What the peahen saw

I hadn't planned on blogging so much about the animals on Goat Rope Farm this week, but then I ran into an interesting article about what female peahens look at when a peacock is displaying. For some time, people thought it was the eyelike features on their tails, but that doesn't seem to be much of a factor, at least when the peahen is fairly close to the male. 

Based on this clever experiment that involves using little cameras to trace eye motion on the female, it may be the case that they pay attention to the size or width of the display. (Let it be noted that I resisted the temptation of making an adolescent remark that would have occurred to some immature minds after reading that sentence.)

As I write this, our peacock, Woodstock (he really looked like the Peanuts character when he was a baby) has started to lose his feathers. In a week or so, he will look like faded glory indeed. Meanwhile, it's my job to gather up the feathers so that the Spousal Unit can give them out as favors to her students this coming school year.

Darwin had a hard time with peacocks. The  males seem to put a huge amount of effort into growing and regrowing feathers, an annual event. But the feathers are so huge that they can get in the way of the survival of the animal, which could seem to go against the grain of natural selection.

I think peacocks keep score differently. My suspicion is that they prefer...shall we say...romantic success to longevity. And there are no doubt many who feel the same way.

CRUMBLING DREAMS. Here's a great essay by influential sociologist Robert Putnam on what happens when the economy leaves communities behind. Putnam, you may recall, helped put the idea of social capital front and center. Too bad it tends to fall apart when inequality grows and opportunity shrinks.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND VIOLENCE. There appears to be a link. Of course, WV's ruling class would tell us not to worry since there is no such thing, as is demonstrated by the fact that they get money from coal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DANTE IN A NUTSHELL

If you've ever had one of those moments in life where you realized you're not where you wanted to be and don't know how you got there, you will be able to relate to Dante's Divine Comedy, which is the theme at Goat Rope these days. If this is your fist visit, please click on last week's entries. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Here's the opening line:

In the middle of our life's journey, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, having lost the true path.

Roger that. I've been there quite a few times.

Here's a ridiculously brief summary of all three volumes (there will be more to come this week).

Dante in the dark wood is threatened by three wild beasts, which probably symbolize his own sinful tendencies. He meets a stranger who offers to guide him to a better place. The guide is none other than Virgil, ancient Roman author of the Aeneid and the most venerated poet in the late classic and medieval periods. All this has come about by the intercession of three people in Heaven, the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucia (aka "holy light") and Beatrice, a woman that Dante adored from afar.

The reason for all this special attention is that Dante's soul is so far gone this is his only chance for salvation. And he needs a boost. He will find out on his journey that he is destined for a life of exile from his beloved city of Florence.

Virgil takes Dante on a tour of hell. At first, Dante is totally dependent on him, although he begins to mature as the journey continues. Virgil, by the way, as a pagan, didn't make it to Heaven but resides in Limbo on the outskirts of Hell with other good pagans who never had the chance to hear the Gospel. There's no punishment there, other than "desire without hope of attainment"--i.e. wanting to see God but not being able to.

After going all the way through hell, they come up on the far side of the world at the seven storey mountain of Purgatory. End of Inferno.

Purgatory is a place where people who are going to be saved but still have sins to atone for work off their time. It's pretty bad, but you know you're getting out. Unlike Hell, people are nice to each other here. At a certain point, Virgil goes as far as he can and disappears and Dante has other guides. He drinks from two rivers to purify his mind and is ready to see the vision of Heaven. End of Purgatorio.

Heaven from one point of view is like what was known of astronomy. There were different levels (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) according to the capacity of the saved soul to see God. But it's all good. Dante gets to talk to all kinds of saints and to his great great grandfather who tells him he's going to have a rough life of exile and gives him some good advice.

After going to the top and passing a quiz administered by the Apostles, he gets a brief vision of God. It kind of ends suddenly there. Presumably Dante goes back to his life and faces the trouble in store for him, but the grace he has gained has given him both a way to deal with it and a mission in life: to tell of what he saw in The Divine Comedy. End of Paradiso.

That's a really crude overlook, so check back this week for some more details.

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam of social capital and Bowling Alone fame sees hope in the social engagement of younger Americans.

GAME ON for the next health care debate.

MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. Here's a good source with lots of links on the declining state of the economy for most Americans under Bush misrule.

AWESOME OP-ED from today's Sunday Gazette-Mail is here.
It's about the need for WV Supreme Court justice Brent Benjamin to recuse himself from cases involving Massey Energy. Benjamin was elected due to Massey CEO Don Blankenship's decision to spend $3 million of his own money to defeat his opponent. This mini-drama served as the inspiration for John Grisham's latest novel, The Appeal. Both authors are attorneys who have held posts of responsibility regarding legal ethics.

URGENT DINOSAUR UPDATE here. This one is a 50 foot long sea predator.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I FELT SO SYMBOLIC YESTERDAY

Lately El Cabrero has been thinking about the nature of faith, which is an aspect of life for anyone even if one doesn't profess any religion. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned before, the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich has some interesting things to say about it in his 1957 book The Dynamics of Faith. To recap, here are some things he says faith is not: dogmas subscribed to, intellectual assent, an act of will, something that happens when emotions are manipulated.

Instead, faith is about the things that ultimately concern a person, whatever that may be. It can be positive or destructive. When things like money, power, nation, creed, ideology, etc. are ultimate concerns, the results are idolatrous and demonic.

Even a good religion or worldview can become idolatrous and destructive when it is regarded as the ultimate itself rather than as pointing to the ultimate. Another way of putting that would be to say that when we treat a symbol of a thing as the thing itself, there are problems.

For Tillich, faith is mediated by symbols:

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Symbols are like and unlike signs. Both point beyond themselves to some kind of meaning. Signs can include anything from traffic lights to letters and numbers which have a conventional meaning. Symbols have several unique characteristics according to Tillich:

*A symbol participates in that to which it points. He uses the example of a nation's flag, which is more than cloth for people who honor it.

*Symbols open up "levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us." For example, pictures or poetry can reveal more about a given subject than any amount of statistics.

*Symbols can open up elements of ourselves that we wouldn't otherwise realize. If we really encounter Dante's Divine Comedy or Hamlet, it can open up aspects of ourselves:

There are within us dimensions of which we cannot become aware except through symbols, as melodies and rhythms in music.

*Symbols can't be manufactured to order. They have to grow out of the conscious and unconscious depths of our being.

*Symbols grow and sometimes die:

They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the "king" grew in a special period of history,and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.

Next time: religious symbols and myths.

A NEW SHORT COST OF WAR VIDEO from AFSC is now at YouTube. Check it out and pass it on.

HEALTH CARE. Here's an interesting item about what's being left out of the health care debate.

IT'S ABOUT JOBS. Here's an interesting item on the need for a job creation policy by historian Frank Stricker, author of Why America Lost the War on Poverty and How to Win It.

MORE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL from Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam is here.

IN LIEU OF SOCIAL CAPITAL, is your pet smart or are you just lonely? According to Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business

When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like.

WV MAKES THE TIMES AGAIN. Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED