A Review of Civilization in Little Songs: You, friend, ascend from many victories. All who read these words shall know we won, that we through three millennia have won upon the bloody fields of contest; that through rolls of papyrus, through vellum folios, through books stitched in hard-covered paper we won the sharp battle of…
The dancing step, the telling gesture, memory in movement; we can imagine the joy, the ritual, the sacrifice to God in our days cave-safe, firelit some 40,000 years before this day, creatures as now we are yet without advantage, without these past millennia of humane tradition, the gift of thought, the accumulation of wisdom that…
Words, in their way, might help us see the objects of creation, those creations which grow in beauty from the mind of man. Statues, pictures, et cetera, we understand by words, those vessels of ideas before, beyond the things themselves. Words contain the universe, a universe which knows itself by the mind of man. We…
Book III of “Eden to Ohio” Colonization, Eden, Apples, Apple Cider * * * Aristotle composed many books, many lectures, most now lost. Among those lost, the dialogue “Alexander, ‘On Colonization’”. You might remember that an eager occupation of Aristotle’s Lyceum and of Plato’s Academy was the production of constitutions for those Greek colonies which…
Book III of “Eden to Ohio” Chapman, Appleseed, Swedenborg, Colonization * * * At memory’s farthest reach, my people touch Ohio, Appleseed country, before that, none now living can say. We have photographs, well, drawings, really, most of what was photograph has faded leaving the outlined highlight of handsome, strong willed citizens. One such picture,…
LITERATURE Essay 1: Homer, Hesiod, Homeric Hymns Part 4: Homeric Hymns * * * IN JOY, in praise we lift our voices to God, all of them; we lift our voices in communion with the life-giving force of the universe; in song we participate, we join in meaning, one with the Divine. Listening back from…
LITERATURE Essay 1: Homer, Hesiod, Homeric Hymns Part 3: Introduction, Homer, Iliad * * * THE SOURCE of our religious imagination is HESIOD, more than any other author he codified the liminal character of our nature, the traditions of our cults, our ritual practices, et cetera; yes, even into Christianity, that Roman assumption of Yahweh,…
Bunyan’s Chores, A First Fancy: Ax in Hand. Perhaps you learned of Paul Bunyan from stories in books mother-read or father-read at bed-time, in rainy-day books you read to yourself, or by pass-the-time tales when in-the-car with family. Perhaps you stood in the shadow of a gargantuan Bunyan statue, or rode on the wide back…
