In the Bible, God takes credit for the Great Flood – Who Will We Blame Now?

A Photoshop manipulation combining an idyllic image of Pittsfield as seen from the dam
and a wave crashing at Hampton beach in  the aftermath of Sandy
CC Jean Stimmell

In the Bible, God takes credit for the Great Flood,

when perhaps a comet was to blame 

Genesis 6:13...The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.

Still today 60% of Americans accept as truth the Biblical account of the Great Flood, and most cultures record a world-destroying flood in their oral or written histories.

The Great Flood refers to the most catastrophic flood and the most catastrophic geological event that has ever taken place in human history. Virtually nothing historical, from writings to civilization to long-living organisms like trees, has survived from before about 3000 or 3300 B.C., approximates date given to the Great Flood.^⁠1 

An alternative scientific explanation to the Biblical account for the Great Flood is that “a 3-mile wide comet crashed into the ocean off the coast of what is now Madagascar, resulting in worldwide chaos, including violent 600-foot  high tsunamis and massive hurricanes… All of this terror was accompanied by a week of darkness caused by material expelled into the atmosphere.”^⁠2

Interestingly, the effects from this comet-induced flood are almost identical to the Biblical version: And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth…all the fountains of the great deep broken up (Genesis 7:10-11).

Now scientists say – and events confirm –  another 

cataclysmic climate event is barreling toward us

A prestigious panel of international scientists has just released its conclusions, confirming previous studies on climate change: "Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters.^⁠3 "

But this time God is leaving us to our own devices. A recent article by Patricia Williams makes this case, warning us of the dangers ahead and why it is imperative that we take action now: 

“the risk to planetary life [from climate change] places us all onboard a sinking ship. All hands are desperately needed to widen our sense of what’s at stake: Will a tree dying in the forest be heard? Will a bee dying of insecticide be felt as a loss in the human hive? Will humanity see itself—in all its variety—as one species, to say nothing of one species interdependent with many?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the babble of prayer politicians proffer in the face of disaster, but faith and miracles do not a system of earthly governance make.,. After all, even Noah finally got down to the business of building an ark.”^⁠4

This time we can’t blame the usual suspects–

the enemy lies within

Bill McKibben states the case very well: "There's no one we can shoot to make global warming disappear. But we could, if we wanted to, devote the scale of resources we've spent in the last decade invading Iraq and Afghanistan to the task of retooling our energy infrastructure. That's the kind of commitment it would take, an effort we usually seem to muster only in the face of military threat."

"But the danger that comes from climate change is every bit as real, and in the long run far greater, than anything Al Qaeda could throw at us. We're really fighting for our civilization,”^⁠5 as, unfortunately, so many of our fellow Americans are finding out the hard way in the aftermath of  Superstorm Sandy .

Amen

Click below to see other of my blog entries on climate change: 
Ecocide: The End of Eden
How to Have Hope in an Era Between No Longer and Not Yet
Back to the Future

¹ http://www.conservapedia.com/Great_Flood

² From: http://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/storms/great-flood1.htm

³ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/28/climate-change-global-warming-storms-floods

⁴ http://www.thenation.com/authors/patricia-j-williams

⁵ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckibben/great-floods-climate-change_b_859927.html

The supposition that art is a gift as opposed to a collectible, something that doesn’t try to sell you anything, runs counter to our contemporary notions of what constitutes a meaningful exchange. (See The Gift by

“The existence of a civilization presupposes a public that has both the time, and the need, to draw sustenance from the high-wire acts of the artistic imagination. The United States never has produced such a public in commercial quantity, a fact remarked upon by the art historian Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, who also wrote: “Art discovers its true social use, not on the ideological plane, but by opening the passage from feeling to meaning -- not for everyone, since that would be impossible, but for those who want to try. This impulse seems to be immortal.”

Happily so.

What blocks the passage from feeling to meaning is the replacing of the thing itself with the price or theory of the thing, which is the difference between money and art as the universal medium of human exchange proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer: “Money is human happiness in abstracto, consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.”

This dictum accords with the twentieth century’s wars and devourings of the Earth, accounts for the modernistic expressions of alienation and despair, speaks to the price paid for [a consumption based, market economy].

Spooky Times!

About this image: I took this shot of the clock tower on Concord"s Main Street with the 

Capital Dome in the background, using a long exposure to blur the pedestrians and then 

posterizing the image in Photoshop to increase the overall quantum spookiness.

Spookiness is in the air. And it’s not just from Halloween ghosts and goblins. Take, for instance, election day spookiness: Vampire-like political operatives spending hundreds of millions demonizing their opponents, blowing through enough money to reopen NH’s roadside rest areas for eternity – or as a down payment to avoid careening over the dreaded fiscal cliff that economic fortune tellers foresee in their crystal balls.  The candidates all warn of a stampeding hoard of impending catastrophes, all of which will surely be our ruin if we do not vote for them – all, that is, except for one.

The enormity of this omission is, at least to me, the spookiest thing of all! Why is it one subject is never mentioned on the campaign trail by either party, even as the candidates frantically rearrange their schedules as the super storm approaches, the ‘Frankenstorm’ some predict could be the storm of the decade or even the century? Why is it that extreme weather and climate change is not a campaign issue despite the fact that, in the long run, nothing else is more certain to do us harm, if not do us in.

Issues like climate change reveal a deeper existential dread we all harbor, living as we do in a world that seems to be spinning out of control. Many of the old, bedrock realities by which we have lived our lives are either gone or threatened. We want to take action but find ourselves paralyzed instead, like being stuck in place, unable to move when confronted by a nightmare monster. What could be spookier than that!

Life appears increasingly tentative and unpredictable. What kind of a future will our children and grandchildren face?  Can the dazzling profusion of capitalist growth continue or will we be consigned to the quiet rhythm of sustainability? Did Jesus really have a wife? Are we living in a new and exciting Postmodern Age or reverting to the Dark Ages?  Will the human race survive?  Is America on an inevitable downward slide? Has Bill Belichick lost his touch?

Perhaps life is indeed stranger than fiction, more unpredictable than we could ever imagine in our wildest dreams – and always has been!  According to quantum physics, as outlined in David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity, we live in a multiverse consisting of an infinite number of ordinary universes all existing simultaneously.

The very essence of the quantum universe is unpredictability: “At every instant, the objects in our physical environment—the atoms in our lungs and the light in our eyes—are making unpredictable choices, deciding what to do next.”  Not to worry, the multiverse contains a universe for every combination of choices, no matter what it is. “The ‘quantum weirdness’ that we observe in the behavior of atoms, the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that Einstein famously disliked, is the result of universes recombining in unexpected ways.”

According to Deutsch, each of us, as a human being, exists in the multiverse as a crowd of almost identical creatures, traveling together through time along closely related histories, splitting and recombining constantly like the atoms of which we are composed.

If life is indeed this spooky, uncertain and unpredictable, than we should at the very least, as almost identical creatures traveling through time together, be kind to one another. Because, as every great spiritual tradition has affirmed, like it or not, we are all in this together.

xxx

Maya: Facts and Fictions of the Mind

Maya Deren gazing out the window of 
abandoned Texico station in Hooksett
Photoshop dream image: CC Jean Stimmell

A dream image: This is the way Texaco stations looked in the 1940s and 50s when Maya Deren was doing her best work. In her travels around New England, she undoubtedly stopped at such a station…perhaps she went inside to use the restroom and took her cat with her…pausing to gaze out the window.

  I was a kid growing up back then and used to go with my father to get gas at a Texaco station that was a twin to the building in my photograph. It was a simpler world back then – and more personal. Rocky, the proprietor,  always bustled out of the station to greet us with a big smile and embrace us with his enthusiasm and goodwill, despite his advancing years and fingers deformed into claws by rhomboid arthritis. Rocky is now long-gone, along with his gas station that was torn down in the sixties to  make way for a modern, multi-pump, self-service station, sterile and anonymous – where no one will ever be happily waiting to greet you. 

Somehow, the Texaco station I photographed in Hooksett, although shutdown for decades, has escaped the wreaking ball of history, just as Maya’s films have. I believe she would have been in favor of associating her image with an abandoned object because that concept had special significance for her: she believed a work of art is never complete, just abandoned at some point.  That’s what she meant when she, as she often did,  referred to her films as abandoned. 

As I write this, I find myself falling into a state of personal reverie because, in a real sense, this story is as much about me as it is about Maya: In the beginning, I was a little boy visiting the Texaco Station in Epsom with my father, but now I am an old man taking photographs of its abandoned twin, the Texaco Station in Hooksett. 

Luckily, Maya is once again able to come to the rescue: being well versed, not just in film making but anthropology, spirituality, and mythology, she is able to salve my weary soul, transforming the “material circumstances” of my plotting existence into an adventure of the mind.

While the following quote by Maya refers to indigenous rituals and ceremonies in Haiti,  I believe it is universal and applies to all of us.  It is from her book, Divine Horsemen, which Joseph Campbell, preeminent scholar and mythologist, encouraged her to write. Campbell wrote in the preface: “It has always been my finding that the poet and the artist are better qualified both by temperament and by training to intuit and interpret the sense of a mythological figure than the university-trained empiricist.” 

“THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 

Myth is the twilight speech of an old man to a boy. All the old men begin at the beginning. Their recitals always speak first of the origin of life. They start by inviting this event which no man witnessed, which still remains mystery. They initiate the history of their race with a fiction… Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter. 

The speech of an elder in the twilight of his life is not his history but a legacy; he speaks not to describe matter but to demonstrate meaning. He talks of his past for purposes of his future. This purpose is the prejudice of his memory. He remembers that which has been according to what could and should be, and by this measure sifts the accumulation of his memory: he rejects the irrelevant event, elaborates the significant detail, combines separate incidents of similar principle. Out of physical processes he creates a metaphysical processional. He transposes the chronology of his knowledge into a hierarchy of meanings. From the material circumstances of his experience he plots, in retrospect, the adventure for the mind which is the myth.” *

Please see my past blog entries on Maya Deren:
Ode to Maya Deren
Importance-of-Visual-Metaphor

*   Page xiii from Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren; preface by Joseph Campbell. Chelsea House Publishers: New York. 1970

** Page 21 from Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren.

Caves of Forgotten Dreams

Photograph taken under the Granite Street Bridge, Manchester NH: 10/5/12

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Like the cave walls in France immortalized by paleolithic art,

this concrete abutment under the Granite Street Bridge

depicts a sense of beauty, the nature of humanity,
and the evolution of creativity.

Rather than the drip of water from stalactites

we have the splashing efflux from storm sewers.

Rather than art memorializing our animal friends,

kindred spirits and dieties killed for food,

we have foreboding monsters and cartoon figures,

a testament to our digital age subconscious.

Rather than witnessing the ice age artist's footprints,

 still preserved in the dust of the ancient cavern floor,

we see the bags and blankets of the homeless,

stashed away while they beg for food.

Maya Deren: until the cinema, "like a mute, had never spoken"

Maya Deren: Entangled in the Web of Modernity*

CC Jean Stimmell

This is Part II in My Ode to Maya Deren.

To see the original post, click here.

The Importance of the Visual Metaphor:  I like the following quote by Maya Deren from a letter she wrote to film archivist, James Card,  reflecting back a decade to when she made her first film: 

"Meshes of the Afternoon is my point of departure.  I am not ashamed of it; for I think that, as a film, it stands up very well.  …I had been a poet up until then, and the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating images into words, and could work directly so that it was not like discovering a new medium so much as finally coming home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax, grammar, was my mother-tongue; which I understood, and thought in, but, like a mute, had never spoken…."  **

__________________________________

Please see my other blog entries on Maya Deren:
Ode to Maya Deren
Facts and Fictions of the Mind

* This Photoshop creation combines and manipulates a photograph I took of a tent caterpillar web along the Merrimack River 9/4/10 with a still image of Maya Deren @ public domain, taken from her movie, At Land. 

** http://claudemathews.com/2009/12/30/film-guide-to-maya-derens-and-alexander-hammids-meshes-of-the-afternoon/

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An Ode to Maya Deren

I’ve combined and manipulated my photographs and Maya Deren’s most famous 
still image[1] into a dream vision of her looking out my office window:

Is she my patient, my therapist, my lover, or my muse?

We were lucky enough to see three of Maya Deren’s experimental silent films from the 1940s at the West End Studio Theater[2] last Sunday in Portsmouth. Although Russet was familiar with her work, I wasn’t.   What a discovery… for me it was love at first sight.

As Gerald Peary so aptly gushes in his blog: “She was the transcendent centerpiece of every red-hot Village party in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a wild-tousled, peasant-bloused 1960s flower child before her time, a Botticelli babe in high bloom with Modigliani almond eyes and matching elongated lips, shaking her booty to Haitian voodoo drums. Pre-Beat generation, nobody in New York was more mesmerizing than Maya Deren, the mother of American underground cinema, the filmmaker and star of Meshes in the Afternoon, At Land, Ritual in Transfigured Time, and other silent-cinema 1940s experimental masterworks.” [3]

Deren’s first name, Maya, adopted by her in 1943, resonates with me. Maya is not only the name of the mother of the historical Buddha but maya is also the Buddhist term used to name the illusory nature of reality. Perfect for a postmodernist!

While she was best known as an actress – particularly for the famous still (see image above) of her looking through a window ­– what people have forgotten is that Deren was also a dancer, choreographer, poet, writer and photographer. In the cinema she was a director, writer, cinematographer, editor, performer, entrepreneur and pioneer in experimental filmmaking in the United States. Like Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein, Maya Deren was both a film theorist and a filmmaker. Unlike these luminaries, Deren’s writing remains relatively obscure in film theory and her films are rarely screened outside of experimental or feminist film courses. [4]

There appears to have been no limits of Maya’s talent. For instance, she was acclaimed for her work in anthropology and myth by Joseph Campbell who encouraged her to write Divine Horsemen, Voodoo Gods of Haiti,[5] based on her years spent studying, participating in, and filming indigenous rituals in that country.

I’ve just scratched the surface. I’m not sure if I am more impressed by her hypnotic, dreamlike early films, capturing so exquisitely our heightened subconscious fears and insecurities, living as we do in the modern age. Or her writings about film and myth and what it means to be human.

To see Part II of My Ode to Maya Deren: importance of the visual metaphor click here.
To see Part III on Maya: facts and fictions of the mind chick here

---

[1] © public domain

[2]  Georgetown cellist and composer Kristen Miller participated in “Maya & Me,” a concert included in the ACT ONE festival at the West End Studio Theatre in Portsmouth, N.H.

[3] http://www.geraldpeary.com/essays/def/deren.html

[4] http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/

[5]  Divine Horsemen, Voodoo Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren with preface by Joseph Campbell. Chelsea House Publishers: New York. 1970.

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