My Brother on Marriage
From his anniversary post — good description of the thing, I think!
Right now is a challenging and transitional time. . . .
But that’s life, right? It’s all challenging, it’s all transitional. All relationships are confrontations, collaborations against solipsism, alliances in combat, diplomatic relations between different planets. Marriages are the closest and most mystifying of all partnerships: the twinning of strangers, the merging of galaxies. The alchemical conversion of an emotional attachment into a business arrangement, or vice versa.
His stepdad post is good too:
Middle Daughter turns 20 today.She is one of those rare individuals whose child-self shines through her adult self. As a child, she was dreamy, distracted, funny, very loving, resolutely happy. As an adult, she is still all those things. To have known her for 17 years is to have watched her grow lovely translucent layers — a sweet onion of a human being.
Keep going and you’ll come to his dad posts. At almost 50, he’s in academic (not pastoral) divinity school (always sounds to me like something divine to eat — do they learn to make angelic pastel fudge and taffy?), but given that the most sacred things in Judaism are Book and Family, in either order, I wonder which is his real religious education.
It’s nice to hear my brother being emotionally eloquent, especially when I’m feeling, in that respect, inexplicably mute. Most of my five siblings are having these empty-nest reunions with their spouses. (I say “most” only because one of my sisters is fairly newly married, for the third and best time.) The next generation is pretty well launched, and the generation after that has begun arriving, with the generation before us still here to welcome them. I feel at once very much a part of it all and like a bit of an outlier — like a comet: of the solar system but not in it, with a life cycle stretched to extremes, an eccentric elongated orbit that has taken me far out but not away.
More Lame Than A Wise Latina Dodge
From what little I saw of the first three days of the Sotomayor hearings, she is something of a dud as a witness. Not much sparkle for her resume. Be that as it may, her tone deaf prevarications are not the most shameless moment for these hearings. That will be reserved for friendly questioners of the New Haven firemen. After three days of hand wringing about how “empathy” should not be a factor in selecting Supreme Court Justices, the Republicans are putting on a show of asking people how it felt to have a high test score and not get a promotion. Have they no sense of irony?
Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings: A Centrist’s Lament
I found Sotomayor’s head-down, dogged evasiveness almost unbearable to listen to. I am told Alito and Roberts were equally careful, and that it’s all about Robert Bork, who as far as his qualifications went (very far indeed) should be on the Supreme Court right now, but who was lured out in the open on the content of his ideology — which should not be the measure of a SCOTUS nominee — and slaughtered. All presidents and their nominees swore “Never again,” and the result is this travesty of a hearings process.
It made me reflect on how I often feel the two political parties are ruining our country. Perhaps this is how the real world works and there’s no alternative, but the way real philosophical differences get contaminated and distorted by sports-fan emotions and patronage interests is so disheartening. The net result is an “Our side must win for the good of the country, no matter the cost to the country” mentality. It verges on the treasonous: what is it called when your loyalty to an internal entity trumps country? Very complicated, since each side claims to be the true patriots, loyal to their own vision of the country. It’s as if King Solomon faced two mothers more ready to cut the baby in half than to tolerate the other one having it. The Democrats who savaged Bork did inestimable damage to the Supreme Court confirmation process, and I’m sure examples from the other side are near to hand (the Republicans trying to impeach Bill Clinton instead of just censuring him?).
Is it still the unhealed wound of the Civil War haunting us? The Hamiltonians versus the Jeffersonians? Is it, finally, all about social class? Or what? I suggest revisiting this thoughtful and thought-provoking post of Donna B’s from June. To extend Donna’s thoughts:
“Centrists” or “moderates” are misunderstood if we are seen as wanting to blend distinctions together into an inoffensive gray mush. We want more distinctions, not fewer. What we resent is being pressed to choose between two straitjackets, two Procrustean beds, neither of which fits. Maybe what we have in common is an anti-ideological, antiutopian bias. We don’t lack passion, or fear confrontation, but maybe we get more passionate about embodied cases — particulars — than abstract principles. The truths that seem self-evident to us cross and straddle party lines. We value the flexibility to respond to what’s in front of us without pre-cut filters. Guiding principles are there in the belly, but they feel preverbal, more like an operating system than a manifesto. There’s a sense that as soon as you articulate them you’ve crippled them, curtailed their ability to respond to the full spectrum of cases. “I know it when I see it.” Taoist.
I’ve been traduced by both liberals and conservatives for liking Senator Lindsey Graham (not coincidentally, he first came to my attention as the only Congressman to split his vote on the Clinton impeachment), but I enjoy the way his responses seem unconstrained by ideology (though not devoid of it) and powered by common sense. He acknowledged Sotomayor’s success story and qualifications (citing, in support, Ken Starr), and then told her some of the things she said and thought bugged the hell out of him. That mix of generosity, anger, and humor suits me. So sue me.
A lot of those who write and read here are centrists. We don’t agree on everything but we have in common a certain fluidity and unpredictability. Your thoughts?
Devouring the World, Tiger by Tiger [UPDATED]
The Chinese, and the poachers who supply them, are not going to rest until they have destroyed every last wild tiger left on the planet.
When you put the life of a tiger in one pan of the scale and some human’s arthritis or impotence in the other; and when you then consider that the traditional remedies in question have no efficacy but what is bestowed by the human imagination (that most potent but fleeting and insatiable efficacy); and when you note that the supply of sore joints and soft penises is practically endless (1.3 billion mainland Chinese) while the supply of wild tigers to feed that demand is almost gone (perhaps 500 left in Malaysia, a few thousand worldwide); and when you ponder the irony that the rarer magnificent wildlife becomes, the higher its value, both to the domesticated, deracinated human imagination and to the poacher and the gangster-smuggler . . .
Dan Tri Newspaper on Thursday said a kilogram of fresh-frozen tiger meat costs about 20 million dong (1,130 dollars).
Tiger bones and other parts are often used in traditional Vietnamese medicine. ‘Tiger paste’ – made from boiling the bones of the tiger and said to restore the bones of the elderly – can sell for as much as 5,000 dollars a kilogram on the black market.
Less than 100 of the cats are believed to survive in the wild in Vietnam, where habitat loss and poaching have taken a heavy toll on endangered flora and fauna in recent decades.
According to Vietnamese law, those hunting, transporting or trading in rare animals are subject to a prison term of up to seven years and a cash fine of up to 1,250 dollars.
. . . well, it can make you feel like a self-hating sapiens deep ecologist for a few moments, seeing our planet pullulating with multiplying primate vermin. Yet who’s to say my refined sentimentality about tigers I’ve mostly seen on calendars is any less disgusting a human trait than some Chinese guy’s desire for a tiger’s tireless potency? “Speer-itch-ew-all” yearnings can at least consume their objects’ mojo without devouring the source, but in the muscular marketplace they’re laughably feeble; they come cheap and don’t make anybody any money (well, except the calendar companies). Hey, what do I know, maybe God wants the whole biomass of the planet converted into human beings, ugly critters but with that inner jewel of priceless awareness 98% of which they squander on porn and videogames . . .
Ayatollah Montazeri’s Awesome Fatwa
“A regime that uses clubs, oppression, aggression against [the people’s] rights, injustice, rigged elections, murder, arrests, and medieval or Stalin-era torture, [a regime that] gags and censors the press, obstructs the media, imprisons intellectuals and elected leaders on false allegations or forced confessions… – [such a regime] is despicable and has no religious merit…
Tangent
I’m thinking of this story, but it could be any one.
For the first 12 hours after an incident, tragedy, or event, the news and chatter will be about what happened. From hour 13 to eternity, the news and chatter will be what people said about what happened. Then what they said about what other people said.
How we will know the end of the world.
Recent news reports have mentioned a likely North Korean spam attack disabling computers in South Korea and the U.S. It occurs to me that many countries have cyber-warfare units designed to disable computer communications or to defend against the same, which led me to the realization that nuclear Armageddon would probably be preceded by 20 minutes of people staring at computer screens with hundreds of nonsense messages. The world may end with a bang or a whimper, but it will probably be preceded by a lot of gibberish.
Today’s Dead Musical Instrument: the Viola da Gamba
(Cross-posted from A Quiet Evening)
Some of the ghosts with whom I particularly enjoy having conversations are defunct musical instruments. The good thing about dead instruments is that it sometimes doesn’t take much to bring them back to life. One easy and grateful resurrection has been that of the viola da gamba.
The old gamba is with us again, speaking in its high, nasal voice, like an ambassador from those centuries when it was the principal bowed instrument of European music. And, like any good diplomat, it knows how to fit its style to the message it intends to deliver.
Sometimes acerbic and edgy, telling stories of war and glory to the ladies and gentlemen at home, as in the clip above, with all the drama of that great age of warfare and theatre, the 17th century.
At other times, smooth and eloquent as at a great council from the same century, its head bowed in prayer at the convocation, and its subsequent discourse profound yet courteous, as in this 6-part Fantasia by William Lawes, the last great English composer for the viol (as it was known in English) before the Civil War and the age of Cromwell. Lawes was, in fact, killed on the Royalist side at the seige of Chester in 1645, but not before he demonstrated the manners he had learnt at Court:
Developed in the 1400’s, the viola da gamba, as it was known in Italian, held sway during the same centuries as the harpsichord. Viols were made in various sizes, something like the violin family, but with a few more thrown in for variety’s sake, and played, not under the chin, like the violin and viola, but on or between the legs, the larger sizes being held something like a ‘cello. Viols had six strings, tuned in 4ths with a major 3rd in the middle, like a modern guitar, and commonly had tied-on gut string frets, like lutes, early guitars, and other plucked instruments of the time. The bass closest in size to the ‘cello was often fitted with 7 strings, which was begun in France in the 17th century. Sometimes the bass sizes were played fretless, leading ultimately led to our modern string bass, which is, in fact, the lone member of the viol family to survive in continuous use into modern times.
The bow was also held with the hand turned upwards, a finger or fingers helping to regulate the tension of the bow hair. The so-called “German” style of bow and bowing technique used by some modern string bass players is the only survivor of this method of playing stringed instruments.
An early example of a depiction of the viol is this angel, playing a rather kinky-looking instrument with an equally kinky technique in this detail from the famous Isenheim Alterpiece of Matthias Grünewald of around 1512-1516:
Clearly, some music not of this earth is being made here.
If we fast-foward 2-1/2 centuries, we find ourselves face-to-face with this slightly tipsy-looking gentleman, the last professional virtuoso on the viol, a German living in the London of Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Johnson, one Carl Friedrich Abel:
Abel had his portrait painted by Gainsborough, and wrote music like the following, although his tie-back wig would have kept any flowing locks from getting caught in the strings as this guy’s threaten to do:
The one, great, semi-pop-culture moment for the viola da gamba came in 1991 with the release of Tous les Matins du Monde, a movie based loosely on the life of Marin Marais, a gamba virtuoso at the court of Louis XIV, which starred Gérard Depardieu, and sparked a short-lived craze for viols and their music, especially in France. It’s an excellent movie, except for the complete lack of coordination by some of the actors pretending to play on their instruments, the music actually supplied by Jordi Savall, who is in the first clip in this post.
If we’re back in the dramatic 17th century through that movie, we might as well get a final taste of the young Marin Marais charming the elusive Sieur de Sainte-Colombe and his daughter, Marais being played by Guillaume Depardieu, who actually could play the instrument a bit, and who came to a tragic end last year:
There are plenty of ghosts here, old and new, to keep us company if we want to bother with them. They’ve always seemed more to bother with me, but, as I say, that’s just my particular bit of luck.
—Theo Boehm
Hmmm.
If there were no speech, neither right nor wrong would be known; neither true nor false; neither good nor bad; neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Speech makes us understand all this. Meditate on speech.
For true and false are attributes of speech, not of Things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.
Ambiance 