Henry David Thoreau

Blue Jays in the garden

Listening again.
Four Blue Jays arguing in the garden.
What can be so important as to cause such a lengthy ruckus?  

On Reading the Odyssey

Stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end have a temporal framework. The story of the Odyssey is built on a timeline of forty days, but the framework expands to include the ten years of Odysseus’ wanderings, the twenty years of the Trojan war, and also contracts into a hundred smaller stories - tales of the war, Odysseus’ travels and  other characters lives, and also lies - products of Odysseus’ imagination and strategy.  As Professor Struck noted, a story may begin with an object such as the scar or a bow, digress into another narrative and then cycle back through time to the main narrative thread. Time contracts and expands in Homer just as it contracts and expands within our consciousness. 

Professor Struck comments that the Odyssey is a story that doesn’t want to end. In many ways it expands endlessly, circling back on itself. The arc of the story is always toward home and peace. Birth, suffering, struggle, and cessation of struggle - the cycle of human life. Odysseus’ peaceful life, a successful ruler, loving husband and father is interrupted by war, by conflicts among the gods and men, yet from the beginning the reader knows that Odysseus -”the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course” will return home, will live to a peaceful old age - will complete the human cycle successfully. Odysseus is the most human of heroes. We need Odysseus to be okay in the end, because his struggle is so much like our own.

Within the forty days of the Odyssey’s timeline Homer retells the cycle repeatedly. Sometimes in years as in Eumaeus’s tale. Sometimes within the arc of a single day in Book 22, the slaughter of the suitors, or within the span of an hour in Book 23 in Penelope’s final recognition.  Or in just a few brief lines, when all of the epic story is compressed into the details of the life of Odysseus’ dog Argos. In Homer time often shrinks into the details and then explodes into the eternal.

Does Homer’s temporal framework have significance for the making of myth? Yes, in that it affirms the universals of human experience. But there is more to consider. The Odyssey is - by common agreement, over a vast period history - one of the greatest works of the human imagination. It is impossible to fit it into  Burkert and Struck’s definition of  myth as a traditional tale told with secondary partial reference to something of collective importance and “told by someone for some reason.” Homer burst through those boundaries. The Odyssey is simply so much more than just a myth. So much more than a “secondary partial reference to something of collective importance.”

In the six lines below, as Odysseus and Eumaeus settle in for the night, Homer tells us everything I believe we will ever actually know about why people tell each other stories:

We two will keep to shelter here, eat and drink

and take some joy in each other’s heartbreaking sorrows,

sharing each other’s memories. Over the years, you know,

a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man

who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles.

My own story? This will answer all your questions …

Book 17 Eumaeus Lines 447 - 452

I’m lucky enough to have always had a room in my house for myself and myself alone. A place where books accumulate slowly but surely until all the shelves are full and stacks grow on the floor, where the walls grow photographs, maps, a thousand stick pins - bits and pieces of a life. After sixty years of no one is allowed to move my stuff, its a more a museum than a study. 

Below is an image of three photographs pasted together as a vertical triptych of one of the  bulletin boards that hang in my museum.

The first panel 

• A photograph of a grandfather resting.  His grandchild has crawled on top of him and is hugging his neck.  

• A collapsed imaginary horse whose beloved rider, a wondering Princess, is urging to rise from the ground and continue galloping about the forest  in pursuit of a dragon.

• “My child is an Honor Student at…” bumper sticker, an oak leaf, business cards, and a postcard of a Tutor house. 

The middle panel

• A shining sun and a joyous moon look down on a colorful house. 

• A map of England, Scotland, and Wales and 

• A partial image of a shoulder, an ear, and a room 

• A second photo of the grandchild resting on the grandfather’s head.

The bottom panel

• On the right, a greeting card showing a small smiling bear hugging a larger smiling bear with the prepositional phrase, “For a Fun Papa” printed above the bears in a white display font. 

• The image on the left is of a cutout photo pasted on an index card of the grandchild sitting in a Radio Flyer. The child’s expression is content. Is she simply happy to be sitting in her lovely red wagon? Or is she being contently patient, sure that soon a hand will grasp the wagon handle and a ride down the sidewalk will begin?

Rose, where did you get that red?

I choose a new rose in my garden. The bush was planted two weeks ago for me by my son and son-law, who gave up their Sunday to refresh my rose bed.

Three days ago this rose, "Forever and Forever" bloomed. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet? Other names: Dream Come True Showbiz Lady Marmalade What do a rose garden and a horse race have in common? Silly names.

However, a rose is a rose is a rose. Gertrude was so right. Touch, smell, draw, photograph and then just walk out in the morning light and you ask, "Rose, where did you get that red?"

The question is profound. Halts the pace of my walk. Opens deep rivers of thought. That deep bright dark red is like the tiny drop of red that appears on my arm when I prick it to test my blood sugar. The pedals are ripples from a stone thrown so many years before.

Rose, where did you get that red?

How to Change the World?

Paralyzed by Global Warming

Are developing countries justified in demanding that developed countries take responsibility for their historical contributions to climate change, and therefore reduce their greenhouse gas emissions before the developing countries do?

A simple answer is - Yes, you break it; you have to fix it. It’s a powerful moral truth that resonates with even the most hard-hearted or morally misguided.

The planet’s poor and vulnerable, particularly in rural Asia and Africa, will be the first to suffer from global warming caused by the historical industrialization and deforestation of developed countries. Those now living on the edge of survival will suffer the most, even though they have contributed the least carbon output. Their basic survival securities -- health, hunger, and shelter are already being affected by rising temperatures.

• The livelihoods of roughly 450 million of the world’s poorest people are entirely dependent on managed ecosystem services; about 2.6 billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. (Cameron et al, 2013)

Scarcity brings political instability and with it further suffering – repression, terrorism, and genocide.  Meanwhile, those of us in countries that have over the last two centuries increasingly used carbon output to build comfortable lives, argue among ourselves and pose arrogantly as failed former President G.W. Bush did in 2000, when he set the tone and temper that the Republican party follows fourteen years later:

• “I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to do is, I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air, like the Kyoto treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty, I think we need to be more even-handed.” (G.W.Bush, 2000)

It is obvious that rural Africans, Indians and South Asian villagers don’t have the skills or tools needed to solve the complex problem of global warming, although they will be the first to suffer its consequences.  Its just as obvious that developed countries should take the leadership initiative in reducing carbon emissions because they alone have the money, resources, and advanced technological infrastructures to find effective solutions that can be used to reduce carbon emissions in both developed and developing countries.   Why haven’t they? Why haven’t massive tax-funded programs to solve the problem been started? 

Here in America two factors interact with each other to produce inaction -  The usual basic human faults: greed, hatred, and ignorance, and a complacency based on a misguided faith in last minute technological miracles - It’s gonna be OK, technology will find a solution.

Americans are paralyzed in a debate fueled by vast amounts of greed - corporate energy company money and the Republican party. Climate Change Believers vs. Climate Change Deniers - the noise of the debate leaves no middle ground for rational action or the creation of effective policy. Most deniers, except for the real crazies, secretly believe the science. The vast majority on both sides, wouldn’t say it out loud, but their plan for a solution to climate change is to stop watering the lawn and turn the air conditioner up. That’ll probably work just fine for their family, too bad about some family in an African village. They have always had it rough anyway.

Our greed prevents any thought of cutting consumption to reduce carbon output. President Reagan, among his many “gifts” to the American people introduced the term, “Tree-hugger” -- branding anyone concerned about the environment over production and consumption as an Un-American wimp. Americans are a “I buy therefore, I am” nation. Do we really firmly intend to continue shopping and the rest of the planet be damned?

We think we’ll be okay, because we believe that our cities and our way of life will somehow be saved by our wonderful technology and not by our poorly funded science programs. Back in the sixties Star Trek predicted that we would take five-year voyages to discover distant worlds, communicate with tiny hand-held devices and talk to each other on giant screens. It did warn us that bad decisions can generate disasters on a planetary scale, but it also gave us a fictional confidence that  push a few buttons and technology can solve our problems instantly without the need to dedicate large amounts of tax money, effort, and resources to solutions that can be applied globally in developed and developing countries.

Meanwhile, the temperature is rising, and those of us who are rational are forced to confront the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with the process of creating and implementing solutions to real dangers. Below are two headlines from this week - May 6 - illuminating our paralyzed condition:

U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

http://goo.gl/U5Iq6u

GOP rejects grim White House climate change report,

Republicans vowed Tuesday to fight back against the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda, dismissing the White House’s massive new climate change report as nothing more than a “political document intended to frighten Americans.”

http://goo.gl/7QGMe5