In the forest of the night

Spider, spider burning bright...

Last night, I took the dog on a walk in the woods while wearing a headlamp. It had been raining, so there was water on the grass. As we trudged up and down the hill, I saw what looked like a skyfil  of little diamonds moving on the ground. A closer look revealed, a closer look revealed a multitude of spiders busy going about their nocturnal business. There had to be thousands of them.

I guess I knew that there were spiders on the hill. And I guess I didn't expect them to go to be at sundown. Still, there was all this activity going on all around me that I'd never been aware of before.

I think that's a pretty good metaphor for life. There's stuff we don't have a hint about going on all around us all the time. Thoreau said "Only that day dawns to which we are awake" I guess something like that is true of the night as well.

A little progress

In keeping with the occasional theme of positive things about West Virginia, today's Charleston Gazette included an article about a report on prisons given by Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein to an interim legislative committee. According to Rubenstein, the results of prison overcrowding legislation passed in 2013 are already promising, with a drop from 1,700 to 900 inmates who should be in state correctional institutions backlogged in regional jails.

The overall population has dropped by 3.5 percent between July 1 2013 and June 30 2014, even though the effects of the reforms would take a few years to start working. The Division of Corrections is also implementing other policies aimed at reducing recidivism.

Next stop: the juvenile justice system.

NOW, go take a walk.

Hobby horses

It has long been noted that individuals and groups often have certain pet ideas or obsessions that they enjoy fiddling with and thinking about. In Lawrence Sterne's immortal Tristram Shandy, the author refers to these as hobby-horses:

...have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, - have they not had their HOBBY HORSES; - their running horses, - their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums & their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, - their maggots and their butterflies? - and so long as a man rides his HOBBY HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, - pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?

The Anglo-Saxons, whose culture gave us Beowulf (the theme here lately, by the way) had some hobby horses of their own. They were especially fascinated with the biblical story of Cain and Abel. You may recall that the Beowulf poet states that the monsters Grendel, his mother, and a host of other nasty critters were descendants of the primal brother-murderer Cain.

They weren't the only ones who found fratricide interesting. The theme of enemy brothers shows up in all kinds of myths and legends, including the story of Romulus and Remus and the sons of Oedipus. But the story of Cain had its special place. What was up with that?

For starters, the North Sea raiding societies, including Danes, Norse, Swedes, and the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, were prone to killing and feuding. War was very common, but so too were fights that could break out at any time in a culture of honor. Just as many fights today take place in bars, so then boasting and insults in the mead halls could easily lead to killing. And, then as now, one good killing seems to call for another, with revenge killings and feuds.

They did devise one way to put an end to the cycle of violence, i.e. by paying the weregild or man price to the dead man's survivors. That worked fine as long as the killing took place between people of different families. BUT, when a man killed his brother, there was no way to atone; one could not pay oneself. Hence people who killed their brothers were seen as especially cursed. They probably felt this way even before their conversion to Christianity, but when they finally did, they found special resonance in the Cain story.

This theme also shows up in Beowulf when the hero has an unpleasant exchange with Unferth, who challenges Beowulf's courage. Beowulf dismisses him, saying

...you were a man-slayer, killed your brothers,
closest kinsmen, for which you must suffer
damnation in hell, clever though you are.

Today's take home message: if you have a brother, try not to kill him.

THE LATEST SCAPEGOATS on the right are public employees.

SPEAKING OF SCAPEGOATS, here's Frances Fox Piven, a frequent target of Glenn Beck's conspiracy theories, speaking for herself. In Glennbeckistan, Piven, who has written extensively about poverty and poor people's movements with Richard Cloward, is believed to be a mastermind of revolution. She has been the target of many death threats as a result.

SPEAKING OF IRRATIONAL BELIEFS are alive and well.

TEEN'S BEST FRIEND. Here's another story about how dogs are good exercise equipment, in this case for teens.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A fiend out of hell

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Beowulf, although you will also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

I've been blogging on this subject for a while now but am just getting around to the cool parts, i.e. the monsters. You may recall there are three in all, Grendel, a kind of humanoid man eating giant; his unnamed mother, who was if anything nastier than her son; and a dragon. Grendel first appears after Hrothgar, king of the Spear Danes, builds Heorot, his grand mead hall. All that nightly carousing by drunken proto-Vikings gets on Grendel's last nerve.

Things were going just fine for Hrothgar and his drunken buddies, but trouble was waiting in the wings. Here's a passage from Seamus Heaney's translation:

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain's clan, whom the creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.

The Anglo-Saxons had a real thing about the story of Cain, and found in it an explanation and origin for all kinds of nasty creatures that inhabit northern European folklore. More on that tomorrow.

REJECTING THE FRAME. Economist Dean Baker takes on one of his favorite targets here.

AMERICAN WORKERS. Does American business need them any more?

HEALTH CARE REFORM. What will the US Supreme Court do when it lands in the docket?

OH GOOD. Meat eating machines and furniture are here.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on walking.

BACK TO MONSTERS. Here's an interesting if lengthy New Yorker profile of filmmaker, author and monster fan Guillermo del Toro.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Walk on

Arpad and Smiley, his chicken killing Platonic girlfriend, love a good walk.

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.--Gary Snyder