Author: Ted Murphy

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Opinions

“There is Money in Them Thar Trees”

The future is not what it used to be. Many of us mourn the fact that we might just be too late in addressing the disruptive and destructive future outcomes of the environmental and industrial decisions we have been making. The ice caps are melting and the time to act just may have been 50 years ago. Nothing we can do now will reverse this process. All we can do is hold on and watch to see just how bad this is going to be. Like the bumper sticker says “at least the WAR on the environment is going well”.

Murphy_TedI attended the Town meeting held on September 16th in the CFTA recital hall, a venue way too large for the few who attended. This meeting was for the town and campus–the “community”–to weigh in with concerns over the college’s intention to harvest trees from the college’s wooded property. The presentation was made under the description of Stewardship of our natural resources.  The opening slide used a Bible verse to set the proper tone of just how caregiving this task force was inspired to be as they thoughtfully and prayerfully consider the best way to manage this important natural resource of the school. “Proper care of the forest today will help a future forest to better prosper”.  

I stated  publically that although I understood the explanation, I doubted that this alone was our reason for wanting to turn trees into lumber…I suspect that the real reason is  money… “there is money in them thar trees and we are foolish to let them die before we get the profit.”  It was explained by the professional forester we hired that we have before us a situation of future devastation. The trees in our forest have too much common age. The canopy is too dense and the younger trees trying to grow to displace the older growth are being destroyed by more aggressive “undesirable growth”.  The deer are too manifold and eating the tender good trees.  

Ted-QuoteBut the money side of the evening continues to bother me. At the meeting,  I kept thinking why this issue? There are so many resources at the college that need attention. It cost money to hire a consultant. The college has very tight resources. There is just no way we are going to address this issue if there is not some immediate payoff  for the investment.  All the arguments for the future might have some truth to them, but I still feel the real reason we are looking to our forest is for its value as lumber money, not as an inherently valuable natural  resource.

I am not hypocritical enough to try and pass myself off as a purist on these issues. I buy lumber for art projects. I live in home partly carved out the very forest I treasure. Line up the observations and you will find me two-faced on them all. But I do want to make the case that the damage that is going to be done to our most beautiful natural resource will come at a cost to us in the present. When I pointed out the recent logging done by the Western District of the Wesleyan church of the part of the forest that runs along the edge of the college property, the forester emphasized that this was done not by a forester, but by a logger. “Don’t confuse forestry with logging”. Ok…but that sounds a little like a barber saying “It’s not me that cuts the hair, it’s the scissors”. Loggers cut trees marked by foresters. Yes, there are terrible loggers and there are environmentally responsible loggers. My hunch is that there is also a cost differential here that I doubt will be persuasive enough when cut comes to chopping that we will choose  wisely.  

It looks to me like there is not any way to change the mind of the college about this proposal. Thus, I am asking the students, faculty, and staff who care about the college forest to do the following:

Weigh in on this proposal. Insist that the people making these decisions do so with the least disruptive and most responsible means possible. Perhaps this will mean hiring the Amish to use horses rather than huge ground-destroying equipment to get the lumber.

Insist that we also hire an outside agency that is not trained only to look upon forest as lumber farms, but to see them in other environmentally focused terms. With an aesthetic eye and not one that describes lumber-lacking growth as junk trees but sees other ways in which the woods might be fine if left to go its own evolutionary direction…whatever that might be.

That a promise is made to carefully guard against harvesting trees on the borders of property other than the college and that those parts of the woods used now for recreation be the least harvested-meaning the ropes course, the paths and trails, and those parts most visible as we walk, run and recreate in this great natural resource.

That the harvesting happens in winter so that the noise and disruption will be least impactful on the forest use- leave ski trails open and safe.

That we also take into account the damage that might occur to other sensitive environmental habitats. That tree values be weighed against the value of salamanders, woodpeckers, and biodiversity.

Have the college only  hire people that will promise this in writing and make it legally binding to not walk away from the woods once the trees are gone and to not leave it like a forest looks after artillery shells have devastated an enemy embankment.

I will feel better if more people have a chance to consider what was proposed at the town hall meeting.  I am, by my own public admission, a tree hugger. I also believe that the arguments about taking care of the forest today for a future tomorrow are valid.
If we decide to still do this (I wish we would not) …how we do it is critical.  The mature trees that are surely going to die out need middle growth and younger trees to be healthy and have a future.

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Reviews Stories In Focus

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul

Faculty Film Review: Ted Murphy

Immigration issues in Europe have reached such a pitch that it has been the lead story just about every night on National Public Radio (NPR) and other news venues for the last three weeks.

The refugee crisis has merged with the economic crisis by many third world countries who were forced to mortgage their economies to an international system that has lead to conditions where people are compelled to find somewhere- almost anywhere to migrate to in order to earn a living wage. We are witnessing an adjustment to new fears of protecting borders.

These issues have brought back to me a film that seems always relevant to what historically can be called The other”, “the stranger among us” and the ancient notion of xenos.

Ali Fear Eats the SoulXenos means “the stranger”(fear of strangers is known as xenophobia) and is one of the fundamental ideas of much ancient text, from the Old and New Testament, to Homer and Ovid to the Koran. Giving comfort to the stranger is more than mere hospitality. It is a cultural virtue.

Fassbinder’s 1974 masterful film Ali: Fear Eats The Soul tells the story of a 60-year-old widow Emmi whom one evening enters a bar to get out of the rain. The bar is filled with immigrants of Arabic North Africa. On a dare, a young woman taunts Ali (in his mid 30s) to go and ask Emmi to dance. One expects Ali to embarrass and humiliate Emmi. Everything is off in the scene…the age of the couple, the races of the couple, the alcohol among Islamic people, and the music…everything.  

Fassbinder intentionally provokes as many conflicts with this scene as possible. The shock of the film is what follows. Ali and Emmi develop a connection. They fall in love. Their love is too much for everyone else in the film. Her adult children revolt when she introduces her new husband. All the people on both sides of the relationship are confused and against the relationship. It is a brilliant and subtle study of all of our deepest held prejudices.  Racism, nationalism, ageism, classism, religious bigotry and even clever hints at homophobia (Fassbinder not only wrote and directed the film, he also plays Emmi’s son-in-law) Fassbinder was homosexual.

He died young at 37. He was also specifically suggesting in this film that Love between two people can and should never be anything but a celebration. Love is always a good thing. Love should break down all barriers. But in Ali: Fear Eats The Soul love becomes a brutal “fear filled” affair that leads to sadness and isolation.  

Germany has historically not been a nation associated with open warm embrace of ‘the other”. At the time of this film the immigration crisis with Turkey was reaching a near panic state in West Germany.

Tribalism is perhaps one of our deepest held cultural connections. Marx believed that workers of vastly different cultures would come together from a common experience.  For Marx, a British laborer would unite with a Russian who worked in similar status. Ultimately the world wars of the 20th century tragically revealed that tribalism and nationalism trump nearly every other connection humans could forge in society. Fassbinder’s film takes you into a world where strangers are asked to set aside their differences and embrace the power of Love. 1 John 4:18 states that “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (NIV) Ali tells Emmi that in Islam there is a saying that “Fear eats the soul”. The film ends with Emmi sitting beside Ali in a hospital where he has been taken after he collapses from complications of an ulcer. In Fassbinder’s film the inverse of 1 John 4:18 becomes the thesis of the film. Perfect fear casts out not only love but also every other human emotion.

Every night I see the faces of the various people who are trying to enter new countries …their faces are filled with fear. The faces of the people standing guard at their borders are filled with fear. The politicians currently running for nomination use rhetoric that is filled with fear about the stranger at our borders, the undocumented among us- the xenophobia is ramped up to shrill tones and the leaders in the polls are those who play the fear card to the fullest extent.

Christ welcomed the outsider. How we think about such issues reflects our embrace of the invitation of the gospel. The world is changing. The economic, environmental and political challenges in our near future will lead to an increase of migration. How we welcome those people will reflect much about our character. These are not simple ideas or challenges. The responsible questions of protecting borders while at the same time being open to those most in need are complex issues. We should never allow the pundits to try and capitalize on our easy slide into fear. Fassbinder offers up a story of profound implications. The story of two people from radically different worlds coming together is a metaphor as much relevant today as it was in 1974.
This film is in the Houghton college library film collection. It is Criterion 2 DVD set. Consider it as a means for generating discussion.

Categories
Stories In Focus

Murphy’s Recommended Reads The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

One of the proposals for my sabbatical was to further read in areas of interest in my interdisciplinary work in film and art.  I would like to share a few thoughts on one particular book that has had a lasting impression.  Roberto Calasso is one of the great polymaths writing today.  He writes on literature, art, culture, and philosophy. His books are difficult to define. The book that made him famous is The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

calasso-marriage-cadmus-harmonyThe book is a rhapsody on the origins of Greek mythology.  But rather than offer another attempt to retell the myths, such as classics like Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, or Gustav Schwab’s Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece, Calasso’s book is more of a work of art.  He begins with where the myths begin… with the abduction of a beautiful young woman.  From there his tale weaves together strands of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Plutarch, Pliny, Sophocles, Euripides…etc. He moves through the permutations of the narratives as one might have heard them spoken in the oral tradition.  The endnotes explain the matrix of sources.  Many familiar  – many not available in any English translation.  Calasso’s idea is that the history of myth is as Joseph Campbell once described it – a grand narrative of our social values and truths.

Some of the best moments for me are those parts of the book where he enters in and comments or questions the nature and interpretations of those stories.  For instance, the alternate narrative of Helen who was never even in Troy.  The woman who precipitated the Trojan/Greek war was actually a double… a phantom.  One reference in Herodotus says she was kept in Egypt. Calasso muses about why Homer decided to give us the other story? This raises the ante on what it is exactly we care about most…ideas or realities?

The book is composed of 12 chapters.  It covers the enormous range of what Graves called the “disorganized corpses of Greek mythology.”  The final chapter gets you into the title of the book.  It tells the story of the tragic fate and aftermath of the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.  It ends with Cadmus’ gift – letters…” those fly’s feet” that became the Phoenician language in written form, essentially the transition of oral to written text.

It is a pleasure to teach art history to Houghton students. I seldom have to pause to explain who Jacob is or why Absolom is hanging by his hair in a tree.  They know the stories of the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament) and it’s companion, the New.  Sometimes I prod them into interpretation or to ponder the interconnectedness of the stories.  How Adam and Jesus are mirrored ideas in the text as Paul expounds on the significance in a kind of literary criticism of the text.  It is great to teach students who know the stories.  Houghton students read well as “moral readers”…getting what the text is trying to teach… but not always as “experiential readers.”  Some of the stories are there to makes us feel things.

Calasso’s book is a remarkable work that will generate new ideas about familiar and not so familiar stories.  I recommend this to anyone looking for a highly crafted rich narrative on these foundational stories to western culture.  Read him after you have read Ovid. The Myths of Greece (and the Roman counterparts) form the other half of what all those magnificent paintings in the Louvre, the Prado and the Met are largely about.  Who was Pelops?  Why is that peninsula call the Peloponnese?  Calasso has a great story to relate on that theme. Learn about the curse upon the house of Atreus or the meaning of the oracles. Read the heart breaking investigation that Plutarch took to discover who Charila in Delphi was. These and so many more are the reason this is such a wise, erudite investigation into these sometimes familiar and often times obscure stories.

Did the Greeks believe in their myths? Yes and no. Most of these stories existed to explain the forces of life and fate. On the one hand they are a way to address the season, the mystery of attraction and the reason why a bronze spear misses the foe at whom it was thrown.  Calasso has a very refined sense of the balance between story and meaning. It is a book not quite like any you are going to encounter on this old subject.

Categories
Arts

Recommended Reads: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Other Inquisitions”

This past week my wife Nancy mentioned that Pope Francis and I have something in common. Naturally I was thinking of the all-too-obvious humble piety connection that everyone would notice between he and I. “No,” she said, “sorry. Pope Francis stated in an interview that two of his favorite authors were Dostoevsky and Borges.” Neither of these authors surprises me as being special for Pope Francis. Dostoevsky remains important to most believers (and many non), and Borges is Argentine, as is Pope Francis. Being the most admired author from his native country it really makes sense…though Ernesto Sabato would reject this assumption.

Courtesy of themodernword.com
Courtesy of themodernword.com

The Brothers Karamazov remains my most treasured reading experience…but second to this would be Other Inquisitions by Jorge Luis Borges. Published in 1952, it was not widely read in English until 1964. Borges is world famous for his mysterious labyrinthine short stories. He was also a poet and a writer of essays. Other Inquisitions is a collection of his essays from 1937-1952.

Like T. S. Eliot, Borges published many of his essays before his more famous poetry and short fiction. Both writers used published essays to prepare a reading public to comprehend (at least to be prepared for) the work to follow. His essays read like his short stories; they are packed with complex circular associations.

Borges was remarkable for his erudition. He had few peers who could keep pace with his prodigious memory. Borges appeared to have read everything from obscure Icelandic sagas to Arab poets to Egyptian mystics, to modern authors like Chesterton, Faulkner, Joyce and Paul Valery.

These essays cover topics such as metaphysics, dreams, absolute languages, the age of the earth, time, and history, and of course the power and meaning of Art. One of his most celebrated essays is “A New Refutation of Time.” It is the longest and most complex essay in the book…notice the irony of the title? Read it again.

“The Wall and The Books” is a highly anthologized essay where Borges reflects upon the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who both constructed the Great Wall and decreed that all the books of the empire be destroyed; he wanted history to begin with him. Borges was most gifted with his ability to see metaphors. He made brilliant connections. He asks in this essay what symmetry there might be between an Emperor walling in an empire, while at the same time decreeing that this most ancient and historically sensitive of people eradicate their past. To Borges there was some meaning there. He concludes this essay with a sentence found frequently among those who search for definitions of things ineffable like beauty and art: “Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not occur, is, perhaps, the esthetic phenomenon.” Yes that sense of something just about to become clear and yet…and yet…

The first time I read this I knew I had encountered something special. Right there was succinctly stated that truth about what I felt when I looked at Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Ear Ring or read the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, or lost myself in the final movement of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”

Borges had given this experience a form for which I had no words.

Each essay is a work of art. Each a careful and complex luminous mediation upon persons and ideas: Pascal, Zeno’s Paradox, The Partial Enchantments of the Quixote, The dream of Coleridge, the mystery of the authorship of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

While running from the Burning-House-of-literature (I owe this description to Billy Collins) this would be the second book I would grab. Borges rewards re-reading. Although his writing is short, it is dense and you end up re-reading them enough to feel in retrospect that these short works are among the longest ever written.

In the epilogue Borges muses about his collection and states that he notices certain elements to be a feature of all the essays. The first is his tendency to weigh philosophical and theological ideas in terms of their aesthetic worth, “…what is singular and marvelous,” and the observation that the number of metaphors possible for the human mind is limited, but like the apostle can be all things to all people.

Borges has, more than any writer, been my most formative influence. His desire to see and live a life aesthetically has sustained me during many a dark time in my life. Borges believed that reading was an act of art- no less important than the act of writing (and by extension listening and looking). Borges established the post-modern idea of how we as readers create new works each time we experience them.  Every reader makes new connections and continues the creative process. He elevates reading. In one of his most celebrated essays he discusses Kafka and his influence. He refers to them as both precursors and also writers on whom he had influence. One of these is Pascal. Every college graduate should perk up at such an assertion. How indeed can a writer of the 20th century have had any influence upon a writer of the 17th century? How indeed. Borges notes that it took Kafka for us to connect the dots- to detect a common theme. It was in one sense not there until Kafka revealed it to us…hidden in plain sight. The existential thread that leads us through the author of Ecclesiastes to Lucretius to Augustine to Pascal to Kafka is imaginatively engendered by the “active artist reader”. None was ever so engaged as Jorge Luis Borges.

I like a Pope who reads Borges. The leader of the Catholic Church keenly understands that the great skeptic Borges can in his own circuitous pattern ultimately restore us to our Faith, an irony thick and no doubt satisfactory to Borges (who died in 1986). Some would say that there is no way he can enjoy something since he is dead. Readers of Borges know “not so fast”.

One final point: Borges, who remembered and read more than almost any person in the 20th century, who could quote indexes from memory and spoke when he met Anthony Burgess in “Old English”, who could recite Shakespeare and Quevedo and had nearly the entire Comedia of Dante committed to memory…was blind from the mid 1950 until his death some 36 years later. Blind.

It beggars the mind.