hold for release

When the first twenty-four hour cable news network debuted in 1980, ushering in a new era for the way we thought about and expected from the media and I think to a large degree conditioned us to use and be exploited by the internet, the founding mogul pledged that the US National Anthem (the traditional sign-off music for when television stations had an end to their broadcasting day) would only be played once for the network’s inaugeration and be on the air until the end of time. There was a contingency video prepared in the event the end of the world which would consequently stop the intrepid reporting—I wonder what they imagined back then as opposed to now and what catastrophes have changed and what have remained the same—that was rediscovered by an intern in 2009 and might be worth a look at what was supposed to never be seen—not out of morbid curiosity but a glimpse at how one individual prepared for such an occasion with dignity.

abuela hypothesis or santa hanna

The mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus is not named in the Gospels, but as with the narrative of Mary and Joseph and the holy kinship, Jesus’ extended family which was a very popular theme for medieval artists, the faithful soon were introduced to Saint Anne—Hanna as she is known in Islamic and the Orthodox tradition.

This cult of Anne had early adherents in the Eastern Church, a few shrines in France and the Cathedral of Düren, between Köln and Aachen, holds her reliquary since the fourteen century. Saint Anne or Santa Ana as she is known in Spanish enjoys most veneration, however, in Central America, dating back to the arrival of the Conquistadors. Most other religious settlement had been claimed long ago, through displacing pagan festivals with the moveable feasts of Christianity and accepting seasonal trappings—long since frozen as traditional, and the Church could not very well bend to accommodate every new encounter with a new liturgical calendar and agenda. Besides, no matter how convincingly disguised, missionaries were worried that aboriginal practises and believes would continue under a different sacrament. As violently cataclysmic as the contact between the New and the Old Worlds was, conversion probably was the most humane and peaceably conducted act of the whole business of colonialism in this part of the Earth, not that that particularly is saying a lot compared to the level of atrocity. Even if they had been willing to make concessions to the native beliefs, the priests found few archetypes—with one exception being the popular spirit of Xmucane, known as the grandmother of the Mayan pantheon of the gods. She and her consort, Grandpa Xpiacoc, also helped the creator spirits fashion the first people—out of corn once the first trials with clay and wood failed.  Churches dedicated to the Grandmother of Jesus were built on the foundations of temples of Xmucane.

café-culture

Learning that ritualising coffee and tea as national beverages and past-times, with plenty of celebrity endorsements to bolster acquiring the taste, carried aloft by these habit-forming tonics, was done on such an institutional level, in part to perk-up and pacify a proletariat given to drinking more adult beverages that were needed in the factories and in a condition to operate heavy-machinery. Beer, wine and spirits were still the safer alternatives to water, since Europe had been cursed with bad plumbing and poor sanitation since the fall of Rome, and had of course the added benefits of antiseptic properties and inebriation. Required to be brewed and seeped which killed germs in the process, coffee and tea, as production increased and came under colonial control, however, could be released into the mass-market.
Unlike tea, whose cultivation and ceremony maybe as far back as five-thousand years in China (allegedly due to a fortunate mishap that blew some tea leaves into a pot of water on the boil, the government having decreed ages before that all water must be boiled before it is drank) and slowly leached to the rest of Asia, coffee’s properties were discovered relatively late—possibly by observing the behaviour of birds and goats fiending after the berries, which were too bitter for human-consumption. This late entry and South American plantations had me convinced, considering the timing during the Age of Exploration, that coffee was purely a New World import. Introduced to Yemeni dervishes by Ethopian planters, the devotees sipped the strong wild coffee (qahwat al-bun, wine of the bean, loaned into Turkish as kahve, whence it was discovered by European merchants) to help them keep awake for all-night vigils. A domesticated variety of the plant was cultivated in the port city of Mocha and the drink gradually expanded beyond religious use. Conflating New World chocolate with the souqs of this Yemeni port is similar to the word for the quintessentially North American poultry coming indirectly to England via merchants from the Ottoman Empire. Just as the methods of silk and porcelain production were a highly guarded industry secret for China, so too was coffee for Yemen, East Africa and Persia. Only beans already roasted were allowed for export to prevent propagation. Another Sufi Bada Budan smuggled seven cultivars from the Middle East to India, where, like the British despoiling China’s monopoly on tea, the plant and coffee-culture thrived and promulgated to the rest of the world.

insular culture or gunboat diplomacy

As the culture had periodically done several times during the long history of its civilisation, Japan in the nineteenth century had turned inward and had isolated itself from the affairs of the rest of the world and incubated unique and refined art, literature and social etiquette.

This state (sokoku, a closed state, in the political sense) carried on for over two centuries until Commadore Matthew Perry appeared in Edo Bay, the former capital and close to Tokyo, suddenly in 1853 with his dreadnoughts and menacing missive from the US president Millard Filmore, obliging Japan to open its ports to international trade. There was just a little violence and the threatening language of the message, which promised worst of all to be unrelenting, thrust Japan towards engagement in the markets. A different sort of isolationist policy was taking route in America around this time—with the country healing from its own war against Mexico and earlier conflicts with Britain, and recuperation and military-industrial surplus, a militarised and recovering nation already despairing to expand markets—and America was compelled to trounce on this serene and nearly self-sufficient society to find new buyers and new suppliers of raw material.
While I suppose there’s a certain romancing element to uncontacted Japan, they definitely were not ignorant of the outside world, with a select few, government-vetted Chinese and Danish merchants doing brisk-business in a free-trade zone demarcated in the harbour of Nagasaki; they just didn’t care to be part of it. Maybe they conceded just to be rid of this presence, who lingered a lot in the area. Perry went as far as acquiring Taiwan (then called Formosa) as a base of operations, like America had done with Cuba and the Philippines. Once, however, their insular society was infiltrated, the Japanese did not suffer the fate of many other lands under colonialism, having taken the time to study the world at large, and instead excelled on the international stage and appropriated what was imposed upon them.

après moi, le déluge

A brotherly syndicate is apparently poised to rally its religious wing in order to subvert the Pope’s stance on environmental conservation. Business magnates that rely on cheap and dirty exploitation of Nature in order to ensure their profits don’t much care for the Pope’s message and hope to counter any reforms that might come about in policy changes, both publicly and privately.
Some conservative religious leaders have rediscovered a nascent and absolving argument that mankind ought not to presume it can alter God’s creation in any way, and that any ecological crises we witness and choose to append an anthropogenic label on is false and prideful. These rapture-ready flocks, I think, are easily led down the path of such irresponsible, selfish thinking—après moi, le déluge, “after me, [comes] the Flood” and just might adopt that sentiment of French King Louis XV of self-enrichment at the expense of others and future generations (which a lot of politicians and business leaders have honed). Many in the US already dismiss the Pope’s entreaties for charity and redistribution of wealth as communist-leanings, probably because, thanks to American exceptionalism, even the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and are just waiting to claw themselves to the top. I hope such attitudes don’t spread and this proxy war for the status quo is not prolonged.

oh, du fröhliche!

For this first weekend after the New Year finding many agonising over resolutions, Brain Pickings presents a nice book-review of a vintage, seminal work by Friedrich Nietzsche called Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft—usually translated as the Gay Science.

This happy discipline is itself derived from a Provençal term—gai saber—needed for the art of composition, which was already popularised through parody by writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who coined the phrase appositely as the “dismal science,” sure that poets were supposed to be tortured, wretched souls. As the name implies, it is on the balance a positive and optimistic work, and Nietzsche, on the occasion of the New Year, resolves to be a yea-sayer and presents ideas that echo in famous and constructive lists of resolutions of other authors, thinkers and celebrities that the article also features. The Gay Science is often summarily dismissed as being the first instance in the philosopher’s body of work to contain the phrase “god is dead,” and although Nietzsche, as a secularist, wants to find the divine in ourselves that was imparted to us before we can intelligently discuss true deities, I think that the statement is amplified far beyond its tenor. The “dead god” is the departed Buddha and the vignette paints a swirling image of madmen desperately searching for religion but only finds worshipers bowing to the flickering shadows projected from a statue of the Enlightened One—and for this, Nietzsche makes us all accomplices.