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joculumIt’s a kind of [devastated-landscape] ugliness that can be achieved anywhere, I suppose, but it’s most easily found on the borders where cultures clash....
...among the handlers, I had learned not to dismiss anything as meaningless. Mystery, I’d read somewhere, isn’t the absence of meaning but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. ---Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
I wonder what he meant by that? ---punch line of joke in which the psychoanalyst is referring to a colleague’s pleasant “Good morning.”
Why haven’t I seen this before? ---Walter Pidgeon as Edward Morbius in Forbidden Planet
I find myself reading Salvation on Sand Mountain after twenty years in which I never quite felt the need to do so, and am finding it unexpectedly resonant.
The remark about the ugliness of borders where cultures clash (in Appalachia, places where mountains are leveled both for strip mining and to provide a space for a new Holiday Inn) suddenly illuminates for me—because different cultural expectations have real material effects in life and landscape—the dubiousness of most attempts to disentangle material and spiritual/psychological factors. (This last remark would be easier to make in German, where the word Geist serves for both “spirit” and “mind.” German, however, has had to go to “spirituelle” rather than “geistig” to translate “I’m spiritual but not religious,” if Google Translate is to be believed. “Geistig” still means both “spiritual” and “mental,” however.)
As I have written so often before, it is pointless to try to derive cultural characteristics solely from economic substructures, as pointless as to try to insist that only the spirit matters, matter doesn’t matter. (As in the intrinsically untranslatable old British joke, “What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.”)
As Election Day nears in a couple of places, and has just passed in a few others, I find myself thinking about the persistence of cultural preferences in the midst of changing economic circumstances, and how cynics can play upon regional psychologies to attain their own ends, ends which may be either economically or culturally based. Leaders, too, are prepared to sacrifice their own best material interests for the sake of the ideals that stir their souls most deeply.
The best outcome would be one in which material and spiritual goals were not muddled up together, or mistaken one for the other.
As Captain Obvious said once, I believe.
The problem, and I have written more than a few thousand muddled words about this, is how to extract meaning from the muddle.
I wish I could remember which character in fiction said, “I love mystery, but I hate muddles.” It seems like it came out of a Charles Williams novel, but it is such a British-English thing to say that it could equally well be something as embarrassing as Agatha Christie or as differently embarrassing as Robertson Davies.
None of the above...a very modest amount of websearching attributes the quotation to Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, which is rather appropriate to my original topic of borders where cultures clash. Adele: “I dislike [mysteries] not because I’m English, but from my own personal point of view.” Mrs. Moore: “I like mysteries, but I rather dislike muddles.” Fielding: “A mystery is a muddle. ... A mystery is only a high-sounding term for a muddle.”
“Boum,” said the Malabar Caves.
...among the handlers, I had learned not to dismiss anything as meaningless. Mystery, I’d read somewhere, isn’t the absence of meaning but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. ---Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
I wonder what he meant by that? ---punch line of joke in which the psychoanalyst is referring to a colleague’s pleasant “Good morning.”
Why haven’t I seen this before? ---Walter Pidgeon as Edward Morbius in Forbidden Planet
I find myself reading Salvation on Sand Mountain after twenty years in which I never quite felt the need to do so, and am finding it unexpectedly resonant.
The remark about the ugliness of borders where cultures clash (in Appalachia, places where mountains are leveled both for strip mining and to provide a space for a new Holiday Inn) suddenly illuminates for me—because different cultural expectations have real material effects in life and landscape—the dubiousness of most attempts to disentangle material and spiritual/psychological factors. (This last remark would be easier to make in German, where the word Geist serves for both “spirit” and “mind.” German, however, has had to go to “spirituelle” rather than “geistig” to translate “I’m spiritual but not religious,” if Google Translate is to be believed. “Geistig” still means both “spiritual” and “mental,” however.)
As I have written so often before, it is pointless to try to derive cultural characteristics solely from economic substructures, as pointless as to try to insist that only the spirit matters, matter doesn’t matter. (As in the intrinsically untranslatable old British joke, “What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.”)
As Election Day nears in a couple of places, and has just passed in a few others, I find myself thinking about the persistence of cultural preferences in the midst of changing economic circumstances, and how cynics can play upon regional psychologies to attain their own ends, ends which may be either economically or culturally based. Leaders, too, are prepared to sacrifice their own best material interests for the sake of the ideals that stir their souls most deeply.
The best outcome would be one in which material and spiritual goals were not muddled up together, or mistaken one for the other.
As Captain Obvious said once, I believe.
The problem, and I have written more than a few thousand muddled words about this, is how to extract meaning from the muddle.
I wish I could remember which character in fiction said, “I love mystery, but I hate muddles.” It seems like it came out of a Charles Williams novel, but it is such a British-English thing to say that it could equally well be something as embarrassing as Agatha Christie or as differently embarrassing as Robertson Davies.
None of the above...a very modest amount of websearching attributes the quotation to Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, which is rather appropriate to my original topic of borders where cultures clash. Adele: “I dislike [mysteries] not because I’m English, but from my own personal point of view.” Mrs. Moore: “I like mysteries, but I rather dislike muddles.” Fielding: “A mystery is a muddle. ... A mystery is only a high-sounding term for a muddle.”
“Boum,” said the Malabar Caves.
