Only a Blockhead

The More Things Change

A History of the Crusades, Vol. III: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades

Steven Runciman

They had come to fight the Holy War against infidels of every race . . . .  Thousands of soldiers and pilgrims found themselves in a land where the language, customs and the religion seemed to them strange and incomprehensible and therefore wrong.  They expected the peasants and citizens in the territory through which they passed not only to resemble them but to welcome them.  They were doubly disappointed.  Quite failing to realize that their thieving and destructive habits could not win them the affection or the respect of their victims, they were hurt, angry and envious. (p. 475)

There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding.  High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost. (p.480)

    —Steven Runciman in A History of the Crusades, Volume III: The Kingdon of Acre and the Later Crusades

Runciman is, in addition to being a hell of a writer, also a blood relation of one of us blockheads.  I'm proud, as it were, to have shaken the hand that shook the hand . . . .

--David

Untitled

Untitled

—NC Tate

Winter mornings

After days of chilling wet, the sky began to clear yesterday. The full moon, which had passed unseen behind cloud two days before, made a ghostly appearance in the early morning sky. It returned after sunset, large and burnished above the horizon.

Last night a fierce frost glazed the puddles and raised tiny pillars of ice on the fringes of the fields. Before sunrise, the orange in the east was echoed by the palest rose tint in the western sky. As the color deepened, it seeped into the snow of Mount Fuji. Across the valley, Oyama mountain and the hills of Tanzawa were also brushed red with reflected light.

Surely no one would rise in the frozen twilight to see all this beauty if they didn't have a living to make. Bundled in hat, coat and gloves, I pedaled to work, putting up the local flock of sparrows as I rounded the corner.

Sparrows fly to the roof ridge
Yesterday they faced this way
This morning that

--Julian

What Immigration Policy is Really About

Empire of Capital

Ellen Meiksins Wood

But, on balance, global capital benefits from uneven development, at least in the short term (and short-termism is an endemic disease of capitalism).  The fragmentation of the world into separate economies, each with its own social regime and labour conditions, presided over by more or less sovereign territorial states, is no less essential to 'globalization' than is the free movement of capital.  Not the least important function of the nation state in globalization is to enforce the principle of nationality that makes it possible to manage movements of labour by means of strict border controls and stringent immigration policies, in the interests of capital.

Ellen Meiksins Wood in Empire of Capital

--David

Ofuro

Of the simple pleasures of Japan, the bath is perhaps the most profound. The Japanese bath (ofuro) is a return to the womb. You immerse yourself up to your neck in water a few degrees warmer than body temperature. The muscles unknot and soften. Mental and physical stress slips away. The minutes pass...

Other pleasures cluster around this one. While squatting beside the bath on a low stool or sitting cross-legged on the floor, rinsing by sluicing bowls of hot water over your head and body is a bracing gratification. Then, lowering yourself into the full bath, the displaced water rises and flows profligately over the sides. In season, a yuzu orange may float on the water, releasing a quiet aroma. On May 5 Children's Day, green, swordlike shobu reeds—symbols of courage--are laid on the surface of the bath.

A bath is taken upon returning home before donning a yukata robe for dinner and the rest of the evening. Or in winter, it can be enjoyed before retiring.

Steeped in a hot bath;
a punctuation
that ends the working day.

a calorific transfer
bath warms the body
body warms the bed

--Julian (with thanks to Sayuri and fellow blockheads David and Mark)

Blogger's thought for the morning

"There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true." - Ian Hart

(Via Undernews, Sam Smith's invaluable daily-ish free email news roundup; subscribe at prorev-subscribe@topica.com)

--Julian

By Any Other Name

By Any Other Name

—NC Tate

American History

The great American statesman Benjamin Franklin, a Deist, said, "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian Assemblies." President Thomas Jefferson, also a Deist, was even more anti-Christian: "The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious." President Abraham Lincoln said, "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."

But they lived in what might be considered more enlightened times: the 18th and 19th centuries.

I found this at wood s lot, but it's originally from an article by David Barrett in the online magazine nthposition. 

It's too bad that the great mass of Americans have preferred to jettison the healthy skepticism of Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln in favor of one or another version of Christian mythology.

—David

New Year

The New Year holidays were special in the Kanto area. Travelers returning from other parts of Japan told of rain and snow. Here on the Pacific coast we had day upon day of blue skies. The warm sun made the end-of-the-year spring cleaning more than a matter of grinning and bearing it, even if it did show up every streak on the newly-washed windows.

In the last days of the old year, the countryside was wreathed in smoke as farmers made bonfires of straw, and households pruned bushes and trees and burned the dead leaves and clippings. December 31 was a day of calm, cleaning over and New Year preparations made.

For the first few days of the New Year, with less driving and manufacturing, the air was sparkling clear. It beckoned you to the shrines and hot springs of the nearby hills, from where you could see all the way to Enoshima Island just off the coast.

New Year's morning: always
A mailbox full of cards
From folks I didn't send one to

--Julian

Tatami

A tatami mat is a pallet of coarse straw covered with a layer of tightly woven, fine reed affixed with borders of plain or patterned fabric. A tatami room is a space floored with these rectangular mats of standard size, each the area needed by a human lying at rest. Tatami is firm but giving, cool in summer and warm to the bare foot in winter. The feel of the mat is rough against the grain, smooth with it. The reed is green at first and powerfully sweet-smelling, soon fading to an odorless ivory.

To sit on tatami is to be grounded... literally. You have the freedom to sit straight, to slouch or to lie, head supported on one hand. For some--for me--whether at home at the end of the day or out at a convivial spot like Inaka, the floor is the only place to sit with a meal, a drink and good company, crossing or splaying one's legs, changing position as the evening unfolds. To truly relax and to reclaim one's center, a chair will no longer do.

Tatami: one of the simple pleasures of life in Japan.

Once in a decade
Filling the whole house
The smell of new tatami

--Julian