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Story of Job

Feb 28, 2020 / terry / No comments

Everyone knows the story of Job. A righteous man is tested by God. All that Job owns is taken away, all his children are killed, and he is struck down by disease. Job’s friends advise him to seek God’s forgiveness since he must have somehow offended Him. However, Job insists on his own righteousness. He does not repent. He demands an explanation for why he is being unjustly punished. An angry God appears unto Job in a whirlwind. He proclaims His workings to be far beyond the understanding of Job. He talks of Behemoth and Leviathan. He castigates Job’s friends. He grants Job happiness and prosperity. He neither explains nor justifies what happened.

Everyone knows the story of Job. No one fully understands its meaning.

Category: Art, Literature, Music, Painting, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Archibald MacLeish, Babylonian Theodicy, Byron, Divine Providence, Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Melodies, Leibniz, Robert Frost, Stephen Mitchell, Sumerian Literature, Theodicy, Voltaire, William Blake, Yahweh

Antisemitism

Feb 8, 2020 / terry / 4 comments

Hatred is directed anger. Though we can claim metaphorically to hate unconscious objects or abstractions, hatred is typically directed at another person or persons. Hatred is evoked by suffering that we perceive they caused. Since it leads to actions against these persons, hatred can also be described as “ill will.”

Emotions can overwhelm reason. Passion is not logical. We often hate without any justification. Hatred must then be maintained by fictions that describe the evil nature of those we hate.

Antisemitism is the most enduring and most unjustified of human hatreds. The ill will suffered by the Jewish people has lasted for thousands of years, and has led to countless crimes, the most terrible of which was the Holocaust wherein 6 million Jews were put to death by the Nazi Government of Germany (Bauer, 2001; Marrus, 1987). ;

Antisemitism has been inspired by many fictions. This posting considers the unfortunate power of some of the stories that paved the way to the Holocaust.

Category: Art, Ethics, History, Literature, Painting, Poetry, Politics, psychology, Religion, Sculpture, Uncategorized / Tags: Christianity, Cosmopolitanism, Holocaust, Kishinev, Monotheism, Nationalism, Pale of Settlement, Pogroms, Pontius Pilate, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Richard Wagner, T. S. Eliot, Ten Commandments, Usury, Zionism

“Death is Nothing to Us”

Jul 7, 2019 / terry / 5 comments

Death is inevitable. What it entails is largely unknown. Some believe that it permanently ends an individual’s existence; others that it simply provides a transition to another form of life. Most people fear it, but some consider it with equanimity. Among the latter are the followers of Epicurus, who claimed

Death is nothing to us. For what has been dissolved has no sense-experience, and what has no sense-experience is nothing to us.
(Epicurus, reported by Diogenes Laertius, translated by Inwood and Gerson, 1997, p 32; another translation is by Yonge, 1983, p. 474).

Epicurus proposed that human beings are made of complex compounds of atoms. At death these compounds dissolve, releasing the atoms to form other things. The body decays and the soul evaporates. Once we are dead, we are no more. We cannot feel what it is like to be dead. And the dead certainly cannot experience pain. Death should therefore not be feared.

Epicureanism was popular during the Roman period. A common Latin epitaph summarized the life of the Epicurean as a brief interlude between the nothingness preceding birth and the nothingness following death:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo
(I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care).

Category: Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: atomism, Aubade, Bernard Williams, Cicero, clinamen (swerve), Dante, De Rerum Natura, Democritus, Epicurus, hedonism, Henry James, Karel Capek, Leos Janacek, Lucretius, Makropulos Case, Marcus Aurelius, Philip Larkin, Stoicism, Thomas Nagel

Modern Wheels

Jun 30, 2019 / terry / One comment

The wheel has been around since about 4000 BCE (Bulliet, 2016). The first wheels used for transportation may have derived from potters’ wheels used for moulding cups and bowls. Some early wheels were made of stone, but these were soon replaced by wood which was lighter and faster. Around 3000 BCE spokes were invented, and for several thousand years fast-moving chariots with spoked wheels often decided ancient battles.

By the middle of the nineteenth century wooden wheels for carts and carriages had become fully developed (see figure). The rim was made by bending ash to form curved felloes. These were attached to the hub by strong oak spokes, and held in place by a steel tire.

In the last two hundred years the wheel has changed dramatically. Some changes have made the wheels more efficient (working well) and some made them more attractive (looking lovely). The forces driving the changes are thus similar to those that occur during evolution with its survival of the fittest and its sexual selection. However, wheel innovation is controlled by human design rather than random mutation, and the changes have occurred much more rapidly. And, as in evolution, some innovations do not survive: hubcaps and whitewall tires have become extinct.

Category: Art, History / Tags: alloy wheels, automobile, bicycle, evolution, hubcaps, spokes, tires, whitewalls

Stones of the Picts

Apr 6, 2019 / terry / 3 comments

With my surname it is inevitable that I should become interested in the Picts, a people who lived in Scotland during the first millennium of the Common Era. They left behind many sculptured stones, which now stand in fields and churchyards in the Northeast part of Scotland. Together with the Scots, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, they became the people of Scotland.

Category: Art, History, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Agricola, Battle of Dun Nechtain, Battle of Mons Graupius, Bell-Beakers, Bronze Age, Celts, Gaels, Kenneth MacAlpin, Picts, Scotland, Sculptured Stones, St Columba

Antigone

Apr 26, 2018 / terry / No comments

Sophocles’ play Antigone tells the story of a young woman who defies the laws of the state in order to do what she believes is right. The issues considered in the play remain as important now as they were almost two and a half millennia ago. Should one follow one’s conscience or obey the law? Does justice transcend the law? How does one determine what is right?

In the words of Hegel, Antigone is

one of the most sublime and in every respect most excellent works of art of all time. Everything in this tragedy is logical; the public law of the state is set in conflict over against inner family love and duty to a brother; the woman, Antigone, has the family interest as her ‘pathos’, Creon, the man, has the welfare of the community as his. (Hegel, 1975, p 464).

The word pathos most commonly means the quality of something that evokes pity. However, Hegel uses the word to denote “an inherently justified power over the heart, an essential content of rationality and freedom of will” (p 232). Pathos is the emotional commitment that defines a person – his or her driving passion. Sophocles’ play presents the conflict of these passions.

Category: Art, Ethics, Film, Literature, Music, Painting, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Anne Carson, Anouilh, Brecht, Fates, Irene Pappas, Juliet Binoche, justice, natural law, Oedipus, Sophocles, Thebes

Mitchell and Riopelle

Mar 23, 2018 / terry / 2 comments

From February 18 to May 6, 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is presenting an exhibition of the paintings of Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle entitled Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation. This is the first time that many of these paintings have been seen together. The paintings are stunning, the relations between them fascinating.

Category: Art, History, Music, Painting / Tags: abstract expressionism, abstraction lyrique, Claude Monet, emotions, jean-paul riopelle, joan mitchell, la vie en rose, les automatistes, Paul Cezanne, triptychs

Bruges-la-Morte

Dec 13, 2017 / terry / 4 comments

In 1892 Georges Rodenbach published a short novel entitled Bruges-la-Morte (“Bruges, Dead City”). Although the book deals more with internal emotions than external reality, Rodenbach included in his book 35 photographs of the city of Bruges (Flemish, Brugge). The city thus plays as much a part in the novel as its human characters. This was the first time that a work of fiction had been photographically illustrated.

Category: Art, Film, Literature, Music, Painting, Photography / Tags: Aria, Bruce Beresford, Bruges, Die tote Stadt, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Fernand Khnopff, illustrated novel, Rodenbach, Symbolism

The Mysteries

Apr 4, 2017 / terry / One comment

For over a millennium the Mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis, about 18 km northwest of Athens. The main buildings in the temple precinct were built in the 5^th Century BCE, but earlier buildings were present in the 6^th Century, and evidence of cult-activity at the site goes back to the Mycenaean period before 1100 BCE (Mylonas, 1961, Chapter II). The Mysteries continued through the Hellenistic and Roman ages until their demise in the 4^th Century CE when Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.

What happened during the Mysteries is unknown. Those who were initiated into the Mysteries were instructed not to reveal their secrets. All we know is that they provided their initiates with a vision of the divine and a way to cope with death.

Category: Art, History, Philosophy, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Clement of Alexandria, Death, Demeter, Dionysus, Eleusis, Hades, logos, Persephone, visions

Aspects of Etruria

Oct 22, 2016 / terry / One comment

The Etruscans thrived from about 900 to 100 BCE. Although archaeology has revealed much about their life, even more remains unknown. After the Etruscans were assimilated by the Romans, their written history was lost. Although the Emperor Claudius wrote a 20-volume history of the Etruscans, not a page of this has survived.

Popular ideas that the Etruscans originated in Greece, Turkey or Phoenicia have given way to the idea that they were indigenous to the area where they lived – Etruria. This is the land north of the Tiber River, south of the Po River and west of the Apennine Mountains, comprising the present day Italian regions of Lazio, Tuscany and Umbria.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: afterlife, bronze mirrors, bucchero pottery, Castel d'Asso, divination, Etruscans, portraiture, Sarcophagus of the Spouses, Tomb of the Augurs, Tomb of the Leopards, tomb-paintings

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