sylvan

H and I must make it a point to explore the extensive, almost primordial forests this year. Though not contiguous, unlike the ancient forests that must have covered the whole of Europe long ago and fossilised in the city named Pforzheim (from the Latin Porta Hercynia, the gateway to the Black Forest which must have extended without much interruption to the ends of the Earth) there is besides the Kellerwald, the Bavarian Wood plus reserves throughout the country, covering more than one third of the land. This protected space is not of course historic in range but does represent more wooded areas than Germany had a century ago. The majority of the forests in Germany are composed of beech and oak, which enjoy a certain reverence for the people, which does not outstrip conservancy with a unifying identity but rather went astride. The Teutoburg Forest was where Arminius (Hermann the Cherusker, the name of a street adjacent to where I stay in Wiesbaden) beat back Roman incursions and kept the land in a sense unconquered, and after the Napoleonic Wars that ultimately meant the demise of the Holy and Roman Empire of the German Nation, a towering monument to that battle was erected, facing down France to the west. The proving ground of the forest, where one if careless can still find himself irretrievably lost, was also an essential factor in for the Brothers Grimm whose folklore that was championed as German identity, those stories that were told by mothers to children generation after generation regardless of where frontiers were or who was in charge.
The mysterious and dangerous wood was the only place where good might triumph over evil, the brothers observed long after trees were considered as sacred markers but yet subconsciousness ones and that character was made a recurring one. In any case, I suppose Germany’s caretaking and conservation would have greatly impressed the warriors and the myth-makers as much as the environmentalists and important to acknowledge it as a part of one’s collective identity in all its aspects.

sturm und drang oder elective affinities

Though mostly doing the responsible thing and honouring his father’s wishes for him to study law, Johann von Goethe really of course wanted to pursue Oriental studies (Islam and the Arabic language being two subjects that fascinated him throughout his life) but grudgingly left his patrician home in the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt am Main to go to the University of Leipzig. There, Goethe fell in with some influential Bohemian types and while his grades suffered, he was did find inspiration in one students’ pub for his re-telling of Faust that would take torturing decades more to realise. These first few semesters were quite productive for Goethe, having gotten into the practise of churning out experimental short plays and poetry on a regular basis.  Either because Goethe himself was too harsh a critic, however, or because they really were sophomoric works, few survived from that early period. Waxing dissolute and not doing so well in school, Goethe returned home to Frankfurt and eventually remarshaled his resolve to again take up his studies, but this time in Strasbourg.
Although the land of Alsace had been in possession of the French Empire, annexed from the Holy Roman Empire, for more than a century in this most recent in a long chain of redrawing borders, there still was a large German student population at the illustrious university and the city’s architecture and high spires of its cathedral—though somewhat mistakenly—struck Goethe as quintessentially German but not in the nationalistic sense (there was no Germany, just a loose confederation of city-states, petty kingdoms and imperial monasteries with varying degrees of allegiance to the Emperor) but rather as a community united in language, in the artistic sense as well as the spoken word. Goethe became particularly keen on this notion, drawing from his own childhood experiences being educated with a very liberal curriculum that included the classics and world literature, and finding more and more frustration and dissatisfaction with his own writing projects—as meaning and passion seemed to retreat from his poems (overtures to one young mistress especially) the more he applied himself.

In Strasbourg, Goethe saw his horizons broaden and the literary world unfurled before him when he was introduced to the plays and sonnets of one bard called William Shakespeare, and found in Shakespeare’s free-wheeling and bold manner the conventions that he sought for own prose. Back at the family home, the prodigal son celebrated his first love fest to the Bard and his muse with a “Shakespeare Day” on 14 October with some of his classmates. Goethe’s family saw no harm in their son’s renewed interest in writing, as his marks had improved and would be allowed to open a small practise in first in Frankfurt then in Wetzlar. His career as a lawyer, however, was destined to be a short one—Goethe often courting contempt by demanding clemency for clients and more enlightened, progressive laws. Perhaps sensing that this was the wrong vocation or perhaps because of his moonlighting, Goethe worked extensively on his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers)—a semi-autobiographical account of a failed love affair told in correspondence and climaxing in the anti-hero’s suicide. The novel was an instant sensation and helped to propel, just as Shakespeare had done for English, German into the pantheon of literary and scholarly languages. Though not the stylings of emo or goth, young men were dressing as Werther (Werther-Fieber it was called) and tragically, there were some urged to the same ending after reading the book—and not just in Germany but all over. Fearing the dangerous influence that this potentially subversive work might have if the international celebrity might be allowed to spread unabated, a writer and publisher called Christoph Friedrich Nikolai from Frankfurt an der Oder, in central Prussia, went so far as to give the story a Hollywood ending, under the title “The Joys of Young Werther.”
Napoleon was a committed fan as were many others. The political discontinuity that charaterised the Holy Roman Empire was a grave subject of consternation to outsiders, who lived under more centralised governments, but as the city-states of an equally fractious Italy during the Renaissance encouraged the arts through patronage—every little lord wanting to retain pet talent, the same sort of arrangement could be fostered in Germany, and Goethe’s book caught the attention of one young heir-apparent to the small but grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. This enlightened ruler ennobled Goethe—putting the von in his name—and kept him on in Weimar for the rest of his life.
The young duke was of the same line who had two-hundred fifty years earlier had the courage and the wherewithal to provide sanctuary in the Wartburg by Eisenach to another controversial figure, Martin Luther—whereas in a more unified society with no place to seek refuge, like France or England, the Reformer would have been burnt at the stake for heresy. Goethe held a number of royal offices through his career, which afforded him travel on diplomatic missions throughout Europe and experiences Goethe could not have otherwise obtained, meeting many other contemporary luminaries—while not infringing on his writing and scientific studies. Goethe was deeply interested in all facets of existence and was absolutely prodigious in many fields, having amassed the largest mineral collections in Europe, published several seminal treatises on botany, optics and anatomy (which included some inspiring observations that Charles Darwin took to heart), and meteorology (researching the forecasting nature of barometric pressure) among others.

explanatory proposition, fusion paranoia or cui bono?

Not that it matters much, but the latest subject of controversial satire in the making was in fact not Muslims but rather Islamophobia itself—nor that no institution was considered sacrosanct and off-limits to ridicule, but this calming and thoughtful reflection from the editorial staff of Boing Boing came across as another neglected spot of truth and clear-thinking.
While I do not think that it is anyone’s intent to correlate civic disengagement with religiosity or that caring about politics and faith excludes cohabitation and that secular sentiments only can make a good citoyen, it is worthy to note how fast-paced and frenetic events cause people on any side to loose their skeptical inner-voice and forget that people lie and lie often in public forums. France is the host and home of probably the least radicalised elements in all of western Europe, yet we all subscribe to the trickery of pundits and martyrs willing, whereas in a more refined venue, doubt would run rampant. Without risking running a-fringe, which shuts down more reachingly creative theories, such a retreat to a safe middle distance also risks empowering that same group of believers, who manufacture crises to exploit. Such thinking, almost superstitiously, cedes power to thuggish interests by legitmising the power and influence of the caliphate but also of every other boogey man that feeds off fears and derision and oversees the surrender of freedoms and privacy. Conspiratorial thinking is not aways on target but still provides a good and robust way to gauge the patterns of our conclusions.

mood board

Writing for Mental Floss, Miss Cellania introduces us to some clever alternatives to the boilerplate, filler text “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” Sort of like the classic Kant-Generator, my favourite of the bunch is the Samuel L Ipsum. Unlike the other engines, however, that return gibberish based on a certain genre, the sample text that is delivered are actual blocks of dialogue spoken by the characters Mister Jackson has portrayed:

Do you see any Teletubbies in here?  Do you see a slender plastic tag clipped to my shirt with my name printed on it?  Do you see a little Asian child with a blank expression on his face sitting outside on a mechanical helicopter that shakes when you put quarters in it?  No?  Well, that's what you see at a toy store. And you must think you're in a toy store, because you're here shopping for an infant named Jeb.

And unlike the greeking that’s characterised the lorem ipsum (since it’s not even sensible Latin), one runs the risk of having readers focus on what the text says, rather than how the text-layout and type-speciment looks in the presentation.

hitch and bight

Laughing Squid features a splendidly executed teaching diagram of various knots and their application. The infographic, writ large at the link, is from the design studios of Fix and is called Tying the Knot. The expression “hanging on to the bitter end” and derivations like ‘til the bitter end is from rope tying terminology, referring to the working end of the rope, the length being worked and specifically secured to a bitt—the metal block on a pier. The opposite section of rope that’s not the anchor is called the standing end. I got the merit badge, I think, but I am not sure if I am the best visual learner when it comes to this skill and probably would need some hands-on instruction.

tres chic

The ever marvelous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a brilliant assemblage of redesigned chicken coops with a Mid-Century Modern flair that are just as functional for their residents as they are stylish. The cosmopolitan ensemble of roost and scratch pictured is called ‘the Cocorico’ and was conceived by artist Maxime Evrard in protest to battery-farming conditions.  See more inspired coop couture creations at the link.

storefront or slate and shingle

Via the Browser, here’s one prognostication for the coming year regarding “distributed content” that’s a very good and quick study.

Already the publishing houses of the internet scuttle writing and reporting to select social networks, where their articles are handily propagated and garner much greater exposure in those wilds, rather than on their own tamer, manicured turf: their home page. The prediction is that news organisations and other forums will shed their own web pages entirely and only exist in that stream of consciousness. Sometimes hosting one’s own content does seem a little vainglorious or ungainly and unrefined, but—and even for all the flash and circulation—I imagine that it is still a better route to maintain some sense of place and ownership and pride for what one has made.

iconodule

Celebrated on the first Sunday of the Great Lent (1 March, this year), the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy celebrates the restoration of icons, holy images, to the Church, and the victory of the iconodules—those who venerate images, the iconophiles over the iconoclasts who considered the practise idolatry.

The service that takes place in churches on that day has come to present the defeat of heretical thinking in general but the mass remembers a historic event that took place in March of 843 when the icons were returned to the Hagia Sophia. Recursively, an icon was created to illustrate this auspicious event. I had always believed that the iconoclasm was an internal matter and one could easily imagine disputes arising, as they continue to do, over the sacramental nature of holy objects—whether they help the faithful to focus their attention or are vain distractions, but it seems that the division arose and sides were taken due in part—at least, to mounting outside pressures: with the rapid expansion of Islam—who were strongly against any human or divine imagery of any kind, the Church began to reassess its position. Did these Muslims, who were making inroads on Byzantine territory and even threatening Constantinople itself, have God’s favour because they had roundly rejected graven images? As above, the debate—and often violently continues—within and without.