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Intimations of Mortality

Apr 28, 2020 / terry / 4 comments

We have been here before. The coronavirus pandemic has many precedents. Over the centuries various plagues have swept over our world. Many millions of people have died before their time. From 1347 to 1351 the Black Death killed about 30 million people in Medieval Europe: over a third of the population. From 1918 to 1920 the Great Influenza killed about 50 million people: about 2.5% of the world’s population. Each of these pandemics was as deadly as World War I (about 20 million) or World War II (about 70 million). Pandemics are more worrisome than wars: we cannot sue for peace with a virus. Most of us survived even the worst of past infections. Our systems of immunity will likely once again become victorious in this present pandemic. But just like after a war, we shall be severely chastened. How close we will have come to death will change the way we think. Everything will be seen through the mirror of our own mortality and the transience of our species. The nearness of an ending will distort our thinking. We shall have strange dreams and frightening visions.

Category: Art, Film, History, Literature, Medicine, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Albrecht Durer, Apocalypse, Black Death, Coronavirus, Death, Four Horseman, Grim Reaper, Influenza, Ingmar Bergman, John of Patmos, Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse Pale Rider, Pandemics, Revelation, Spanish Flu, The Seventh Seal

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

Station Island

Nov 25, 2019 / terry / No comments

Station Island is an island in Lough Derg in County Donegal in the northwest part of the Republic of Ireland, very near the border with Northern Ireland. Lough Derg is a small shallow lake set amid low hills. Drainage from the surrounding bogs often gives its waters a russet hue, accounting for its name, “Red Lake” in Irish. Legend attributes the color to the blood of a monster serpent killed by St Patrick. Station Island has long been a place of Catholic Pilgrimage. This post presents some history of the pilgrims and of those who have written about them. Particular attention is paid to Seamus Heaney’s sequence of poems entitled Station Island (1984). The posting is long – like the pilgrimage.

Category: History, Literature, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Hunger Strike, Lough Derg, Patrick Kavanagh, Purgatory, Seamus Heaney, Station Island, The Troubles, William Carleton

“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

Music of the Viola

May 4, 2019 / terry / 2 comments

The viola is much under-rated. The instrument is difficult to play and its sound box is not optimal for its range of notes. Violists are the butt of numerous jokes maligning their tuning and their timing. Nevertheless, in the hands of a master, the viola has a wonderfully rich sound, melancholy in its low register and silvery in the high. Of all the strings it is perhaps most similar to the normal human voice.

Category: History, Literature, Music, Poetry / Tags: Brahms, David Ravinus, Lionel Tertis, Mozart, Paul Hindemith, Percy Grainger, Rebecca Clarke, viola, William Walton, York Bowen

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

Metaphor and Meaning

Jun 29, 2018 / terry / 2 comments

At the close of the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Horatio notices the arrival of the dawn

But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
(Hamlet, I-1: 165-6)

No one is on the hill. Horatio is speaking metaphorically, describing the dawn as though it were a person. His words relax the tension of what has just happened. He and his colleagues have just seen the spirit of Hamlet’s father wandering in the real world where it should not be. Terror is in the air. At this moment, however, Horatio does not see a real person on the hill – this is how the dawn seems in his imagination. He takes comfort in metaphor.

Category: Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: figures of speech, Hamlet, Hobbes, Locke, Memling, Shakespeare, tropes

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

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