neil, perhaps you would like to check these dates as well.
Eva,
Growing up on a reservation where English was taught from the perspective of the
Cherokee language, while the Cherokee language itself was banned, created an
interesting English to say the least. It wasn't until I went to college and
left the reservation that I began to realize that the non-Indians read the bible
differently from the folks on the reservation with the words being more concrete
in Tulsa at the University. Well it is a big geology school.
I would suggest that your view of religion and God is a particularly literal
fundamentalist one. We have the same problem when non-Indians interpret what
they believe we are saying in our Sacred myths. It's as if we were all
fundamentalists, but we aren't. That is not even close.
I would suggest that you look into Paul Tillich, Martin Buber or even the J.A.T.
Robinson, the Bishop of Woolich for a concept of God that is not 19th century
Romantic. I would also point out that while you complained about not being
read, you didn't seem to try to read what I wrote about Sacred language which a
lot of Christians (My not being Christian) have no trouble accepting either.
Tillich merely defined faith as "ultimate concern" (not belief in that which is
unseen or cannot be proved) and God was that part of your existence that had
your "ultimate concern" while Robinson called God simply the "Ground of all
Being." We say that the first choice you have in life is that which will be
your "ultimate concern" and that is your God. I don't think that Buber would
have had a problem with that either since it fits nicely with the Jewish concept
of "idolatry." I would be curious how it would have fitted with a first
generation German Christian whose grandfathers had been Rabbis as well.
This has little to do with the "God as the big supernatural Object" (big white
daddy in the sky) that you seem to be railing against. That God is a part
of the 19th century Romantic flourish which said things like "My God and I walk
through the fields together" or maybe Kazantzakis' Barbarian who drinks wine
from the skull of his God in the "Odysseus Sequel."
But Eva, I don't understand how you can say these things when Hungarian
translates so much like "opening blossoms" into English. Even the
dictionaries are forced to rely upon metaphor and "as ifs" when translating
Hungarian into English. Even on the Internet, the Hungarian dictionaries are
not an easy read in the English mode. Where is your respect for the speakers
who have lived with the English and struggled with IT'S complexities all of
their lives?
Mark Twain did a very funny piece called "Innocents Abroad" where he constantly
confused the literary with the phonetic, especially around the word "dammit" in
German which is written like it would be a swear word in English, and thus taboo
in the 19th century, but in actuality sounds nothing at all like damn it, except
by a polluted Englishman. (The joke had layers.) It is wonderful to hear the
melodies of languages, like Hungarian and French and then to see how the removal
of those melodies from the literary makes conversation across linguistic
boundaries in English, almost impossible.
Not knowing the sounds of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry makes a huge
difference in immediate comprehension of his written word. I suspect that the
same separates Marx from his Romantic roots by not hearing the inflections or
the emphasis by which he said things. Perhaps it might be even more
important to have heard them in German as well. I also suspect that the
terrible life of Ginny his aristocrat wife made him a very bitter and unhappy
man, determined to speak like daggers in the world. So little is made of
context in these lists and I believe that is a mistake. Many of the Nietsche
"experts" don't even know he was sick. Can you imagine separating people dying
of AIDs from the message they express in their work? I can imagine those who
would say yes but for me the message in the work is hopelessly incomplete
without understanding the conditions of the writer's life and health.
As for four Volumes, 2,500 pages of writing about ideals that exist nowhere on
earth, it seems a little like propaganda or maybe art to me. Doing it for the
sake of itself, but ultimately I agree with Steven when he says:
>Thus, a group with a "chief" may not REALLY be a social hierarchy
>at all: it just looks that way to people who think that they see a
>"superior" lording it over "inferiors" and who may see things this
>way because they are sure that such arrangements are "natural" or
>"in our genes".
As I look at it from the other side, what it seems to me is: a bunch of people
who insist upon the other's seeing the world through their assumptions.
Capitalism isn't Marxist anymore than the Communism that the Capitalists have
been using as a whipping boy for the last 151 years is what really went on in
the Soviet sphere or is found in Das Kapital. Although I do think that the
counter warlike posture of the Soviets, and the zest for punctilious intrigue,
is found in the Marx writings that I personally have read. Enough to convince
me that I've had enough of that attitude in my life and care little for it.
No one was as pedantic and punctilious as Phillip's gold collectors. When the
last of his records are translated, the world will understand Franco and his
empathy for the Germans. They will also understand that the Spaniards were as
arrogant, genocidal and as proud of their culture as were the Germans under
Hitler. I see Marx as an extension of those attitudes even though he and his
family suffered great poverty and were chased from one country to another.
So was Wagner, but Wagner blamed it on the Jews while Marx made swiss cheese of
the Capitalists. I don't mean to imply that the Capitalists didn't deserve it
and the bankers who imprisoned Wagner were remarkably stupid. But hyper
objectivity simply means that you control the rules by which you will argue.
Reality is far more complex than that. That was Romanticism's mistake and it
was Darwin, Marx and Wagner's as well even though they were great men.
As an Indian I am asked to accept some of the most bizarre activities by
European Americans, not the least of which is a general lack of generosity and
cruelty to children while calling people who practice birth control
murderers. And yet both Capitalists and Communists (Marx's lack of tolerance
was legendary) are locked in mortal combat . Both devoid of humanity and
helpless without the other to defeat. How do I know? We could start with
the 10,000 lbs of TNT for every man woman and child on the planet during my
entire growing existence. But at an earlier time there was the following:
I lived in the only State in the Union that had a Socialist/Communist revolt.
Oklahoma had more Socialists than any other State in the U.S. (17,000) in 1917
and there was a revolt. Everyone was reading Das Kapital and the Manifesto and
were sure when the poor Whites, the Blacks and the Indians rose up that the
underclass would "do in" the middle of the country and we would have a worker's
paradise.
But theory is not reality and their theory blinded them to the reality of their
neighbors. That foolishness created one of the most conservative States in the
Union today. You even had Indians, Blacks and Poor Whites supporting the KKK
against the uprising. It was called the "Green Corn Rebellion" named after the
peace thanksgiving ceremonial of the Creek and Cherokee Indians who the State
was stolen from 27 years earlier. That was certainly sensible of them!
(joke) So their neighbors either ran them off to Texas, Mexico or put them
in jail. You won't find it in the history books. It was buried so deep
that very little is mentioned except in a few graduate thesis's. America's
history books bear a striking resemblance to the pre-Mandela apartheid Afrakaan
histories even today. But families do talk.
I have a basic problem with people putting forth their system and then
commanding that it is the only one. They seem to believe that the future of
mankind is being waged in a war at this time. It certainly does make for an
unfriendly climate and I believe makes us all incompetent at dealing with the
world. Maybe it should be remembered that books are meant for memory and
that they basically make us fatter and dumber. A little water on all of the
books in the world and in this virtual machine might well make us get up, walk
around and talk to our wives instead of believing that we understand each other.
Ray Evans Harrell
Durant wrote:
> The way I see it, a few people seem to assume
> to know what I'm saying without actually reading it...
> It is a bit like my poor mother-in-law, who rather than trying
> to understend my poor English, tried to guess what this
> wierd foreign girl would might want to say...
>
> Eva
>
>
> > "FOR EXAMPLE, I think that underneath the discussion, disagreement,
> > and (occassional) incomprehension between Jay, Eva, and Ray, what
> > is at issue is a view of human nature (gasp!) and what is possible
> > for humans. Jay's view seems to hinge importantly on biological
> > necessity -- our evolutionary legacy -- which he sees, I think, as
> > fundamentally unalterable. With some justification, Eva sees these
> > assumptions as essentially false (because too reductive) and
> > distressingly self-fulfilling -- if we BELIEVE that we have no
> > choice but to be agressively self-aggrandizing, then we have been
> > given permission, as it were, to BE that way."
> >
> > Almost seems like a "tower of Babel" at times doesn't it? Might different
> > language games be at play here? Or in the case of Ray, different forms of
> > life?
> > A student of Wittgenstein, Maurice Drury, wrote a book _The Danger of
> > Words_. It explores much of what you comment on here.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > **************************************************
> > * Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator *
> > * Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
> > * Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 *
> > * FAX:(613) 533-6307 Phone (613) 533-6000x74937*
> > * e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
> > * "The limits of our language means the limits *
> > * of our world" Wittgenstein *
> > * *
> > * *
> > **************************************************
> >
> >
> >
> >
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
