Obsidian Wings

A poetry open thread

by liberal japonicus

My previous thread is turning into a poetry thread, so a bespoke thread. Unfortunately, I can't really get away from what's been happening, but if you can, please feel free to share

This essay from the Poetry Foundation, worth reading itself, begins by discussing Anna Marie Sewell's Washing the World. An excerpt:

from one dawn to the next mourning for the broken wailing for regrets

love lost, wrong words, wrong actions
unbalanced moments and all the cracks between heart
and heart, parent and child
lover and beloved friend, nation and nation
creature, and creature of another kind

for what we choose and what we neglect to choose
for what we wish we'd known
for each hand unclasped tongue unbridled
one whisper falling short of heard

until they're home, until they are all home

Pure genius

by liberal japonicus

Seems like we need some comic relief, and it is Banksy to the rescue!

That he titled the video on instagram as 'Going, going, gone!' only adds to my admiration.

In the beginning: some Bereshit parsha thoughts

by Doctor Science

My Jewish New Year's Intention is to try to read the weekly Torah portion or parsha. I'm getting a big push from the twitter group #ParshaChat, which discusses topics selected by the moderators every Wednesday evening (Eastern time). Coincidentally, Mr Dr Science teaches fencing classes on Wednesday evening, so I can participate without distractions.

The first parsha of the year is Bereshit, "In the beginning": Gen 1:1-6:8. This week's discussion focused on the theme of "trees", and we mostly talked about the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil.

The thing that always puzzled me most about this story is Gen 3:22, which is not often discussed:

And the Lord God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." [New International Version]

This kind of contradicts the whole exiled-for-disobedience story--a story which already contradicts itself. G-d told Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as though it was a warning about poison: "you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die." And the Snake doesn't tell Eve anything untrue: "G-d knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like G-d, knowing good and evil" -- which is precisely what G-d says in Gen 3:22.

This bugged me a lot while I was growing up. At some point in my late teens or early 20s I was reading about Mesopotamian religion, and I encountered the story of Adapa, the first man. Adapa is very wise, but is fooled by the trickster god Ea into refusing the food of immorality--and thus condemns humanity to sickness and death.

Looking at the Genesis story from a Mesopotamian point of view (in which immortality is a long-standing goal), trickster Snake gets humans to eat from the wrong tree. Indeed, Snake is probably in cahoots with G-d (not unlike in the book of Job), doing a good-cop-bad-cop act.

If I assume the composers (writers? bards?) of the Genesis story started with a Mesopotamian tale about humans being tricked out of immortality, then what strikes me is that our Jewish composers doubled the Tree [1]. The drama now becomes, not just a tale of loss, but about a choice between Knowledge and Immortality.

And from the Jewish POV, we always pick Knowledge. Specifically, it's "Knowledge of Good and Evil" -- which could be shorthand for "everything", or could mean "Right and Wrong, Good and Bad". Moral knowledge, having a conscience. Becoming human, instead of staying with the timeless minds of animals.

Thinking of it that way, it feels to me as though rejecting the Tree of Knowledge would be rejecting Torah. And then we say, Torah is a Tree of Life (per Prov 3:18)--so by choosing the Tree of Knowledge, we end up with both Trees, head and heart together.

The ParschaChat mods pointed out that Gen 3:6

When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate.

makes an implicit parallel between Eve and G-d, who also looked on things and "saw that it was good."

I'd never noticed that parallel before, but by the usual rules of Torah study it MUST be significant. It certainly leaves the door open toward a reading in which Eve is the one who makes the choice to follow G-d. As Tolkien said, "We make still by the law in which we're made": in the image of G-d, we're creators as G-d is a creator, we appreciate beauty as G-d appreciates beauty, we seek to be wise as G-d is wise.

When the mods asked, How is Torah a Tree of Life? What does this mean?, two answers impressed me in particular [3].

One person argued that

There's a persistent dichotomy - you can live knowledgeably, you can have a full, interesting life - or you can have an eternal life, without knowledge or conflict. But you can't have both.

So when I hear "Torah is a Tree of Life...", I hear it as "don't seek immortality - immortality is empty. Hold fast, instead, to this rich tradition of knowledge and thought and exploration. Let THIS be your Tree of Life, and be satisfied."

And another summed up why I study Torah. She is a Tree of Life because of

Her physical substance, her acknowledgment of the grittiness of human existence (we're not the first or last to face truly ugly problems), her admonishment to welcome the stranger, her shared history with our community, and bringing us together to study/interpret her.

That says it for me.

Tree of Life, stained glass by Ardyn Halter.

---

[1] In the Quran it becomes a single tree, as it tends to in Christian images of Eden. A single Tree as Axis Mundi makes intuitive sense in a way that the two Trees do not, so I consider one Tree to be the ancestral or primitive state of the story, two Trees is a derived state [2].

[2] Tolkien's Two Trees are of course another derived state of the same basic trope.

[3] I'm not using names or links because the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism is ramping up (again), and I want to protect my fellow students from trolls.

Victories, Pyrrhic and otherwise

by liberal japonicus

It's probably a sign of my liberal optimism, but when I think of what has just gone down, I'm thinking of Pyrrus quote of 'another victory like this and we are undone'. Or maybe Robert Duvall's speech in Apocalypse Now.

Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… Victory. Someday this war's gonna end…

Anyway, as you stroll around with the smell of gasoline in your lungs, you are welcome to drop some psychoanalytical bs in the comments.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

by liberal japonicus

While we watch the shitstorm that is the Kavanaugh nomination wind down, the tag-team of the Count, cleek and nous (if I missed anyone, let me know) share the next.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

the title comes from this

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design.

Not sure how to say read the rest in Mandarin.

The Count also recommends this Fresh Air podcast which is not directly related, but a good listen.

This is being spun by Clickbait and his enablers as China interfering in our elections

White House Begins the China Counter-Narrative

Your thoughts, opinions and psychoanalytical bs are eagerly sought.

How the other half (of the world) lives

by liberal japonicus

Something a little closer to home. You may have read about Yuka Ogata, who was elected as a city councillor in Kumamoto, Japan and, after numerous attempts to arrange for child care, brought her infant into a city council meeting.

After I discovered I was pregnant, I asked the assembly to support me so that I could look after my infant son and continue my job as a councillor. I asked for permission to breastfeed him in the chamber, or for daycare to be provided in the assembly building for the children of councillors, assembly staff and visitors.

But my proposals were turned down. Instead, I was told to resolve those issues myself. Once again, I came up against a mindset that supports the status quo and makes bringing up children in Japan very difficult.

People overseas may find it hard to appreciate just how severe the situation is in Japan.

The shortage of childcare facilities forces many women to give up work. Even parents who manage to find a place for their child have to deal with lots of rules and regulations. For example, they have to write their child’s name on every single item of clothing, including nappies, and provide proof from a doctor that they have recovered from a cold or other communicable illness. When our children get sick – as they often do – it is very difficult to take time off work to look after them.

It may or may not surprise you, but a lot of Japanese, including women, accused Ogata of grandstanding, not behaving correctly. While the buzzfeed "5 things you need to know" is often trite, the edition for Ogata is worth linking to
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bradesposito/yuka-ogata

And a nod to those kinds of attitudes is found at the bottom.

There is a Japanese proverb, 出る釘は打たれる/Deru kugi wa utareru, or 'the nail that is sticking up gets hammered down' (fun grammatical fact, note how the passive tense removes any agency. No one is identified as doing the hammering, it just kind of happens)

Well, city councillor Ogata is in the news again. This time, for sucking on a cough lozenge.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/01/japanese-politician-thrown-out-of-meeting-for-sucking-cough-drop-yuka-ogata-breastfeeding-row

(note: I use the Guardian link because the vernacular articles are often much less detailed. Here is the Japan Times reporting on the same thing
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/09/30/national/kumamoto-municipal-assembly-kicks-female-member-sucking-cough-drop-session/ Papers in Japanese have similar summaries)

The session was suspended while assembly members voted in favour of forming an ad hoc committee to decide how to discipline her. It composed an apology and demanded that she read it out. When Ogata refused, the committee reconvened and the chamber voted to suspend her for the rest of the day. The incident held up council business for eight hours. (emphasis mine)

If you are curious about what the apology said, here is a translation

"On the 28th of September, when I stood to address the chamber, I violated Article 134 (which prohibits undignified behavior) of the council rules. In view of the need for members to behave in a dignified manner, I deeply regret my thoughtless behavior. I am deeply sorry and hereby apologize."

When a colleague recently posted about it on a local community page, he garnered this response from a Japanese woman.

I wish she would improve her communication skills as a local politician and stop bulldozing what she wants to do without consensus. Only spread impression of a trouble maker or smug ...is not gonna change the world. Those ‘old men’ in the city council are not enemies from the beginning. It looks like she’s inviting bully situation by herself and that’s suggesting a quality appropriate to a politician.

Any links to the current shitshow in the US are purely coincidental. Any comments, including "psychoanalytical bs", are permitted, indeed, are actively sought. Knock yerselfs out...