Pictures from New Mexico

Sculpture on the Art Gallery Road, Canyon Road (also the home of the Quaker Meetinghouse)

Canyon Road

One of the courtyards in the dorm area at St. John's College in Santa Fe. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are visible.

This little guy munched outside my window all morning on Thursday, and he's out there regularly. I was working on an essay and hoping he wouldn't go away.

The adobe structure of the Santa Fe history museum. The telltale chilis. NM produces more than any other state, and consumes 70% of what they grow.

The morning view during an early hike.

Downtown Albuquerque. The Feline Film Festival let out a few minutes later, and cat lovers flooded la rue.

I had to take a picture of the people taking film of the mariachi band stage right. 

This house also had a lawn sign that said, "In this house, we believe science is real".

What park strips in the desert ought to look like. Take a cue, Salt Lake!

Monica with the friendly neighborhood wolf, not far from the Georgia O'Keeffe museum.

An old railyard (Santa Fe) re-imagined into a terrific low-water urban garden.

Renaissance Dramatists consider human nature

This morning I passed on the 6:00 am Dawn Patrol hike in order to read the General Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama. 

It has been an incredible read, and I'm hardly halfway through the 50 page, phone-book-print chapter. 

The part I've just read prompts reflection. The economics of 17th century English fascinate me. The growth of a merchant class in London somewhat challenged the ideas about nobility being the only ones entitled to and deserving wealth. Suddenly, virtues didn't seem to be the only source of affluence: other traits of the protocapitalist class, such as imagination, diligence, risk-taking, time-consciousness, and a keen sense of the bottom line, produced wealth as well. 

The English had seen, until now, social structure based on a hierarchy in which everyone played his given role; now it became evident that everyone aspired to have more than was his station, though they achieved that "more" with varying success. 

Now, perhaps the most interesting, is to think about what implications this aspiration had for the understanding of human nature. Former economic models had placed the health of the community above the profitability of business venture or of individual effort. Now, the practices of business owners often destroyed the social fabric that had contained economic activity (and the production of wealth) and protected the vulnerable. 

So, what is our impulse? Are we naturally community-oriented and cooperative, or do we all yearn to be individual agents competing against one another? The introduction quotes Marlowe's Tamburlaine, asserting the latter: 

"Nature, that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds."

We take this position for granted today, believing that cooperation is unnatural and in fact often hinders the progress which is propelled by self-interest uninhibited. But imagine living at a time when you looked at your neighbor and thought, "do I want to get ahead of you, or do I want to make peace with you?" Well, I suppose we wonder that today, but I think mostly we come down on the "get ahead" side.

Chaucer

Had to share this. I'm reading an excerpt from the Canterbury Tales for the first time. It's  reminding me of reading The Decameron in my first year of college. Both are a collection of tales from different characters. The Canterbury Tales are from pilgrims headed to Canterbury Cathedral. An innkeeper tells them he'll drive them, and they'll pass the time on the road by telling their stories.

First of all, like Dante when he wrote The Inferno, Chaucer uses the vernacular to write his long poem, which no one else had done. He was writing in the 14th century, three hundred years after the Norman invasion of Britain when French was still the language of literature on the isle. He is, therefore, the first English poet.

I love what Joan Acocella writes here about why what Chaucer has done in one of these tales is interesting:

And then, everything is concrete. In the Merchant’s Tale, an old man, after his wedding night, sits up and croaks out a song: “The slack skin around his neck shook.” Another man, in love with a married woman, Alison, calls her his cinnamon stick. Here, in a translation by Colin Wilcockson, is how the narrator of that tale, the Miller, describes Alison:

This young wife was beautiful, and moreover her body was delicate and slender as any weasel. She wore a belt with silk strips, and, on her lower half, an apron as white as morning milk. . . . She had plucked her eyebrows so that they were fine, and they were arched and as black as a sloe. She was lovelier to look at than the early pear-tree, and softer than ram’s wool. . . . Moreover, she could skip and play like some kid or calf following its mother. Her mouth was as sweet as ale-and-honey drink, or mead, or a heap of apples set out in hay.

What is so witty here is that this woman is characterized, ravishingly, in terms of humble country matters—morning milk, the early pear tree, a heap of apples, a weasel—which is what the Miller, a man of the countryside, would think of as beautiful. Apples, weasels: this is not the pinnacle that English metaphor will achieve—it is not Queen Mab—but it is foremost among the reasons that people love Chaucer.

We haven't even discussed Chaucer in class yet, but this is exciting. I am eager for class tomorrow.

Beowulf and The Spanish Tragedy

The Middle Ages

Beowulf. Reading it is reminding me of the Ancient Heros class with Mr. Rowe at Emma Willard. Heaney's translations starts with “So.” as if it’s the continuation of a former story, of a tradition of storytelling.

The New Yorker article about JRR Tolkien’s translation says that Beowulf is a solitary figure - no parents or siblings, never marrying or having kids himself. Unlike Anna Karenina or Oliver Twist, Beowulf has almost no psychology, which makes the poem “sparkle” with clarity.

The writing is so simple. It sounds like the poetry that Vikings would have used, at least based on my ideas of what Vikings were like. I like the idea that they were terrible foes in battle but thoughtful poets. In that way they are similar to the workmen in “Il Trovatore” who sing beautiful poetry in the beginning of the Anvil Chorus, then during the chorus return to their decidedly working class work as blacksmiths:

See how the clouds melt away

from the face of the sky when the sun shines, its brightness beaming;

just as a widow, discarding her black robes,

shows all her beauty in brilliance gleaming.

So, to work now!

Lift up your hammers!

These two images, of the Vikings telling poetry round the fire and the working men singing about the beauty of the morning sky, speak of the ability for beauty and poetry to appeal to everyone, not just the affluent and literate. All people need beauty!

Beowulf defeats Grendel by grasping his arm and ultimately ripping it off.

 

For the Shakespeare and Co. class we read the Spanish Tragedy today, by Thomas Kyd. The production I watched online while reading to keep the characters straight is dreadful, though it served its purpose. The themes that are similar to Hamlet are the delay of revenge, the presence of a ghost demanding revenge, and the play within the play as an essential element of the realization of revenge.

I also consulted the New Yorker on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and found an article on the New Oxford Shakespeare which conveys collaborator status to several of S’s contemporaries, particularly Marlowe, who was remarkably capable but was killed young in a bar brawl. The editors of the Oxford Shakespeare say that Shakespeare’s telling of history had disproportionate influence on our understanding of history as monotheistic, monarchical, and monologue-based. He told history as a history of kings and their struggles, at the expense of, for example, Marlowe’s broader emphasis on commoners.

Think about the implications! If we had plays that were as wide-read as Shakespeare but told the story of the common people and their fight for justice, we might see a much more just world.

Beowulf is also the story of the single man, the monarch, saving his people and having his own struggle. You know, this is making me question the emphasis on individualism as modern. That implies that the importance of the individual didn’t arise until the enlightenment and the reformation, but Beowulf was the ultimate individual.

Francis Bacon, "Of Truth"

Today was the first day since March that I have been busy all day, going straight from one thing to another. It was thrilling. I find it curious that, having spent weeks in vacation mode, and having hardly done any writing on this blog, I now arrive at a busy and exhausting day and all I want to do at the end of it is blog. Shows that having time does not make one more productive or efficient. We are productive when we have something we want to produce; when we have something to say.

And today gave me things to say. It was the first day of class at Bread Loaf School of English on the New Mexico campus in Santa Fe. 

Francis Bacon

What I want to comment on is the essay "Of Truth" by Francis Bacon, written in 1625 and the topic of today's 2.75 hour class with Professor Nunokawa. It was so exciting, mostly because Nunokawa is the most high energy, overtly passionate teacher I have had.

I want to say only a brief comment here, because I think it's so fascinating. 

Bacon is writing the first essay, of the first essay collection ever published in English, and the first sentence goes like this: 

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

Context: Biblical. John 18:38 when Jesus says, by way of explaining what he's doing on earth, "In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Pilate responds, "What is truth?" then goes out and joins the Jews in the crowd. 

He doesn't listen to Jesus answer. Hence Bacon's "and would not stay for an answer."

Thus professor Nunokawa argued that the essay is, from it's very first existence in English, spoken to the back of an authority figure who is no longer listening. It is a piece of writing that is concerned with truth, where the stakes are actually very high, but it is written from a position of exile. Jesus spoke at that moment from a position of exile. Pilate wasn't listening to his explication on truth; he was only "jesting" when he asked what truth is. But the stakes are monumental! Jesus holds the truth! As does the writer of the essay. 

Today's class shimmered with titillating morsels like this one. Every sentence had its own delights to dissect and debate, and dissect and debate we did, our class of 8. I am thrilled to have permission to audit this class.