TANABATA & SHINTO

“Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.” - Seneca

The Hoshi Matsuri is a Shinto festival celebrated in Japan today. It commemorates the two Tanabata lovers who were separated by a raging river. Magpies took pity on them and formed a living feathered bridge across which the two lovers were reunited. The lovers were fixed in the firmanent as stars (Cowherd Star [Altair] and Weaver Star [Vega]), but unfortunately, still separated by the Milky Way. They get together once every year on the seventh day of the seventh month. Japanese families tie samples of their children’s handwriting to bamboo poles and offer them to the lovers in hope of improving their children’s script. This has evolved from an ancient Chinese myth to which the following Chinese poem alludes:

The Seventh Night of the Seventh Month
To “Magpie Bridge”

Sparse clouds and faintly glowing moon–
Where can the bridge be built?
Surely the magpies are many and the crows few.
Between the mortals a nightly sharing of the net curtains,
But alas! How quickly does wedded bliss grow cold.
For a whole year there is the grief of separation,
And now in early autumn there is the glad reunion.
All through this night the two stars dread the coming of dawn
And I ask: “Had they not been separated by the Milky Way,
How could they have felt the full joy of their reunion?”

Hsü Tsuan-Tsêng (17th century AD)

Shinto is an ancient Japanese religion, which is believed to have started at about 500 BCE (some say even earlier). It was originally an amorphous mix of nature worship, fertility cults, divination techniques, hero worship, and shamanism. Its name was derived from the Chinese words “shin tao” (The Way of the Gods) in the 8th Century CE. Shinto has no real founder, no written scriptures, no body of religious law, and only a very loosely-organized priesthood.

Many texts are valued in the Shinto religion. Most date from the 8th century CE, for example, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), which is the the mythological history of Japan. The Gods of Shinto, which is a polytheistic religion, are said to have created Japan as their image of paradise on Earth, and placed the emperor as its true ruler. The Emperor is a direct descendant of Amaterazu, the Goddess of the Sun.

Other famous Shinto texts are the Rokkokushi (Six National Histories), the Shoku Nihongi or Nihon Shoki (Continuing Chronicles of Japan) and the Jinno Shotiki (a study of Shinto and Japanese politics and history), which was written in the 14th century

Shinto recognises many sacred places: Mountains, springs, forests, etc. Shrines are built in these places and each shrine is dedicated to a specific Kami who has a divine personality and responds to sincere prayers of the faithful. When entering a shrine, one passes through a Tori, a special gateway for the Gods. It marks the demarcation between the finite world and the infinite world of the Gods. Believers respect animals as messengers of the Gods. A pair of statues of “Koma-inu” (guard dogs) face each other within the temple grounds.

In the past, believers practiced “misogi”, the washing of their bodies in a river near the shrine. In recent years they only wash their hands and wash out their mouths in a washbasin provided within the shrine grounds. Shrine ceremonies, which include cleansing, offerings, prayers, and dances are directed to the Kami.

Kagura are ritual dances accompanied by ancient musical instruments. The dances are performed by skilled and trained dancers. They consist of young virgin girls, a group of men, or a single man. Mamori are charms worn as an aid in healing and protection. There come in many different forms for various purposes. An altar, the "Kami-dana" (Shelf of Gods), is given a central place in many homes.

Seasonal celebrations are held at spring planting, fall harvest, and special anniversaries of the history of a shrine or of a local patron spirit. A country-wide National Founding Day is held on February 11th of each year. Other festivals include: January 1st – 3rd Oshogatsu (New Year); March 3rd Ohinamatsuri (Girls' festival); May 5th Tango no Sekku (Boys' festival); and July 7th Hoshi Matsuri (Star festival). Followers are expected to visit Shinto shrines at the times of various life passages. For example, the “Three-five-seven matsuri” involves a blessing by the shrine Priest of girls aged 3 and 7 and boys aged 5 and is held on November 15th.

Many followers are involved in the "offer a meal movement." in which each individual bypasses a breakfast (or another meal) once per month and donates the money saved to their religious organisation for international relief and similar activity.

Origami ("Paper of the spirits"): This is a Japanese folk art in which paper is folded into beautiful shapes. They are often seen around Shinto shrines. Out of respect for the tree spirit that gave its life to make the paper, origami paper is never cut.

Shinto is different to most religions because of a few reasons:

• It is polytheistic, believing in several gods.
• It has very little theology
• It practices no congregational worship.

One of the most recognised Shinto arts is calligraphy, the types of paper, styles of writing, inks and utensils and methods of pressures on the paper are all variables that add beauty and style to this very ancient art.

SUNDAY MATINEE & ROMAN HISTORY

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” - G.K. Chesterton

I had a head cold over the weekend and it was a good excuse to stay in and get some work done. Dosing myself on medication so the symptoms abated, I was able to get most of the last work on my book finalised. It is quite a big project and the last part of it is related to illustrations, photographs and diagrams, graphs and charts, about 40 per chapter, at 24 chapters that’s close to about 1000 illustrations. Not a mean feat working through and ensuring that they are all exactly what is required, of adequate resolution, correctly labeled and relevantly placed within the text. Nevertheless, they’re all done and now the completed manuscript will go off to the publishers.

Despite the work, we had some time to relax also and see a movie or two. One of them was an old film, Henry Hathaway’s 1957 “Legend of the Lost” starring a famous trio: John Wayne, Sophia Loren and Rossano Brazzi. This was a real adventure story, a kind of toned down precursor of the Indiana Jones movies. The core of the movie, however, was more serious with a moral, and a love story thrown in for good measure. It was slightly reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s short story “Rain” in its tale of sin and redemption.

The plot centres on three people and the relationships amongst them. Paul Bonnard (Rossano Brazzi) arrives in Timbuktu in search of a guide to escort him into the Sahara desert. American Joe January (John Wayne) reluctantly takes the job despite misgivings about Bonnard’s undisclosed plans. Dita (Sophia Loren), a prostitute who has been deeply moved by Bonnard’s spiritual nature after a long conversation she has with him, follows the two men into the desert. Once in the Sahara, Bonnard reveals his plans. He has a letter from his father who wrote to him about a lost city in the desert where there is hidden a fabulous treasure. After some days trekking through the sands, the trio arrives in the ruins of a Roman city, where Bonnard hopes to discover the legacy of his father. What Bonnard finds alters him in unexpected ways, with tragic results.

Once you get over the observation that there is almost no chemistry between the leads, John Wayne and Sophia Loren, the movie was fun and reminded me of the sort of movies I used to watch on TV as a child. There was quite a lot of colour and action, adventure and romance (in the sense of a feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life) and the ruined city was fantastic. The ruined city is referred to as “Timgad” in the film. This is a Holywoodian geographical blooper as the distance from Timbuktu (in Mali) to Timgad (in Algeria) is about 3,500 km – definitely not possible given the time course of the trek depicted in the film.

Timgad was the ancient Roman city of Thamugadi on the high plateau north of the Aurès Mountains in northeastern Algeria, which offers the most thoroughly excavated and one of the most well-preserved Roman remains in North Africa. Thamugadi, founded by the emperor Trajan in AD 100, proved to be of strategic importance in the defence of Numidia. Its long prosperity was derived from the fertility of the surrounding territory. In the late 4th century it became the seat of the bishop Optatus, one of the most ardent supporters of Donatism, a heretical Christian movement, and the stronghold was sacked by Berbers in the early 6th century, toward the end of the Vandal supremacy in Africa.

The 10,000–15,000 inhabitants of Thamugadi lived in a classic Roman type of city, quasi-military in appearance, with all streets intersecting at right angles. That life there was comfortable is evidenced by the remains of a forum, a public library (4th century AD), a theatre capable of holding about 4,000 people, and an exceptionally large number of public baths.

This of course is at variance with the directions given to Bonnard by his father, as the city he described was Ophir, a lost city mentioned in the Bible. This was a mythical place, famous for its wealth. King Solomon is supposed to have received a cargo of gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks from Ophir, every three years. Many Egyptian pharaohs reported sending naval expeditions to Punt (Somaliland) for monkeys, ivory, frankincense, and slaves lends credence to an East African site. On the other hand, the Jewish historian Josephus and St. Jerome evidently understood that India was the location of Ophir. The Hebrew words for the products of Ophir may be derived from Indian languages; furthermore, sandalwood and peacocks are commonly found in India, whereas, at least in modern times, they do not exist in East Africa.

The real location where the was shot film is neither Timgad, nor Ophir! It is Leptis Magna in Libya. This is a magnificent ancient site, the largest city of the ancient region of Tripolitania. It is located 100 km southeast of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. Lying 3 km east of what is now Al-Khums. Leptis Magna contains some of the world’s finest remains of Roman architecture. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. The city was founded as early as the 7th century BC by Phoenicians, it was later settled by Carthaginians, probably at the end of the 6th century BC. Its natural harbour at the mouth of the Wadi Labdah contributed to the city's growth as a major Mediterranean and trans-Saharan trade centre, and it also became a market for agricultural production in the fertile coastland region.

Near the conclusion of the Second Punic War, it passed in 202 BC to Masinissa's Numidian kingdom, from which it broke away in 111 BC to become an ally of Rome. Through the 1st century AD, however, it retained several of its Punic legal and cultural traditions, including its municipal constitution and the official use of the Punic language. The Roman emperor Trajan (reigned AD 98–117) designated Leptis a colonia (community with full rights of citizenship). The emperor Septimius Severus (AD 193–211), who was born at Leptis, conferred upon it the jus Italicum (legal freedom from property and land taxes) and became a great patron of the city. Under his direction an ambitious building program was initiated, and the harbour, which had been artificially enlarged in the 1st century AD, was improved again. Over the following centuries, however, Leptis began to decline because of the increasing insecurity of the frontiers, culminating in a disastrous incursion in 363, and the growing economic difficulties of the Roman Empire. After the Arab conquest of 642, the status of Leptis as an urban centre effectively ceased, and it fell into ruin.

So, there you go a B grade movie got me to review my ancient Roman history and to find out something more about Leptis Magna and Timgad.
Enjoy your week!

ART SUNDAY - SARGENT

“A portrait is a picture of a person with something wrong with the mouth.” - John Singer Sargent

Today for Art Sunday, John Singer Sargent (born in Florence, 12 Jan 1856; died in London, 25 April 1925). He was and American painter and draughtsman, active in England. Sargent was the most fashionable portrait painter working in England and the USA in the late 19th century. He was brought up by expatriate American parents in an environment of restless travel and an insulated family life. On both sides of the Atlantic the famous Sargent was sought after to paint portraits of American businessmen and financiers, English manufacturers and their wives, fashionable Edwardian aristocrats, and the English gentry. The international art community admired his style of seemingly effortless, bravura brushwork and dashing likenesses.

Best known is his portrait “Madame X” (Madame Gautreau, one of the most elegant and fashion-conscious beauties of Parisian society), which created a scandal at the 1884 Salon; critics found it eccentric and erotic, and the sitter's mother claimed it made her daughter a laughingstock. Discouraged, he moved permanently to London, though he often visited the U.S. He tired of portrait requests and increasingly turned his attention to painting his sisters Emily Sargent and Violet Ormond and Violet's family, and, more and more, holiday subjects in watercolor and oil.

Sargent was cosmopolitan in outlook, a linguist, a fine pianist and an avid reader of the classics. The spirit of self-sufficiency and isolation, both physical and emotional, remained with him all his life. He never married, grew wary of emotional entanglements and remained closest to his sisters, especially the eldest, Emily.

Here is his “Nonchaloir” (Repose), of 1911. It is 64 x 76 cm, oil on canvas and exhibitied at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The painting is characteristic of Sargent in that the style is relaxed and effortless and manages with a limited palette and easy fluid strokes to evoke the essence of “rest”. The woman in Repose is Sargent’s niece, Rose-Marie Ormond Michel. The portrait is informal and the sitter is depicted as a languid, anonymous figure absorbed in poetic reverie. The consummate luxury and nonchalance is documenting the end of an era. The lingering aura of fin-de-siècle gentility would soon be shattered by massive political and social upheaval in the early twentieth century.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” - Thomas Paine

Happy Fourth of July!

Today, as it is Independence Day for the USA, something appropriate. A march by John Philip Sousa, the famous “Stars and Stripes Forever”. This is one of my favourite Souza marches, especially the lyrical second part beginning at 1:10.



And to stay in an American mood, today is also the birthday of Stephen Foster (1826 – 1864), the “Father of American music” and composer of many classic songs such as “Oh, Susannah!”, “Old Folks at Home”, Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”, “Camptown Races”, etc. Here is a lovely lullaby, “Beautiful Dreamer”, sung by another great Roy Orbison:



Enjoy your weekend!

APPLE PIE

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

When I was visiting the USA several years ago, I was invited to dinner at a colleague’s house. The family was delightful and the dinner very good. However, what stuck in my mind was the excellent apple pie, which was definitely home made and the pride of the hostess (with good reason too)! She was even kind enough to supply the recipe:

American Apple Pie
Ingredients Pastry:
• 3/4 cup butter
• 5 tablespoons cold water
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt

Filling:
• 6 large new season apples
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 4 tbsp. apple cider
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 6 tbsp. blanched, toasted almonds
• 1 tbsp. sugar
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tbsp. milk or cream

Method
1. Peel, core and slice the apples. Put in a large mixing bowl and sprinkle with lemon juice. Toss the apples with the cider, sugar, cinnamon and cloves. Let stand for up to an hour, tossing from time to time.

2. Preheat oven to 200°C. Place butter, water, flour and salt in food processor bowl. Process just until dough clumps together - about 5 seconds. Divide the dough in half and shape each half into a 6-inch pancake. Center one pancake inside a 25 x 30 cm plastic bag. Sprinkle a few drops of water on the countertop to hold the plastic bag in place. Smooth out the bag and begin rolling the pastry from the center out in alternating directions to form an even circle. After every few strokes, lift the top surface of the bag from the dough and smooth it down again flip the bag over and lift the other surface and smooth it down. Continue this "roll, lift, flip" pattern until your circle of dough is about two cm wider than the rim of your 25 cm pie pan. Loosen both sides of the plastic bag from the dough and slide the pie pan upside-down into the bag and center it over the circle of dough. Turn the pan and bag over so the dough rests in the pan and slide the pan and dough from the bag. Gently press the pastry into the pan and trim the edges about one cm beyond the rim.

3. Sprinkle the almond-sugar mixture over the bottom of the shell. Keep the rest of the dough chilled until ready to use.

4. Transfer the apples to the pie shell, mounding them higher in the centre and leaving the sugary liquid behind in the bowl. Add the heavy cream to this liquid and beat until it is slightly thickened. Pour the mixture over the apples to coat them.

5. Put the remaining dough pancake inside the bag and roll it out using the same "roll, lift, flip" routine. When the top crust is rolled, cut the bag on 3 sides and peel off the top sheet of plastic. Use the remaining sheet of plastic to turn the top crust over the filling, center it, then peel off the plastic. Trim the top crust to once cm beyond the edge of the pie pan. Fold the top edge under the bottom crust and flute. Make several slashes in the top to allow steam to escape. Brush with the egg yolk beaten with the milk to form a glaze.

6. Bake for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to 175°C, and bake for 50 more minutes or until the crust is golden. If the edge darkens too much during the baking, cover it with foil, leaving the center open, and continue baking. Cool and serve with ice cream, if desired. Makes 8 to 10 servings.

Enjoy your weekend!

FOR THE PERSON WHO HAS EVERYTHING...

“To speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.” - Ben Jonson

Seeing that Yahoo 360 is soon closing, and the bloggers here are looking for a new home, it is apt that I share with you an interesting snippet of news I read in the newspaper today. “Twitter” is the new rage, it seems, and is threatening “Facebook” in supremacy. This is no surprise as we live a society where communication seems to be in a process of ever-shrinking dimensions. The “140 character message limit” of Twitter constitutes a “tweet” and is perfectly suited to the SMS, telegraph-like brevity of the communication of the modern person. Our ancestors once communicated effectively with short grunts, so why not us? Let’s get back to our roots…

Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo 360 and Blogger, MySpace and Multiply, just to mention a few of these social networking sites, are big business. There is much money to be made wherever people congregate in large numbers and that goes for the virtual community, not only the real one. Hence the big competition in the popularity stakes and the extreme marketing associated with each of these platforms for ascendancy. Alas for some, popularity (ever fickle), has by-passed them and hence the decadence of Yahoo 360 that we have witnessed lately.

Seeing that Twitter is the new wunderkind on the block, is it a surprise that various para-service industries have sprung up to cater to the advertising needs of the twitterer market? Brisbane-based company uSocial has launched a service that allows twitterers to buy “packages of followers” if they can’t attract any of their own. For only $87 you can purchase 1,000 followers and for $3497 you can buy the maximum of 100,000 followers!

So how is that? You can buy yourself admirers! You can purchase your own fan club! So when you write: “I am now thinking of going out for a stroll because it’s a nice day here in Melbourne, and I feel like a leisurely walk.” (122 characters), your fan club can know about it and rejoice in your excellent thought so pithily communicated. The world must know of course about such important events in your life.

Humour aside, if a company buys 100,000 followers on Twitter and keeps bombarding them with advertising, it’s well worth the $3497 investment. Another uSocial service puts paying customers’ websites on the prestigious front pages of social networking sites such as Digg, Buzz and StumbleUpon. Another revolves around positions of prominence for your company in search engine results. What did I tell you before? It’s big business!

Meanwhile, keep on blogging!

confabulate |kənˈfabyəˌlāt| verb [ intrans. ]
1 [formal] Engage in conversation; talk : She could be heard on the telephone confabulating with someone.
2 [Psychiatry] Fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.
DERIVATIVES
confabulation |-ˌfabyəˈlā sh ən| noun
confabulatory |-ləˌtôrē| adjective
ORIGIN early 17th century: From Latin confabulat- ‘chatted together,’ from the verb confabulari, from con- ‘together’ + fabulari (from fabula ‘fable’ ).

Jacqui BB is hosting Word Thursday

FALSE PRETENCES

“The greater absurdities are, the more strongly they evince the falsity of that supposition from whence they flow.” – Francis Atterbury

How easy it is to delude ourselves. We are eager to substantiate our dreams, see our hopes bear fruit, yearn to realise our desires. How often we can succumb to the sweet insistence of a spurious but so attractive premise! We are our own accomplice in the duplicity of the feelings that we manufacture to make our fantasy an actuality. Alas, the virtual reality that we concoct is so flimsy that it seldom fails to survive the probity of logic and fails the test of time…

False Pretences

Drowning in your sea of insinuations
Clutching the bright straws of your gaze
(How duplicitous those eyes!)
I may as well try to capture
A sunbeam in an attempt to save me
From an inevitable death.

I lie, you lie, we lie
And in the midst of all of our lies
There is a truth, so richly dressed;
She looks at us, beaming innocently
Because we cannot tell her apart
From our naked lies.

Too late to turn back now,
We’ve missed our chance
We’ve bypassed the turn-off
Of that saving grace of the detour…
On false pretences, we career on,
And like lemmings, we shall plummet to our death.

This is a poem that I wrote several years ago when sweet lies were so easy to consume. Lies always hide poison beneath their pastel-coloured sugary coating…

Jacqui BB hosts Poetry Wednesday