Category Archives: Culture & Arts

Lost in the Stars

Before Lord God made the sea or the land
He held all the stars in the palm of his hand
And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand
And one little star fell alone

Then the Lord God hunted through the wide night air
For the little dark star in the wind down there
And he stated and promised he’d take special care
So it wouldn’t get lost no more

Now, a man don’t mind if the stars get dim
And the clouds blow over and darken him
So long as the Lord God’s watching over him
Keeping track how it all goes on

But I’ve been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my head turns gray
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away
Forgetting his promise and the word he’d say

And we’re lost out here in the stars
Little stars big stars blowing through the night

And we’re lost out here in the stars
Little stars big stars blowing through the night

And we’re lost out here in the stars

Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson. An especially nice version of this song is sung by the inimitable Frank Sinatra.

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Two Bestiaries

The Phoenix

Take a few hours and browse through the Aberdeen Bestiary. The Aberdeen Bestiary Project has done a magnificent job in presenting this treasure of the University of (you guessed it) Aberdeen. Full color, legible pictures of each page with transcriptions, translations, and commentary are given. It’s a great site and a fine example of what should be done with every manuscript before they fleck away into the dust of forgotten questions and best intentions.

Our second bestiary is of the printed species. One of my favorite books, its source a bibliophile’s dream though it is of far more recent origin that the above bestiary, is D. M. Dooling’s abridged and translated edition of Louis Charbonneau-Lassay’s The Bestiary of Christ (Parabola Books, 1991). (It is out of print, but you might find copies here.) The history of this beautiful volume is as follows:

Le Bestiaire du Christ was originally a book of a thousand pages and over a thousand of the author’s woodcuts. It was published in Brussels just after the outbreak of the Second World War: one of four volumes planned by Louis Charbonneau-Lassay, all pursuing his interest in religious symbolism. The others were Le Floraire du Christ, Le Vulnéraire du Christ, and Le Lapidaire du Christ. All the material was gathered for them, but he did not live to finish and publish any of the three. Le Bestiaire alone has survived, and barely. The firm of Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie. published it in a limited edition of five hundred copies, almost all of which, along with the woodblocks for the illustrations, were lost when a bomb set fire to the warehouse where they were stored. Four other printings of five hundred copies each were printed in Milan from surviving copies of the first edition. That is the entire publishing history of this extraordinary book until its present appearance.

Dooling was fortunate enough to have access to one of the extremely rare first editions of Le Bestiaire du Christ in preparing the volume, which though an abridgment, is still a sizable one of more than 460 pages. This Parabola edition is a beauty in itself. The hardback, which is what I have, is of a satisfying heft, on acid-free paper, with sewn bindings. The creamy, faintly textured paper is a delight to the hands as well as the eyes.

I tend to drop into it now and again, like visiting an old and very learnèd friend with an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities. Even in translation, there is an Old World charm to the phrasing (Monsieur Charbonneau-Lassy was born in 1871, after all), bringing gracefully to the mind a recollection of a world now sadly passed; for instance:

The Frog—Here is another humble member of God’s family whose name many Westerners will be surprised to see among those whom the reverence of the first Christian centuries linked with the personal symbolism of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Charbonneau-Lassay was a lifelong Roman Catholic believer, and was even a novitiate in an eventually defunct order. During life he was an archaeologist and historian, yet he is known, solely now, for Le Bestiaire du Christ. As Dooling says in the Foreward (p. ii), “He led one of those remarkable unremarkable lives that are probably the reason why God does not lose patience entirely with the human race.” Noble praise, nobly phrased.

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Matson Photographs

Up until about the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most popular sources for photographs of places in the Middle East was the Matson Photo Archive. Included in the catalog are numerous photographs of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From an origin in being illustrations of Biblical lands and peoples to the Victorian and Edwardian public which couldn’t get enough of them, the photographs have now become historical data themselves, revealing to us images of a landscape which has since been transformed.

The complete collection of Matson negatives was acquired by the Library of Congress. For several years now, they have had a browsable and searchable subset of the collection available online. Enjoy!

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Philip Glass: Akhnaten

Open are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts
Clouds darken the sky
The stars rain down
The constellations stagger
The bones of the hell hounds tremble
The porters are silent
When they see this king
Dawning as a soul

Such are the first words (from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts) spoken by the Scribe in the prelude of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. The setting for the immediately following Act I Scene 1 is the funeral of Amenhotep III, which contains two rousing pieces sung in ancient Egyptian. The opera includes a number of other pieces in Egyptian, as well as one in Akkadian (a section from Amarna Letter EA 288), and a few verses in Hebrew from Psalm 104, which naturally follow the end of the English translation of The Hymn to the Aten. Though many may find much of Glass’ work repetitious, it is much less so in this work than in others. In any case, the novelty of the ancient languages is just too much to pass up! In addition, the performance and recording are exquisite. I hadn’t listened to this in a long time before today, and had forgotten how enjoyable it is. It’s a two CD piece, with (at least in my old CBS Masterworks edition) a 93 page booklet with the credits, introduction, libretto and translations in German and French, performed by the Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Akhnaten was the third work in Glass’ Trilogy: Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980; depicting the life of Gandhi, with Sanskrit libretto), and Akhnaten (1984; it seems the boxed Masterworks edition is out of print; I don’t know what that Sony one is like).

Those of you teaching or learning Egyptian, Akkadian, or Hebrew could no doubt use parts of Akhnaten for counting some “ancient meets modern” classroom coup, I would think. The rest of us can just plain enjoy it!

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Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh

I’ve just been to the new de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to see the soon-closing exhibit Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh. The exhibit closes here 5 February, moving to The Met in New York (21 March-9 July) and finally the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth (27 August-10 December 2006). Rather than a strict focus on Hatshepsut, the artifacts included in the exhibit date to the early Eighteenth Dynasty in general, down into the sole reign of Thutmose III, with a majority of non-royal items. There were some huge statues, at least twice life-size, included, but the vast majority of items were small, and therefore difficult to enjoy or even to see due to the crush of the crowd (never go to the museum on the weekend!). The catalog is quite fine, and nearly a steal at under $30 for the softcover (only $35 for the hardcover), which you can, for now, purchase online here (in the past, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco website links to such have been temporary, so I don’t expect this link to be valid for too much longer). In any case, if you have a chance to see the exhibit in SF, New York, or Fort Worth, it’s well worth the effort if you can avoid the crush. There are items in the catalog that I didn’t see at all in the museum due to the number of people in the way. I’ll probably make a morning visit during the week, which I had intended to do last week, but it was too busy a week. Note to all potential patrons of any museum: when you want to know the least crowded time to go, ask a docent sometime, and then go only at their recommended times. Again: never go to a major museum on the weekend if you actually intend on having a remotely pleasant visit. I should’ve known better. Still, I did have a very nice rainy day’s walk through Golden Gate Park, which is almost always nice.

Since the de Young just reopened in November (the original museum was severely damaged in the 1989 earthquake, closed in 2000, torn down, and this new museum constructed), part of the interest for me today was in seeing the new museum, as I was rather fond of the old building, never having thought it so ugly as some say it was. Well, it’s different, of course, and will take some getting used to, like any new building. I don’t think the new tower is ever going to grow on me, as it resembles too strongly an air traffic control tower. The exterior of the museum is sheathed in beaten copper, which, now that it’s taking on a patina, is actually quite nice (by all accounts it was quite ugly when new and shiny). The landscaping is still in progress, and as it was raining today with just a little too much wind as I was leaving, a stroll through the sculpture garden was not on my list, but it looks like a nice thing for more pleasant weather. Unfortunately, across the way from the de Young, the California Academy of Sciences is now closed and being reconstructed, with a re-opening date of “late 2008,” so there’s going to be construction going on for a while right there.

Anyhow, if you have a chance, see the Hatshepsut exhibit. It’s well worth your time, just for the indescribable serenity of line and form that Egyptian art possesses and the calm that this distinctively beautiful tradition of art instills.

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Beautiful Bookmarks

If you’re someone who loves books, thoroughly enjoys the act of reading, and would like to honor that pastime with accoutrements of a bit more quality than perhaps you have in the past, consider treating yourself to these woven silk bookmarks. Each is in the traditional style of a rug from long ago and far away.

Not only will they add a level of dignity to your act of reading, much more than a torn slip from the newspaper or the envelope of an old bill would do, they also make very well-appreciated gifts. One friend of mine uses hers in her Bible, where the intricate patterns peeking out from between the pages are enhanced by the beautiful glow from the gold of those gilt-edged pages themselves. Another friend’s five year old daughter treasures hers, using it to mark her place in her nighttime storybook.

It’s much more pleasing to see these little fringed beauties gently drooping from out of the books rather than the rigidly jutting dog-eared paper stock bookmarks that come gratis from the booksellers’ counters, a torn corner of notebook paper, a used bus transfer or train ticket, or any of the other detritus that I’ve used in the past to mark my place in a book. With reading being such an integral part of the process of learning, it deserves a better than occasional amount of respect.

Treat yourself! You won’t regret it!

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Pseudepigraphic Music

The Hillard Ensemble recording of the Orlando de Lassus works Missa pro defunctis and Prophetiae Sibyllarum is in print again.

The Prophetiae Sibyllarum includes selections from the oracles of the Sibyls of Persia, Libya, Delphi, Cimmeria, Samos, Cumae, the Hellespont, Phrygia, Europe, Tibur, Erythraea, and Agrippa. It is de Lassus’ only experiment in extreme chromaticism, a quite striking and rather esoteric work, an oddly haunting blend “of pagan hysteria and Christian epigram,” as the booklet says. The Latin text of the oracles used by de Lassus first appeared in a Venetian printing of 1481, so their relation to the OT Pseudepigrapha Greek Sibylline Oracles is tenuous at best. Still, it’s fun to have a recording of such an unusual subject!

The Missa pro defunctis is, of course, another fine example of the polyphony for which de Lassus is so justly renowned.

If anyone knows of other recordings of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, let me know. It would be fun to put together a collection of such.

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Walking the Bible

I’m pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying PBS’s Walking the Bible. Rather than the typical assortment of discordantly talking heads paired with sonorous narrative and anachronistic dramatizations or stock footage, host Bruce Feiler (author of a book also named Walking the Bible and some others) is producing here a new kind of first person biblical travelogue, and it is entirely refreshing. There are gems here: from Turkey’s Mount Ararat, where a tight-lipped Kurdish mountain guide refuses to divulge the secrets of the mountain, to a leisurely row across Egypt’s Lake Timsah in a boat whose fisherman explains that they call a certain fish “the Moses fish” because, when the waters of the sea were split, the fish were split and so on one side they are grey and one side white. Delightful!

Feiler is a fine host, peppering the program with biblical readings and not uninformed scholarly explanations and conjectures, yet still giving the upper hand to the story in its relation to faith. Such an approach is perfectly in keeping with the goals of this blog and its companion email list. So, I recommend to folks that they catch it on their local PBS station, or if you’re outside of the US, purchase the DVD (available here). Either way, it’s informative, fun, and commercial free! And while it appears that there are only three episodes, the overall quality is quite enough to compensate for the lack of quantity.

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