"In the book of my memory, after the first pages, which are almost blank,
there is a section headed Incipit vita nova."
On Wednesday and Thursday, I read Dante's La Vita Nuova, which
I'd long been curious about. It's very interesting that Dante feels compelled
to explain his own poetry, even in a very formulaic way. ("There are four
parts in this sonnet. In the first, I...")
There are definitely some interesting parts in the Vita Nuova.
It's good to get the inside story on Dante's love for Beatrice -- something
commentators on the Divina Commedia always write footnotes
about, something my father has often mentioned, but never something I read
a primary source about.
After the vision which I had described, when I had composed the
rhymes which Love had commanded me, a number of conflicting thoughts
began to contend and strive one with the other, all of them, it seemed,
unanswerably. Among them were four which seemed most to disturb my
peace of mind. One was this: "The domination of Love is a good thing
because he guides the mind of his faithful follower away from all
unworthiness." Another thought was this: "The domination of Love is not
good because the more faithfully a follower serves him, the more
burdensome and grievous are the moments he must endure"; yet another thought
was as follows: "The name of Love is so sweet to hear that it seems
impossible that it can be anything but sweet in its effect upon most
things, for it is known that names are a consequence of the things which
are named, as it is written, Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"; the
fourth thought was this: "The Lady for whom Love holds you so enthralled
is not like other women whose hearts are easily moved." Every one of these
thoughts so contended within me that I became like a person who does not
know which road to take on his journey, who wants to set out but does not
know where to start.
(Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, XIII (trans. Barbara Reynolds))
Dante's self-condemnation on account of his love for the "compassionate lady"
who appears after the death of Beatrice is remarkable. Dante was a very
serious man and really felt things deeply; I think this is something that
leads people to compare him with Vergil, whom he put into his own poetry
later on as a character or as an inspiration.
People are remarkably divided in their views of Dante's love for Beatrice.
La Vita Nuova records that (as has become legendary) he saw
her when they were both nine years old -- we could presume before puberty,
when they were both children -- and he fell in love and remained deeply
in love with her for the rest of his life, although they barely spoke.
(Dante remembers being greeted once by Beatrice some years later, and
wishes at length that she would greet him again. So they did actually say
hello to each other, at least once.) But Dante had a series of visions
which convinced him of the validity of his inclination that Beatrice was
unique and special and that he ought to love her for his whole life.
("And some in dreams assured were...") And when he did waver from this
commitment (after Beatrice was dead!), he couldn't live with himself:
Your levity I contemplate with dread [...]
While life endures you should not ever be
Inconstant to your lady who is dead.
(id., XXXVII)
and again: "often I grew angry in my heart and reviled myself greatly [a]nd
often too I cursed the vanity of my eyes [...] 'for never, this side of
death, ought your tears to have ceased!'". Finally "my heart began to
repent sorrowfully of the desire by which it had so basefully allowed itself
to be possessed for some days against the constancy of reason; and when this
evil desire had been expelled all my thoughts returned once more to their
most gracious Beatrice".
So you can see how Dante's view really polarizes people; few people reading
this are neutral in their assessment of Dante's behavior. (It's interesting
that I say "behavior", because Dante barely did anything observable in
the entire book, except visit another city, get sick, cry, and write poems.
He's very concerned with his inner life, which continues in parallel to
and separate from what people can see about him. It's of consequence to
him whether his feelings are noble or base, whether his thoughts are
reasonable or unreasonable -- whether inside himself he is virtuous or
vicious. Certainly Dante, as a Christian, kept in mind the admonition of
the Gospels about looking at women the wrong way, as opposed to the Jewish
emphasis on good deeds, what Christians ended up calling "works". In
La Vita Nuova, Dante's only works are his poems, and he never
does anything that most people today could call "real". This is a source
of continuing controversy. Dante's concerns make lots of sense to me;
I can relate.)
By the way, there is a company called
Vita Nuova which sells support
for the Bell Labs
Inferno operating
system.
I always associated the title of La Vita Nuova with
Christian apocalyptics -- "Ecce nova facio omnia", which I remember
acutely from a love story of my own, and the New Jerusalem and the
New Heaven and New Earth, and then of course in the Symbolum Nicenum where it
says "et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi
saeculi, amen". So the phrase has this really strong eschatological
significance for me, which really affects how I would read a book called
La Vita Nuova -- but the notes in my edition say, to my
surprise, that "[t]he literal English translation, 'The New Life', has
religious overtones which are probably not in the original". Hmmmmm.
On a very different note, on Tuesday I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon with Zack and two ladies whom I presume are gracious. It's
definitely a beautiful movie, and I agree with the praise for the fighting
scenes, especially in the forest.
Crouching Tiger is interesting for addressing ancient mythical
Chinese sexism: Jade Fox becomes evil because the founder of the Wudan
school rejects her as a student and sees her only as a sexual partner (we
could probably even say "sexual object"). And
Jade Fox's student in turn rejects Wudan for its continuing sexism and
begins to turn toward evil. There is the sense that Wudan is to blame for
all this: if Wudan's founder had been willing to teach Jade Fox as an
equal with his male students, the policeman's daughter would not have ended
up as an orphan.
A lot of artistic works have been addressing sexism in somewhat cliched ways.
The classic example for me is actually a Dar Williams song, "The Babysitter's
Here":
And will they get married with kids of their own? He says
"Not if she's going to college we won't,"
And he kisses her, oh... some day I'll have a boyfriend just like that...
(Emphasis in original.) The young girl's misunderstanding of her babysitter's
life
She says, "Do me a favor, don't go with a guy who would make you choose,"
And I don't understand, and she tries to explain
And all that mascara runs down in her pain
Cause she's leaving me...
(emphasis added) is tragic, but I think the presentation is a bit heavy-handed.
Every single time I hear that song, I find it really jarring: it's the core
and key to the song, but the little girl narrator has no idea of that. This
is a traditional literary device, which Dar Williams wields powerfully, but
what's being revealed this way is somehow too much for me.
Another sexism plot showed up at the beginning of Carl Sagan's
Contact, which I read recently. The daughter wants to be a
scientist. Her father encourages her and then dies tragically. Her
(wicked) stepfather thinks women shouldn't be scientists. She keeps on
studying
science and nature against his wishes. So she becomes endearing, appealing,
interesting; her stepfather rapidly becomes the bad guy, ignorant, even
cruel. This is all laid out in just a few pages, but we can so quickly
identify with the young woman in her enthusiasm and independence (we know
that this is a character who will not care about convention, who will find
her own path).
When I read the beginning of Contact, though, I felt
manipulated, as though Sagan had picked out an unreasonably extreme
situation just to polarize the beginning of the story and draw us in. But
the problem is that I actually know of a young woman in real life who wants
to be a scientist and whose parents are actively discouraging her because
they believe women shouldn't be scientists. So "this is real, this is
something that happens", and Sagan isn't just making it up.
I had lunch with Art Tyde, one of the founders of Linuxcare, on Wednesday
at an Indian restaurant on Folsom (it's actually under the same management
as the Tandoori Mahal on Kearny, where I always used to go for lunch
buffet -- and they have exactly the same menu, including the lunch buffet)
by 8th or 9th.
One of the things we talked about was the effect of business involvement
in the Linux community. I reminded Art that this had been a subject of
really active controversy in 1998 -- "is business good for Linux?" -- and
that there had been all sorts of different views. The most prescient, I
think, was the view that "business involvement won't hurt the Linux
community as a whole, but personal relationships will suffer". I don't
remember whose idea that was, but I'm sad to say that it seems to have
been true. I've lost no friends, as far as I know, through business and
the "Linux industry", but many of my friends have lost friends that way,
sometimes very close friends.
I really do miss the casual and enthusiastic local Linux community from
1998, but I'm glad that I'm still in touch with so many people despite
all the turbulent events since then.
I did work for Linuxcare at home. In very classical teacher style,
I actually graded a bunch of written multiple choice tests.
I also got my beard cut.
Doesn't it make sense to use the <H1> and <H2> tags here
instead of <BIG> and <STRONG>? I got into the habit of
using <STRONG> for section headings on Advogato.
My arms really hurt, from moving a filing cabinet last weekend and then
typing during the week.
I noticed that
RyanMuldoon on
Advogato was a co-founder of the ARHS
network, with Gabe Ricard, whom I met and corresponded with a bit when
I visited ARHS in 1999. It's
quite likely that I actually met Ryan, too. Their advisor in this
undertaking was Peggy Westcott, who was my computer teacher in
elementary school at the Smith College Campus School. (She taught Logo
to 4th through 6th graders, including the really exciting LegoLogo unit
in 6th grade, to which I looked forward for years and about which I once
had a very dramatic dream. It was a dark and stormy night and a few of
us, students all, took shelter at Peggy's house, where she let us do
experiments with LegoLogo. I think I had that dream in 5th grade, and I
wish I could remember who the other students in the dream were, because
I have a guess.)
Peggy was a computer teacher at ARHS (one of the best public
high schools in Massachusetts) after that, and she had a group of really
motivated students who set up a network with a Linux box and did
technology projects. I am very much reminded of
GEECS, and it seems
to me that every high school should have a project somehow along these
lines, if students are interested.
After work, in Jamba Juice, I heard the song "Closer to Fine" by the
Indigo Girls on the radio, but I think it was more like
"closer to crying" for me, because it made me want to cry.
I went to the doctor, I went to the mountain
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
I guess I've done all of those things lately except for drinking from the
fountain. The Indigo Girls continue:
I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
so when I walked out of Jamba Juice, closer to crying, I thought "Everybody's
looking for salvation" but also that I was unlikely to ever have a Ph.D or
a beard to my knee -- where other times I seemed to be on track for both of
those things.
Well, I remembered the bit from Thornton Wilder's The Bridge
of San Luis Rey:
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are
like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on
the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has
not been brushed away by the finger of God.
I liked this because I always associated ignorance with cruelty and knowledge
or certainty with kindness.
But the Indigo Girls associate ignorance and uncertainty with health,
which would certainly have been anathema to me once. (I suppose there are
other ways of reading that Wilder quotation, like associating polytheism
with cruelty and monotheism with kindness.)
If we take the straightforward interpretation of the list of activities
in "Closer to Fine" as metaphorical for all the things that people attempt
or look to in order to find meaning, health, happiness, or wisdom, then I
think it's easy for anyone to sympathize with the story in that song. Sure,
the list there is pretty "New Agey", for the most part. (It does mention
the Bible later on, and a "revival", presumably mixing some Christianity
together with mountains and fountains in the catalogue of salvationist
technique.) But the message of the song is "I did x, y, and z, and nothing
worked" (but now the person to whom the song is addressed has allowed the
singer to feel more comfortable with ignorance and thereby "closer to fine").
Well!
Isn't it just a little strange for a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to have a
safety seal on it, saying "Sealed for your protection"? Isopropyl
alcohol doesn't exactly go bad, and you're not supposed to drink it, as
it's already a poison. Yes, there are ways of tampering with it that
could make it dangerous to people, but it's not exactly a bottle of pills
or something.
mike dillon (I'm conflicted about whether to capitalize the names of
people who don't capitalize their own, like bell hooks and e. e.
cummings; it involves a judgment about whether or not capitalization
is part of orthography so that somebody can say "You are misspelling my
name!" if you use a capital in a standard place where that person
doesn't) is preparing
an edition
of Ferrer's The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School.
I had dinner with Zack and worked a bit on getting this diary set up.
zork is still down, but this is hosted on homer, so this is
available even though my home page is not.
My arms felt marginally better in the morning, but that didn't last too
long. zork has come back up.
I had a dream last night that I lost a tooth; I definitely hope that
doesn't happen in real life. At a few points in my life, I haven't
taken good care of my teeth. There are consequences to that.
I'm thinking about various possibilities for interface for this diary.
One is to have month pages (2001-03.html) with concatenated day pages
together, separated by horizontal rules. Another is to take the
output of cal, like
March 2001
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
and generate links to entries for days where entries exist. Another is
to have "next" and "previous" links. I'm just not sure what to do.
I've been hearing a lot (from five different sources!) lately about solar
activity and likely storms on Earth. I'm told I might even be able to
see the aurora down here in San Francisco this evening, and then that the
power grid may be even more unstable. And my cell phone may not work.
Good thing I don't have a cell phone!
With my right arm in lots of pain in the afternoon, I read E. L.
Doctorow's City of God.
This is one of the best books I've read in years, but also one of the most
painful, maybe more so than The Last of the Just -- solid
competition, anyway.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
