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Knowledge of Good and Evil

Apr 18, 2024 / terry / No comments

According to the book of Genesis, Yahweh created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden of Eden. He commanded them on pain of death not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Eve was convinced by the Serpent to eat of the tree, and she in turn convinced Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. The interpretation of this myth has led to the Christian idea that humanity is forever tainted by “Original Sin,” and that our only hope for immortality is through the sacrifice of Christ which offers redemption from sin and entry into eternity to those who believe in him. The concept of Original Sin has become dangerously ingrained in Christian thinking, and needs reworking,

Category: Art, Ethics, Literature, Painting, Religion / Tags: Adam, Augustine, Eden, Eve, Freedom of Choice, Milton, Morality, Original Sin, Paradise Lost, Pelagius, Serpent

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Mar 10, 2024 / terry / No comments

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: An Lushan Rebellion, Chan Buddhism, Chang'an, Chinese Poetry, Daoism, Kenneth Rexroth, Li Bai, Spring View, Stephen Owen, Tang dynasty, translation, Wang Shimin, Wang Wei

Basho’s Journey to the North

Oct 29, 2023 / terry / 4 comments

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), one of the most famous poets of Japan, was a master of the haiku, a poetic form in which an abundance of meaning is concentrated into a paucity of syllables. Basho travelled widely in Japan, writing about t his experiences in a fascinating mixture of prose and poetry. In 1689 he undertook his longest journey: from Edo into the far north of Japan, a region known as Oku. His record of that journey is known as Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the North).

Category: History, Literature, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Bush Clover, haiku, Matsuo Basho, Matsushima, Morikawa Kyoriku, Oku no Hosomichi, Yamadera, Yosa Buson

Zeno of Elea

Aug 12, 2023 / terry / No comments

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5^th Century BCE. He described a set of paradoxes to prove that space and time are continuous and cannot be divided into discrete parts. The most famous of these are the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, which purportedly shows that Achilles could never catch up with the much slower Tortoise, and the Paradox of the Arrow, which shows that an arrow in flight is always stationary.

Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Algebra, Archilles and the Tortoise, Arrow Paradox, Arthur Eddington, Calculus, Entropy, Gravity, Infinite Series, Le Cimetiere Marin, Ludwig Boltzmann, Paul Valery, Rudolf Clausius, Time and Space, Velia, Zeno of Elea

Robinson Jeffers

May 20, 2023 / terry / No comments

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California’s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel Point using rocks from the shore. From 1920 to 1924 he built by himself the adjacent Hawk Tower. Jeffers became famous soon after the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924. This book and those that followed included both long narratives and shorter lyrics. His epics were bloody and tragic; his verse was free and passionate. Underlying his poems was an austere philosophy of “inhumanism.” This compared the transience of humanity to the persistence of the natural world, and proposed that we should detach ourselves from the passions of mankind and simply celebrate the beauty of the universe. Over the next decade, Jeffers published extensively and in 1932 his photograph graced the cover of Time. After World War II, his outrage at the death and destruction that occurred during the war and the severity of his inhumanist philosophy led to controversy and obscurity. In more recent years, the environmental movement has found inspiration in his love of the natural world and his anger about how humanity has despoiled it.

Category: Literature, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: Big Sur, Carmel, Edward Weston, Environmentalism, Humanism, Inhumanism, No Man Apart, Pacifism, Silent Spring, Tamar, Una Jeffers

Edward Hopper

Mar 26, 2023 / terry / 2 comments

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) painted the independence and the loneliness of 20^th-Century America. He was a realist in the days when most painters tended toward the abstract. Yet his paintings incite the imagination far more than the works of any abstract expressionist. His enigmatic images force the viewer to wonder what is going on:

Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don’t tell stories. What they do is suggest—powerfully, irresistibly—that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He shows us a moment in time, arrayed on a canvas; there’s clearly a past and a future, but it’s our task to find it for ourselves. (Block, 2016, p viii).

More than any other painter, Hopper has inspired writers to find the stories and meanings behind his paintings. This post summarizes his life, describes his working methods, and presents some of his pictures together with the writings they have stimulated.

Category: Art, Film, Literature, Painting, Photography, Poetry / Tags: Degas, Edward Hopper, Ernest Farrés, Eugène Atget, Greenwich Village, James Hoggard, Jo Nivison, John Updike, Leonard Michaels, Manet, Mark Strand, New York City, Robert Frost, Robert Mezey

The Cathars

Feb 11, 2023 / terry / 3 comments

The Cathars

From the 12^th to 15^th Centuries groups of people called the Cathars lived quietly in various regions of Western Europe – Northern Italy, the Rhineland and, most especially, Southern France. They followed the moral teachings of Jesus, forsaking worldly goods and loving one another, but they did not believe in the basic theology of Christianity. They considered that the world was evil, that human beings were spirits imprisoned in the flesh, and that the soul could only be set free at death if one had lived a life of purity. The Catholic Church considered these beliefs heretical, and in 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a crusade to eradicate the heresy. Named after the inhabitants of the city of Albi which had a flourishing Cathar population, the Albigensian Crusade lasted from 1209 until 1229. After years of terrible violence and cruelty, most of those who professed Cathar beliefs were dead. All that now remains of these peaceful people are the ruins of the hilltop castles in which they sought refuge.

Category: Architecture, Art, Ethics, History, Literature, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Albi, Arnaut Daniel, Bogomils, Carcassonne, Cathars, Crusades, Dominicans, Dualism, Heresy, Innocent III, Langudoc, Peyrepertuse, Simon de Montfort, Toulouse, Troubadours

The Divine Feminine

Aug 15, 2022 / terry / No comments

All the major religions of the present world are androcentric in nature and misogynistic in practice. The following are some typical injunctions in the Christian scriptures:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.
And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (I Corinthians 14: 34-35)

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (1 Timothy 2: 11-12)

These rulings are in spite of (or perhaps because of) women being more attentive to religious teachings, and participating more often in religious services than men (Pew Research Foundation, 2016). The two passages nevertheless serve a purpose – they provide clear evidence that the New Testament does not always represent the word of God.

The androcentricity of organized religion differs completely from prehistoric religious beliefs, wherein God was more likely female than male (Stone, 1978). Over recent centuries, however, female aspects of the godhead have become more and more recognized. This posting briefly considers some of the manifestations of the divine feminine, and mentions what might be involved in a feminist theology.

Category: Art, Literature, Music, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Buddhism, Christianity, Eternal Feminine, Feminist Theology, Goethe's Faust, Gounod, Hinduism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mahler, Primordial Mother, Sophia, Theosophy, Venus Figurines, Virgin Mary, Wisdom

Searching for the Dao

Jul 1, 2022 / terry / No comments

This post presents some ideas about the Dào (“Way”) as described in the Dàodéjīng (“Book of the Way and its Virtue”), that legend claims was composed by Lǎozī in the 5^th Century BCE. The Dào cannot be explained in words. But that has never stopped anyone from writing about it.

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Ancient China, Chinese Calligraphy, Chinese Painting, Daodejing, Daoism, Lao Tzu, Laozi, Ni Zan, Tao Te Ching, virtue

Thoughts on the Kaballah

Jun 18, 2022 / terry / No comments

The Kabbalah is a body of Jewish thought based on mystical insight into the nature of God and an imaginative interpretation of the Torah. The word itself means “received.” According to legend this special knowledge was imparted by God either to Adam in Eden or to Moses on Sinai, and handed down thereafter from generation to generation to an enlightened few, who preserved the received wisdom and taught it to their students. This post presents some thoughts about the Kabbalah from someone who, though neither Jewish nor fluent in Hebrew, is fascinated by the intricacy of its ideas.

Category: Ethics, History, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Religion / Tags: Ein Sof, Esotericism, Judaism, Moses de Leon, Mysticicm, Pico della Mirandola, Religion, Sefirot, Tikkun HaOlam, Zohar

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