A year and a day

Often I read that all one has to do to find out some bit of information is to google it. Maybe I'm just not very good at phrasing my query properly, but more often than not all I get back is irrelevancy, triviality and repetition. My most recent attempt concerned the language in Gawain and the Green Knight. This is one of my favourite stories from the period of Grail literature. I was reminded of it because a number of articles in my regular readings brought it up. One of the writers described the language as moderately challenging. Hah! Here's how it starts, as nearly as I remember:

Sithen the assaut was sesed at Troye
The borgh brittened and brent to brandez and askes
The tulk that the trammes of tresoune there wrought
Was tried for his treacherie,
The trewest on erthe...

I can pretty well read it now, with good comprehension of maybe 60% of it, very poor comprehension of another 10% and of most of the rest I'm pretty shaky. I don't take to it quite as readily as to Chaucer who wrote about the same time. The dialect is different. Even today some English dialects sound like foreign languages, and the Gawain poet's language was far closer to Old English than Chaucer's. Old English really has to be studied as a foreign language and there aren't really that many texts to read. So I tried to find a source that would help reduce the opacity of the text. But all I found were essays like "Colonialism and the Green Knight," and the "Wicca symbolism in the Green Knight." Colonialism? In 14th Century English Midlands? Wicca, a bogus invention of silly Neopagans? Obviously departments of medieval studies have descended into triviality as much as classics departments.
So I gave up. I don't really enjoy playing with my computer like some people do. Too bad, because I love our English language, and I love the Green Knight story. I went through my Grail literature phase about twenty years ago and it's still a favourite of mine. Along with Wolfram's Parsifal it seems to stand out from all the others for its strangeness. The strangeness is more than a function of the differences between our modern world and the medieval period. It hints at cultural currents that have largely been ignored by mainstream histories, perhaps because of a lack of records.
One of the elements I find especially curious in most of the Grail romances is the significance of sisters' sons. There are no indications that either Germanic or Latin cultures would be interested in sisters' sons and in the medieval context it would not even make any sense. So why these references? My uneducated guess: evidence of a matrilineal succession of kingship. It would be an interesting way of doing it, changing the psychology of inheritance if a king's son does not stand to inherit the throne. On the other hand, which sister's son gets the nod? Might be bloody.
The story revolves around a strange visitor to Arthur's court at the celebrations for the New Year. But Arthur
"...Wolde never ete
Upon such a dere day, er hym devised were
of sum aventurus thyng an uncouthe tale,.."
And sure enough a giant knight, green of complexion and dressed all in green enters the hall on his horse and challenges the assembled company to deal him a blow. Poor Gawain gets the nod, and finds that it is his task to cut off the knight's head with one blow of the Green Knight's huge ax on the condition that Gawain himself will have to withstand a blow from the Green Knight.
Dutifully, Gawain agrees to the condition and lops off the man's head. At that, the Green Knight picks up his own head by the hair, mounts his charger, and enjoins Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day to await the returning blow.
All very strange and mysterious, and I think worth the trouble of learning to read in the original version.
Happy New Year to all.

Oscar Peterson

One of my crow friends looks to have a broken a leg since yesterday. His left foot doesn't seem to work and he has to hop on one leg. That's life- and death- in the wild lane,and he probably won't survive long. I feel surprisingly sad about it.
In an online publication new to me, Prospect,the January issue has an article about Parmenides, an old philosopher who is also new to me. I haven't read the article thoroughly yet, but it seems Parmenides believed nothing new could come into this world. It had to previously exist in a different form. Maybe this is the kind of reasoning that led the Epicureans to come up with the concept of atoms, indestructible elemental particles out of which all things are made.
I happen to think otherwise. I think the universe is in a constant state of creation and destruction, and that what comes in to being, although seemingly made out of the same constituents over and over, is nevertheless unique and unrepeatable. Only the themes in philosophy repeat each other over and over, rephrased and dressed up in new outfits.
Oscar Peterson died yesterday. There was never before another Oscar Peterson and there will never again be another Oscar Peterson. Yet, by existing he changed the meaning of every musician of his time. Have a good crossing, Oscar, they're waiting for you in the heavenly choir.

Gaggle of crows

A blustery day in Victoria on Sunday, and the trailer at my construction site was arockin and arollin. A two foot length of 2 by 4 fell out of the sky while I was looking out over the scene, and a large moth fluttered by. Surprising. Made me think of the scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up in her house and sees the witch riding by. I gave my flock of crows a can of sardines to go with their cat food today. They know me by now and follow me when I patrol the catwalk, one or two walking behind me and another one alighting on the railing ahead of me. They don't get enough from me to grow too dependent, but maybe it will be enough to tide some of them through the winter. And maybe in the spring they'll bring their fledglings over. I've always wanted to have a wild crow friend. He's got his own life, I've got mine. And I want to teach him to say, "F... off." I think they leave little gifts for me on the railing in front of the office. An old chicken bone, or one of the colourful foam earplugs that get tossed all over the site when the guys are finished with them.
I don't know these crows well enough to distinguish one from the other. Some are bigger, others smaller, some are bullies, others are bullied. I think they might be members of a single family. Crows are often thought of as birds of ill omen, presumably because they are feeders on carrion. In The Iliad being left on the field of battle to feed the birds and dogs is a disgrace. Crows, and all corvines, are considered the brains of ornithology, and obviously much smarter than gulls. Gulls are much bigger than crows and prey on their nestlings and push them off their food. However, I've seen a crow tease a gull by sneaking behind and pulling his tail feathers. Over and over again. Clumsy and stupid, the enraged gull could do nothing to rid himself of the pest. It was hilarious and I had the feeling the crow thought so, too.
One of my lifelong interests is evolution, and looking at the crows' beaks make me wonder about beaks and birds. Not all birds fly. Ostriches and their kin run. Different birds fly differently, soaring on updrafts like eagles, flitting through underbrush like finches, hovering like hummingbirds. But all birds have beaks. A myriad of birds live all over the world, filling every conceivable niche, varying drastically in size. Many navigate thousands of miles when the seasons change. They eat seeds, insects, nectar, grass, rotten meat, fish. Yet they all have beaks.
My first criticism of standard Darwinian theory was over the complexity of the ear. How could there be any advantage to an incremental mutation that had nothing to do with hearing to eventually become an ear, including the complex mechanisms that transfer air vibrations to the neurons. This is something I recently discovered has a fancy name: irreducible complexity. Compared to an ear or an eye a beak seems fairly simple, but I don't think it is. Without knowing anything about the anatomy of a beak I can see it has nerve endings, a nasal passage and all sorts of complexities. So what happened in the great long ago of cretaceous or jurassic times? Did a clutch of birdlike lizards suddenly hatch out of their eggs with beaks while all others around them in the colony had jaws and teeth? Because obviously, unless you are an amoeba, it takes two to have descendants. The complex of adaptations must occur twice before it can be passed on, and at the same time. What are the odds of all this occuring? You'll have to ask the statisticians, but it looks like a very poor bet to me. And yet there is no denying the facts of evolution.
However it happened, did it happen just once, and have all subsequent birds descended from that one mutant? Pretty hard to know, and a real mystery that has yet to be solved deepens the more you think about it. But what is evolution, anyhow? The word itself is inadequate. Incremental change over time through genetic variation (mutation) and adaptation to different habitats and life strategies (natural selection) is what evolutionary theory attempts to explain. It seems on the surface fairly logical that it might work until you realize that genetics is about chemistry- the chemistry of proteins. DNA is a chemical factory able to precisely produce chemicals with an almost infinite range of variation. A whole organism, like a crow, or even Prince Charles, must be at least as complex as the entire physical universe.
This complexity preexists life itself. As Wickramasingh and Hoyle point out in their book, The Cosmic Life Force " Enzymes are polymers or chains of smaller units known as the amino acids. There are enzymes to assist almost every basic biochemical process and without such enzymes biology as we recognize it could not exist...The random chance [of enzymes forming spontaneously] is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally a superastronomical number equal to 10 to the 40000th power."
But although life is based on chemistry, complete organisms like crows and Prince Charles are not just a collection of chemicals, they have form: wings, black feathers, a beak, in the case of crows, and a potential monarch of an island in Prince Charles. The relation of form to chemistry is something evolutionary biologists don't like to talk about. There is no obvious connection.
I bring Hoyle and Wickramasingh into the discussion because of their theory of panspermia, which argues that life, far too complex to have begun in the short lifespan of the earth, must be a cosmic phenomenon and that comets may be the means of transplanting it to earth. Their book is especially strong on the chemical basis of life, from the standpoint of one of the great physicists of the 20th century. It's well worth a read and I hope to say more about it in the future.

Victoria weather

For anyone who doubts that the global warming kerfuffle is anything but a swindle, I suggest reading about the wing ding in London recently where the Goracle got paid about $5000 a minute to deliver his spiel. Having won both an Oscar and a Nobel prize this year, he has become an even bigger ass than ever- a feat I would have thought impossible. Too magisterial to be bothered meeting with the lesser mortals, those guilt and angst ridden attendees who paid thousands of pounds to hear him pontificate were severely disappointed not to be allowed to see speak to him in private. If only they had known, they could have jumped in their personal jets and gone to Bali- the better to save the earth, of course.
My view is that we are far more likely to experience dramatic cooling than warming. I'm sorry about that because personally I think a little warming would be a pretty good thing. More biodiversity, y'know.
More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that 'environmentalist' and 'idiot' are synonyms.
Meanwhile, here in Victoria the fag ends of autumn have not been bad at all this year. It's been a little cooler than usual, with snow falling in some areas of the region from time to time, and the obligatory storm blowing down trees, disrupting ferry schedules and so forth. There have also been floods in Washington state and up Island. Nothing unusual. But we have also had a number of very beautiful days. Since November and December are usually the most miserable months of the year, often almost continual rain and gloom, I am optimistic for a pleasant January and February...but with periods of snow.
The lovely weather last week gave me the opportunity- nay, the duty- to provide photographic comfort to those caught in some of the less temperate climes of our great nation where it's snowing like hell and cold as a witch's bleep.

Who is Killing Homer?

I was looking for another title, but the only book of Victor Davis Hanson's in the library was Who Killed Homer? So I read that book instead, and was glad I did, although most of the material was familiar to me in a general sense. Or maybe I should say I'm sorry I read it because it was another sad tale of the decline of our intellectual life.
More specifically it was about the decline of classics departments in American universities and the abandonment of Greek and Latin language studies. No facet of our culture is immune from the Lilliputians who swarm over anyone of sufficient stature to highlight their inadequacies. He makes the case of why Latin and Greek literature should be read today and in the original languages. I need no convincing. I have always regretted my lack of Greek and Latin, and my feeble attempts to self-teach myself have gone nowhere. It's been a problem. Oftentimes I wonder if the obscurity of some sections of Plato would be cleared up if I could read the Greek.
Most people don't even try, it doesn't even occur to them to try to learn to read Greek, and I suppose wanting to makes me abnormal and odd. But the ideas expressed in the Greek language, from Homer to Plato, to the New Testament are so fundamental to how we understand the universe that nobody can be really knowledgeable without reading the original authors. These are not old, outmoded ideas, but perennial, constantly shifting, multifaceted ideas that must be asked again by each new generation. Besides, they are absorbing and intriguing, even fun. And the Greeks are the best of guides, the most provocative, the most exasperating.
Mr. Hanson is best known as a military historian and he can be pretty provocative, too. The attacks he makes on the academic establishment are telling, and at the same time ominous for those of us who treasure our western heritage. Behind the ivy covered walls a war for domination of young minds has been going on since the infamous '60's and now all the tenured positions of influence have been usurped by individuals who are determined to undermine everything the Greeks taught, and everything that has been learned since.
These were lessons painfully learned, examined thoroughly by serious and intelligent men, commented and elaborated upon by subsequent generations. When classical civilization collapsed (more from internal rot than anything else- as ours shows signs of doing) it left a vacuum that was filled by German tribal groups. They didn't want so much to conquer the Roman world as join it. They wanted to get in on all the wealth of the civilized world, not destroy it. But because they knew nothing about the thought and knowledge that underpinned it, they did destroy it. Most of them were illiterate, skilled at warfare and tribal politics, but without the least idea of running an urban society. So virtually all the intellectual capital of Greece and Rome was lost in Western Europe...with the surprising exception of Ireland which was never subdued by the Romans in the first place. But the Irish had adopted Christianity and preserved the knowledge of both Latin and Greek, which they carried with them as they evangelized on the continent in those centuries known as the Dark Ages.
Are we seeing a return to another Dark Age? It certainly seems that the people who have taken control of our educational facilities are determined to bring it on. Is it on purpose or are they just clueless, like the barbarian Goths of late antiquity? Or are they worse, because the Goths in their kingdoms wanted to retain the glory of the Empire. Like the Goths, the new PC academics want to retain the trappings of prestige and reputation of scholarship, but all they can do is spout the kind of gibberish Davis quotes from their published (but unread) works.
It's all very well for writers like Hanson and others to call our attention to this problem, but what do we do about it? The Lilliputians keep cloning themselves through the brainwashing factories the universities have become and sending them on to teach children, run bureaucracies and write for newspapers. Something has to be done to stop them before they wreck everything. They're extremely industrious, like an army of termites nibbling at the house framing. Lift off any wall section and they will fall out in the hundreds. I hate to say it, but an exterminator is needed.

The end of her line

A story is circulating in the media regarding one Toni Vernelli, a 27 year old British woman, who had herself sterilized because she didn't want to burden the earth with another despicable human being. This followed an abortion she had because she thought it would be unfair- to the child or the world, I'm not sure. How sad that the brainwashing she has received through her school years, and the unrelenting propaganda barrage from the media has led not only to the death of an innocent child but to the extinction of her line. Remember, we are all directly connected in an unbroken line to the original life forms to appear on the earth some billions of years ago. And if Fred Hoyle's theory of panspermia is right (and I believe it is- someday I want to do a piece on this theory) then the universe is as much a creation of life than the other way around. I doubt if she is the first to take this step in the name of the envirocult. There are probably many, many more who have not made the news, but just quietly did the deed. This is where the logic leads. Ultimately environmentalism as it has been invented is part of a greater culture of death, and it's silly women like the now neutered Vernelli who are paying the price. Only one more step needs be taken: suicide. If David Suzuki really believed the stuff he spouts he should have offed himself years ago. And I'm not sure the world wouldn't be better for it. He, and his venomous creed, is the pollutant that kills, and would kill many more given the opportunity. As he opined once, "I guess there will have to be a massive die off." Perhaps it's unfair to focus on Suzuki as a source for this miasma, but somebody has to serve as an icon and he has applied for the job. Rachel Carson would also be a good candidate. Her grossly inadequate book, Silent Spring, was taken as gospel. DDT was banned. Up until that point, malaria was on the decrease all over the world. Since then there has been a resurgence, especially in parts of the world unable to combat the mosquito with other means. The result has been millions of deaths, mostly children, and mostly in poor countries. But perhaps the desexed Vernelli would think that's a good thing.

The government money spigot

I should never read our local paper in the morning before my nerve endings are toughened up a little. Of course I already know what the topics of interest are to the poor newspaper folk. Not only are they stuck in a dying trade, the Willie Lomans of our day, but they are stuck in the little Victoria backwater, their dreams of being a star reporter for the New Duranty Times turning to ashes in their mouths.
So what was the lead story today? The plight of the homeless? That was the front page news in the free newspaper, something about cutbacks in 'victim services.' Oh, no. That class of parasites which depends on drug addicts for its grant proposals is being cut off? If so, our government (at which level I don't know) is showing a little common sense.
Wel, how about the dastardly George Bush and his misguided persecution of murderous tyrants? No, nothing about Bush today.
Ah. Smoking. In cars. With children. This nefarious practice is now banned in Nova Scotia, and the usual list of suspects, the cancer society, the provincial public health officer, the minister of health, all promise to take into consideration the possibility that we might follow that example. And probably there is a committee somewhere trying to figure out if there is any aspect of life the government hasn't stuck its nose into. I would suggest something be done about all the drug users at large who discard their government supplied needles after shooting up drugs purchased with their government supplied welfare checks, but that would be considered 'blaming the victim,' as all right thinking people would loudly proclaim.
But the big article today is, "BC sets out tough targets for emissions." I don't suppose this means they are going to shut their cake holes for a while. Imagine the blessed silence! How silly. The announcement coincided with "...yesterday's unveiling of the 22-member Climate Action Team." Wait a minute. Isn't a big confab on carbon dioxide emissions due to take place in Bali next month? Bali! In December! I wonder if the reservations have already been placed. And I wonder how many asses had to be kissed, palms greased, who you had to be related to, to get appointed to the committee. There are always unemployed politicians and operatives lurking near the money spigot. Say, what about those victims' services people. One scam is as good as another, and there's a lot more money in the global warming swindle than homelessness nowadays. Might be time for a career change.
How I yearn for a real conservative party in BC. Not that any of the conservative governments anywhere in the world have made any lasting impression. They have cranked up economies everywhere they have been, but in the end all that extra wealth gets appropriated by their neo-socialist successors, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. "The fools voted for us! The gravy train has arrived! Let's all get aboard, boys and girls."
I guess it's too much to hope for a return to sanity in public affairs, and I have enough to do keeping my own sanity when I read the papers.

Sunshine and raindrops

The sun is just barely up when I start my morning walk to work and it's almost down when I walk home in the late afternoon. Pretty soon it will be completely dark both ways. And today a small cloud scattered it's load of moisture on me as I crossed the Blue Bridge while the sun was shining all around. Just a friendly, puppy dog lick, no need to bother with an umbrella.
On Monday the weather gods were not so benign. I couldn't hold my camera steady enough for a good picture of the waves threatening to put Clover Point awash so this one will have to do. All day the wind pounded the coasts, downing power lines, canceling ferry sailings and so forth. Just a normal November preview of wintry days to come. Last year we had already had our first snow. We don't get very much snow in Victoria and that's a good thing because we are never prepared for it. Although we don't get much snow here (usually two or three spells in the course of a winter) the snow we do get is nasty stuff because it melts during the day- but not completely- and then freezes at night. That makes our streets and roads quite treacherous.
The storm was on Monday but by Tuesday the sun was out again, the winds had slacked off, and the sky was darkened by the odd stray cloud. It was a beautiful day. So I took a little spin around the peninsula in my little car and took a few pictures. The one of Prospect Lake was taken from the Observatory hill. Take a good look at all the green. You are looking at forests that have been logged more than once- clear cut. The trees grow back. The meadows and glades support healthy populations of deer, and the deer support the cougars. Vancouver Island, of which the Victoria area is one tiny corner, has the largest population of cougars in the world. Or so I have read. I've never seen one myself. Bears, yes, black bears, no grizzlies. Vancouver Island is mountainous and heavily forested these days, unlike the situation 10,000 years ago when it was under a mile of ice and only the highest peaks protruded above the glaciers. Isn't global warming wonderful? I wonder how it happened. As one irreverent soul joked, maybe the wooly mammoths were driving SUVs.
Although most of Vancouver Island is covered with coniferous forests of diverse types- cedar, hemlock, fir, spruce, and others depending on soil, elevation and other factors, Victoria and southeastern Vancouver Island have a special ecosystem known as Garry Oak Meadow. The arbutus with its peeling red bark is a favourite tree of mine. It is classified as a broadleaf evergreen and shed its leaves throughout the year. The wood is very hard and will burn well and very hot even when green. I heated a cabin for a couple of winters with arbutus I scavenged from road building crews. That was when I was trying to be a back-to-the-land hippie. I'm too old for those silly games now, but I remember those days with fondness.

The soul of a people

If by some chance you've been following my maundering prose and have missed it these several weeks past, I apologize. I was going through one of those phases when the fact that I really don't know anything rose up and bit me. What, then, is the point of blathering away on the internet, a place that makes me think of Yeats' line about the 'bee-loud glade.' Is there anything more to it than the buzzing of bees, an inbred, introspective noise signifying nothing? After all, and here are the big questions, will anything we do or think matter a billion years from now, does anything we think or do matter in another galaxy, or even on our nearest inhabitable planetary neighbor? How about our non-human cohabitors on this earth. Does a Beethoven symphony mean anything to a garden snail?
According to certain shapers of modern opinion it doesn't. This is the lesson humanity has ultimately (wrongly, I think) gleaned from Galileo, a lesson that is expressed very succinctly in the phrase 'dead white males..' Because if there is no significance to the thoughts, beliefs or actions we leave behind, then life consists solely of the me and the now. That's it. But if that's the case why do we humans, all humans, have the nagging compulsion to bequeath a legacy to future generations? Even those who reject the contributions of those nefarious dead white males seem passionately committed to propagating that belief- but not children, who often turn out to be men. Personally, as a future dead white male, I am not so much offended by that bit of spitefulness as saddened by the paltry, dreary mentality that utters it.
Not only do we humans want our achievements to persevere after the death of the body, we also yearn to endow the products of our industry with beauty and grace be it as exalted as the Great Pyramid or as humble as a doily on the back of an easy chair. We are tireless composers of tunes and verses, we polish our cars, we clad our bodies with fashion statements, we populate our northern domiciles with captured tropical plants. The list of things we do to beautify ourselves and our surroundings is endless. And are we the only species that cares about beauty? Peacocks would beg to differ. Without a suitably colourful tail poor bachelor peacock hasn't a ghost of a chance with the discerning peahen. Darwinists twist themselves into pretzels trying vainly to fit such phenomena into their scheme of randomicity and determinism.
Scientists, philosophers and theologians argue endlessly over these issues trying to fit them into some grand scheme of things. I applaud these efforts, but when I need rescuing from the doldrums of insoluble questions I like to turn to music or poetry. Somehow the poets and composers perceive the big picture directly, not without the intellect, but the intellect illuminated by an interior kind of light without which Plato's light of pure reason is a pale and wan little candle sputtering in the dark. Sometimes I think reason operates in much the same way as natural selection. It doesn't create anything new, but it weeds out bad ideas and sorts things out into their proper places.
I've been struggling in the last few years with certain texts, especially the Semitic Bible and the Greek thinkers, both of which have molded our civilization beyond any reckoning. But we of the northern European races had a vital cultural life before the Roman law, legions and road-builders spread the cross and Plato into Gaul and Britain. There is something about the poor remnants of that older heritage which thrills me in ways that the new-fangled stuff doesn't. Introduced to us a mere 2000 years ago, the desert patriarchs and the Aegean poleis in many ways still seem as foreign and alien as ever. Indelible images abound in the few remaining muddled Celtic and Germanic texts which hint at a lost literature of vast proportions. Hard now to fit them with any context, our lives so much different now, and so all the more remarkable how striking those images are, even when translated into a language that didn't even exist when they were current.
Take for example the picture painted in "Pwyll Lord of Dyved" of the King, Pwyll, at a feast. (found in the Welsh Mabinogion) After the meal he decides to get away from the festivities and go for a walk to Gorsedd Arberth (a mound, possibly identified with Glastonbury) where he sits down with his retinue. He is in no way discouraged when he is informed that anyone who sits on the gorsedd will either be badly beaten or he will witness a Wonder. Spared the beating, the Wonder takes the form of a young woman clad in gold silk riding by on the road below. Curious about who this apparition might be, Pwyll orders a lackey to run after her and ask who she is. But although the lady is only traveling at a leisurely trot, and the lackey runs as fast as he can, she recedes further and further into the mist. The next night Pwyll comes back, bringing a lackey with a fast horse. Yet as fast as the lackey rides after her when she reappears, he cannot catch her in spite of her leisurely pace. The next night Pwyll decides to take on the job himself, bringing his fastest horse. And yet as fast as he rides, it is not enough. He cannot catch up with her. As the distance widens, he calls out to her: Lady, for the sake of the man you love the best, stop for me! I will gladly, she replied and it would have been better for your horse if you had asked me that sooner. I am doing my errands and I am glad to see you. I welcome you, said Pwyll, for it seemed to him that the beauty of every woman and girl he had ever seen was as nothing compared to the beauty of Rhiannon.
As the story progresses we become aware that Pwyll has entered another world. It may be he was originally sacrificed, as the prechristian celtic rituals were quite bloodthirsty, if the descriptions of Roman witnesses are to be believed. But I can't help comparing the Welsh vision of the other world with the sad view of Hades as depicted by Homer.
By comparison to the dreaminess of the Welsh stories, the Scandinavian counterparts seem blunter, coarser, more fatalistic. Heroism is a matter of stoic endurance, a defiance of death and suffering, but for all that, life is preferable. Hjalmar and his brother defeated twelve Goths in an island duel, but in the end:

"My armour is split, I have sixteen wounds,
I cannot see, my sight is darkened,
My heart was pierced by Angantyr's sword,
The steel-edge, steeped in venom.

"The farms I posessed were five in all,
But no joy have I known from these,
Bereft of life, I must lie down,
Sword-wounded on Samsey's shore.

The Norse poems are also more concerned with everyday practical matters. In one of Gudrun's songs she is forced by family pressure and international diplomacy to marry Atli the Hun. Gifted with the ability to foresee the tragic outcome, as the daughter of one king and the widow of another she may not escape her duty. On her way from her home she crosses the continent to meet her new husband:

The brave ones mounted the backs of horses,
But the Gaulish women in wagons rode,
Seven days were carried through cold land,
Seven more sailed on the waves,
Rode seven more through mountain country.


(From Norse Poems, as rendered by W.H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, Faber and Faber, 1983)
There is much in the Norse literature that is vivid and sharp. You can be reading along and then all of a sudden you can see in your mind's eye the scene portrayed as if you had witnessed it yourself. But rarely is there humour, or the imagery of love and beauty one finds in the celtic sources.

'The burial of the poet, dead for love' contains these sentiments: My bright shaped girl, with the brow like the lily, under your web of golden hair, I have loved you with a strong and enduring love... (From a Celtic Miscellany, Penguin Classics, 1971)
Gory scenes of battle are common in these stories, but there always seems to be at least a hint of mirth. A man's end is not so much a matter of inescapable fate as it is of his own foolish actions, and as often as not resembles a pratfall more than anything else. But what I love best about the celtic stories is the irrepressible sense of wonder they all convey. The world, whether this one or the other one, not so easily distinguished from each other, and the boundaries easily traversed, are marvels to be wondered at. Life in either realm has more to it than mere accumulation of goods- though the celts were well-known in the ancient world for their love of gold. In the story called Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Bran a champion of the Isle of the Mighty leads a host to an invasion of Ireland. They win the battle, but Bran, like Achilles before Troy, is fatally wounded in the foot. Homer fails to see the humour and very grimly lectures us on the topic of eternal fame vs a long but ordinary life. Before Bran dies he tells his men to cut off his head, take it to London and bury it facing France. But on the way they may stop for seven years of feasting in Harddlech, "...with the birds of Rhiannon singing for you, and my head will be as good a companion as it ever was. After that you will spend eighty years at Gwales in Penvro, and as long as you do not open the door to the Bristol Channel on the side facing Cornwall you may stay there and the head will not decay." The men do as he instructs but even the bravest warriors will get bored after eighty years of carousing. "One day Heilyn, son of Gwynn said, 'Shame on my beard if I do not open this door to see if what is said about it is true.'" As soon as he did he and all his companions "...became as conscious of every loss they had suffered, of every friend and relative they had lost, of every ill that had ever befallen them, as if it had just happened."
Strange. As I read this passage I'm reminded of the story of Adam and Eve. A door of knowledge instead of a tree of knowledge, but still an act of will that loses them paradise, and sends them down into a world of sorrows. But how much differently it is played out, without the moralizing and the punitiveness.
Of course there are similarities among the literary outputs of these different peoples, the Hebrews, the Hellenes, the Norse, the British, but at the same time there are clear distinctions, and the distinctions are important...vitally important. The misnamed multicultural crowd advocates a flattening of distinctions and would have us believe everyone is the same. But we are not. Multicultural theorists, most of whom are of North European descent, are not lovers of any culture, and in particular seem to hate their own. That's why they are so determined to suppress public symbols like crosses and Christmas trees. They are really statists who want to substitute the state in place of family, country, homeland, history. And what is this state they so assiduously serve? They have turned into an army of mice nibbling away at the store of wealth amassed in the chambers built by their ancestors, not comprehending the damage they do. There is an adage which says if you don't love yourself you can't love anybody else. I'm not sure if that's true when applied to an individual, but when applied to a heritage, I'm certain that if you don't love your own you can't possibly love another's. This is what they have in common with Islamists. But the Islamists are more fully aware that they are on a mission to destroy what they see.
But can the soul of a people really be destroyed? Or maybe it's the genius of place that accounts for the retention of characteristics by a people which predate a massive transformation of culture and language. For instance, the Persians. Islamic, yes, but Semitic definitely not. And how much of that literature we call Celtic originated from a preCeltic substratum in Britain? Very hard to know for sure, or at least to prove in a scientific sense. But when I respond in my heart the way I do to these ancient stories I believe it. My ancestry is American (in the broad sense) for hundreds of years and yet I still think I belong to certain parts of the Old Country in ways I don't belong in the Americas. Highly irrational.

Victoria Fire and Rescue Team

On Saturday at my construction site post I watched about a dozen fellows with backpacks march through the gate and up the steps to the catwalk. Who are these guys and what are they doing here I wondered. It seems they were members of Victoria's special rescue team, arrived for their yearly crane rescue drill. Its gratifying to me to see these young guys willing to take on such dangerous work. They are conscientious, take the the work seriously, and practice so they can do it right when it's for real. Here are a few pictures.

The Goracle

So Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It just goes to show that not all of the quislings were run out of Norway after the war. I suppose it was like Canada's own Red Cross big boys who, having presided over a tainted blood scandal leading to the deaths of thousands, are quietly reabsorbed into the upper class fabric instead of sitting in jail where they belong. Gore joins an estimable fraternity. Kofi Annan, architect of the oil-for-food ripoff, and Yassar Arafat, inventor of the use of children for suicide bombers, are alumni. With company like that I suppose someday in the future Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler will be awarded the prize posthumously. But what has Gore done to deserve the honour? I can only speculate. So far, although the potential is clearly there, nothing he has done has led to mass murder or thieving on an industrial scale. (He is working hard on the latter with his carbon credit scheme) He is arguably the world's biggest ass, and that certainly deserves an award of some sort, but personally I think that Allmadinthehat fellow from Iran is the real Nobel material. Of course, I know Arafat had already done a lot of work toward extinguishing the only prosperous, functioning democracy in the Middle East, keeping his Palestinian constituency in a state of abject misery and poverty for all those years and so far Allmad has only started a small war or two with his good neighbor policy. Weasels like them are more Nobel-like than asses. Maybe Allmad's time is yet to come, especially if he succeeds in setting off a nuclear device somewhere in the middle of, say Antwerp. A worth attainment for an honour funded by the estate of the inventor of dynamite. Self flagelation seems to be the default setting of the European intellectual class these days so I'm sure it would shiver and squeal with pleasure.
I can only guess at the reason for including Gore in this company, but maybe it's this: Arafat, a murderer, Annan, a thief, and Gore fraud... all three masters at their trades. A trifecta.
But seriously, folks, where is the absurdly wealthy patron who is willing to endow an anti- Nobel prize? Something is clearly needed to reward human beings of genuine courage, high purpose and integrity as opposed to the frauds and schemers so admired in Norway. And there is certainly one human being living on this planet right now who deserves elevation to sainthood, a modern day Joan of Arc. Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she has been run out of Holland, which is a good sign in itself. Not only does she think with a rare clarity and express herself in plain, unvarnished truthful words, she is beautiful and endowed with a wonderful nobility. It's no wonder the religion of peace hates her: she seems to be hated by all the right people.

Autumn in Victoria

Some leaves are falling in Victoria but much of the city is still green. Methinks that means we have a pleasant Indian summer in store, my theory being that the trees are the best forecasters of upcoming weather patterns. Even the trees are wrong sometimes, so I tried my best to enjoy the sunshine. The days get shorter and shorter and at this time of the year and you never know for sure how long it will be before the next really gorgeous day comes, or if I'll still be here when it does.

Murder in the north

We haven't had much good weather in Victoria this year and so a lovely autumn day like this is precious. Some leaves are turning but most trees are still dressed in green. In places the ground is littered with horse chestnuts, acorns, and apples, and the wasps are ravenous for their last meal. A few weeks ago the hanging flower baskets were taken down from the light posts, and the light bulbs on the parliament building are being changed. But at Goodacre lake in Beacon Hill Park it still looks like summer.
It's too bad a certain young RCMP officer in the Northwest Territories can't enjoy these photos, but someone cut his life off last Saturday.
The article in the paper Monday made the front page but it didn't tell us much. Skim it quickly and you might be forgiven for thinking he had met with an unfortunate accident while raking the lawn. We were mostly told how his young wife felt, as if there were something unusual about her grieving for her murdered husband and their life together. In fact, I don't remember the word 'murder' being used. A few more specifics, not many, were furnished in a separate article inside the paper. Ho hum, another dead cop. Nothing to get angry about. That would be so uncool. I don't blame the reporters so much, they're probably young and haven't thought about these things very much. They've seen lots of murders in the movies, and when was the last time you took a movie seriously?
But I have thought about it and it does make me angry, very angry, that reporters, movie stars, and left wing politicians are more apt to sympathize with the murderer than the victim. And don't let me forget the criminal justice industry who profit from crime. The lawyers, judges, social workers, advocacy groups, they all have a stake in maintaining a high crime rate. The police are a part of the system, too, and it's a wonder most of them aren't corrupted by it. But I don't think they are as a rule. They are the ones who see every day the consequences of a justice system that refuses to enforce the laws. They are the ones who do the dirty work.
The name of the suspect in this case is Emrah Bulatci who came to Canada from Turkey when he was four years old. He doesn't seem to like his adopted country very much. In the last three years he has been up for 25 charges in four Alberta towns. People familiar with him say he is violent and aggressive. His father had an interesting response with regard to his son's whereabouts: "Even if I know I won't call the cops. Why should I? Maybe they are lying." Sounds like the father is part of the problem.
Today's Edmonton Journal gives us a look at Emrah's rap sheet. Assault, uttering threats, vehicle violations, possession of proceeds of crime, and many more. But aside from a few slap-on-the-wrist fines, and one 'intermittent' ten month sentence, almost no convictions. But lots of court time, I'll bet. Lots of counseling sessions, I'll bet. Lots of publicly funded defense lawyers, I'll bet. But what do I know? Maybe he's just a poor, misunderstood young man who is being unfairly persecuted.
One thing is sure: I wouldn't know anything about his rap sheet if the mountie hadn't been killed, just like I seldom hear about other rap sheets until some innocent person is killed. Then I wonder: why wasn't that person put in a cage? Why was he on the loose? A few months ago the Victoria police shot and killed a fugitive driver who rammed a police barricade. His rap sheet was right up there with the best. You would think the reaction would be to pin a medal on the chest of the cop who shot him and kept him from killing some innocent party who got in the fugitive's way. Writeups by a rational newspaper reporter would have questioned the judiciary on why this guy was on the loose in the first place. Nope. To the newspaper writers it was the cop who had to explain himself.
Why are things like this in enlightened, modern Canada? The answer is that the people who have taken on the responsibility of enforcing the law do not believe in the punishment principle. That went out a long time ago and was replaced by the rehabilitation principle. However that was only a passing phase. Nowadays there is no longer any concept of 'criminal,' there is only the victim. Who is the victim, you might ask? Certainly not you or I who may have had a windshield smashed by vandals, or purse snatched, or tools stolen out of a truck. Oh, no. The victim is the person who did the crime...and it's all our fault because we have crated such an unjust society. If you work hard, have money in the bank, a regular job, a mortgage, that means you are an oppressor, you capitalist pig. If you are a heterosexual white male who supports a family, pays taxes, contributes time and money to your community, and maybe even (god forbid) attends church, you are the epitome of evil, the true criminal. It only follows that when law breakers are released on parole or given minimal sentences and while they are free to roam whatever violent acts they commit on you- why, it's all your fault.
I don't know when this slide into idiocy started exactly, but I think it must have been when we became too squeamish to use the noose. When murderers are allowed to walk away from their crimes, then what happens to lesser felons? It becomes like a devaluation of the currency. If a murderer only serves a year or two then what do you do with someone who steals? Why, it's catch and release. What about someone who scribbles graffiti on the side of your grocery store? In Victoria you, the proprietor, are the one who gets fined. The scribbler, often one of the "homeless," is one of your victims. That's why he breaks into your dumpster to stash his drugs and leaves his government supplied needles strewn in your back alley.
The same people, philosophy, advocacy groups, whatever, that have brought us to this sorry state are currently working openly to 'decriminalize' drugs altogether, and in the background are quietly working to legitimize what they call 'intergenerational sex,' or what you or I would call child abuse.
I have no idea what to do about it, but I get angrier by the day. Not to excuse the murderer of the young Mountie, whether or not it was Emrah Bulatci, but he is a victim all right. He is a victim of the prevailing unwisdom that there is no absolute right or wrong, and its companion unwisdom that our actions are predetermined and so we can not really be held accountable for them.
But the fate of the murderer when he is apprehended is easily foreseen. There will be endless hearings, depositions, court appointed lawyers, counseling sessions, all subject to a court ordered information ban. Because we wouldn't want to violate his rights, would we?
Meanwhile Christopher Worden's widow is left with an urn of ashes. Yes, I get very angry sometimes. My condolences to her and their child.

The meaning of miracles

An interesting piece on the First Things blog last week by Matthew J. Milliner recounts an experience he had while visiting a church in Crete that dated from the period of Venetian rule. Catholic Venetians and Orthodox Cretans had divergent liturgies, a problem that was resolved by building churches with naves on opposite ends of the structure so that services from each rite could be celebrated in the same space. I was unfamiliar with this bit of historic lore and so it caught my imagination at once. I like stuff like this.
Milliner was there in his capacity as an art historian, and while there he encountered an English speaking Cretan who was well-versed in the iconography on display. In response to an inquiry about a depiction of Mary consoling the infant Christ, the Cretan explained the story behind it.
"Mary was permitted, due to her wisdom, to study in the Temple from an early age. Because of her access to Solomon's mysteries, she knew what was to happen to her son. And so, as Gabriel confronts Christ in this icon with the instruments of the Passion, Mary comforts her son."
Milliner, not believing the historicity of this legend, launches into a meditation on how these mythic tales could be true and untrue at the same time. The story contains a code, the Cretan elaborated, something that needs interpretation to be intelligible. Because, how could it be literally true? He tells us about other legends that require similar readings, like the Turin shroud. Never fear. They do not contradict the gospels but amplify them.
This is familiar territory for me, a long time enthusiast for poetry in general and mythic literature in particular. The challenge for a poet is to transcend the limitations of language itself, just as a painter is challenged by the two dimensional limitations of his medium. This is somewhat easier to do when poetry is transmitted by a blind harper like Homer, a mythic character himself. He used gesture and vocal expressiveness to augment his words. Verse itself has no literal meaning but without verse the meaning of the words in the poem are diminished, even neutralized or altered to an entirely different meaning. A great poet, as opposed to a hobbyist versifier, turns these limitations into opportunities. The limitations amount to a kind of traction. Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" is an eye opening introduction to reading myth, if you can figure out what he's talking about while trying to separate out all his misdirections. But I'm convinced he understood myth better than anyone else I have ever read.
The specific problem Milliner mentions in the reading of that icon is Mary's presence in the temple. The story is new to me, and surprising. Were women taught religious doctrine in the Temple? Wasn't the Judaism of that date as patriarchal as Mosquism of today? Milliner doesn't say anything at all about the angel Gabriel. Does that mean he believes that part, or is he avoiding that question? I don't know.
But these are important questions in the context of Christian belief since the authenticity of the religion itself depends on the literal truth of supernatural events occurring in real, literal, historic time. IE, the Son of God, come to earth, suffering torture and death, only to come to life again for a few days before returning to heaven. Stories in the gospels of miracles he performed are important only if they actually happened.
A school of thought among Christian believers doesn't care for these tricks and would prefer to forget about them. As for me, I have never seen a miracle performed. I have never seen an angel. I have never seen or heard of a documented case of a dead man coming back to life. To the skeptical mind that seems preposterous, and I have a skeptical habit of mind. I always subject ideas and theories to critical assessment. For someone like me claims of a virgin birth, a resurrection, visitations by angels and so on are hard to accept.
At the same time dogmatic skepticism is a trap that unimaginative minds often fall into. The classic example is the case of the museum curator who didn't believe there could be such an animal as a platypus even after examining a preserved specimen. Skepticism shouldn't be a closing of the mind to unfamiliar phenomena. Often skepticism is a mask for the kind of intellectual laziness that doesn't want to go to the terrifying trouble of reexamining all previous premises.
The reason I can take the gospels seriously is not just because they are great literary works written by intelligent and honest men of serious purpose who set them down because of something utterly momentuous they had witnessed. The reason I am open to ideas of the miraculous events they recorded is that I already know life is an astonishing miracle. Nevertheless, I am still troubled over the built in limitations of my ability to know what it all means. These limitations are not transcended by means of reason or through an accumulation of information or an amplification of my sensory faculties. They are inherent. All I know is that there has to be something more to it.
That's where the 'tricks' in the gospels enter into the discussion. We do see people who set themselves up as gurus and prophets and anyone with half a brain can tell they are crackpots. Presumably things weren't much different in the Roman province of Judea, a place literally crawling with preachers and prophets. Mystery religions were a shekel a dozen. Can Pontius Pilate really be blamed for not wanting to get caught between warring factions in his own consulship? It would look bad on his resume, and interfere with the Roman penchant for accumulating plunder.
The problem for the gospel writers was to distinguish Jesus from all the other preachers, and the miracles were the proof. The kinds of miracles Jesus performed were contrary to the natural order. In the natural order of things corpses do not come back to life. In the natural order of things cripples do not throw their crutches away and leap in the air. In the natural order of things the blind remain blind. In the natural order of things loaves and fishes do not proliferate in baskets. According to the scriptures all these miracles occurred in the presence of witnesses. If a man was blind, he was known to all in the vicinity as a blind man. There would be no faking it. Even in the Temple in front of the most hostile of skeptics Jesus was said to perform miracles.
We are told Jesus' reasons for performing miracles. He was backing up his claim to be the Son of God. He was proving that he was not bound by the rules of the world. He was proving he was not as others so that when he submitted to the same sufferings as thieves and murderers the world would know that it was through his choice. Even more it was to prove to the descendants of Abraham that he was the Messiah and that he was therefore entitled to change the terms of the Covenant made with Moses. Through the miracles he left the skeptics with no option but to reexamine their doctrines.
We moderns don't have the evidence of plain vision before us. We only have the words of the gospel writers and in spite of my own habitual skepticism I find them convincing...though not quite enough to salve all qualms.
As for the icon in the Venetian church on Crete, I wish I could see it for myself, and I wish I knew more about the legend that goes with it. The gospels are the bedrock of Christian belief, but that doesn't mean the gospels were the only accounts recorded or memorized by the early congregations. The gospels were accorded privileged status by the early Church Fathers as a preemptive strike against promulgators of mainly gnostic cults that would have been fatal to the Church. For an excellent discussion on why heresies are so important to counteract I refer the interested reader to a website- The Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc. These issues never fade, but we have been disarmed by philosophical trends that trivialize their importance.
I would think feminist researchers into Christian history would be very interested in this icon...if their minds weren't so closed to anything but the blather preached by the sorority.

Mickey Rooney

I had despaired ever again of finding any new issues of Hollywood Golden Age musicals in A&B Sound. Since being bought out by a computer maker, Victoria's best source of good music and DVDs has drastically downsized. And they wonder why customers have been turning to online sources. I wouldn't go in there that often anymore if it wasn't just across the street from my bus stop.
But on Sunday I hit the jackpot. They had a nice boxed set of Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musicals at under 50 bucks. I only hesitated a minute before running down to the bank to refresh my wallet. Didn't even miss my bus.
I have only watched two of them so far, "Babes in Arms," and "Girl Crazy." Bookends, the first and the last of that collaboration. Early on in the first film, Mickey is sitting at the piano while Judy sings "Good morning, good morning...it's great to be out late...good morning, good morning, to you." It's a cheerful, upbeat ditty written by Arthur Freed, producer of the movie, and his song writing partner Nacio Herb Brown. I think Judy was seventeen when she made the movie. Standing by the piano she is dressed demurely, looking perky, neat and stylish, with a wicked little sparkle in her eye. She and Mickey are in a music publisher's office trying to sell this, Mickey's latest song. Toward the end of the song Mickey sees he has caught the interest of the music publisher and he looks at Judy and says, "Hit it, mama!" And boy, does she hit it. Judy Garland could deliver more smoldering sexuality by just arching an eyebrow than Paris Hilton can dream of by spreading her legs.
The plot sounds corny. Judy and Mickey are both children of vaudeville parents who have been put out of work by 'talking pictures.' A social worker threatens to put the children of all the out of work performers into reform school so they can learn honest trades. While all the adults are on the road trying to restart their careers, Mickey decides to organize a show using the talents of all the kids left behind and put it on in a local barn.
It isn't so corny when you know that both Mickey and Judy were children of vaudeville performers, and that when Mickey became MGM's top star he persuaded Louis B. Mayer to hire his father, who was playing in a run down L.A. burlesque house, for the studio. One of the threads of the movie plot duplicates this real life experience of the real Mickey Rooney.
Judy Garland I have always been in love with, but I have never known that much about Mickey Rooney. The more I know about him, though, the more I like him. He made his stage debut at the age of 17 months, and he worked constantly from then on. It was work he loved, not really distinguishing his life from his work. He could do everything: dance, sing, play piano, play drums, write songs. Many of the big stars who knew him said he was the most talented movie actor ever. A bonus disc in the set replays an interview he did as an old man for TV that really helps to give a sense of what it was like to be Mickey Rooney, and I envy him. All that exuberant youth erodes inexorably into old age and death, but what a life to look back on. I'm absolutely certain he was in love with Judy, has been in love with her all his long life, and not even Ava Gardner, to whom he was married for three years, was a satisfactory substitute. Mickey Rooney was definitely a guy with little man's syndrome who punched above his weight! Everyone was above his weight! Even Frank Sinatra had trouble handling Ava. Now that I do know more about what kind of a person he was, I have developed a real fondness for him, and the more I see of his work, the more respect I have for him. Singing and dancing,and kissing some of the most beautiful women who have ever lived...it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. And what a gift to the world these performances are. When you watch his movies you can see that Mickey was often better than his scripts. By the way, Mickey did his duty and went to war when his country called, earning a few medals in the process.
"Girl Crazy" was an an adaptation of a Gershwin Broadway production and has a lot of great songs. As with all Hollywood adaptations it's a mixture of good and bad. Hollywood had trouble just leaving things alone without adding overblown spectacle. Sometimes it works and you just have to accept it on its own terms, like Busby Berkeley's infatuation with Art Deco effects. But when Gershwin's music is involved any embellishment amounts to gilding the lily, and we have just a little too much embellishment in this production. At least Arthur Freed didn't try to shoehorn one of his own songs into it. He wrote good songs but he was no Gershwin. However, many of the songs were over orchestrated, and some good songs were removed from the score. But believe me, Mickey and Judy could rescue any song from maltreatment and they make the movie a delight all the way through.
For anyone who loves music and great singing and dancing, this set is highly recommended. I know I'm going to be able to enjoy watching these movies over and over again.

Miss Hanley

Most people buy ipods so they can listen to music, but I have an ipod so I can avoid listening to 'music.' Most bars, coffee shops and so on where I might otherwise enjoy sitting in silence are apt to play 'music,' which I use the music on my ipod to shut out. 'Music' I regard as that which has been used by the entertainment industry to cultivate a docile mass market of teenagers too ignorant to know any better. This is a strategy that has been in place since the fifties. This 'music' is otherwise known as "Rock and Roll." Real music demands one's total attention. 'Music,' if the sixties is any indication, causes brain damage. Especially in combination with marijuana.
Being a teenager at the time of its inception I was vulnerable to the media manipulation, too. Not for long. There was something about Elvis I never really liked and I soon noticed that I was only pretending to like him to be cool. At home I discovered the local classical music station and was enraptured among others by Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz soloing the latter) Let's be kind: Elvis suffered by comparison. And so do the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the subsequent icons of faux music.
In childhood I think I must have been inoculated against its ravages by a few good teachers and by the Walt Disney recording of "Peter and the Wolf." I say inoculation because I now regard Rock and Roll as a disease, a maladaptive mutation that has the same effect on music as phyloxera had on the vineyards of France, because it destroys the beautiful work of generations of careful and conscientious workers and several inspired geniuses.
I vividly remember the Peter and the Wolf recording. The composition was pretty new then, having been written by Prokofiev in 1936 and the popular music industry was quite open to real talent then. Disney made an animated feature out of it and the recording came from that. The production drew on a It doesn't seem to be available any more, maybe because it's not considered politically correct to have little boys wandering around in forests hunting wolves with a pop gun. In those days boys were good and wolves were bad, but today it's the other way around.
The name of the teacher I am thinking of was Miss Hanley, and she taught grade four at St. Margaret's Separate School in Edmonton. It was a time when a teacher taught the same class all day, every day. Arithmetic, social studies, language, catechism, she taught them all. And music. I think it was almost a requirement for employment that a teacher could play the piano. Anyway, I can still remember the day she took the class down to the music room and started to play the piano accompaniment to Schubert's setting of "Ave Maria." Schubert's melodies and piano accompaniments are very tightly interwoven and I was dumbfounded. The piano part didn't sound anything at all like the melody of the song. It took me a little while to grasp that idea but once I did I couldn't hear it often enough.
Thank you, Miss Hanley for the gift of Franz Schubert, and thank you Walt Disney (and Prokofiev, of course) for Peter and the Wolf.

Max Roach

Max Roach died a few weeks ago. He was one of those human beings who seemed to be an elemental force of nature and it's hard to believe that such a force is quenched. Of course his music is still around, caught on tape, frozen in amber. Not all of the life of it is preserved in the electronic amber but enough so you can fill in what's missing. You all know he was a drummer in the bebop era of jazz, famous for his polyrhythmic capabilities. I made a little trip to youtube because while I have some of his recordings I had never known what he looked like. Then, running out of the small supply of his videos I started searching through the ranks of some of the famous jazz drummers of past decades. Chick Webb, Cozy Cole, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich and a fantastic film of Barrett Deems. I don't even know who Barrett Deems played with but he was phenomenal. Feeling too confined by the limitations of his drum set, in this clip he migrates from the bandstand to the club floor and finds a chair to beat on. Then, just for comparison sake I took a look at some rock drummers. But there is no comparison.
There was a koto player I saw and heard at Vancouver's long defunct Classical Joint in Gastown. Japanese music is an acquired taste for westerners and I acquired it during my two year stint in Yokosuka. Takemitsu is one of the few modern composers I like. Abstraction comes naturally to zen conditioned Japanese and his music reminds me a lot of haiku. Never liked saki or sushi, never learned to use chopsticks, but I like Japanese music and poetry. Music has the advantage of not requiring knowledge of the spoken language of the composer. Listening to that koto player I realized what was unique about Japanese music. I don't know anything about scales and harmony so I have nothing to say about that, except that the 'frets' on a koto are adjustable according to the scales and harmonics the performer wants to use. What really struck me was that the rhythm of her music was implied rather than stated openly. This has the effect of releasing the musical phrase from the confinement of a strictly observed beat. This was a very emphatic impression. Haiku is like that, too. Most of the meaning of a haiku is not in the words used in the poem. The words on the page are meant to stimulate the mind so that other, deeper, meanings are sensed. In the koto song the rhythm is not stated overtly so the listener must supply his own rhythm, which may be more subtle and meaningful than even the finest musician can express. Or at least those were the thoughts I had when I came away from that lady's performance.
When thought of this way western music, even the music of the master composers seems crude. Not really. The great composers incorporated rhythm into the structure of the musical line. They knew what they were doing. And they were aware of the confinement problem, if the story is true of Wagner's putting down a famous conductor by calling him a Bavarian timebeater. Mediocre musicians pay excessive attention to timekeeping, as all good conductors know. It's the hobgoblin of little minds.
One of the reasons Negro music in America became so popular, I think, is that it found a way of keeping a strong rhythm while still leaving room for phrasing. Synchopation they call it, and it's what they mean when they say "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I think it's just as important for jazz development as the blues -inspired bending of notes. All those influences evolved together in the early twentieth century until it reached an apogee in the bebop era. But by then it had become too arty and self indulgent to speak to an ordinary audience. Myself, I like the jazz from the swing era the best, before it got too proud to play for dancing teenagers.
Still, here I am listening to Sonny Rollins' quirky take on "The last time I saw Paris" -I'm not sure who's doing the drums but it might be Max Roach- and loving it.

War and Peace

Sunday was cold and rainy, a foretaste of soon-to-arrive winter, but this morning is almost perfect. The sun is out, a few clouds dapple the sky, the temp is 12C/54F- what could be better for a walk into town along the water? From my place I can take the quick way along Esquimault Rd or dawdle via the Songhees walkway. I like to dawdle. It's not just that Songhees is winding that makes it slower. It's just about impossible not to stop and sit on a bench for a while and watch the harbour sights, so if I'm in a hurry it's not the way to go.
A little drama: a flock of gulls foraging right about where a twin otter was landing. I'm not sure if they all got away. What were they finding in that particular patch of water that made them so reluctant to abandon it? We humans are so wrapped up in our own daily concerns that we tend to forget about the other critters who also get caught up in their daily concerns. That means obeying the demands of the belly. For seagulls, unable to store up provisions for the future beyond the capacity of its belly, as soon as one feeding is done, the next is sought. Urgently. The needs of Safety are always in tension with the need to eat.
We humans have devised ways of storage and distribution that would require a catastrophic and global disruption over a long period of time to thwart. Hunger and deprivation are no longer technical problems, but a really inept and corrupt political structure can do more to disrupt our well-being than all but the worst natural disasters. As examples in recent history I would cite the Marxist- inspired regimes in Russia and China. Stalin's collectivization program in the Ukraine, for millennia one of the breadbaskets of the world, resulted in millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation. Mao, not to be outdone, presided over the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen. Nowadays we can readily see what Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe. Once the breadbasket of Africa, the country is starving. It looks like Hugo Chavez has ambitions to follow these examples, starting with a campaign against the investors who finance the Venezuelan oil industry.
In our western system of private property and personal innovation, where individuals reciprocally offer up their services to others, it is possible for an individual as low down in the economic order as me to live within a five minute walk of a pleasant waterway and know that my little economic contribution is enough to provide me with comfortable shelter, good food, and security. Capitalism and free enterprise are wonderful ideas. I also am glad that I live in a political culture that tolerates divergent ways of thinking with differences decided through open debate. People forget the most important aspect of freedom of debate: I have a right to be wrong and you have a right to correct me on it. This is how we learn from each other.
We Anglo Americans have lived so long in this system that we take it for granted. We live in such peaceful and prosperous circumstances for so long that we have difficulty with the idea that some people in the world hate us and want to destroy our way of life. But if you pay attention then you will know that the Marxist inspired movements have worked tirelessly against us for nearly a century. Aided and financed by the Soviet and Maoist slave states, they have done a lot of damage. The Marxists have not gone away, they live and breed on campuses all across the continent. They are joined now by the Islamists, a much older scourge with a far deeper hatred than the Soviets had. At least some aspects of western culture were valued in Soviet Russia, and even Maoist China. They may have hated traditional religion but they cultivated many of the western inspired arts. But the Islamists hate everything about us. They hate our belief in freedom of expression. They hate our belief in equal rights before the law. Democracy to them is foolishness. Emancipation of women is lunacy to them. It hasn't been easy for westerners to learn how to live together while respecting different ways, creeds and languages but we have done it. Precariously, perhaps, and always under pressure, but we have done it. Islam proclaims itself the only possible and permissible creed. Every single human on the face of the planet must submit to that creed, either as a full-fledged member or as a lower class being with no rights to protection from the law.
Because of our inexperience with people who hate us just because they hate us and have no compunction against killing us, we have a hard time understanding that there are times when we have to defend ourselves, and that means war. That means a generation or more of young people who will not have the privilege of walking along the Songhees shore without a care in the world. There are a lot of people who refuse to believe that we are in danger. They think that if we stop fighting then we will have peace. Au contraire, mes amis. The reason we have peace now is that we have had generations of citizens willing to fight to preserve our peace.
Wake up, folks

September in Victoria

On one of Victoria's patented summers it's hard not to think you have arrived in paradise. We didn't have much of a summer this year so today was much appreciated- better late than never- and if the weatherman is right it's going to stay this way for a while. Sometimes this kind of weather persists until the end of October.
And I think I must be blessed to live just over the bridge from downtown Victoria. The walk along the Songhees walkway is always full of interest with boats and planes coming and going, joggers and dogwalkers out for a stroll, the sky and the sea always changing, always the same. Theme and endless variation. This morning I stopped for a moment to size up a picture of one of the harbour markers with the tide down. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a little movement on the sidewalk. I had already spotted a mouse (shrew, vole?) scurry into the underbrush. This bit of fluff was a fledgling and at first I thought it was a sparrow or finch or one of the other varieties of small gray birds I am unable to identify, but this one had a bedraggled little crest on top of his head. I think he was a quail. We see a few families of them strutting along the railroad tracks, and somehow they have survived all the construction in our neighborhood. I always enjoy seeing these dapper characters. This little guy looked like he had gotten separated from his elders and wouldn't have survived much longer if I hadn't been there. Three or four drooling sea gulls had also spotted him. A bite sized morsel for a seagull. So I herded him into the shrubbery. See? I may be a paleocon but I've still got a heart. And I like quail a lot better than seagulls.
I often hear locals brag, "I haven't been downtown in years." I never say anything, but I'm incredulous. Are they idiots? Victoria has one of the loveliest downtowns in North America. You wanna see ugly, go to Tacoma. I remember in Vancouver I had a young couple in my cab. We were driving down Arbutus from Kerrisdale, it was a beautiful day, and the North Shore mountains were awesome. The girl was saying how beautiful it was, and then the guy chipped in. "Yeah, but what use is it?" He was from Ontario, of course.
Now that it's September the majority of tourists have gone home, leaving the artisans with slim pickings. But a few die hards are still on the Causeway and in Bastion Square taking care of their customers. Good on ye, guys and gals!

Death of the spirit

Two things I read this morning reminded me of my theme of aliveness from the other day. The first was a review of Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not Great," by another well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins. There is quite a crew of these evangelistic atheists trying to whip up a bit of religious bigotry among the anti Christian crowd. The other item is in today's First Things blog, a posting by Peter Leithart called "The Pagan West." The arguments of Hitchens and Dawkins are old and tiresome. But Leithart has noticed something interesting.
It's a well known fact that in Europe and countries of European extraction, the force of traditional Christian faith is moribund. This is especially true of the mainstream protestant denominations, as well as the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church where the core doctrines of Christanity have been largely abandoned. Not coincidentally, as the 'progressive' clergy abandons the core beliefs, the congregations abandon the churches. Away from Europe and the American 'blue states,'- what Dawkins calls the cerebral cortex of America, as opposed to the reptilian brain of southern and middle America- notably in Africa, Christianity is vibrant, growing, and alive.
Leithart informs us that Christianity is growing fastest in those parts of Africa where traditional African religion is still strong and suggests that this is not mere accident. "Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience."
In other words Africans are attuned to the aliveness of existence and so the idea that a creator god animates this aliveness is only common sense. Unlike Dawkins whose seething hatred of everything religious blinds him to the beauties of both religious tradition and the aliveness of the world. This can't be too good for science, either.
Sometimes I wonder if this deadness of spirit is a product of urban living. The traditional Paganism of the Greeks and Romans lost credence among the educated as their civilization matured and was only retained as a set of rituals used to cement loyalty to the city. Our educated class has even lost this remnant of belief, and maybe this is why patriotism in Europe is pretty much a thing of the past, and only survives as a hatred of America. It's as if all the ecclesiastical architecture that crowds the European landscape is occupied by twittering mice- as the shades of the dead were imagined in Homeric Greece.

The Medieval Sourcebook

I'm still pretty new at this internet business and am only beginning to plumb its depths. The political blogs wherein all the latest contoversies are debated are the easiest to find. It doesn't take long to find pornography either. Every time I poke the 'next blog' box there's about a one in five chance a porn site will appear. The rest are Spanish. Sadly, I have never found a blog by that method I thought was worth revisiting.
I'm quite interested in literature, music and science but only a few of the professionally produced sites have caught my interest for more than a few reads.
But now I have The Medieval Sourcebook to turn to whenever I lose interest in the tiresome news of the present, although it's not much easier to figure out what did happen than what is happening. But at least we know the results, and it's always revelatory to me when I listen to the words of someone who was caught up in the events of his day, someone who had no way of knowing how it would all turn out, someone who was involved in the disputes, who had an interest in the results. I always marvel that nobody is interested in these stories.
Here is one, found at random while I was looking for something else. It's from a Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou written about the year 1100. Anjou is the lovely region of France on the lower reaches of the Loire River and its tributaries, an area I cycled through. Somehow or other these Counts ended up as kings of England, among other things. An anecdote of one Fulk making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem while it was still controlled by the Saracens tells how he was only allowed to visit the Holy Sepulcher if he agreed to piss on the altar. The Saracens, "Knowing him to be a man of quick temper, mocked him, and said he would never get into the tomb he wanted to see unless he were to urinate upon it and upon the holy cross. The prudent man, though unwilling, agreed to this. A ram's bladder was found, cleaned and washed and filled with the best wine and then placed between the count's thighs. Shoeless, he approached the Lord's Sepulchre and let the wine flow forth upon it..."
Still looking for Honorious of Autun I stumbled onto something I was looking for a few months ago. This is a series of letters between wealthy landowners in Roman Gaul written just before the complete collapse of Roman authority and the assumption of power by illiterate and uncultured German war chiefs. What is astonishing about the writer is that the was unaware that history as he knew it was at an end. Rome was done, but that was a concept he didn't grasp. Sidonius was the name of this Roman and he paints an idyllic picture of the countryside around Nimes and the great aquaduct where it crosses the Gardon River- known now as the Pont du Gard. I also cycled through this area- occassionally on a Roman road- and camped right next to the aquaduct for a few days while I explored the vicinity. He is visiting friends. "Their estates march together; their houses are not far apart; and the extent of the intervening ground is just too far for a walk and just too short for a ride..." So far were they from any concern over attacks that he amusedly describes being 'ambushed' by his friends waiting at all approaches for his arrival. "Into this trap we willingly fell, no unwilling prisoners; and our captors instantly made us swear to dismiss every idea of continuing on our journey until a whole week had elapsed..." He goes on to describe the amusements prepared for him, including discussions of philosophy and theology, and tells how he had his servants dig bathing holes for him into which were placed hot stones.. the better to help him recover from excessive consumption of the local wines.
In another letter he describes for his correspondent a meeting he had with a king of the Goths. What impresses me is how ordinary a thing it seems, this crashing down of an ancient civilization, how unheroic, how unremarked. Until a generation or two has come and gone and people realize what has been lost. The king is a man of parts. Not sophisticated, but plain. Not educated but intelligent. And he is a man of action, not especially interested in the effete pleasures of his Roman visitor. Sidonius, thinking himself the clever fellow, relates that in dice games, "I myself am gladly beaten by him when I have a favour to ask..." never thinking how obsequious he has become.
Strange as it may seem, this is how history happens.