Category Archives: History

Michael Meade on Genius

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We all know what genius means in the modern sense of the word:  people like Einstein, Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Beethoven.  As far as I know, the image of the solitary genius, often suffering and at odds with the culture, is an artifact of the romantic era.  The word and original concept came from Rome, where it meant something else.

“In ancient Roman religion, the genius was the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing.  The rational powers and abilities of each and every human being were attributed to his soul, which was a genius.” Wikipedia.  

The Three Graces – Pompeii fresco

In his blog on the Huffington post, Michael Meade has started a series on genius that delves into this classical meaning. Meade says:

“Genius involves deeply subjective qualities and an inner pattern that marks each person as unique in some way and genius tries to leave that mark on the world. Since the genius in a person is ageless it can awaken at almost any age.”

He then adds,

“An old Greek word for happiness translates as having a satisfied genius. Recognizing and following the promptings of one’s inner-genius can be one of the most fulfilling experiences of life even if all else has been reduced to garbage and scraps.”

Michael Meade

In these terms, genius has little to do with most of our cultural assumptions about the word, like IQ, conventional success, or 15 minutes of fame.  It is more like what we mean when we speak of “marching to one’s own drummer.”

I invite everyone to read Meade’s post and watch for the next in his series which will focus on “the genius zone.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-meade-dhl/genius-fame_b_1563235.html

What I’m Listening to Now – A World Undone by G.J. Meyer

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I’m a huge fan of audiobooks and have been since the days of cassettes.  Audiobooks are great for travel, especially over repetitious routes.  I spent last weekend in the bay area to attend some Tibetan teachings, and I’ll be making more trips in the weeks ahead, so I wanted to find something to listen to on the road.

I usually favor action-adventure novels for travel, but this time I chose A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918, by G.J. Meyer.

The opening was so fascinating – history truly can be more fantastic than fiction – that I downloaded the ebook in order to read certain sections in detail.

But why choose such a tragic story for a road trip?

For several reasons.  Mostly because the Great War has held a haunting fascination for me since I read All Quiet on the Western Front when I was sixteen (the author, G.J. Meyer said something similar in his introduction).  Because of my father’s work, we were living in France when I read the book, and older people at that time remembered the war.  Several told us there wasn’t a family in France that didn’t lose a father, or husband, or brother, or son.  I remember sitting in old cafes and parks, thinking that everything must have looked the same to the young men in 1914 who would march into a maelstrom no could have imagined, least of all their leaders.

Like the Titanic two years earlier, the first world war was a tragedy we cannot forget because it marked a loss of innocence for the generation it consumed and for every one that came after.  As the title of Meyer’s book suggests, a world order was swept away in a horror no one wanted.

“Thirty-four long, sweet summer days separated the morning of June 28, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shot to death, from the evening of August 1, when Russia’s foreign minister, and Germany’s ambassador to Russia fell weeping into each other’s arms and what is rightly called the Great War began.”

An assassination should not have sparked a world war.  In that era, assassinations were commonplace.  In the years before 1914, presidents of the United States, France, Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay were killed, as were Prime Ministers of Russia, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Persia, and Egypt.  Kings and Queens of Austria, Italy, Serbia, Portugal, and Greece were murdered, and no armies were mustered.  This time things spun out of control through a series of errors and misunderstandings that makes one cringe when seen through the lens of history.

“Men with the power to decide the fate of Europe did the things that brought war on and failed to do the things that might have kept the war from happening.  They told lies, made mistakes, and missed opportunities.  With few if any exceptions they were decent, well-intended men…But little of what they did produced the results they intended.”

Those results reverberate down through the present day.  Think of Iraq, a nation of sects and ethnic groups that hate each other, created by European diplomats who understood none of that as they drew the borders.  Think of the lesson the world learned from the Armenian genocide – that most of the time, perpetrators can get away with “ethnic cleansing.”

Meyer describes in detail these “decent, well-intended men,” leaders of backward-looking monarchies and empires that were already out of date.  Kaiser Wilhelm owned 300 military uniforms but failed to understand how little glory there was in facing machine guns and poison gas.  Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, didn’t even like his nephew, the Archduke who was assassinated, but he let his generals persuade him that punishing Serbia might restore some of his nation’s fading glory.

Such accounts go on and on and perhaps are the point of this post.  A hundred years ago, political leaders failed to grasp that the world had changed and required new methods and understandings.  Today I believe our political leaders have failed to grasp that the world has changed and requires new methods and understandings.  I spotted a fine example last Friday, just before I got in the car, in Time Magazine.  In her article, “Your Global Economic Mess is Now Being Served,” Rana Foroohar says:

“Not only are the fortunes of the world’s major markets and economies still very much tied together, but the root cause of their problems is the same:  dysfunctional politics.  There are economic solutions available that could calm markets and help countries avoid the risk of a double dip; what’s lacking is the political will to implement them.”

This take on the world economic situation is eerily similar to Meyer’s description of the political landscape a hundred years ago.  Nations are linked together even when they would rather not be, while leaders are lost in the mindsets of the previous century.  Nineteenth century poet, Matthew Arnold described the condition like this:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born

What does one do in such a situation?  There aren’t any clear answers, but a few thoughts came to mind as I mulled this stuff over during my trip.

It helps to think that most of our leaders are clueless instead of the villains I sometimes take them to be.  The thought reminds me that it’s as much a waste of time to indulge in anger as it is to believe they have any real solutions.

Our current politics and economics are mostly driven by fear.  During the run-up to World War I, the Austrian ambassador said, “Fear is a bad counselor.”  His words are as true today as they were a hundred years ago.  Making decisions based on fear is something I try to avoid, though clearly it’s sometimes difficult.  Avoiding most TV news programs is a good place to start.

And finally, there’s something like acting as if this was already the world I want to live in.  What that looks like can change from moment to moment.  Often it’s a matter of small gestures and courtesies.  And yet, if enough people acted in ways that went beyond us and them thinking…

There’s a man named Jean Jaures who did his best to stop the outbreak of World War I.  As a pacifist and a socialist, he was loved by some and hated by others, but Meyer says,

“As a leader, a thinker, and simply as a human being, Jaures stood out like a giant in the summer of 1914…he had dedicated his life to the achievement of democracy and genuine peace not only in France but across the continent…Everyone who knew him and has left a record of the experience tells of a sunny, selfless, brilliant personality, bearded and bearlike and utterly careless of his appearance, indifferent to personal success or failure but passionately dedicated to his vision of a better and saner world.”

Jean Jaures

In Meyer’s opinion, Jaures was the one man in Europe who might have been able to calm the war fever that gripped all of Europe at the end of July.  On the afternoon of July 31, 1914, a confused and unemployed 29 year old named Raoul Villain was walking through Montmartre with a gun in his pocket.  He was planning to travel to Germany to assassinate the Kaiser, when he saw Jaures and some friends enter a nearby cafe.  Ever careless of his own safety, Jaures sat with his back to an open window.  Forgetting the Kaiser, Villain fired two bullets into his head.  War was declared the next day.

Jaures reminds me of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, two other men whose lives and deaths ask us what kind of world we want to live in.  One way or another, our actions answer that question every day.

I know what kind of response I want to give.

Ship of Fools

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Ship of Fools, German woodcut, 1549

While sitting with friends the other day, I heard a woman describe her extended family as “all about issues.”  At holidays and picnics, arguments erupt over politics, gender, economics, and all the social concerns du jour – right-to-life vs. right-to-choose, and who can and should get married.  The woman shook her head and said, “I think I want to live a life without issues.”

That phrase really clicked with me, and the more I thought about it, the more it explained certain “issue oriented” posts that I started recently but never finished.  I’d wondered if it was summer laziness, or if I needed a break from blogging, but no – I saw it in a flash – I need a break from issues!  Not an ostrich move, but an issue fast.

A voice in my head objected – “But…but…but…now that the presidential race is really on, aren’t these issues more important than ever?  Doesn’t the future of the Republic and who knows what else hang in the balance?”  One thought led to another, and the phrase, “ship of fools” came to mind.   I found myself humming The Grateful Dead’s, “Ship of Fools.”  I cranked it up when I got home and logged in to explore the theme.  What follows is just a hint of the history of the image and its vast metaphoric possibilities.

And yes, there’s a nice Grateful Dead clip at the end of the post you can listen to while you read…

Hieronymus Bosh, “Ship of Fools,” c. 1490-1500, detail

Wikipedia says, “The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction.“

It’s surprising that the Ship of Fools/Ship of State analogy has yet to be picked up this year, with its “deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers,” but there’s more than allegory bound up with the phrase.  The same Wikipedia entry details the origin of the image:

“Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew’, had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘Ship of Fools’ crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.” – Jose Barchilon’s introduction to Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault.

On the literal level, this “delightful, yet horrible” custom is not entirely a thing of the past.  We can think of New York City in 2009, with it’s offer to homeless people of free one-way tickets to anywhere else.  The same thing happens here, when overworked neighboring social service agencies “dump” their homeless in Sacramento county.

As an imaginal image, The Fool still evokes powerful responses of fear and fascination in the Western psyche.  The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana in the Tarot, evoking “beginner’s mind,” that mix of wisdom and naiveté with which we begin the spiritual path, or depending on your belief system, each new incarnation in the world (or both).

From his studies of Irish folklore, Yeats learned that among the fairies, the Queen and the Fool each share tremendous power.  A mortal may survive a “stroke” given by one of the other fairies, but nothing in heaven or earth can save you if you get on the wrong side of the Fool or the Queen.

While Europeans consigned them to ships, and later to institutions like Bedlam, some native American tribes considered their “fools” as sacred, for they had clearly been touched by the spirits.  I’m reminded of Theodore Roethke’s poem, In a Dark Time, when he says, “What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”

The image of the Ship of Fools turns up in movies, music and books, most recently in Ship of Fools, 2009, by Fintan O’Toole, an Irish journalist who uses the metaphor to describe “the Irish political establishment and their self-deception regarding the economic situation in the country.”

This wanders into dangerous territory for someone on an issue-fast – it cuts too close to certain Americans seeking office – “deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction.”

So let’s adjourn to the Grateful Dead!  “Ship of Fools,” by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, was first performed in 1974.  Here is an excellent clip from the 1989 summer solstice show at Shoreline Amphitheater.  Enjoy!

Went to see the captain
strangest I could find
Laid my proposition down
Laid it on the line;
I won’t slave for beggar’s pay
likewise gold and jewels
but I would slave to learn the way
to sink your ship of fools.

What Ancient Bones Tell Us About Being Human

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Last week a remarkable show ran on PBS, “The Bones of Turkana,” which documents Richard Leakey’s search for the origin of the human species. Convinced that the Turkana Basin in Kenya is the place where we all began, Leakey, his wife, Meave, and their team have excavated the region around Lake Turkana since the 1960’s.

Richard Leakey beside a scaled computer generated figure of Turkana Boy who lived 1.6 million years ago. Photo courtesy J.J. Kelly/National Geographic Television.

This documentary, largely narrated by Leakey, gives a real feel for the region and the painstaking work of uncovering our past, but the most interesting questions concern what it means to be human.  Computer simulations picture early hominids who lived hundreds of thousand years apart.  At what stage, at what point in time, did our ancestors become human?  What core attributes distinguish us from other mammals?  In the 1980’s, Leakey founded the Turkana Basin Institute to explore this and related questions.

Filmmaker, John Hemingway (left) and his crew filming, “The Bones of Turkana.” Photo by Katie Carpenter.

Language is one key attribute Leakey says, along with walking upright and using tools.  Communication, walking on two legs, and tool use are not  exclusively human traits, so Leakey expands on his nuanced criteria:

“We know birds use tools and chimps and insects and lots of mammals. But to take a block of very hard stone and to take another stone and fashion an object from it, that’s something different. You have to “see within” the stone to know what you’re fashioning before you fashion it. You have to project an idea.  That’s a step that no other tool maker uses.” http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/bones-of-turkana-meave-and-ri.html

Leakey bases his final core criterion on the 1.6 million year old skeleton he calls, Turkana Boy.  This young person apparently suffered from spinal deformities.  He was not a robust adolescent and could not have warded off predators or hunted on his own.  Leakey identifies the final key human trait as compassion.  This is something he knows about first hand.  Since losing his legs in a plane accident in 1993, Leakey has had to rely on the kindness of others to help him survive and thrive.

PBS has made the entire program available to watch at this link:  http://video.pbs.org/video/2235479708/.  It’s a fascinating account.

Ancient Mayan Newsflash: The World is Not Going to End in December

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We can all breathe easier on this score, according to a recent find at Xultan, in northeast Guatemala.  Archeologists discovered a wall in a small room that seems to have functioned as a blackboard for Mayan astronomers.  The 1200 year old calculations represent the oldest known Mayan astronomical tables, suggesting a future at least 6,000 years long.

Courtesty, National Geographic.

“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” asked Anthony Aveni of Colgate University, an expert on Mayan astronomy.  Aveni and others published their findings Friday, in the journal, Science.

Independent researchers call the find very significant.  The results of Mayan calculations of moon phases and the position of the Sun, Mars, and Venus were known from public monuments, but up until now, the means of calculation were unknown.  Aveni suggests the scribes may have been  “geeks … who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations…”

Rain forest location of the find – Courtesy National Geographic.

At the end of the year, when we no longer have the the elections to worry about, and all your friends are starting to think of apocalypse, you can tell them about the Mayan geeks, and suggest they chill.

You can read more about the find here: http://tinyurl.com/cw4aqzx

Identifying a Civil War Soldier

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For those interested in Civil War history, there’s a marvelous story on NPR.org today.  A collector and his family donated 1,000 photographs of enlisted soldiers from North and South to the Library of Congress, and reporter, Ramona Martinez tells of her quest to learn the identity of one of these men who intrigued her with his flamboyant uniform and dashing pose.  You can read the story and see the photograph here:  http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150288978/unknown-no-more-identifying-a-civil-war-soldier.

The collector, Tom Liljenquist, gave Martinez her first clue, pointing out that the young soldier had carved his initials, T.A., into the stock of his rifle.  At the West Point Museum, Martinez learned that the Zouave-like uniform belonged to just one regiment, the 14th Brooklyn, sometimes called the “Red Legged Devils, for the bright red pants they wore.  The 14th Brooklyn served in some of the fiercest fights of the war, including Antietam and Gettysburg

Martinez plugged this information into the National Park Service’s Civil War Database http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.cfm, and found just four men with initials, T.A., in the regiment.  A National Archives researcher helped her narrow it down to two possibilities.  Armed with vital statistics, including the height of the men, Martinez found an antiques dealer in Gettysburg who owned a musket like the one shown in the photograph.  Using the gun as a yardstick, they identified the soldier as Thomas Ardies, who stood 5′ 4 1/2″ tall.

Ardies was wounded at Chancellorsville, but survived the war.  He emigrated to Canada, where pension record notes, “He was always considered a bachelor by all who knew him in the community where he was widely known and most respected.”  Ardies married at age 75, five years before his death, and is buried in Ontario.

Those who have followed this blog for a while know I am fascinated by Civil War history.  Ramona Martinez search for the details of one private soldier’s life highlight an area that’s not as well known as the stories of generals and major campaigns.

I wonder a lot about the lives of private soldiers, during and after the war.  The battles were as horrendous as those of the First World War fifty years later, but history does not record a “lost generation” after the earlier conflict.  Bitterness, economic hardship, and instances of violence,yes, but not the world-weariness that characterized veterans of later wars.  More Viet Nam veterans died of suicide after the war than were lost on the battlefields – nothing like that happened after the Civil War.

We always see history through the filter of our own sensibility.  It’s easy for us to believe the casual brutality we find in the pages of Cold Mountain. It’s harder to imagine the idealism we see in pictures of men like Thomas Ardies.  Maybe that’s why the old photographs are so haunting.

Of Greensleeves and Christmas Carol Karma

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Regular readers will recall that at the start of the  season, I posted a wee diatribe on how much I hate what passes for Christmas music in most of the stores. http://wp.me/pYql4-1tv

Here’s where karma part comes in:  Mary is organizing a Christmas dinner for a large number of people at a local church.  I already volunteered to help with food prep, but the other day she gave me a further assignment.   “I need you to make a three hour playlist of Christmas music, and it has to be respectful.”

That actually is not a problem.  I love Christmas music – if I didn’t, the stuff in the stores wouldn’t bother me.  As I started to rummage through what I have on iTunes, I got caught up in listening to various versions of “Greensleeves,” and wondering – even though I love the song – what it has to do with Christmas.  Tracking its origins was not unlike researching a folktale.  I also found that everyone from Homer Simpson to John Coltrane has covered it, so I invite you to have a listen as I share a bit of what I learned about this haunting song.  Let’s begin with Homer (relax – his clip is only 14 seconds long).

Greensleeves is a traditional English folksong, of the sort known as a “romanesca.”  A broadside ballad of this name was registered at the London Stationer’s Company in Sept., 1580, as “A New Northern Dittye of the Lady Greene Sleeves”.  A broadside was a ballad or poem, printed on one side of a cheap sheet of paper and common between the 15th and 19th centuries.  Here is a traditional version, sung by Méav Ní Mhaolchatha’s on the Celtic Woman tour:

There’s a persistant rumor that Henry VIII wrote the song while courting Anne Boleyn, since at first she apparently “cast [him] off discourteously,” but music experts dismiss the legend.  Greensleeves is an Elizabethan song, composed in an Italianate style that did not reach England until after Henry’s death.

Another common interpretation is that the song refers to a promiscuous woman or a prostitute.  At the time, the color green had sexual connotations.  One translator of Chaucer notes that in the Canterbury Tales, green “was the colour of lightness in love.”  I tend to agree with this interpretation based on what I know of pre-Christian nature religion in the British isles, and the Pan-like “Green Man,” whose face still peeks out at worshipers in many British churches and cathedrals:

Green Man at Dore Abbey, Herefordshire

A reference to Greensleeves in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602, suggests both the popularity of the song, and coming from Falstaff, a bawdy interpretation.  The popularity of the song has continued unbroken to the present day.  Here my favorite modern interpretation, by Jethro Tull:

In 1865, William Chatterton Dix wrote “What Child is This,” to the tune of Greensleeves, which made both songs popular during the Christmas season.  Here is the version I’m going to use for the Christmas dinner project.  Josh Groban knows how to stir the soul, and that is something we really need this year.  Elizabethan renditions of Greensleeves have historical interest but tend to be slow and even lugubrious.  Much as I love ballads of trials and woe, this year we need all the hope we can get and the kind of music that can awaken it.

***

I wish each and every one of you a joyous holiday in whatever way you celebrate it.  I’m going to take a blogging break for a week or so, to walk, to read, to meditate, to catch some of the great year end movies, and in general, to simply kick back for R&R.  I will be back right around the new year.

Peace to all of you!

Forgotten Hero Honored – 67 Years Later

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At 5:30am on the morning of Dec. 16, 1944, a massive German artillery barrage along an 80 mile front in the Ardenne Forest opened the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest conflict of WWII.  The battle, which raged until late January, cost 89,000 American casualties, including 19,000 killed.

Some of the fiercest fighting took place in the Belgian town of Bastogne, at a crossroads the Germans needed to capture in order to split the Allied armies in half.  Bastogne was the town where American general, Anthony McAuliffe, famously answered, “Nuts!” when ordered to surrender.  The town sustained a massive barrage, but never fell, and many stories of heroism later emerged.  This week a forgotten hero was honored – Augusta Chiwy, a Congolese nurse, now 93 years old, who saved hundreds of lives.

Augusta Chiwy. Photo by Clark Boyd

Chiwy’s story came to light, in great part, because of Martin King, a Scottish military historian. King has lived in Belgium for 30 years, interviewed countless veterans of the Bulge, and co-authored a book on the battle. He explained how Chiwy, just 4’8″ tall, repeatedly braved artillery and machine gun fire, in freezing weather, to drag wounded soldiers to safety.  “What I did was very normal,” Chiwy said. “I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”

On Christmas Eve, 1944, an Allied aid station where Chiwy was sipping champagne with the only doctor in town was hit by a German shell.  She was blown through a wall, but afterwards, got up and began helping the doctor, who also survived, tend to the wounded.  Several history books said Chiwy died in the blast, but King did not believe it.  He finally found her living in a retirement home in Brussels.  It took some time before she would speak of her experiences.  King noted that nowadays she would likely be diagnosed with PTSD.

The more he listened to her, the more convinced King became that Augusta Chiwy should be honored for her service.  He began to write the King of Belgium and the US Military.  At last it paid off.  Chiwy was knighted by the Belgian king in June.  General David Petraeus, who once commanded the 101st Airborne, which defended Bastogne, wrote her a letter of appreciation, and earlier this week, she was awarded the US Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service.

Col. JP McGee, who commands the “Bastogne Brigade” of the 101st Airborne Division, gave her the award and said:

“M’aam, you embody what is best and most kind in all of us…It is an honor to share the stage with you and to be able to say on behalf of US veterans everywhere — thank you. The number of lives that you touched is incalculable. There are men and women in America who would never have a father or grandfather if you hadn’t been there to provide them basic medical care.”

After the ceremony, Chiwy said, “I’ve had a good life. I’ve got my children, and my grandchildren.  And,” she added, pointing to her head with a smile, “I’ve still got my marbles.”

You can listen to the story, here:  http://www.theworld.org/2011/12/nurse-honored-augusta-chiwy/