Flamingos

Checking my referral stats, it seems that not only ABBA pictures, but an older post about Don Featherstone plastic flamingos also drives a little traffic my way. I'm going to ride that wave from time to time as well. It all fits together, somehow.



The picture is from a site called Just Pink Flamingos, from which you can purchase a calendar of flamingo arrangements, or a flamingo nightlight. It has a sister site called Just Garden Gnomes. I'm wondering which Emily will get for Christmas next year.

Post 2200 - The Same Palin Post

Just repeating what I've been saying for 18 months. I am lukewarm about Palin, but the evidence her opponents bring up to show she's stupid only shows their own stupidity. The latest is this writing-on-the-hand thing.

I have "Don't take it personally" written on the top line of my to-do legal pad every day. Whatever else I may lack, I do have IQ candlepower. I don't write on my hand, but I do write on random scraps of paper to carry in my pocket and hold in my hand at times. Writing five words on your hand as telegram reminders of the main points to hit during a Q&A period is simply not evidence of any intellectual lack. The objection is entirely cultural, because People Like Us don't write on their hand, and have negative associations with it. To them, it is entirely more acceptable to read off two teleprompters when speaking to a 6th grade class, because that all very dignified looking.

It's just nuts. The Couric interview, even if it is conveniently edited as Palin claims, can be legitimately used as minor evidence that Sarah isn't that smart. But it's not that big a deal. Lots of people in Washington say much dumber stuff yet retain a reputation for intelligence for reasons of smoothness and culture. Lots of highly-placed people, in fact, including...oh never mind. You can generate the high-profile list yourself.

Here's a modest proposal. When making an argument for someone's qualifications of any sort - intelligence, courage, experience, common sense, fashion sense, or kindness to wombats - describe first your criteria, then rate the person. In this way you expose yourself to the very reasonable risk that 1) others might challenge your criteria, or 2) others may point out that your own favorites don't meet the criteria. If you are unwilling to take that risk, you shouldn't be opening your mouth.

Tragedy?

Akafred also sent along a BBC article about languages going extinct, The Tragedy of Dying Languages. Anthropologists are very big on this topic, insisting that it would be a terrible thing if the endangered languages of the world - about half of the 6,000+ - disappeared. Linguist K David Harrison's sentiments are typical.

Though it belongs solely to them and has inestimable value to their people, they do not hoard it. In fact they are often eager to share it. What can we learn from these languages before they go extinct? And why should we lift a finger to help rescue them?

As the last speakers converse, they spin individual strands in a vast web of knowledge, a noosphere of possibilities. They tell how their ancestors calculated accurately the passing of seasons without clocks or calendars. How humans adapted to hostile environments, from the Arctic to Amazonia.

I am less certain.

As a person fascinated by languages and historical linguistics, you might expect me to be very strongly on the preservation side of this argument. And certainly, the loss of any human knowledge is a negative. But I don't find the arguments compelling that we should get all that worked up.

It is charming, and worthy of adventure plots in children's fiction to think of wise old grandmothers passing on tribal knowledge to willing descendants, including language and life lessons which figure prominently in the heroine's coming-of-age. But to learn a language fully one must grow up with it as a conversational language. When no young children are learning a language, it will die. Governments encouraging Gaelic or Welsh in school can slow the tide, or perhaps even bridge it over to a time when a native language revives, but this is quite rare. More importantly, the speakers themselves often do not regard the knowledge as that important. They grow up with two languages spoken, and increasingly discard the less common one as they get older. The Auld Tongue gets dragged out for special occasions and ethnic festivals, but lapses into disuse. I learned to say grace in Swedish as a child, and I passed that on to my two oldest sons. It's all quite charming, but I don't see that language fragments have provided any especial wisdom. In fact, the word gagn meaning "gain" is now archaic in Swedish, making the little I know even less useful. Do the fragments of Chemehuevi that still survive in Arizona make us all wealthier in knowledge? Does it even make the possessors of those fragments wealthier in knowledge?

Most of the knowledge of endangered languages is self-referential, circular, and bound not only to a particular culture but a time period two generations past and more. We can extract some knowledge of language relationships as an aid to guesses about history, perhaps, but our genetic knowledge already begins to exceed that and will soon overwhelm it. Then also, the tribes with endangered languages are often isolated and poor. Do we propose to keep their children isolated and poor so that we may study them like animals in a zoo? No thanks, pal. I'll learn one of the 10-20 most common languages and get a job, thanks.

Another ABBA Museum

This one's in London, and it's ABBAWORLD, more of an interactive experience than a museum. The karaoke, judging from these samples, is frightening.



HT: akafred

Halftime

I stood frozen in jaw-dropping horror in my son's living room. Daltrey and Townsend looked ridiculous. Their vocals were acceptable, and Townsend won me back a bit with his guitar work - plus I thought they arranged around the limitations of their vocal aging pretty well. But that coat. That scarf. How did the coolest guys of my generation (heh) ever think those choices weren't goofy? It was humiliating to watch them.

Wyrd And Providence - Part IV

The Book of Nature. If I get to it after clearing up some other stuff.

Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.
Monty Python, Stake Your Claim

karrde's comment on part III, and my own response to it, sets me to thinking. I shouldn't put everyone through the back and forth of whether my original theory is now in ribbons - people read essays of folks who have worked that out before writing, not this will he/nill he of an internal debate. But perhaps it will entertain.

I connected Calvinist Providence to Germanic/Norse wyrd across 6 centuries on the basis of geographic restriction and cultural persistence, though admitting it might be a stretch. But there is an enormous intervening fact in those centuries that looks a more plausible explanation. The Black Death, which wiped out 1/3 of Europe in the 14th C, was particularly destructive in the areas I identified on the east coast of England, claiming upwards of 40% of the population. Each one buries one. For instilling a sense of doom and fatalism, it would be hard to top that as a cause. It doesn't rely on possible cultural transmission over 600 years, but awareness of catastrophe over 200. As abandoned villages would still be on the landscape, reminders to all who passed, a 200-year memory doesn't seem improbable. It's a more compact explanation to point to the Black Death's fury as a cause of Calvinist belief in destiny, providence, election.

Two lines remain which might give my theory some breathing room. A) Both could be true, with the events of 1348-9 powerfully reinforcing an already existing sense of doom. B) Other areas with heavy losses did not adopt this philosophy, suggesting that there was indeed something different in East Anglia and surrounding areas. It would be hard to argue that areas that lost "only" 25% of their population were significantly less traumatised.

I leave it there for now. On to the 17th & 18th C American Puritans and their reading from the Book of Nature. However the culture developed to get them to that habit of mind, we know that they did get to that habit of mind. Nature could be observed, decoded, interpreted, read, originally to understand God's judgments and messages, but over time, to understand God's nature. Natural history (itself a revealing phrase) and natural philosophy, what we would now call observational science grew explosively in the 18th C. Moreover, it was an enormously North American pursuit, the first disciplines where the mere colonists and upstarts became world leaders. Even now, the list of natural history museums shows an overwhelmingly greater frequency in the US and Canada, with the rest of the Anglosphere holding the next rank of concentration.

From understanding God's nature to understanding the nature of the universe may be a great change philosophically, but only a short step in practice. One performs the same acts with a different attitude or perspective.

This is all on one level unsurprising and unremarkable. Farmers and sea-traders watch the plants, the skies, and the waters anxiously. Understanding nature, with or without the God part, and then harnessing nature are a matter of economic survival. Plunk down colonists in unfamiliar territory and they are going to observe their surrounding feverishly, making many guesses as to what is up.

Yet why a book of nature? Why that image, that analogy that embedded itself in New England culture, giving eventual rise to deism, Unitarianism, and the modern save-the-whales church in general? Given what we now know about colonists behavior toward the natives - originally quite different in New England than in other regions, though it ended much the same - how did the Puritan admiration/contempt attitude toward Indians get accommodated into this book?

Well, I think the printing press is going to be involved, and the germ theory of disease, and what we would now call cultural confidence. But I don't think they ever did find a place for the natives in their understanding, neither the Puritans, the Unitarians, nor the transcendentalists. Theories developed in Europe, but fell apart in the reality of the colonies. Stay tuned.

Crossing Guard

The lady at the crosswalk in the morning? She's got to learn not to wave to her friends with the hand with the big orange glove on it.

Slamming on the brakes does wake you up of a morning, though.

Wyrd And Providence - Part III

I started the discussion of Norse paganism with the sentence

There are two intensities of North European paganism that set it apart from other beliefs: a multiplicity of creatures, and a belief in doom, destiny, or fate that is powerful but not absolute.(Wyrd and Providence - Part II)

and ended with

New England was a peculiarly fertile ground for a peculiar and intense version of Calvinism.

The creatures I dealt with in the earlier post.

The belief in fate or doom is found throughout the world, but was especially strong in Northern Europe, both in pagan times and extending into the Christian era. We see it in Beowulf, in the Siegfried legend, the Eddic sagas, and the Battle of Maldon. (It is less prominent in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, suggesting that the theme and philosophy may be more Germanic than Uralic). Most commonly in our era, we see it in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Gandalf suggests that Bilbo and then Frodo were chosen or appointed for their tasks, and senses that Gollum has some part to play before the end. In other parts of the world, the idea of luck, a more temporary situation of auspiciousness, or a cycle of fortune, or a blessing/curse changing a destiny is more dominant.

Norse Fate or wyrd is powerful, and treated in retrospect as if it were inexorable, but for those actually in the events, effort, choice, and wisdom seem to matter greatly. One's path is chosen, yet one can refuse it or mishandle it.

The Germanic settlement of England came in waves, sometimes by invitation and sometimes by invasion. For obvious geographic reasons, they settled most densely in the eastern and southern coastal regions. Essex and Sussex bear Saxon names, East Anglia named for the Angles, the Jutes to Kent, and the later Danes overlaying large sections of those territories. It was not merely that invaders came to rule and built some temples - the Romans did that but had little longterm influence on English religion. (They did, at the end, include some Christians, whose continuity was more impressive than their initial influence.) The Germanic tribes - throw in a fair number of Frisians and a few Geats as well - came in greater numbers and stayed.

The creatures, I have noted, did not seem to cross water well. But cast of mind certainly accompanies those who move. Here's the first leap: Puritanism in England was strongest in England in the areas where Germanic/Norse settlement was greatest. The Danes may have arrived in the 10th C and Puritanism taken hold in the early 16th, but there could be continuity. The intensity of belief in predetermination among the Puritans, even more than among other Calvinists, may have been due to a congeniality of temperament. The Puritans searched the skies, their ledger books, their crops and herds for signs that they were among the elect. They were in fact obsessed with the topic, for themselves, their neighbors, and their kin. In our sexualised age we think Puritans were obsessed with sexuality. They were far more obsessed with death.

I don't want to oversell this. Farmers and sailors everywhere watch the weather intensely, seeking to understand its portents. Almanacks were known in ancient times, but no one produced almanacks in similar number and variety to the English and later, the Americans. Distant second, third, and fourth place went to Germany, Holland, and Belgium, tending to support my supposition that this reading of the natural world has a Germanic tinge to it. In other parts of the world signs in nature were used to read the future: prophecy and divination. Among the Puritans they were used to read the present, or the recent past.

It is a fair challenge to my theory that one would expect the more thorough descendants of the Norse and Germans in current-day Scandinavia and Germany to be even more fatalistic than the English. I think that holds only for fatalism in the negative sense. I think those groups moved more toward the dualism of Norse religion. The war of the gods and giants is what the universe is really about, and human actions only a secondary phenomenon. We are on the side of the gods because they are noble, but they are going to eventually lose to the giants. Lutheranism is rivaled only by Orthodoxy in its dualism among the Christian sects. Garrison Keillor speaks humorously but accurately about the Light Lutherans and the Dark Lutherans.

The Puritans of East Anglia then, had a core temperament of doom (in the neutral sense) distilled by Calvinism. Those who moved to a harsh and dangerous new land in New England, especially the Bay Colony because of their piety were thus double-distilled. They strained to read all events as indicators of God's favor or disfavor - a redeemed version of reading events for clues to the friendliness or unfriendliness of nature and the universe, perhaps. They believed that striving did not affect salvation, yet they strove more than any other peoples because they considered striving evidence of salvation. Only the saved would care so much. This doesn't strike me as all that different from The Battle of Maldon:

Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað.

Thought shall be harder, heart the keener,
Mood the more, as our might lessens*

You will note that I used the verb read for the observance of nature. That was not accidental. Part IV on the Book of Nature.

* If one notes that sc is pronounced sh while the c in cenre is hard (and lytlad is littleth), you can get some sense of both the nearness and remoteness of English of a thousand years ago.

Boring History

The boring book from the last post is Peter Hunter Blair's Roman Britain and Early England, 55 BC - AD 871, published in 1963. I had forgotten what that old style of writing history was like, listing the rulers, generals, and battles and describing the construction of buildings and the layouts of towns.

Although it was not constructed on such a massive scale and was neither so broad or so lofty, the Silchester basilica was longer than the Norman nave of Ely Cathedral. At either end in apsidal recesses were the raised platforms, tribunalia, upon which rested the seats of magistrates. Beyond the basilica was a further range of rooms with the curia, the meeting-place of the cantonal senate, centrally placed. The floors of the basilica were of red tesserae set in cement, its walls were frescoed, and its columns were made of Bath stone with Corinthian capitals. Part at least of the curia was lined with Italian marble and much Purbeck marble in other parts of the building. Among its statuary were a stone image, twice life-size, of the guardian deity or tutela of the Atrebates...

I am halfway through the book and halfway through that 900 years and have learned almost nothing about the inhabitants of Britain, except where they lost battles. Nothing about their religion, their form of government, their foods, their customs, their clothing, nothing. I have learned a bit about the people who ruled them, who when they departed had left little mark on the genetics, language, or customs. They left roads, walls, some buildings, and a little technology.

That was what history used to be - who conquered, who ruled. I have grown so used to modern cultural histories that I had forgotten.

Good Husband, Good Father

I lay back in my recliner with my book and my second glass of wine, all very placid in the afternoon. After a few minutes I heard right at the edge of perception, the sound of someone laughing hysterically or crying uncontrollably. It could have been either Tracy or Kyle. A Good Husband or Father, I told myself, would go check that out on the chance that whoever it is is crying. I did not move, reasoning rather conveniently that it was overwhelmingly likely to be laughter, which I would be unable to escape being told about later. A Really Good Husband or Father, my conscience chided, not only would not take the chance, but would rise up and go to his family even if he knew it was laughter, to share in that experience. I used to be that guy. But the recliner was very comfortable, merlot is soporific, and the book boring. It was a lovely nap.

Wyrd And Providence - Part II

There are two intensities of North European paganism that set it apart from other beliefs: a multiplicity of creatures, and a belief in doom, destiny, or fate that is powerful but not absolute. Unexpectedly, if we jostle them around a bit, the Creatures and Fate don’t fully resolve into a single aspect, but they come darn close.

When we moved from Gethsemane Lutheran to Bethany Covenant in the mid-80’s we moved from one historically Swedish church to another. As I did not grow up with Saint Lucia Day and was at that time very worried about occult or sub-Christian influences in the church, I found Luciadag disquieting. Starboys, sheaves of wheat to placate little mischievous tomten, the whole Winter Solstice connection (Dec 13 was the shortest day of the year under the old calendar) – those seemed possibly okay for home fun or ethnic celebrations, but having them in the sanctuary irritated me. Lucia seemed to be some Sicilian saint Swedes had attempted to insert into their regular winter celebration in order to give it a Christian wash.

And in fact, that’s pretty much the case. The demoness Lussiferda – no, really – roamed the countryside on the longest night of the year stealing souls, a version of the Wild Hunt myths (Huntsmen of Annwn, Woden’s Hunt); the little tomten lived in the burial mound before he was moved to the barn.

But it’s cute, cute, cute. Girls in white robes, apple-cheeked preschoolers dancing in costumes. And like many other ethnic celebrations in America, tomten, the dangerous imaginary creatures – like leprechauns, sprites, kobolds, hobs, elves, and gnomes – are made harmless and comic. We associate Norse mythology and paganism with creatures, a far greater variety of soul-stealers and house-gods than is found elsewhere. To the list above add dwarves, trolls, brownies, and a dozen lesser-known varieties. And they displayed a remarkable persistence in Europe, with serious belief in them recorded well into the 19th C. Such creatures did not cross the ocean well. Headless horsemen and ghost riders make their appearance in America, but only as intentional legends, not preserved belief. They were often place-spirits, inhabiting a well, a barn, a mountain – those are hard for the imagination to transport, though some version of the idea may remain.

Though we have the stories of Saints Patrick, Augustine, and Ansgar bringing the gospel to the tribes of northern Europe well before the year 1000, this does not mean that by the 11th C most people were Christian in the exclusive sense we would consider today. First, many places were bypassed in the preaching – Lithuania did not become even nominally Christian until the late 14th C. Second, we all can hold incompatible ideas for generations (we still do, but that’s another post), and remoter areas held considerable paganism alongside the enforced Christianity of their rulers. If you were to visit a rural parish priest in Germany or Cornwall or Norway in 1500, you would get an earful of local pagan practices.

This is one of my main adjustments in thinking over the last ten years, appreciating how deeply pagan (somewhat different than occult) Europe remained well into the modern era, in spite of the Christian cathedrals, artists, philosophers, and writers it produced. Greece and Italy had civilization, literacy, and law centuries before they had Christianity, and Christianity centuries before northern Europe. Tourist books of the Orkneys or Ireland record with amusement marriage or burial customs that persist from ages long forgotten. The old beliefs died hard .

A side note on belief before I move on to the discussion of Doom. Do not hold any association of Peter Pan asking “Do you believe in faeries?” or of amusing Grampas asking all the children to gather round and sit on his lap while he tells them a tale o’ the wee folk, or moderns who think there may be ghosts somewhere. When I refer to belief extending into the 19th C, I mean the utter seriousness of believing that the depressed, inert daughter upstairs had her soul stolen by the huntsmen because of some incaution on her part. Not the automatic and mild superstition of throwing a small offering in a well, but a certainty that fell creatures not fully banished by the Christian God resentfully take a life here and there when they can get it because people no longer pay them worship. They believed in nature-spirits who took the shapes of these creatures. We see the last, degraded, quaint forms of these beliefs, but they were never interrupted.

Wyrd And Providence

I am reconsidering an idea I rejected 30 years ago.

A young friend (33 - I now call that young) has submitted his PhD thesis topic in History at Notre Dame The Book of Nature in New England, 1630-1763. To touch on some of his main themes, the Puritans not only read intensely from the scriptures (and the Geneva Bible, not that suspicious KJV, thank you very much), but also from the signs around them, which they called reading in The Book of Nature. This emphasis has been downplayed in studying them. Reading letters, diaries, almanacks, and sermons we see this dual emphasis more clearly.* The Puritans were in fact obsessed with interpreting the events around them to understand God's judgements and messages. Hurricanes, good crop years, signs in the sky - all of these were believed to tell humankind something of God's intents and opinions.

This study of the Book of Nature by colonial New Englanders included both the special signs of God, and learning the natural order of things.

The thesis traces how this reliance on the Book of Nature, though general among them from the start, became more important than the Book of Scripture in some groups, leading eventually to Unitarianism, scientism, transcendentalism, and environmentalism. The usual tracing of Puritan thought is from Calvinism to Arminianism to Arianism to rationalism to modernism, or more dualisticly, from magical to mechanical universe; moral to market economy; providentialism to deism. All this true, so far as it goes, but it ignores a continuity of two centuries. Which is where Josh and his thesis come in.

All that by way of introduction. Those who know me will see how this would set off cascades of ideas, many of which I excitedly wrote to my friend. I'll try and stay focused on the main point here.

Thirty years ago, I somewhere ran across the idea that the Calvinist idea of predestination was just a dressed-up form of Norse fatalism. The thought annoyed me, and taken as a categorical statement like that, it still does. It reminded me rather of the young man who assured me that the Chronicles of Narnia were all based on tarot cards. Need I mention that the lad was very much into tarot cards and the occult in general? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Wiccans and fundamentalists both declared numerous European practices to be pagan and occult. It is an ironic similarity between those groups that the merest nonchristian tainting makes something entirely pagan. Which, as everything is tainted in this fallen world, and all believers live in a physical environment in an historical context, would make everything pagan.

But I hung with fundamentalists a lot in those days and was myself looking for only the purest expressions of Christianity, so I was not disposed to cede any territory claimed by my Christian brothers and sisters back to pagan interpretations. It seemed a point of honor. Since that time, either my character or my theology has changed to see that no human expression is God's expression unadulterated. There are not even individuals or movements that are 99% or even 90% Christian. The flaws go deep in all human behavior. If there is paganism in Christmas trees, there is idolatry in shining a spotlight on an open Bible in a Baptist sanctuary as well. There is no getting away from it, no matter where we go. There are only choices.

Many of you will sense the broad outlines of where I am going from here. Yet there are some odd twists still, and I want to make sure the general idea gets in before I go into more lengthy discussion: New England was a peculiarly fertile ground for a peculiar and intense version of Calvinism.

Fun preparatory reference: Wonder Working Providence of Sions Saviour, By Captain Edward Johnson.

*Previously, viewing history through the prism of government, settlement, battles, and economy, the schoolbook history we grew up with, we focused on the Great Men and their doings. Social and cultural history, dealing more with everyday men and women, the less-prosperous, and the technology of home and hearth, is a more recent and quite valuable way of understanding a people and time. Studying the outcasts, the exceptions, and the marginalized, which is the extreme of this school, also has its value, though that prism has its limitations as well.

My Theory About The GPS

My theory, which is mine (ahem), is that you can learn the important touristy rudiments of a language by switching your GPS to it while driving around in the US. Distance measures, numbers, left, right, straight ahead, street, east/west, plus a solid feel for pronunciation, word order, and cadence - it seems excellent. Has anyone out there tried it? I don't use one myself.

When driving back from Parris Island my two Romanians found it uproarious to listen to the GPS direction in their language while driving in NJ. Drept inainte.

Popeblog

Pope Benedict now has a blog, Pope2you. I'll bet his has hardly any ABBA photos, though.