Jon Cogburn's Blog

Jim Harrison - Larson's Holstein Bull

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

three cheers for the Associate Baptist Press

Great article by Ken Camp and Robert Marus on the troubling propensity of many conservative Christians to believe and spread patent falsehoods HERE. Camp and Marus discuss a set of these involving Madeleine O Hare, Al Gore, and President Obama.

God bless snopes.com! Exploring it gives you a fascinating tour of America's psychic underbelly.

Denis Dutton on dead sharks jumping the shark

Absolutely fantastic piece by Denis Dutton on conceptual art in today's NYT available HERE (Dutton's book HERE). Interesting fact:

The earliest stone tools are choppers and blades found in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These unadorned tools remained unchanged for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and other human ancestral groups started doing something new and remarkable. They began shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. Acheulian hand axes (after St.-Acheul in France, a site of 19th-century finds) have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, wherever Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of hand axes indicate a rate of manufacture beyond needs for butchering animals. Even more curious, unlike other prehistoric stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges, and some are in any case too big for practical use. They are occasionally hewn from colorful stone materials (even with decoratively embedded fossils). Their symmetry, materials and above all meticulous workmanship makes them quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient yet somehow familiar artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are literally the earliest known works of art — practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and virtuoso craftsmanship.

Clincher:

However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall — where now and again the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks — human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it — even before they could put their love into words.

Thomas Merton

How can you help seeing your vocation, and its obligations, in a new light when you realize that monks like yourself, with the same weaknesses, the same problems, the same difficulties, are suddenly called upon to suffer things that belong to the Acts of Martyrs?

. . .There is nothing magnificent about us. We are miserable things and if we are called upon to die we shall die miserably. There is nothing of grandeur about us. We are null. And perhaps we are already marked for sacrifice-a sacrifice that will be, in the eyes of the world, perhaps only drab and sorry and mean. And yet it will end by being our greatest glory after all. Perhaps there is no greater glory than to be reduced to insignificance by an unjust and stupid temporal power.

------------------------From Neo-Resistance.

• Mohammad Hossein Barzegar, 25, killed in haft-e-Tir square, 28 Khordad.
• Seyed Reza Tabatabayee, 30, accountant, killed on Azerbaijan street, 30 khordad.
• Iman Hashemi, 27, shot in the eye that killed him on Friday 30 Khordad on Azadi street.
• Parisa Keli (not sure of spelling last name, female) 25, graduate in Literature, shot in the neck on 31 Khordad on Keshavarz boulevard.
• Mohsen Hadadi, 24, computer software designer, shot in the forehead on Nosrat street, on 30 Khordad.
• Mohammad Nikzadi, 22, graduate of building engineering, shot in the chest, in Vanak Square, on 26 khordad.
• Ali Shahedi, 24, after being arrested and transferred to the police station in Tehran Pars district, he was killed on 31 Khordad, and the cause of death was not revealed.
• Vahed Akbari ,34, married with a 3 years old daughter. Shot in torso, on 30 Khordad on Vanak street.
• Abolfazl Abdollahi, 21, shot in the back of the head in front of Sharif University on Azadi street, on Khordad 30.
• Salar Tahmasbi, 27, graduate student in trade management in Rasht university, Shot in the forehead on Saturday Jordad 30 on Jomhoori street! [jomhoori means republic]
• Fahimeh Salahshoor, 25, female, hit on the head with a baton on Khordad 21, and died of internal bleeding at the hospital.
• Vahid-Reza Tabatabayee, 29, graduate in English, shot in the head in Baharestan square [in front of the parliament] on 3 Tir.

Wifred Owen - Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Proverbs 1:20-22

Wisdom cries out in the street;
   in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
   at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
   and fools hate knowledge?

James (3:1-2)

Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness. For we all make many mistakes. . .

verbatim from http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

He was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have contributed so much to human learning or to his country's survival. But Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and barred from entering the US because he was a homosexual (now America reserves that distinction to homosexuals with HIV). Here is the story of his death:

In January 1952 Turing picked up the 19-year-old Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house again, and apparently spent the night there.

After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.

Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections which lasted for a year. One of the known side effects of these hormone injections was the development of breasts, known as gynecomastia, something which plagued Turing for the rest of his life. Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ.

Every now and again, we should remember how brutal the persecution of homosexuals was for so long, how counter-productive, how many lives were ruined, and how a great man like Turing could be reduced to suicide by the oppression he lived with on a daily basis. And so it is a good thing that Britain has now offered a formal apology to Turing - if fifty years too late. Here are prime minister Brown's words.

Brian Eno

Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.

Rumi - Music Master (excerpt)

You that love lovers,
this is your home. Welcome!

In the midst of making form, love
made this form that melts form,
with love for the door,
soul the vestibule. Watch the dust grains moving
in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.

We rarely hear the inward music,
but we're all dancing to it nevertheless,
directed by the one who teaches us,
the pure joy of the sun,
our music master.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.
Praise God for these two insominias!
And the difference between them.

W. H. Auden - September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

 Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
  Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
  Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Diogenes of Sinope

When told that people were laughing at him, Diogenes [Laertius] said, "But I am not laughed down."

When asked why he was begging form a statue, he said, "To get practice in being refused."

When asked what kind of wine he preferred, he replied, "The kind another pays for."

When someone said that life was bad, he replied, "Not life itself, but living as you do."

Thomas Merton

In the refectory is read a message of the Pope, denouncing war, denouncing the bombing of civilians, reprisals on civilians, killing of hostages, torturing of prisoners. . .

Do the people of this country realize who the Pope is talking about? . . .

The monks seem to know. The voice of the reader trembles.

Glenn Greenwald

The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always condemend as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies ("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.

Thomas Merton - To the Immaculate Virgin, On a Winter Night

Lady, the night is falling and the dark
Steals all the blood from the scarred west.
The stars come out and freeze my heart
With drops of untouchable music, frail as ice
And bitter as the new year's cross.

Where in the world has any voice
Prayed to you, Lady, for the peace that's in your power?
In a day of blood and many beatings
I see the governments rise up, behind the steel horizon,
And take their weapons and begin to kill.

Where in the world has any city trusted you?
Out where the soldiers camp the guns begin to thump
And another winter time comes down
To seal our years in ice.
The last train cries out
And runs in terror from this farmer's valley
Where all the little birds are dead.

The roads are white, the fields are mute
There are no voices in the wood
And trees make gallows up against the sharp-eyed stars.
Oh where will Christ be killed again
In the land of these dead men?

Lady, the night has got us by the heart
And the whole world is tumbling down.
Words turn to ice in my dry throat
Praying for a land without prayer,

Walking to you on water all winter
In a year that wants more war.

Robert Graves - In the Wilderness

HRIST of His gentleness

Thirsting and hungering

Walked in the wilderness;

Soft words of grace He spoke

Unto lost desert-folk

That listened wondering.

He heard the bitterns call

From the ruined palace-wall,

Answered them brotherly.

He held communion

With the she-pelican

Of lonely piety.

Basilisk, cockatrice,

Flocked to his homilies,

With mail of dread device,

With monstrous barbed slings,

With eager dragon-eyes;

Great rats on leather wings,

And poor blind broken things,

Foul in their miseries.

And ever with Him went,

Of all His wanderings

Comrade, with ragged coat,

Gaunt ribs--poor innocent--

Bleeding foot, burning throat,

The guileless old scape-goat;

For forty nights and days

Followed in Jesus' ways,

Sure guard behing Him kept,

Tears like a lover wept.

Saint Paul (with assist from my favorite Hari Krishna ensemble - The Cro Mags)

All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong;
no one does good, not even one.
Their throat is an open grave,
they use their tongues to deceive.
The venom of asps is under their lips.
Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood,
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and in the way of peace they do not known.

W.H. Auden - In Memory of W.B. Yeats (excerpt)

   You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
   The parish of rich women, physical decay,
   Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
   Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
   For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
   In the valley of its making where executives
   Would never want to tamper, flows on south
   From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
   Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
   A way of happening, a mouth.

Against the Word. . .

We shall walk in velvet shoes: / Wherever we go / Silence will fall like dews / On white silence below. Elinor Wylie

 

Silence is the perfectest herald of Joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much. Shakespeare

 

The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him. The Holy Bible: Habakkuk

 

Let there be sacred silence: I, the Muses' priest, sing for girls and boys songs not heard before. Horace

 

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled / About the center of the silent Word. / O my people, what have I done unto thee. / Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence. T.S. Eliot

Jesus (Q gospel)

Those who grasp and clutch at self will lose it.