Art for art's sake.

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As a boy, I wanted to be a great painter.
Even now canvases like Monet’s “Water Lilies,” impress my soul although there’s not much clarity. I can even paint – I have sketches like old naval victories, paintings in the style of Picasso or Cezanne,  Thompson, although Rembrandt’s detailed soul-analysis is a stretch. It’s not even that hard. Not really.

Where is the market? I mean, why bother?
Art teachers, jealous as they were, always assumed I was some kind of expert, a “ringer” who just showed up to show off and make fun of the untalented but sincere persons who take lessons and pay the bills.
They were right. Like the guy who can really play the drums, but makes a living selling shoes – not enough courage to get out there in the trenches, or get one’s head stomped in by critics and fans alike. I figure in order to succeed, i.e. make money, one would have to grab the world’s attention and hold it long enough for someone important to decide you are “in fashion” as a painter. That you are “marketable,” and “collectible” and “in vogue.” Like as in “Good Investment.” Maybe I was just too lazy to do it—to put the time into learning the craft.
Hey! If I was to get some frames, and stretch huge expanses of white cotton over them. Rent the Public Library and Art Gallery – how much could it cost? Bolt or screw them up on the walls, put paint in pots on tables, or on the floor in buckets. O.K. I know what you’re thinking. “It’s already been done! Lots of artists have public participation in their painting projects, and the Old Masters had half of their work done by apprentices…and so called installation art consisting of neat rows of bricks, toilet seats, or even buckets of paint on a table is old hat.”
Yeah, you’re right. But then…you always are. (I’ve never heard you ask a question, or even express an opinion. You know everything.) It is abstract, and expressionistic, and therefore derivative. It’s even nihilistic, and therefore anti-Canadian.
The very first guy that walks in there and says, “Bleep! Any bleep-bleep could do that!” I’m going to grab him by the scruff of the neck, dip his head in the paint pot and bounce the mouthy bleep off the bleeping walls for a while.
It may not be entirely original. One heck of a piece of performance art, eh?
“I couldn’t do it without your help.” Eventually we’ll get this work of art finished.
I may even be able to sell a couple of them. But that’s not really important right now. 
Try to think of it as “art for art’s sake,” and you have to admit; the medium of performance art has really been lacking in some essential quality lately. You know – like violence? Think of it as a great naval victory without the water; ships and smoke and stuff.
                                                     From quiet contemplation comes chaos.

Accolti's Ode to Sleep Revisited

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Thanks very much to Karl Maurer for sending his verse translation of Accolti's Ode to Sleep, with notes:

Night rushes: driving dark steeds in the sky,
    she darkens dark earth with her gentle cold;
and chasing worries from all kinds of people
    lightens weak limbs, as sleep suffuses them.
Yet my tired mind finds no oblivion                       5
    and Sleep, you, too, forever shun my prayers.
Sleep, heart’s own Rest, Sleep, only Ease of Worries,
    come, Secret One, come on your sacred feet,
and with your bough dipped in the stream of Lethe,
    defeat and wet my brows with your light dew.   10
Drive out at last the stubborn crowds of worries;
    and let me worriless pursue your gifts,
so that no troubles of a ruined Age may touch me
    nor grim fears reawaken crueller times.
For you I’ll bring fresh blossoms, freshest casia,    15
    where a sweet-sounding wave runs on light feet,
and that loud bird that has a scarlet crest,
    for you will stain the soil, with its throat cut!
Now let your power tie the exhausted limbs
    while in delight descend the lucid stars.              20

============

(14) To me "tristes metus" seem the subject. One could take them as object; but I think that Sleep does not abolish bad times, but the fears, that bring back bad times.

(16) "facili unda pede": the “wave” I think is that of a brook or spring: as in Horace Epode 16.47-8 "montibus altis / levis crepante lympha desilit pede"

(20) "iuvat et cadunt": perhaps hendiadys = laeta cadunt (vel sim.).

Like Lambs

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), On the Suffering of the World, from Parerga and Paralipomena, II, 12 § 151 (tr. T. Bailey Saunders):

We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us — sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason.

Wir gleichen den Lämmern, die auf der Wiese spielen, während der Metzger schon eines und das andere von ihnen mit den Augen auswählt: denn wir wissen nicht, in unsern guten Tagen, welches Unheil eben jetzt das Schicksal uns bereitet, — Krankheit, Verfolgung, Verarmung, Verstümmelung, Erblindung, Wahnsinn u.s.w.

Saunders in his translation omits Verfolgung (persecution). The same in Schopenhauer's Senilia § 182, except that there he adds death at the end of the list.

I wonder if Schopenhauer might have had an epigram by Palladas in the back of his mind (Greek Anthology 10.85, tr. W.R. Paton):

We are all kept and fed for death, like a herd of swine to be slain without reason.

Πάντες τῷ θανάτῳ τηρούμεθα καὶ τρεφόμεσθα,
   ὡς ἀγέλη χοίρων σφαζομένων ἀλόγως.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who can always be relied on for a cheerful thought to start the day.

Yuan Mei's Outlook

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Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1956), p. 114:

The basic idea on which Yuan Mei's whole philosophy rests is that whatever can be sensuously enjoyed is given to us by Heaven for our delight, and that we are impiously flouting Heaven if we refuse to take advantage of it to the full, or prevent others from doing so. How other people fulfill their duty to Heaven in this respect is indeed no one's business but their own. There must be no 'hiding under beds and spying into private affairs'. I have spoken of Yuan's 'philosophy', but this is perhaps too grand a term. One would expect a philosopher to deal with the main difficulties that adoption of his system would entail. To explain, for example, in Yuan's case, what is to happen if my exploitation of Heaven's gifts interferes with someone else's. But so far as I know, he never does this, and perhaps it would be better merely to speak of his 'outlook'.

Id., pp. 137-138 (on his collection of ghost stories):

A story which Yuan obviously concocted to express his own views is contained in the Supplement to the collection. It is about a man who 'died and came to life again'. He was surprised when he reached the Nether Regions to find a woman from his own village, who was a notorious adulteress, being launched on to a very high-class new incarnation, instead of being (as he would have expected) detained in Hell for punishment. 'Oh, that's not at all the sort of thing they worry about here', the people in the Land of the Dead explained. 'King Yama (the king of the Dead) is a dignified, straight-forward deity. One can't imagine him hiding under people's beds and spying upon what they do together in private.'

Senicide, Part I

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I once heard a story about a former policeman who was asked if he had long term health care insurance. He said, "Yes," while pointing two fingers at his head in imitation of a gun. John Derbyshire, "Going out With a Bang Instead of a Whimper," Taki's Magazine (May 24, 2012), has the same idea:

I have a good selection of guns and have made up my mind that if it comes to diapers, I shall see myself out with a gun. I will not wear diapers—that’s the end point for me, the milestone I am determined not to pass.

In some cultures, the decision is not the individual's, but is put into the hands of friends or relatives or committees, death panels, if you will. The age limit for extermination is quite low in some dystopian fiction, e.g. 18 (the movie Children of the Corn, based on a Stephen King story) or 30 (the movie Logan's Run).

Tim G. Parkin, Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 259-272, has a useful collection and discussion of ancient references to the practice of senicide, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "The killing of the old men of a tribe, etc.". This post is the first in a series presenting some of the ancient evidence. In the following passages from Herodotus (both tr. A.D. Godley), it is noteworthy that senicide appears in connection with cannibalism. E.M. Murphy and J.P. Mallory, "Herodotus and the Cannibals", Antiquity 74 (2000) 388–394, is unavailable to me.

Herodotus 1.216.2-3 (on the Massagetae):

Though they fix no certain term to life, yet when a man is very old all his family meet together and kill him, with beasts of the flock besides, then boil the flesh and feast on it. [3] This is held to be the happiest death; when a man dies of an illness, they do not eat him, but bury him in the earth, and lament that he did not live to be killed.

οὖρος δὲ ἡλικίης σφι πρόκειται ἄλλος μὲν οὐδείς· ἐπεὰν δὲ γέρων γένηται κάρτα, οἱ προσήκοντές οἱ πάντες συνελθόντες θύουσί μιν καὶ ἄλλα πρόβατα ἅμα αὐτῷ, ἑψήσαντες δὲ τὰ κρέα κατευωχέονται. [3] ταῦτα μὲν τὰ ὀλβιώτατά σφι νενόμισται, τὸν δὲ νούσῳ τελευτήσαντα οὐ κατασιτέονται ἀλλ᾽ γῇ κρύπτουσι, συμφορὴν ποιεύμενοι ὅτι οὐκ ἵκετο ἐς τὸ τυθῆναι.

Herodotus 3.99.1-2 (on the Padeans of India):

Other Indians, to the east of these, are nomads and eat raw flesh; they are called Padaei. It is said to be their custom that when anyone of their fellows, whether man or woman, is sick, a man's closest friends kill him, saying that if wasted by disease he will be lost to them as meat; though he denies that he is sick, they will not believe him, but kill and eat him. [2] When a woman is sick, she is put to death like the men by the women who are her close acquaintances. As for one that has come to old age, they sacrifice him and feast on his flesh; but not many reach this reckoning, for before that everyone who falls ill they kill.

ἄλλοι δὲ τῶν Ἰνδῶν πρὸς ἠῶ οἰκέοντες τούτων νομάδες εἰσὶ κρεῶν ἐδεσταὶ ὠμῶν, καλέονται δὲ Παδαῖοι, νομαίοισι δὲ τοιοῖσιδε λέγονται χρᾶσθαι· ὃς ἂν κάμῃ τῶν ἀστῶν, ἤν τε γυνὴ ἤν τε ἀνήρ, τὸν μὲν ἄνδρα ἄνδρες οἱ μάλιστά οἱ ὁμιλέοντες κτείνουσι, φάμενοι αὐτὸν τηκόμενον τῇ νούσῳ τὰ κρέα σφίσι διαφθείρεσθαι· ὁ δὲ ἄπαρνος ἐστὶ μὴ μὲν νοσέειν, οἱ δὲ οὐ συγγινωσκόμενοι ἀποκτείναντες κατευωχέονται. [2] ἣ δὲ ἂν γυνὴ κάμῃ, ὡσαύτως αἱ ἐπιχρεώμεναι μάλιστα γυναῖκες ταὐτὰ τοῖσι ἀνδράσι ποιεῦσι. τὸν γὰρ δὴ ἐς γῆρας ἀπικόμενον θύσαντες κατευωχέονται· ἐς δὲ τούτου λόγον οὐ πολλοί τινες αὐτῶν ἀπικνέονται· πρὸ γὰρ τοῦ τὸν ἐς νοῦσον πίπτοντα πάντα κτείνουσι.

On the Indians, see also Pomponius Mela 3.7.64-65 (tr. Arthur Golding, spelling modernized by me):

Some kill their neighbors and parents, in manner of sacrifice, before they pine away with age and sickness, and think it not only lawful, but also godly, to eat the bowels of them when they have killed them. But if they be attacked with old age or sickness, they get them out of all company into the wilderness, and there without sorrowing for the matter, abide the end of their life. The wiser sort of them, which are trained up in the profession and study of wisdom, linger not for death, but hasten it, by throwing themselves into the fire, which is counted a glory.

quidam proximos parentes, priusquam annis aut aegritudine in maciem eant, velut hostias caedunt, caesorumque visceribus epulari fas et maxime pium est. at, ubi senectus aut morbus incessit, procul a ceteris abeunt mortemque in solitudine nihil anxii exspectant. prudentiores et quibus ars studiumque sapientiae contingit non exspectant eam, sed ingerendo semet ignibus laeti et cum gloria arcessunt. 

proximos U, proximi V

Latin text and apparatus above are from Pomponii Melae De Chorographia Libri Tres. Introduzione, edizione critica e commento a cura di Piergiorgio Parroni (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), p. 166, where U = Vaticanus Urbinas Latinus 1173, a. 1458, and V = Vaticanus Latinus 4929, s. IX². Parroni in his commentary (p. 416) cites the imitation by Solinus (52,22) with variants, as follows:

sunt qui proximos parentesque [parentes qui N, parentes RCH] priusquam annis aut aegritudine in maciem eant, velut hostias caedunt, deinde peremptorum viscera epulas habent: quod ibi non scleris, sed pietatis loco numerant.

I haven't seen Gunnar Ranstrand's edition of Pomponius Mela or his Textkritische Beiträge zu Pomponius Mela (both Gothenburg: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971) = Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia, 28-29, so I don't know if Ranstrand discusses the phrase proximos parentes. Since parentes can mean also grandparents, progenitors, and ancestors, I wondered whether proximos parentes here might mean mother and father, as opposed to more distant grandparents. But maybe Vaticanus Latinus 4929's reading proximi = friends, neighbors, as subject, deserves a closer look, in light of Herodotus' οἱ μάλιστά οἱ ὁμιλέοντες (3.99.1).

F.E. Romer's translation of proximos parentes, in Pomponius Mela's Description of the World (Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 119, doesn't convince me:

Some kill their parents (when they are on the verge of decline) like sacrificial animals before the parents decline from age and illness, and it is both morally right and absolutely pious to feast on the viscera of the slain parents.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for copying some pages of Parkin's book not available via Google Books.

Ignorant and Affected Preachers

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Samuel Johnson, quoted in "Anecdotes by George Steevens," Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), II, 312-329 (at 319):

'I am convinced (said he to a friend) I ought to be present at divine service more frequently than I am; but the provocations given by ignorant and affected preachers too often disturb the mental calm which otherwise would succeed to prayer. I am apt to whisper to myself on such occasions—How can this illiterate fellow dream of fixing attention, after we have been listening to the sublimest truths, conveyed in the most chaste and exalted language, throughout a Liturgy which must be regarded as the genuine offspring of piety impregnated by wisdom? Take notice, however—though I make this confession respecting myself, I do not mean to recommend the fastidiousness that led me to exchange congregational for solitary worship.'

Samuel Johnson, Life of Francis Cheynel:

When they arrived at Oxford, they began to execute their commission, by possessing themselves of the pulpits; but, if the relation of Wood is to be regarded, were heard with very little veneration. Those who had been accustomed to the preachers of Oxford, and the liturgy of the church of England, were offended at the emptiness of their discourses, which were noisy and unmeaning; at the unusual gestures, the wild distortions, and the uncouth tone with which they were delivered...

Anti-Georgic

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Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to this screed by Roy Campbell, directed against Vita Sackville-West, who had won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 for her poem The Land. Campbell's verses come from The Georgiad: A Satirical Fantasy in Verse (London: Boriswood Limited, 1931), reprinted in his Collected Works, Vol. 1, edited by Peter Alexander, Michael Chapman and Marcia Leveson (Craighall: A.D. Donker, 1985), these lines on pp. 205-206:

Sing but of country joys and you will rise,
Praised by the world, from prize to golden prize:
Now to the soil address your bumpkin Muse,
To some old rick declaim your billets-doux:
Or drive, slow trudging down some boggy road
Your Clydesdale Pegasus with creaking load:
When by your bower some nightingale complains,
Sing but like him and with as little brains:
Or, like the brooklet, with as small pretense
To style, to wit, to poetry, or sense –
Squire will accord a fellow Georgian's praise,
And Gosse, though deader than his own dead lays,
Out of his tomb will sprout a sprig of bays:
Seek some old farm (the image of your mind)
Where in some farmer's ledger you may find
Fodder to please the ruminative mind,
Which, thrice-digested, into cud refined,
May clatter down in cantos from behind:
There, safe sequestered in some rustic glen,
Write with your spade, and garden with your pen,
Shovel your couplets to their long repose
And type your turnips down the field in rows.
Equal your skill, no matter which is which,
To dig an ode, or to indite a ditch,
With lumbering cantos to upload a cart
Or with a pitch-fork to unload your heart,
Or with your fountain-pen to spray the flowers,
The hosepipe of your literary hours.
There, while in rhyme you keep the farmer's books,
Your soulful face will scare away the rooks,
While wondering yokels all around you sit,
Relieved of every labour by your wit,
Which, while it fetches, carries, ploughs, or digs,
Or trickles into hogwash for the pigs,
At the same time will leave your talents free
To make each strophe a catastrophe...

Campbell had other reasons to hate Sackville-West, besides her poetry.

Related posts:

• Aversion from Solitude and Rural Scenes
• The City versus the Country

Saint Naso

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J.B. Trapp, "Ovid's Tomb: The Growth of a Legend from Eusebius to Laurence Sterne, Chateaubriand and George Richmond," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973) 35-76 (at 43), translating from a medieval manuscript:

Neverthless many say that Ovid was saved and is numbered among the saints, because during his relegation to Patmos, St. John the Evangelist went about preaching the word of truth. Patmos and Tomis are islands near to each other. And when Ovid, now old, had heard that truth, he was converted from the error of the pagans and baptized by the aforesaid John and became a great preacher, inasmuch as he had already learned the language of that country—as he himself tells in the Tristia: "I have now learned to speak the barbarian Getan tongue". When St. John was recalled from exile, he ordained Ovid, a very wise and learned man, bishop of the land of Tomis. He suffered for the faith and so is known as St. Naso. I have heard this from many preachers.

For the Latin, in a 13th century hand added to a 10th-11th south German manuscript now in Freiburg, see Bernhard Bischoff, "Eine mittelalterliche Ovidlegende," Historisches Jahrbuch 71 (1952) 268-273 (at 272):

Sed tamen affirmant multi ipsum esse salvatum et de numero sanctorum dicentes, quod tempore relegacionis beati Iohannis evangelistae idem Iohannes circuiebat predicando veritatem. Sunt autem Pathmos et Thomos insule contigue. Cum ergo audisset Ovidius iam decrepitus veritatem, conversus est ab errore gentilitatis et a predicto Iohanne baptisatus et effectus magnus predicator utpote qui iam didicerat idioma **** terre illius sicut ipse dicit in libro Tristium:

"Iam didici Getice barbariceque loqui",*****

Cum autem revocatus fuisset beatus Iohannes, ordinavit Ovidium quasi virum prudentissimum et eruditissimum episcopum terre Tomitane et passus est pro fide et dicitur sanctus Naso. Et ego audivi hoc a multis predicatoribus.

This is the type of story one wishes were true. It strains my credulity much less than the speculations of those doubting Tomises who claim that Ovid was never exiled at all, e.g. A.D. Fitton-Brown, "The Unreality of Ovid’s Tomitan Exile," Liverpool Classical Monthly 10 (1985) 19-22, and his followers.

Sancte Naso, ora pro nobis.

Yuan Mei's Outlook

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Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1956), p. 114:

The basic idea on which Yuan Mei's whole philosophy rests is that whatever can be sensuously enjoyed is given to us by Heaven for our delight, and that we are impiously flouting Heaven if we refuse to take advantage of it to the full, or prevent others from doing so. How other people fulfill their duty to Heaven in this respect is indeed no one's business but their own. There must be no 'hiding under beds and spying into private affairs'. I have spoken of Yuan's 'philosophy', but this is perhaps too grand a term. One would expect a philosopher to deal with the main difficulties that adoption of his system would entail. To explain, for example, in Yuan's case, what is to happen if my exploitation of Heaven's gifts interferes with someone else's. But so far as I know, he never does this, and perhaps it would be better merely to speak of his 'outlook'.

Id., pp. 137-138 (on his collection of ghost stories):

A story which Yuan obviously concocted to express his own views is contained in the Supplement to the collection. It is about a man who 'died and came to life again'. He was surprised when he reached the Nether Regions to find a woman from his own village, who was a notorious adulteress, being launched on to a very high-class new incarnation, instead of being (as he would have expected) detained in Hell for punishment. 'Oh, that's not at all the sort of thing they worry about here', the people in the Land of the Dead explained. 'King Yama (the king of the Dead) is a dignified, straight-forward deity. One can't imagine him hiding under people's beds and spying upon what they do together in private.'

Computer translation of 'Ships with Butterfly Wings'

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Une larme tombe pour le sableVagues et vent soupirent en deuilAu-dessus de la mer dans un pays lointainJusqu'à l'horizon, puis une pauseEt puis il est partiLa chaleur du soleil n'a jamais cesséCris plaintif de goélands sans causeEspoir, desesperee, ne s'arrête jamais de chanterClignotant dans l'éblouissement, elle attendLe résultat doit avoir une causeLorsque les navires avec papillon ailesBat dans le vent sur une quête fineAmants déchirés pendant un certain tempsPersonne ne peut dire le pourquoi de ces chosesLes liaisons ont été libérés Chacun est libre d'être leur propreC'est une graine qui doit être seméeEt personne ne peut dire à son destinParfois, il n'y a aucun moyen de gagnerMais seulement à endurer.Lorsque les navires avec papillon ailesCoups dans le ventTransporter votre cœur à travers l'océanC'est tout que vous pouvez faire, parfoisD'attendre et de présenter un grief et à prier.

Art for art's sake.

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As a boy, I wanted to be a great painter.
Even now canvases like Monet’s “Water Lilies,” impress my soul although there’s not much clarity. I can even paint – I have sketches like old naval victories, paintings in the style of Picasso or Cezanne,  Thompson, although Rembrandt’s detailed soul-analysis is a stretch. It’s not even that hard. Not really.

Where is the market? I mean, why bother?
Art teachers, jealous as they were, always assumed I was some kind of expert, a “ringer” who just showed up to show off and make fun of the untalented but sincere persons who take lessons and pay the bills.
They were right. Like the guy who can really play the drums, but makes a living selling shoes – not enough courage to get out there in the trenches, or get one’s head stomped in by critics and fans alike. I figure in order to succeed, i.e. make money, one would have to grab the world’s attention and hold it long enough for someone important to decide you are “in fashion” as a painter. That you are “marketable,” and “collectible” and “in vogue.” Like as in “Good Investment.” Maybe I was just too lazy to do it—to put the time into learning the craft.
Hey! If I was to get some frames, and stretch huge expanses of white cotton over them. Rent the Public Library and Art Gallery – how much could it cost? Bolt or screw them up on the walls, put paint in pots on tables, or on the floor in buckets. O.K. I know what you’re thinking. “It’s already been done! Lots of artists have public participation in their painting projects, and the Old Masters had half of their work done by apprentices…and so called installation art consisting of neat rows of bricks, toilet seats, or even buckets of paint on a table is old hat.”
Yeah, you’re right. But then…you always are. (I’ve never heard you ask a question, or even express an opinion. You know everything.) It is abstract, and expressionistic, and therefore derivative. It’s even nihilistic, and therefore anti-Canadian.
The very first guy that walks in there and says, “Bleep! Any bleep-bleep could do that!” I’m going to grab him by the scruff of the neck, dip his head in the paint pot and bounce the mouthy bleep off the bleeping walls for a while.
It may not be entirely original. One heck of a piece of performance art, eh?
“I couldn’t do it without your help.” Eventually we’ll get this work of art finished.
I may even be able to sell a couple of them. But that’s not really important right now. 
Try to think of it as “art for art’s sake,” and you have to admit; the medium of performance art has really been lacking in some essential quality lately. You know – like violence? Think of it as a great naval victory without the water; ships and smoke and stuff.
                                                     From quiet contemplation comes chaos.

Remembering the Battle of Lepanto

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The Dominican order of Catholic priests apparently has a web site devoted to stamps that it has influenced, including the one at left commemorating the unexpected Christian victory over a Turkish naval armada in the last conflict between oared warships. The outcome of the October 7, 1571 Battle of Lepanto bought Christianity in the West time it would not otherwise have had, and checked what up until then had been inexorable Muslim military advance.By way of expressing gratitude for the result for which he and many others had prayed fervently to the mother of Jesus, Pope Pius V -- a Dominican priest who was the first to forego vestments of "cardinal red" so he could keep the white robe of his order after being elected to the papacy -- added "Our Lady Help of Christians" to the (Marian) Litany of Loreto, and declared the first Sunday in October a feast of the rosary. Mark Shea has pertinent theological thoughts posted today, and I commend them to you.

Quote of the day

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A tip of the chapeau to Joseph Susanka for finding this gem from Flannery O'Connor:

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

(Why yes, I do believe there is a link between that assertion and the underrated, entertaining, and surprisingly moral "Nacho Libre.")

Ignorant and hypocritical?

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As "October Surprises" in a midterm election year go, the Obama administration's public tiff with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over whether the latter takes foreign money illegally seems a small potato, but also perhaps a hot one.

Nonpartisan fact-checking discredited the original charge almost as soon as it was made. True to form, however, the vice-president -- he who implied recent visits to a long-closed eatery in his home district -- was a little slow on the uptake.

As to why the tiff is a stupid one to have in the first place, well, there are positive and negative reasons. Let's remember that business members of the Chamber of Commerce actually create jobs. Moreover, one of the things I encountered while perusing an angry new book (Pamela Geller's The Post-American Presidency) was this very interesting quote from Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. In May, 2009, Stern bragged to Michael Mishak, reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, that "We [the SEIU] spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it."

Given that admission and the name of the union, would it be uncouth to wonder how much of its own dues were a) foreign and b) illegally used to influence an American election? (If SEIU collects no dues from foreign members, then in what sense would it be "international"?)

(The book, by the way, is worth reading, although flawed by indifferent editing and Geller's penchant for hyperbole. There is considerable evidence to back Geller's overall assessment of the Obama presidency, but I could never figure out why a rogue paragraph about fraud in global warmism dropped unexpectedly into a discussion of sharia law on p. 25, for example, or why Geller describes Obama's presidency as "lethal for Israel" rather than simply "dangerous" to that ever-beleaguered country; one can only hope she's not prescient about Israel's fate. But flaws like those are easily forgivable in an otherwise-useful compendium of offenses that does a slow boil through 300 scary pages and is vouchsafed by heavy hitters like John Bolton and Robert Spencer.)

And how did you think he'd react?

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Ace is too profane to quote at length, and glides right past the personality profiles that National Public Radio still does better than any other broadcast outfit, but his righteous indignation seems well-deserved:

"[Juan] Williams shouldn't be fired for making utterly noncontroversial statements about Muslims being more worrisome on airplanes than Lutherans even if he hadn't "saved" himself with the feel-goodery [...] NPR is a left-liberal's idea of "diversity" -- a taxpayer-extorted fantasyland showcasing diverse opinons all the way from the center left to the hard left."

The quotable Mister O'Rourke

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P.J. having fun is always incisive and frequently hilarious (the wording below is P.J. O'Rourke's but the Greek Chorus of hyperlinks comes from me):

"Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option."

Tribulation

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R.A.B. Mynors, commentary on Vergil, Georgics 1.164:

The tribulum was a wooden sledge, the underside of which was thick-set with nails or sharp flints; on this the driver stood or sat as it was towed round the threshing floor (see on 176-86) by his oxen, and it broke up the ears and chaff so the grain could be separated from them....the instrument was widespread over the Mediterranean and Levant, e.g. in Palestine, 2 Kings 12.31, 2 Chronicles 20.3, Isaiah 41.15 ('Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth')....In Latin the idea was so common that the insignificant verb terere tended to be replaced by the more mouth-filling tribulare (as, e.g., edere was by manducare), and the Christian fathers have bequeathed to us 'tribulation' in the metaphorical sense.

Mynors goes on to cite James Hornell, "The Cypriote Threshing Sledge," Man 30 (1930) 135-139, who writes (at 135):

In Cyprus every farmer threshes his own grain, employing for the purpose a very ancient type of implement, known as dukáni (δουκάνι or δουκάναις), which, for want of a better term, may be rendered "threshing sledge." Its special interest lies in the fact that its lower surface is armed with serried rows of chipped flints, which if found apart and the real origin unknown, may be mistaken readily for palaeolithic artifacts. Such an implement furnishes a striking object lesson of what the ingenuity of ancient man, ignorant of metal working, was capable, in adapting a crude and refractory material to a purpose of considerable complexity. Its survival to-day may also be taken as exemplifying the extreme conservatism of the Eastern agriculturist.

This dukáni of the Cypriote is a broad board about six and a half feet long, of which a length of nearly five feet is straight, the remaining portion, about twenty inches at the forward end, being inclined upwards at an angle of from 18 to 20 degrees. The breadth varies in different dukáni from 24 to 27 inches....

Except for a bare margin of eight inches at either end, the straight section of the sledge is studded on the lower side with many rows of sharp-edged flints (athkiatchia), inserted by their bases into long and narrow triangular slots.

On p. 136 Hornell provides the following photograph:




Hornell describes the operation of the dukáni on p. 138:

A chair and sometimes one or more heavy stones are placed upon the upper side of the sledge, midway between the two battens; on the chair the driver takes his seat and with vigorous prods of his goad starts the cattle off, to drag the sledge round and round the threshing floor over thickly strewn loosened sheaves.

For more interesting details, see John C. Whittaker, "Alonia and Dhoukanes: The Ethnoarchaeology of Threshing in Cyprus," Near Eastern Archaeology 63.2 (June 2000) 62-69. According to Whittaker (at 62), "Until the 1950s, the threshing sledge was in common use in Cyprus. Today it has been replaced entirely by tractor-powered threshing machines and combines."

Hatchet Job

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E.A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church. A Translation of the Ethiopic Synaxarium Made from the Manuscripts Oriental 660 and 661 in the British Museum, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1976), I, 170 (fol. 47b 1; on John of Dailam, who lived from 668 to 738; brackets in original):

Then JOHN departed thence by another road. When he found that the men there worshipped trees, he exhorted them to turn from iniquity, and when they refused to do so he came by night among their trees, and prayed to God, and taking an axe [in his hand], he said, “In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost I will cut you down”; and straightway one thousand trees fell down at one stroke of the axe. When the men of the city saw this they believed, and were baptized together with their women and children.

Dailam, John's base of operations, was in northern Iran. In the passage quoted, "thence" means "from Dailam." John was roughly contemporary with Boniface (672-754), who cut down the Geismar oak for similar reasons.

Facts and Theories

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Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 3.10 (760 b 30; tr. Arthur Platt):

Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observations than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts.

ἐκ μὲν οὖν τοῦ λόγου τὰ περὶ τὴν γένεσιν τῶν μελιττῶν τοῦτον ἔχειν φαίνεται τὸν τρόπον καὶ ἐκ τῶν συμβαίνειν δοκούντων περὶ αὐτάς· οὐ μὴν εἴληπταί γε τὰ συμβαίνοντα ἱκανῶς, ἀλλ´ ἐάν ποτε ληφθῇ τότε τῇ αἰσθήσει μᾶλλον τῶν λόγων πιστευτέον, καὶ τοῖς λόγοις ἐὰν ὁμολογούμενα δεικνύωσι τοῖς φαινομένοις.

Sherlock Holmes, quoted by Arthur Conan Doyle in A Scandal in Bohemia:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Accolti's Ode to Sleep Revisited

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Thanks very much to Karl Maurer for sending his verse translation of Accolti's Ode to Sleep, with notes:

Night rushes: driving dark steeds in the sky,
    she darkens dark earth with her gentle cold;
and chasing worries from all kinds of people
    lightens weak limbs, as sleep suffuses them.
Yet my tired mind finds no oblivion                       5
    and Sleep, you, too, forever shun my prayers.
Sleep, heart’s own Rest, Sleep, only Ease of Worries,
    come, Secret One, come on your sacred feet,
and with your bough dipped in the stream of Lethe,
    defeat and wet my brows with your light dew.   10
Drive out at last the stubborn crowds of worries;
    and let me worriless pursue your gifts,
so that no troubles of a ruined Age may touch me
    nor grim fears reawaken crueller times.
For you I’ll bring fresh blossoms, freshest casia,    15
    where a sweet-sounding wave runs on light feet,
and that loud bird that has a scarlet crest,
    for you will stain the soil, with its throat cut!
Now let your power tie the exhausted limbs
    while in delight descend the lucid stars.              20

============

(14) To me "tristes metus" seem the subject. One could take them as object; but I think that Sleep does not abolish bad times, but the fears, that bring back bad times.

(16) "facili unda pede": the “wave” I think is that of a brook or spring: as in Horace Epode 16.47-8 "montibus altis / levis crepante lympha desilit pede"

(20) "iuvat et cadunt": perhaps hendiadys = laeta cadunt (vel sim.).

Disregard of Funeral Instructions

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V. Sackville-West, Testament, in Orchard and Vineyard (London: John Lane, 1921), p. 54:

When I am dead, let not my limbs be given
To rot amongst the dead I never knew,
But cast my ashes wide under wide heaven,
Or to my garden let me still be true,

And, like the ashes I was wont to save
Preciously from the hearth beneath my fire,
Lighten the soil with mine. Not, not the grave!
I loved the soil I fought, and this is my desire.

Apparently her wishes for the disposition of her remains, as expressed in this poem, were not respected. According to T.J. Hochstrasser, "West, Victoria Mary [Vita] Sackville- (1892–1962), writer and gardener," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "She was cremated and was buried in the Sackville family vault at Withyham, Sussex."

Lucian, Demonax 66-67 (tr. A.M. Harmon):

A short time before the end he was asked: "What orders have you to give about your burial?" and replied: "Don't borrow trouble! The stench will get me buried!" The man said: " Why, isn't it disgraceful that the body of such a man should be exposed for birds and dogs to devour?" "I see nothing out of the way in it," said he, "if even in death I am going to be of service to living things."

But the Athenians gave him a magnificent public funeral and mourned him long. To honour him, they did obeisance to the stone bench on which he used to rest when he was tired, and they put garlands on it; for they felt that even the stone on which he had been wont to sit was sacred. Everybody attended his burial, especially the philosophers; indeed, it was they who took him on their shoulders and carried him to the tomb.

Related posts:

• My Bed of Death
  
• Funeral of a Lover of Horace
• Cactus Ed's Funeral Instructions
• Kierkegaard's Tomb

The Good Samaritans

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Jeff Hart and a handful of other drilling engineers from Colorado have friends all over Chile now; it was their yeoman work over 33 days that bored a hole wide and deep enough to accommodate the ongoing rescue of trapped miners.

33 days, 33 miners, one 625-meter escape shaft with a 28" diameter. Gotta love it.

UPDATE: They're all safe; the shift supervisor volunteered to be the last man up. And Sebastian Pinera, president of Chile, also acquited himself well.

See also this essay from Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Just to whet your appetite:

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

And how did you think he'd react?

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Ace is too profane to quote at length, and glides right past the personality profiles that National Public Radio still does better than any other broadcast outfit, but his righteous indignation seems well-deserved:

"[Juan] Williams shouldn't be fired for making utterly noncontroversial statements about Muslims being more worrisome on airplanes than Lutherans even if he hadn't "saved" himself with the feel-goodery [...] NPR is a left-liberal's idea of "diversity" -- a taxpayer-extorted fantasyland showcasing diverse opinons all the way from the center left to the hard left."

The quotable Mister O'Rourke

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P.J. having fun is always incisive and frequently hilarious (the wording below is P.J. O'Rourke's but the Greek Chorus of hyperlinks comes from me):

"Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option."

Computer translation of 'Ships with Butterfly Wings'

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Une larme tombe pour le sableVagues et vent soupirent en deuilAu-dessus de la mer dans un pays lointainJusqu'à l'horizon, puis une pauseEt puis il est partiLa chaleur du soleil n'a jamais cesséCris plaintif de goélands sans causeEspoir, desesperee, ne s'arrête jamais de chanterClignotant dans l'éblouissement, elle attendLe résultat doit avoir une causeLorsque les navires avec papillon ailesBat dans le vent sur une quête fineAmants déchirés pendant un certain tempsPersonne ne peut dire le pourquoi de ces chosesLes liaisons ont été libérés Chacun est libre d'être leur propreC'est une graine qui doit être seméeEt personne ne peut dire à son destinParfois, il n'y a aucun moyen de gagnerMais seulement à endurer.Lorsque les navires avec papillon ailesCoups dans le ventTransporter votre cœur à travers l'océanC'est tout que vous pouvez faire, parfoisD'attendre et de présenter un grief et à prier.

Art for art's sake.

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As a boy, I wanted to be a great painter.
Even now canvases like Monet’s “Water Lilies,” impress my soul although there’s not much clarity. I can even paint – I have sketches like old naval victories, paintings in the style of Picasso or Cezanne,  Thompson, although Rembrandt’s detailed soul-analysis is a stretch. It’s not even that hard. Not really.

Where is the market? I mean, why bother?
Art teachers, jealous as they were, always assumed I was some kind of expert, a “ringer” who just showed up to show off and make fun of the untalented but sincere persons who take lessons and pay the bills.
They were right. Like the guy who can really play the drums, but makes a living selling shoes – not enough courage to get out there in the trenches, or get one’s head stomped in by critics and fans alike. I figure in order to succeed, i.e. make money, one would have to grab the world’s attention and hold it long enough for someone important to decide you are “in fashion” as a painter. That you are “marketable,” and “collectible” and “in vogue.” Like as in “Good Investment.” Maybe I was just too lazy to do it—to put the time into learning the craft.
Hey! If I was to get some frames, and stretch huge expanses of white cotton over them. Rent the Public Library and Art Gallery – how much could it cost? Bolt or screw them up on the walls, put paint in pots on tables, or on the floor in buckets. O.K. I know what you’re thinking. “It’s already been done! Lots of artists have public participation in their painting projects, and the Old Masters had half of their work done by apprentices…and so called installation art consisting of neat rows of bricks, toilet seats, or even buckets of paint on a table is old hat.”
Yeah, you’re right. But then…you always are. (I’ve never heard you ask a question, or even express an opinion. You know everything.) It is abstract, and expressionistic, and therefore derivative. It’s even nihilistic, and therefore anti-Canadian.
The very first guy that walks in there and says, “Bleep! Any bleep-bleep could do that!” I’m going to grab him by the scruff of the neck, dip his head in the paint pot and bounce the mouthy bleep off the bleeping walls for a while.
It may not be entirely original. One heck of a piece of performance art, eh?
“I couldn’t do it without your help.” Eventually we’ll get this work of art finished.
I may even be able to sell a couple of them. But that’s not really important right now. 
Try to think of it as “art for art’s sake,” and you have to admit; the medium of performance art has really been lacking in some essential quality lately. You know – like violence? Think of it as a great naval victory without the water; ships and smoke and stuff.
                                                     From quiet contemplation comes chaos.

Horace and His Father

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Horace, Satires 1.4.105-131 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

'Tis a habit the best of fathers taught me, for, to enable me to steer clear of follies, he would brand them, one by one, by his examples. Whenever he would encourage me to live thriftily, frugally, and content with what he had saved for me, "Do you not see," he would say, "how badly fares young Albius, and how poor is Baius? A striking lesson not to waste one's patrimony!" When he would deter me from a vulgar amour, "Don't be like Scetanus." And to prevent me from courting another's wife, when I might enjoy a love not forbidden, "Not pretty," he would say, "is the repute of Trebonius, caught in the act. Your philosopher will give you theories for shunning or seeking this or that: enough for me, if I can uphold the rule our fathers have handed down, and if, so long as you need a guardian, I can keep your health and name from harm. When years have brought strength to body and mind, you will swim without the cork." With words like these would he mould my boyhood; and whether he were advising me to do something, "You have an example for so doing," he would say, and point to one of the special judges; or were forbidding me, "Can you doubt whether this is dishonourable and disadvantageous or not, when so and so stands in the blaze of ill repute?" As a neighbour's funeral scares gluttons when sick, and makes them, through fear of death, careful of themselves, so the tender mind is oft deterred from vice by another's shame. Thanks to this training I am free from vices which bring disaster, though subject to lesser frailties such as you would excuse.

Id., Satires 1.6.71-91:

I owe this to my father, who, though poor with a starveling farm, would not send me to the school of Flavius, to which grand boys used to go, sons of grand centurions, with slate and satchel slung over the left arm, each carrying his eightpence on the Ides—nay, he boldly took his boy off to Rome, to be taught those studies that any knight or senator would have his own offspring taught. Anyone who saw my clothes and attendant slaves—as is the way in a great city—would have thought that such expense was met from ancestral wealth. He himself, a guardian true and tried, went with me among all my teachers. Need I say more? He kept me chaste—and that is virtue's first grace—free not only from every deed of shame, but from all scandal. He had no fear that some day, if I should follow a small trade as crier or like himself as tax-collector, somebody would count this to his discredit. Nor should I have made complaint, but, as it is, for this I owe him praise and thanks the more. Never while in my senses could I be ashamed of such a father.