Here’s the English translation of the French Cro-Magnon chorus posted yesterday as The Cro-Magnon Chorus:
“You think you are superior (to us). You are very stupid. Your intelligence and behavior insult your Cro-Magnon ancestors. We never changed the climate!”
Confession: I had to use an online French to English translator to understand the message of the Cro-Magnon Chorus. I wasn’t trying to be superior!
Viewing the 17,000-year-old cave paintings of our Cro-Magnon ancestors in Lascaux, France yesterday, I wondered what they would think of their more developed descendants. Suddenly, I thought I heard a Cro-Magnon chorus echoing through the caves:
“Vous pensez que vous êtes supérieur. Vous êtes très stupide. Votre intelligence et le comportement insultent vos ancêtres Cro-Magnon. On n’a jamais changé le climat!”
A Sin a Week:
52 sins described in loving detail for folks with the inclination and ability to sin,
but who have run out of bad ideas.
ILLUSTRATED!
To order: email sshoem3636@gmail.com
$ 19.30 incl tax
I began writing poetry in Urbana High School. I continued the questionable practice in college. Ten years later my first poem was published in a reputable journal.
Twenty years after grad school, I believed a collection of my poems could be made around the theme of sin. I hired an undergraduate cartoonist, T. Brian Kelly, who had a weekly strip in the Daily Illini student newspaper to illustrate them. At $20 a poem I could afford it, and he needed the money.
“A Sin a Week” became the title and I sent the manuscript to finally a total of five unimpressed NY publishers. They said few books of poetry sold well. Then I put it in a drawer for 25 years.
A month ago Doris Wenzell of Mayhaven Publishing asked me if I had a collection of my poems she could see. She had heard I had readers of my poems on FaceBook, especially since I had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Two days later I handed her my manuscript with my newly added subtitle. (See above.)
She loved it, we signed a contract, she rushed through the editing and printing because of my predicted shortness of time, and the book has now been selling for a week. Reviews from early readers have been good.
Notice the book says it describes sins, not that it is poetry. The first sin described is “Lying.” Ancient writers referred to the Devil as “the Father of lies.” This theme continues throughout the book, notably in my never revealing the book is poetry.
This is my confession–if you choose to order a copy, you’ve been warned.
I thought the lightening bugs were shooting stars
And woke you up at three in the morning
To see the display. You knew better, but
Were kind, suggesting the more likely fact,
Though my view was the more romantic…
Mass murder, terror, hate,
Assault rifles, semi-automatic,
Hand guns, gun shows,
Concealed carry,
Congress bought by the NRA.
Victims: LGBTQ,
Children, shoppers,
Movie-goers,
Muslims, Christians,
African-Americans, worshippers,
Anyone.
Shooters: ISIS,
Racists, bigots,
Mentally ill, gangs,
Drug addicts,
Anyone,
No background checks needed
For private gun sales or gun shows.
Scroll down for Joshi Daniel’s photograph that inspired this reflection.
Tourists and residents see things differently. Actually, it’s more than that. They see different things, like the farmer walking through the field in Kumta, and this tourist website that introduces would-be visitors to Kumta.
Today we’re tourists in Beynac-et-Cazenac, one of the loveliest places we’ve ever experienced. Well, i,e. experienced as tourists. But even a tourist (we’ve rented a house for the week (pictures to follow) recognizes the slower pace of this medieval town on the banks of the Dordogne River.
The Experiment in International Living (EIL) offered a deeper way of seeing the world forty years ago. That summer I lived with a host family in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Immersed in the daily life of my Slovakian family and students at the university, I was not a tourist. I cared nothing about the sites a tourist might visit. I walked everywhere, paying attention to where I was, looking more deeply, more thoughtfully – being more present, one might say – less disembodied, less virtual, less distracted, not as entertained, but so much happier in my body.
Like the Experiment in International Living, Kosuke Koyama encouraged me to slow down, to walk instead of run by, drive past, or fly over – to see the dailyness and the natural field of the man Joshi’s photograph. God, said Kosuke, is a three-mile-an-hour God who meets us at the pace of human being walking.
Momentarily, we’ll walk very slowly down the steep hill into the village on Sunday morning in this beautiful place. If we go to fast, we’ll fall on our faces.
- Gordon C. Stewart, Beynac-et-Cazenac, June 12, 2016.
Farmer walking through the fields | Hegde, Kumta, Karnataka, India
If you would like to buy a print of any of the images, get in touch with me here.
The rotating blades make the red lights
appear to blink atop the windfarm
electrical generators far in the distance, while In the back yard the lightening bugs flash their need for love.
All our chargers need charging, too.
Electronic lives have been drained
by machines powered by dinosaurs.
Coal miners and oil rig workers
die to supply the energy we covet.
Piles of nuclear wastes surround us
glowing unblinking in the dark.
Six degrees of separation and Holy Ground
When Steve learned that Kay and I are staying in the apartment of Abdelwahab Meddeb, he wrote that he had interviewed Meddeb’s translator, Jane Kurtz, on his weekly radio interview program, Keepin’ the Faith (WILL-AM at the University of Illinois). Sure enough. Steve contacted Jane. Jane Kurtz emailed me. And voila! Six degrees of separation.
Jane wrote that she translated two of his books into English, including Talismano, and that they corresponded quite a bit during their work. She listened to his weekly radio program, “Cultures d’Islam,” thanks to the internet and Radio France-Culture (one of the most remarkable radio stations in the world). They were supposed to meet in Palo Alto, and teach a class together at Stanford, but that semester corresponded with his onset of the cancer that took his life in a short time.
“His writings can be very esoteric, since his interest in Islam spanned so many continents and cultures (hence the title of his radio program, “cultures” with an “s”.
“…. I almost think it was a good thing he didn’t live to see the terrible violence that struck his beloved Paris these recent years. It would have broken his heart to see the evil done in the name of Islam in the city he so loved.”
Abdalwahab Meddeb practiced his Muslim faith “though he also believed strongly in the secular values of France —he was of that generation—and in the possibility of an Islamic reform coming out of the communities of European Muslims. How sad that exactly the opposite is happening, French Muslims are being radicalized and are filling mosques and prisons.
“Anyway, a few of his books are available in English, if you are not a reader of French (and believe me, many readers of French still don’t understand his writings), so I would recommend starting with The Malady of Islam.
——–
The old saying “wherever you go, there you are,” is worth heeding. The intent of the saying is to remind us that we take ourselves wherever we go. But it occurs to me there’s another dimension to the adage. Wherever you go, be there – really be present to the place and see it for what it is. This apartment in France has turned out to be a kind of holy ground.
From Day 2, Saturday, June 4, 2016
It’s Saturday morning. We’re standing in front of our apartment complex, waiting for arrival of an Uber car. Twenty feet to our left, two soldiers holding machine guns across their chests stand on either side of the entrance to the building next door. I decide to speak to the nearer soldier.
“Bonjour.”
“Bonjour,” he replies.
“Military, oui?” I ask.
“Oui. Jews,” he says, pointing to the building behind him.
“Synagogue?” I ask. “Jews,” he says.
“Ummm, synagogue?” I try again. He doesn’t understand. I continue: “Eglise pour Jews?”
“Yes, a church for Jews,” he says. “Terrorists.” They’re protecting Jewish worshipers from a potential Islamist extremist attack on the synagogue on Shabbat.
A man walks by talking loudly to the air. He is obviously mentally disturbed and maybe into his cups or on something as well. “Crazy man!” says the soldier says, showing me the taser gun, which he carries in case “the crazy man causes trouble.”
He asks where I am from. “U.S.A.”
“I like U.S.A.,” he says.
I ask whether he has been to the U.S.A. He has not but says, “I like U.S.A. Patriotic.!” I wonder what he means.
What goes through the mind of a 20-something French soldier on a Paris street protecting the Jewish minority from Islamic extremists who have successfully attacked Paris? Why does he think America is patriotic? Is he thinking of an American businessman who has captured the news in Europe by promising to make America great again by closing the borders to Muslims and building a wall against immigrants, returning America to the real Americans?
Anti-immigrant sentiment is not new to France. It has fed the political right in recent years. No one knows what the young soldier thinks. I like him. He seems to like me. Whatever the answer may be to what goes on in his head and heart, we’re dealing with the same world and the same issues. But I do wonder whether he might think that French patriotism would mean taking his country back from those who are not really French?
And who might the really French or the real Americans be?
American Indians?
Wóablakela, Paix, Shalom, Salaam, Peace!
We arrived @ Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) Friday morning @8:30 a.m. Paris time. These are some first impressions.
Unlike the airports in Germany re-built out of the rubble of WWII, CDG is showing wear. It has none of the aesthetic pizzazz one expects from French culture. The driver we’ve hired through a Paris travel agent is nowhere to be found. An hour later we connect. What would we do without Tim’s cellphone and saved phone numbers?
Our driver is very professional, kind, and courteous. He’s dressed in a business suit. Transportation is his business.
Traffic is nuts! Like bumper cars. Motorcycles and scooters zip between the lanes of traffic ignoring the lines between lanes — and it’s legal! Traffic is bumper-to-bumper or slow, except for the motorcycles and motorbikes who speed past us in the small spaces between the cars in the traffic lanes. Good thing we haven’t rented a car in Paris! I can see the headline, “Conducteur de la voiture Américaine stupide tue cycliste Français! Chauffeur parlant non- Français arrêté pour conduite imprudente et d’homicide.” [Stupid American driver kills French cyclist. Non-French-speaking driver arrested for reckless driving and homicide.]
As we come to a complete stop on a busy highway into Paris, an Arab woman carrying a screaming child approaches our van. She comes to the front passenger window, looks at Sasha, our driver, and begs for money. Sasha gently shakes his head no. The woman persists; the child screams louder. Sasha shakes his head again and looks away from the woman. “Syrian?” I ask. “No,” he says,“Gypsy, from Romania.”
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Within the city bicycles go every which way, cutting and turning in front of cars, and cars in front of them. Traffic feels like anarchy. Fraternité is absent on the streets. Liberté is everywhere.
Walking to a restaurant Friday afternoon, soldiers carrying machine guns across their chests patrol the avenue in threes. In the doorways, families sit or lie with bedrolls. Are these gypsies to whom Europe is accustomed or are they newly arrived Syrian refugees?
We enjoy dinner at a small local restaurant known as a non-tourist neighborhood fixture with great food. Wonderful experience in every way – so accommodating to the butchers of the French language, explaining the menu to us as best he can in our native tongue.
Fraternité and égalité fill the the restaurants, cafes, and brasseries. Laughter and easy conversations are shared over wine and food. Faces smile. Joi de vivre lives indoors in Paris.
Views from the Edge 