present and perdurant

Though modern Greek has adopted a more straightforward term to convey happiness, ευτυχία—just suggesting good works—the classical term Eudæmonia is fortunately still around with all its mysterious and internecine intrigues.
The greatest minds are unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes happiness (or whether that’s even a question worthy of pursuit), but I have to wonder if even the first interlocutors really knew what was meant by Eudæmonia. Semantics are of course important considerations and flourishing or thriving might be a better word than our emotionally-laden happiness—the Romans rendered it as felicitas, who was also sometimes deified, but I don’t believe that any translation could capture the sense of being a role-model compounded with a guardian angel or fairy godmother figure like the original Greek. One achieves happiness, it’s argued, by emulating the example of that demon—dæmons just being spirits, familiars or lesser deities and not diabolical ones. The nature of those qualities and whether there’s some universal imperative are hopeless elusive, though that does not mean we shouldn’t bother. Furthermore, one’s level of bliss can be impacted retroactively should one’s present deportment cause him or her to earn a bad reputation after death.
Thinking about these rarefied ideas in general and particularly the last bit that invokes the directionality of time makes me turn back to the novel I am currently enjoying, Jo Walton’s absolutely amazing Just City—wherein the goddess Athena gathers the prescribed youth from all ages in order to experimentally create the utopia of Plato’s Republic overseen by those who’ve prayed for wisdom. I wonder if one’s eudæmon isn’t more of a conflicted personality, like shoulder angels. The cover of the Walton’s book, incidentally, focusses in on a particular section of this larger famous fresco by Raphael—showing students engaged on the steps of the Academy below. The different elements and possible perspectives in this work of art makes me think about another of Raphael’s masterpieces, the Sistine Madonna, who’s two puti reflecting upward has become a better known detail. H and I got to see it in its entirety in Dresden once. The aforementioned fresco, however, is out of public view in the papal apartments but I recalled the style and how the tableaux extended beyond the frame, preceding into the background, as the image that was on our ticket stubs from the Vatican Museum—the ephemera buried behind too many layers of our bulletin board to excavate, just now. I don’t believe I am any closer to the being able to articulate what happiness is but do feel I’ve gone on a little trip in time just now myself.

instant karma or everything zen

I was really kind of baffled to learn that the Laughing Buddha, a traditional fixture of Asian take-away, is in fact not the sage Gautama Buddha or an avatar thereof—like thin Elvis versus fat Elvis, but a completely different character called Bùdài.
This friendly monk represents contentment and enlightenment as well but his following developed at a time when Buddhism was taking root in a unified, ancient China and the two were conflated. I suppose the distinction is always just out of grasp for someone not intimately familiar with Eastern thought, but maybe the Buddha is the Bùdài as the Dionysian force is to Dionysis (Bacchus, the god of wine). The Buddhism that was taking root across China was also a significant departure in terms of practise from the original foundations. Thanks are owed to the bureaucratic harmonisations underlying the teachings of Confucius and his disciples, that instilled a sense of place and hierarchy that in some senses enabled disparate kingdoms and people to come under one mantle, but the revival of Buddhist thought needed some adjustments to fit to the present and enduring societal framework. As paralleled by the independent stance that monastic Ireland took towards a centralised Church authority in Rome, Buddhism as first envisioned was also meant to be a retiring one—cloistered from the illusionary, impermanent world-at-large. It surprised me even more to learn that the concept of Zen (Chàn), with a somewhat divergent but very well attested history and scholarship, was incorporated into Chinese outlook in order that each could mediate in his or her own manner and discover Buddha’s teachings—know that enlightenment is attainable in the everyday—without cossetting oneself in an abbey.  While I am not sure it was exactly planned by the state (nor less authentic for it) to promote civility, there are certainly practical reasons behind it as well, since a coherent community could not very well have all its eligible men skivving off their responsibilities to hearth and home by becoming monks.  There is a delicate balance, I think, between not selfishness but rather self-interestedness, that is concern for one’s salvation in private, and the civic-mindedness of seeking the same while a part of the society around one. 

five-by-five

mondrian: Star Wars minimalism

message in a bottle: a wine glass made for the sand and surf

tempest in a tea cup: tiny box displays the forecast with real precipitation

roy g. biv: a look at the past pseudo-scientific obsession with the Lüscher colour test

mechanical turk: a look into internet propaganda factories of various regimes

neverland

Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman presents a tidy, provoking reflection on the latter-day manifestations with romanticising youth which really makes the alternative, natural consequence—that of growing up and growing old, appear especially bleak.

So much coddling emphasis is put upon one’s prime—as defined by marketers—that to be past it in any sense and by any sight is taken to be a sign of defeat, instead of a hallmark of grace, maturity or conviction. Rather than repairing to the nostalgic and familiar, the doom and gloom and even appealing to the hypochondriac in us as the media is either a projection or reflection—for fear we might be told we can’t keep dreaming (a measure of escapism is keen and dandy but not a whole culture of remakes, prequels and re-hashing), or becoming a retiring curmudgeon, being an adult to a big extent, I think, is about confronting the dissonance with one’s life as it is and one’s life as it should be and being able to recognise (and receive) contentment.

stillgelegt oder little black rain cloud

I learnt from a friend that over the weekend, and with much contention culminating in celebration, that the atomic reactor near my former place of work was brought off-line (Bericht nur auf Deutsch) as part of sweeping energy-reforms in Germany.
I called the distant but highly visible installation our Cloud-Maker with a bit of assuaging dark-humour to make it seem a little less looming and threatening. The cooling towers did in fact figure prominently in the skyline of the town but I am not certain that this poster for a fun-run was composed with the same spirit (it looks more like wide spread panic). I understand that there are plans to convert the moth-balled unit into a museum that documents the potential risks associated with atomic power and underscore the alternatives, but as the world’s demands for power have grown quite insatiable, I am not sure what to think. I wonder if a schedule of other shut-downs has already been released and whether they are proceeding as planned. What do you think? Maintaining the lifestyle that one’s accustomed to of course has its costs, just like with the possible environmental and commercial trade-offs associated with dismantling present infrastructure.

five-by-five

cat fancy: collection of Wikipedia articles involving legendary felines

ottoman empire: accordion coffee table doubles as a dress

merry melodies: five bizarre Looney Tunes cartoons

honeycomb hideout: Oslo builds a bee highway through the city

vajen-bader: possible 1800s steampunk inspiration for Star Wars cast of characters

sunday drive: gersfeld

More times than I’d like to count (at least the half of them when leaving home for the workweek), I’ve passed through the town of Gersfeld at the gateway to the Rhön and near the convergence of Bavaria, Thuringia and Hessen without giving it much thought, since H and visited once before and it seemed too familiar, like some scrolling background scenery against a travelling-matte.

The other day, however, I did decide to explore a little again off the main street. Despite being historically hemmed in by two more powerful municipalities of the region, Würzburg and Fulda, a great fire that destroyed much of the medieval city, the Napoleonic Wars that made the property hotly contested and most recently the loss of its industrial importance and status as a transportation hub with the division of Germany, the little town was really able to hold its own. There’s an ensemble of castles confined within a spacious estate that climbs the rolling, manicured foothills to the Jugendstil Park Villa above.
The far end of this garden also contained an interesting water-feature in the form of a narrow wading pool (between the hedgerows) called a Kneipp Heilbad, part of a regiment of hydrotherapy devised by Priest Sebastian Kneipp that harnessed the healing properties of thermal waters by alternating temperature and pressure.
Father Kneipp’s methods are well known in Germany and has inspired many offshoot techniques but in Norway, he is better known for another invention—the recipe for what’s called Kneippbrøt—a staple whole-wheat food and most consumed bread in Europe. I wasn’t expecting the spa-installation so was not properly attired but do certainly plan to stop in Gersfeld again soon.

palabra jot

Just as the kingdoms of Heaven and the Earth were already careening in directions unknown with the confluence of Martin Luther’s critical and revolutionary stance, Henry VIII’s dissention that led to the Anglican confession, the discovery of the New World materialising and successive plagues picking off large swaths of the impious and faithful alike, the event that probably shook the foundations of the Church the most was a conciliatory bearing, a compromise characterised as a Middle Way, advocated by one of its own, Dutch theologian and scholar Desiderius Erasmus.
In the spirit of Cicero, regarded as the father of humanism, Erasmus championed dialectic over pure dogma and believed that religion revealed rather than one imparted made one’s belief genuine and steadfast—although Erasmus did not go as far as Luther in abolishing the priestly class, maintaining that tutors were necessary. Furthermore, raising more contention with the Protestant movement than reconciliation, Erasmus argued that that personal, less mediated relation with the divine was not consequent to the notion of predestination, accepting that one is part of God’s plan and happy with that, but instead that the orthodox idea of free will (which is not unfettered agency but the ability to see outcomes as otherwise than they actually turn out—that is, understanding that one’s actions and intentions have consequences, for good or evil) still had a place in this reformed cosmology. The most public and controversial act of the academic, however, was his decision to brush up on his Greek and Latin (the stock-phrase Pandora’s box comes from one of Erasmus’ earlier, honest mistranslations of Hesiod—it ought to be Pandora’s jar) and undertake to produce a definitive new translation of the Bible, since Luther’s own (thanks to the advent of the printing-press) was a popular success and successful too in promulgating historic typos. Luther, as King James and virtual all theologians relied on the four century translation of Saint Jerome of the Greek testaments into Latin. Wanting to provide his parishioners as pupils a better text and feeling admittedly divinely inspired, Erasmus quipped that “it is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin” and began his new version. Though a traditionalist in terms of Church politics, Erasmus did a poor job in restraining himself when it came to language. While I am sure that all linguists of any ilk sort of cringe to find surpassing λόγοϛ rendered as plain old word (Verbum), it was just too much for the Church to take when the first proofs started, very first chapter and verse, “In the beginning there was Conversation…” It is hard to say if Erasmus and his adherents might have negotiated a more peaceful and civil schism or might have made matters far worse, but both sides rejected this agitator’s backing as too much of a liability.