamboling and comforting his disconsolate May Queen, and dancing with her.
I wonder if this image appears in the yet more ancient cave paintings in a somewhat more lascivious form?

There are many pubs in Britain named after the Green Man. This is part of our history. We have pretty much forgotten it. When I forget history, I am left speechless. The words flow, but nothing comes out except an endless carpet of verbiage with a border selvage of incomprehension.

--

Spin-offs & Outtakes & Highlights

I am going to be gone for 2 days. I am going to Port Desespoir to assist my brother in his disability hearing, and I shall be staying with my parents who "got no truck" with things like computers and the Internet. They are print-medium-totallers. However, the Detroit newspaper-simulators.... don't really know what to call them anymore... are usually not delivered to their home anymore, the home delivery bubble having burst and newsboy bicycles litter the roadways! They do have a subscription for such delivery, but it is sort of like a newspaper to Garcia... or "we don't need no newspapers!" and it is hard indeed to watch the breakdown of civilization. I am sure this is how Curtius Pomponius felt that morning on the Esquiline Hill when the Rome-Picayune-Observer tablets were not delivered. First the Aquaducts, then the newspapers! Of course, for my parents, it would be - grace to Rush Limbaugh et alii inanes - first Obama, then the newspapers!

So being gone, I thought I'd run some outtakes.
But did you ever try doing a Blog outtake post? I mean, who would want to read your muffs, flubs, and misspellings and grammar errors? Even if you had a laugh-track, would it help? I mean, they already are subject to that type of chicanery already.
O.K. So I thought, maybe spin-offs: I could have my nephews do a blog... or Guest Host: they could host the blog in my absence. They declined, having better things to do in winter, such as following the sun.
Could do highlights, but if them lights are so high, why did nobody read 'em in the first place?

The world will survive.

--

All Molasses are Not Equal!

Not hardly.
I have one tablespoon each of Brer Rabbit and Plantation molasses each morning. One tablespoon of Brer Rabbit has 25% of the daily requirement of Calcium and Iron, lots of Magnesium and less Potassium; Plantations has 17% of the Potassium and 20% of Calcium and Iron and lesser amounts of Magnesium. Take a vitamin tab and I'm done.

This does not even take into consideration molasses in ginger snap cookies and gingerbread and other homely uses.
Read the labels. I have had to read quite a few as I chased down a store carrying my good old Brer Rabbit. I found it at Busch's Market. I told them not all molasses are the same. They said "Uh-huh, uh-huh" and smiled.

--

Grendel, the Cat

Grendel is a cat. He is apparently quite the most cute cat that ever existed. He likes to be tucked in at night, have Curious George read to him, and kissed on the forehead. A night-light burns by his bedroom door. It is an eternal night-light that burns as long as there is felicity - state of being Felis, Latin for "cat" - in the world.

What's so great about cats? According to Wikipedia:

Despite being solitary hunters, cats are a social species and use a variety of vocalizations, pheromones and types of body language for communication. These include meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting.

I can do that, and no one thinks I am cute.

--

Pidgin English

I was reading a post in Ghulf Genes   http://arsendarnay.blogspot.com/2011/02/void-indeed.html    about languages, specifically how easy it is to write a paragraph in German without using any words derived from non-Germanic lingos such as Latin and Greek, whereas try the same trick in The Queen's English and see how quickly you will be at "a full stop"!  You end up with a sock full of Norman French in your mouth - hardly anyone's idea of an amuse-bouche ( or amuse-gueule as I was taught) - and you find yourself a Pilgrim in the Slough of Despond!

As I read, I realized that the dynamics of the English as we know it was that of a Pidgin of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French which the inhabitants of England adopted in order to communicate with their imperialist overlord, William the Conqueror and his brood.
I had indeed read of the process, and it had always been described as an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon and French and "we say lamb, they say mutton" but the explanation never had the robust feeling of living reality as did the realization that it was Pidgin.
Why? Because there are living pidgins to observe and participate in. I myself sometimes say a few phrases in Nigerian Pidgin, which was the lingo the Nigerian musician Fela choose to record in in order that the various tribes and several many dialects of Nigeria could be addressed equally by his song. It is not a "small-small" thing.

Of course, I suppose one of the reasons that English was never described this way was the fact that in my day there was always a sense of condescension towards speakers of Pidgins: the palates and tongues that wrestled with such inelegant lingo inhabited New Guinea, Haiti, the coast of Africa... and other places we were very fond of looking down on; that is to say, we looked down on them when we were not considering them exotic or ripe for exploitation.
It would be hard to call English a form of Pidgin just after getting done telling a joke about no tickee-no washee; it just would not do. I often wonder how much understanding we have missed due to our inveterate racism. A bit, I suppose, a bit.

--

The Nomad Returns Home: кочевник

Возвращение в Москву

кочевник
Nomad

when did you get home?
and did the ocean roar?

did you see your pals again
at the Georgian shore?

did you look into a store,
did you hold your child high?

and why was he a kid again,
and why was I a sigh?

i have already been there...
i shall not go again.
go and find your future
and sometimes i will send

an email of christmas time,
easter email too,
picnics, woods, and running twain
for life will ne'er run true...

--
a reprint.
For some reason, I love this poem. And the nomad is returning home this week.
Originally written about the Caucasus,  but it was all a dream... I think.

Nicknames 2

I have settled on the nickname for another of my wife's friends: Nightshade, as in "Deadly Nightshade". It is so correct that everyone giggles when they hear it, if they do not laugh right out loud.
Hello, Nightshade. We are going to be stopping by. Do you think you could make a reservation for us all at that ghastly ethnic joint you dragged us to last time? You can? Great. If they're booked, we could go to Ye Olde Timbermill ( as in Frasier, where they snip off your tie, if you wear one.). How about that Biker Bar that Arnold walked into in the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgment Day ?

Deadly...

Memorial for Billy

This morning I had buckwheat pancakes. Whenever we go to The Pancake House, I always have buckwheat pancakes. Buckwheat to me is like Kryptonite to Superman, an Achilles heel. It is my downfall diet-wise, not like some femme fatale, like Lana Lane - the evil resonance of Lois,  not my Lex Luther, rather the end of dietary illusions: the end of that innocent age when we dreamed we could control our sweet teeth and that old devil craving for buckwheat in the embrace of maple syrup!

So my brother-in-law Billy used to have the German Pancake when he visited, which was not that often, as he was a Zorba-esque character and Detroit is - it must be admitted - the Lex Luther in anyone's Metropolis!  Detroit is Bizarre-o world's answer to St. Pete Beach and Pass-a-Grille... the sunny havens where Billy spent his time.
But when he did come, we went to The Pancake House and he had a German Pancake, which was approximately the size of a goodly sombrero, dusted with powdered sugar, wedged with lemons, and he loved it, a bit of a mystery to the dull people who never deviated from buckwheat.

I said he was a Zorba-type. He loved life and did not bow down to the dark Devil in the detail, as did those  clever people and grocers... they "weigh everything!" (said Zorba!) Billy was a character drawn by Nikos Kazantzakis.
One day when he was living in Los Angeles with his new wife and baby boy, his wife sent him to the corner store for a gallon of milk. He ran into some of his buddies on the way back from the store; they were going to Daytona, Florida for the big Daytona race.....
Long story short, he ended up in Daytona, not even having dropped off the milk. He came home after the long weekend. Lot of story here. Zorba up to a point, I guess.

Climate Change

If Climate Change is true, the costs of not preparing are devastating.
If false, the costs of preparing for something that did not occur are large, but not devastating.
Choose.

Discrete versus Holistic

Language thinking tends more to the discrete: individual items linked together. Thus, it fails miserably to appreciate richness and diversity: for example, the use of DDT to kill pests, ignoring the fact that everything critter that song birds eat will now be laced with DDT.

Music is different, but not necessarily holistic.
Same with Images.
Films are more holistic, for example, than books, but they are not perfectly so.

We spend our time taking the world apart, then trying to put it back together: very much like the Red Queen and all things Lewis Carroll.

A Minute Before the Hour

I have found that it is always one minute before the hour, and that hour being the last fully dark hour of the morning.
There is silence in the streets, and no cars have yet been filled with luggage, nor has snow been cleared from the windows. No heaters running. Nor, for that matter, any black cars screeching into the drive, coming for you.
Low lamp light spills from each bedroom, laddering the corridors with corn-husk maize colored light. There is yet an imperturbability which reigns.
Water begins to bubble and boil; it just now hits the dark oriental carpet of ground Sumatra, and the odors of every spice island, of every coffee-house, not just Starbuck's but those of Ibn Batuta and those of Samuel Johnson, pervade.

Bones, weary bones, trains of gouty pain moving dinosaurian exhibit in posture-pedic museums! Up! Make haste! The sun is coming, and we must flee the light!

--

The Big Fix

I think the fiscal problems of the USA, nay, the entire World!, are going to be fixed up the same way the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was fixed: magically almost 80% of the petroleum just disappeared! Or some incredibly thoughty microbes had a feast on it!

Well, if we believe that, we can certainly believe what I said about the fiscal and deficit problems.

--

The Mullah Nasr ud-Din

Mullah Nasr-ud-din is walking down a street accompanied by a scholar. Another Sufi approached them, stopped Nasr-ud-din and pointed at the sky, by which he meant “There is only one truth, which covers all.” But he spoke no word.

The scholar said to himself, “This weird apparition is mad. Perhaps Nasr-ud-din will take precautions against him.”

The Mullah rummaged through his backpack and brought forth a coil of rope. The scholar thought, “Excellent. He will seize and bind this madman.”

Nasr-ud-din’s action had actually meant, ”Ordinary humanity tries to reach the  ‘ sky ‘  by methods as unsuitable as this rope.”

The second Sufi, the “madman”, laughed and walked away. “Well done,” said the scholar; “you saved us from him.”

--
We no longer hear too much about Sufis and their manner of Islam. It used to be quite common before the advent of Oil Politics and Power Politics, and the support of the USA against Communism and all the other idiocy that has come back to haunt us.

--

Weather-tainment !

 

Either the film The Day After Tomorrow... or Chicago's Lakeshore Drive

There should be a  W! channel on cable for The Weather-tainment Channel.. For years the weather report has been a gotcha! that has been orchestrated to get people to tune into the news. As a result, we see the same overemphasis on bad weather news just as we see violent and nasty events sensationalized

Since peoples' lives could depend on it, you would think that the weather people on cable tv would make an effort to believable. Some of the trouble in Chicago may have happened because we have come to expect over-the-top weather forecasts. On February 1, I was talking to my brother, and I said that one has to take the forecasted amount of snow, cut it in half, then add 10 to 20% for an accurate prediction: the TV forecast 10 inches to 15 inches of snow, we had 5 1/2 inches, maybe 7 inches nearby;  half of 10 inches is 5, and half of 15 is 7 1/2 inches. Spot on.

I use Unisys and Weather Underground for their weather models to see future weather. In fact, Weather Underground's GFS model had the February 2 storm on its forecast at least a week before, because I remember looking at it on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 as I was trying to determine whether I should meet my brother in Port Huron - sixty miles away - in the first week or second week of February.
http://weather.unisys.com/
http://www.wunderground.com/

At Unisys, there is a link to their NAM model on the homepage. At Weather Undergroun you will have to look under "Maps & Radar" and then "Models".  (Keep in mind precipitation amounts are usually for rain, so for snow, multiply by 10.)
There will be some work involved here. This will require some reading and study, but it is worth it. I used to rely on Unisys, and the results were not only always dependable, they were sometimes hard to believe. When I had to drive 100 miles, there was a big difference between driving in 1 to 3 inches of snow and 4 to 6 inches of snow; the first is doable, the second might not be - a lot depends on the snow removal habits of the municipalities you are driving through... for me, it was Macomb County and St. Clair County mainly, and throughout 35 years, Macomb County hit the expressways first thing in the morning, while St. Clair County got the surface roads, and left the expressway until later. So 5 inches of snow could leave me with a clear shot into St. Clair County where I might come to an abrupt halt.
Unisys said 1 to 3, we had 2... it never let me down. Once there was a blue speck on an NAM 24 hour forecast I missed at first glance. We were doing a night job the next day. The blue dot indicated a storm of such a small size I could only think it was a glitch.
However, next day at 6:20 PM EDT for 20 minutes a storm about 3 miles wide came through for 20 minutes: wind, rain, hail; then sun like nothing had happened! I was quite impressed!

So, on February 1, I looked at Unisys, Weather Underground, and the NOAA and a couple others: no weather model showed anything near the amount of snow the Detroit TV stations were busy touting. They showed a lot in Chicago, Indiana, and Ohio,  but not in Michigan, where there seemed to be 7 1/2 inches maximum.
We had 5 1/2 inches on the 2nd. The Detroit stations had to strain to find localities that had anything near the lower limits of what they forecast.

What have I learned from all this? Jet streams, man. They steer the storms. It all jet streams - winds at the height of 300 millibar pressure approximately.The same jet streams that pushed the hurricanes of 2010 to stay in the Atlantic push the snow to the east coast; on February 2, the streams were bowing northwards toward us. 

(If you're interested and need help, perhaps a longer post with some help learning how to use these maps and forecasts could be in order. Let me know.)

--

Thinking and Temple Grandin

I am watching a lecture by Ms. Temple Grandin on the types of thinking, and I find that she and I seem to agree on the cognition and how people are different. For Ms. Grandin there are 3 basic types of thinking: visual, pattern, and verbal.
Now the verbal corresponds to language and processing language information, about which we have said a good deal over the past years. Essentially, verbal thinking has usurped the paradigm of cognition, and every "rational" thinking must ape language or be considered "irrational".
Pattern thinking processes patterns and structures in space and time, such as music and mathematics, the mathematics being considered mainly as geometry and topology by Ms. Grandin so it seems, but I bow to her insights and must brood much more over this.
Visual thinking is thinking done in pictures, specific representations of objects from memory. This corresponds entirely to what we always called Imagining: processing image information.

I had postulated the basic thought processing systems as the following types of processing:

Language or verbal processing,
Imaging or picture processing,
Art (plastic arts),
Patterned body movement ( dance, sports... motion in space and time),
Patterned emotion experience (love, hate... emotional space/time),
Mathematics and Logic,
Music, ....
and the Holy.

I have believed that our experience of the Holy is a separate and independent thinking, and is one much overlooked in the present age, being considered as an amalgam of the other types of thinking.

And Ms. Grandin speaks of animals and how they think visually, not verbally, and the effort that requires of us to understand, approaching it as we do from a verbal point of view, so also there are multitudes of children who are being trashed and ignored  by our educational system because it does not recognize the type of minds they have and present suitable education for them. For example, she mentioned how visual classes , such as Art, or hands-on classes, such as Shop, are being dropped, and that this would deprive those children who need such things of any stimulus.

So also there is a chance that we overlook those spiritually inclined. Indeed, in the future there will be Orders of religious who freely join in a community of charity, and whose job will be taking care of society's sick, downtrodden, and the poor. How we shall fund these groups remains to be seen, but by allowing the people in them to focus on the Holy, I am quite sure the eventual outcome will be rather good.

--

Montgomery County. Maryland

Once again the power has gone off in Montgomery County, Maryland. It goes off when there is snow, ice, rain, or wind. Sometimes it just goes off. It happens more than 12 times a year easily. What goes through the minds of a county government that can not come to grips with such a problem? What do people think infrastructure is and what is important, especially in winter?
Montgomery County is a rich county, and yet it seems resigned to wander on like Rome in its sunset years. For this is what Rome was like in its decline: services not performed, aquaducts not being repaired. Exactly what do people value anymore?

The Game I Made Up & Hosni Mubarak

First, the actual  "Game I Made Up" was not a game I made up, but a game my daughter made up many years ago, and it was a game we played while driving in the car on long jaunts. Unfortunately, I cannot remember what it was.

However, the real "Game I Made Up" occurred some years ago in Toronto. I suddenly remembered it due to two events:
(1) the events in Egypt, and
(2) my friends Darsen writing a post about Scrabble and Bananagrams and word play, on which I commented with a further down the jumanji lane of words  http://arsendarnay.blogspot.com/2011/01/bananagrams.html

I played the game with my niece one afternoon in Toronto visiting some relatives by the Humber River. The object of the game was to take the consonants of a word or phrase, keep them in order, create a phrase or expression with them in, and devise a clue - intricate or not - to give the others an indication of your new phrase.
For example, "Humber" gave us H, M, B, and R:
example 1:
Do you think Uncle Bob is ready?

one possible correct answer (and the one that was intended) :   He May Be Ready , where the letters are the initials of each word.

example 2:
Egyptian ruler...

answer :    Hosni MuBaRak

Exactly what is legal for moving the letters in a new phrase, where they are used and whether the clue and answer are good is a question that is totally up to the players. Trying to devise a correct hint which did properly describe the answer, but did not just give it away was a very important part of the process, indeed, possibly the most important. Even an uninteresting answer like "He may be ready" would be a great source of amusement if the clue were intricate and witty.
Furthermore, there might be some changes, such as allowing for a Spanish "H"; since phonetically it is silent, we could ignore it. On the other hand, we could use it in "HoMBRe", or make it an emphatic "H" all the way up to Scottish "CH"!  I suppose it is beginning to dawn on you that we were language nerds.
There might also be understanding about how many consonants in the answer could be supernumerary to the sought letters, H,M,B, R in this example. M,B, and R could very well stand for "reMemBer" which is short and sweet.
However, whether it could reasonably mean something like "Mother would deBate on the wRong side of the issue" is moot, for the length of this shows that the possible answers are infinite. This is where you see how important the clue is: to eliminate such nonsense answers.
If all else fails, if people groan too often when you reveal your answer - or if they refuse to play with you - you will catch on. People will either go "Aha! Wizard! Keen!" or "Jeez! I don't get it! Moan!" , and if you are like me, you prefer the first response to your schemes.

Anyhow, we did this game until we drove everyone else quite mad.
(I did copyright the idea and am working on a version for sale. Unfortunately, it is a bit harder than Mad-Libs.)

Nicknames

I have started assigning nicknames to my wife's friends. Ever since one friend recommended some extremely odd carpet cleaners, I have called her "Poison" for reasons which I will not go into, since she may be reading this.
Anyway, I have extended the list to friend #2 as "Anthrax" and friend #3 as "Hemlock". Strangely enough, the names seem oddly appropriate; they are not totally off the wall. I have a few more to go. No one seems to mind. Oh! I just remembered a special friend! I shall have to find the right toxin from Aconite, Hellebore, Sumac, Jimson, or Nightshade. I am leaning to "Nightshade" right at the moment.

Abnegation of the Ego

Love gives up the ego, at least partially.
When we say someone opens up, it is a metaphor for relaxing the structure of the ego: acting as if something else mattered, investing attention and focus and power into an alien object.

Mysticism is the abnegation of the ego... even though there is no material being at hand to reciprocate. There is the leap of faith. When we give up the ego, we tend to fall. Something has to be there to support us. In love, we find our extra support and validation in the sparkling and wet eyes of the loved one. When, however, we are alone with God it is quite a different matter.

We have certain schemata and scenarios for mysticism. All mystics must roll their eyes towards heaven, receive the stigmata or other wounds, and fall into trances. These are nothing more than images and stories devised to try and illustrate what happens when the ego begins to crack open. Furthermore, notice that the scenarios of Mysticism share a good deal of imagery with the myths of Love: trances, swoons, and people acting moonstruck!

We fear the absence of the Ego. We chant daily to reinforce it. We pound holy books into our children's heads to build up the religious wing in the mansion of Ego.
I do not know what God does, but the Holy dances and bids me release...

--

4:19 AM

Looking south.  Approximately 1 mile south of Chrysler world HQ.

Death on the Installment Plan

Born In Sin, Come On In

With all the newly found interest in the Muslim Brotherhood... and - alas! - Sayyid Qutb (about whom I have a post or two around here somewhere)... it is time to reflect on really violent people, not that I mean Sayyid Qutb was violent. He was a grouchy old curmudgeon much like myself. FOX has discovered the Ikhwan even though the members are quite old, and finds them some evil genius behind things in Cairo. Let's look at our own home-grown variety of violence, which cable never pays much attention to.

Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF15Ak01.html
A general in God's patriotic army

wherein we read:

Mike Evans is a shock jock for Armageddon, a cheerleader for the apocalypse. These days, the best-selling author and head of the Jerusalem Prayer Team", a US-based pro-Israel Christian evangelical organization, is at the top of his game. On June 3, his new book, The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps, made it on to the New York Times best-sellers' list at No 1 in the paperback category....

His prose is pugnacious, a style you might expect from a writer who claims that he is giving the US its "final wake-up call". In the book, and in its promotional materials, such terms as "appeasement", "secular humanist God-haters" and "pro-Islamic radical sympathizers" are tossed around as easily as if he were playing catch in the back yard.

Religious short-order grill cooks, flinging hash in the mean-spirited diners.
Your God is Compulsion and Force, Fear and Hatred.
Jigsaw divinity, whose divine scheme is Death on the Installment Plan.

These men are legion, and they are wolves.

--

George Ade

" A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative. "

Change in Egypt

מצרים, הו, מצרים!

The Egyptian Army

This morning I read about the statement from the Egyptian Army, vowing not to use force. It was a relief. The army is an honorable institution with a proud tradition. The army will not sully its reputation. In case you have forgotten, it is the only Arab armed forces to have defeated Israel, when they invaded across the Suez canal and drove the Israeli forces back from their occupying positions on the canal.
That is the primary reason in my mind that Egypt was able to effectively deal with Israel as a nation: Egypt had faced their moment of fire and had succeeded. They were no longer condemned to an endless defeatism which poisons the spirit.

Egypt is a wonderful nation with a wonderful history. The language of the Pharoahs stills resounds in the sound of Coptic, the Al Azhar mosque is a mosque and school that goes back more than 1,000 years. Jewel of Islam, diamond of Africa, beacon for the world!

جوهرة الإسلام

الماس في أفريقيا

منارة للعالم

Al Azhar

--

Art, Sports, & Evanescence

We used to look at the Arts differently: there were the arts like painting and sculpture which were displayed in galleries and museums, there were material objects that took up space and would be there for our children to gaze upon in their time. The performing arts were evanescent and disappeared after a performance, and there were only writings and reminiscences to be had, like the dinner party guests in Joyce's The Dead talking about the great opera singers past.
Sports are very much like the performing arts, except that Sports is more probabilistic; the outcomes are more random. Ballet is Ritual, whereas Basketball can be nearer to chaos... more like Improv!
We live in a time when we may record performances and may listen to them and look at them again and again. They may very well still be there for our children to view. This is a great difference from the past. Just last year I watched the most recent restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and it changed me. I had seen it before, but without the sequences at the night club, which were among the footage found in Argentina. These sequences gave a richer flavor of Weimar to the film, or at least more of the Weimar Republic iconography that we are accustomed to.
It also made me aware that there was a mute and ominous prescience there: in the battle between labor and capital we saw the possible alternatives:  (1) capital maintains its autocratic rule, or (2) labor revolts and destroy the old, or (3) they come together in harmony.
I realized that it was the outcome not shown that actually occurred: the National Socialist revolution and all that flowed from it.

It was that which could not be rationally idealized nor fancifully imagined that was the reality to come, yet had I not viewed the ideal of labor and capital coming together in harmony in Lang's film, I would never have grasped the terrible alternative #4 it in its atrocious irony.

What other performance would have inspired this idea in me? Where would there be the learned forum devoted to Fritz Lang's ideas had there been no cinema? I realized that great artists inspire us by what they miss, as well as what they hit. And my commentary on Nazism as the ironic outcome missed by Metropolis is a creation by Lang and me, assisted by the film conservators and critics through time.

How in the name of heaven do we see something like El Laborinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) and not be changed forever? It resonates, and now it will resonate as long as there is a copy. The record of performance extends art and artistry immensely. How can we ignore it? It will not disappear as did performances in the past. If we are oblivious, it will come back to haunt us! And it will tell its myth to our children and grandchildren, and they may understand us by a community of emotion through the generations.

And mentioning Sports again, perhaps the most interesting exhibit of performance art ( or sports ) made permanent was the film Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 which I saw last year also: arts and sports together; performing artistry and athleticism made enduring for generations.

--
note

To be clear, I consider Sports to be part of the Great Universe of Art: structured and rehearsed physical behaviors which are complex and more chaotic than other such arts, as Ballet. Sports is to Ballet as Pollock was to Painting.
--

Arts & Sports

Sometimes a great notion pops up. I suppose that if one throws seed as widely as I do, and one spreads the manure as freely as I do - working it into the soil - a great blossom of an idea every now and then is not too unexpected.

So the other day I wrote that Dance and Sports were similar enterprises of intelligence: both were structured and choreographed body movements, pursuits that play on the entire body and its make-up and its continuous interaction with its environment. Sports, and in particular I mentioned a basketball game, differs from what we expect of artistic pursuits in that its progress is more chaotic and unpredictable, whereas Dance is very predictable: we know pretty much exactly what is going to happen each year in The Nutcracker; in December 2011 the Mouse King will not pull off a major upset.
(Of course, Art like the paintings of Jackson Pollock come to mind, dependent as they are on a certain randomness of the application of paint.)

Recently I have listened to someone speak about being on stage and remark that during the long run of a play, they look forward to a mistake, because within that mistake is the potential for originality and creativity. It may have been someone speaking of Dance. It may have been in Black Swan, but that I seriously doubt, since it would have been an intrusive "thoughty" bit of dialogue.
Anyway, this shows the rigidity of the limits of Dance; Sports has so many accidents - fumbles, fouls, offsides, etc. - that they are hardly considered moments of creativity! However, both the Dancer and the Athlete spend hours and hours exercising and disciplining their bodies. They study the basic discipline of movements which they will employ in their respective "games". Each are well rehearsed.

Now, as serious acts of intelligent beings, what does Dance communicate to us? What does Sports? And what role does chaos play in our interpretation?
Addressing these questions will eventually lead us to the most important one: the place of intelligence in the universe.

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pix:  http://lazymills1986.deviantart.com/art/basketball-dance-of-the-gods-107161482