With a Brush Stroke

 

I was telling my stepdad, the ornithologist, whom I’ve had the grand pleasure of tromping about in disparate patches of rainforest with over the years, that the male cardinal is as beautiful as any bird you’d ever see in the Oso Peninsula or the Sepik River Valley.  He heartily agreed.  If we saw such a bird in that setting we’d oooh and ahhh and most definitely comment about how that electric cinnabar glow was unique in all the world.  Never seen anything like it.  The male cardinal is out there down in the cedar tree just now.  The whole patch of yard is faded winter word greens, gnarled bark  and some patches of unmelt now.  There isn’t any other red.  He stands out so remarkably. 

First day back on a bike.  I went nearly all the way to Gardiner as I would otherwise do but haven’t done in months on account of all the snow.  Oddly, I could look back over my photos and find the precise day that it was when I last went up.  I snap a few photos robotically every trip.  But it’s not important.  It’s enough to say its been month’s now.  The ground is wet and it is harder than it would otherwise be to get traction.  You use lower gears and as I pedaled I considered my muscles.   Certainly I’m using my calves and thighs, but those are complex muscle groups that it is easy enough to refer to as a single thing.  When I cross country ski some, shall I say deeper part of my calves are stretched and it feels marvelously sore after I’ve put in my time.  That part of my calf isn’t feeling challenged today, reacquainting myself with the physics required to pedal. 

 

I’m suffering.  Sinophilia has me in its clutches.  I’ve channeled my addictive personality or part of it anyway into compulsive reading.  I’d went back to The Six Dynasties because my reading of Tang poets kept referencing what came before.  Sima Qian and Pan Gu lead you back to the Eastern Zhou which are impossible to properly understand unless you steep yourself in the Shang.  I found works by each of the contributors to the Cambridge History of Ancient China and they are all lined up on the shelf.  Dame Jessica Rawson is the Deputy Keeper of the department of Oreintal Antiquities at the British Museum and her “Ancient China Art and Archeology” and “Mysteries of Ancient China” made me fantasize about the five-hour flight to London to see the collection.  David Keightley’s “These Bones Shall Rise Again” is muses on remarkable comparisons between the Shang, the Zhou and Mycenean Greece.   He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.  Lothar von Falkenhausen is a German – American sinologist and archeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.  “Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius, the Archeological Evidence” casts broadly to find relative homogeneity across Zhou archeology.  Kwang-Chi Chang (1931 – 2001) wrote “The Archeology of Ancient China” in 1962 and this morning I read his work was written seventeen years later when he was the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard.  This morning I read this work, and moved straight into Edward Shaughnessy’s “Before Confucius” , written in 1997 and “Ancient China in Transition” written by Cho-yun Hsu the year before I was born in 1965.  Shaughnessy teaches at the University of Chicago and Hsu who was born in Xiamen in 1930 and appears to be doing well is an Emeritus Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. 

 

After a week of earlier-than-thou calls, I got tired at 8:30PM and woke up not long after midnight.  And this morning I just read one and then a second and by the time my wife was up and wanted coffee at nine I was finishing the last of the final three mentioned above.  The other’s I’d all read the weekend before.  When I teach Chinese history, I often talk about the Han Dynasty needs for bureaucratic talent, and the need to disrupt local power blocks, as the catalyst that yields meritocracy. But this was clearly also the case, if you consider Shu, during the increasingly violent transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States, according to Shu.  Shaughnessy shows how the puritanical Confucians could, with a brush stroke sanitize a poem discussing raging genetalia into a staid homily about inter-generational stability.  Did you know that sacred tree of the mythical Xia Dynasty was the pine and the Shang venerated the cypress, but it was the Zhou who held that special place for the chestnut tee.  I’d ordered two seven foot “revival” (supposedly blight-proof) chestnuts for planting here in our yard.   Thanks to professor Chang, I will presumably regard them as Zhou trees. 

 

 

 

Saturday 03/13/21