My New Crest

This is a new crest that I have designed for myself:

Lightning bolt (upper left, outside): Benjamin Franklin, who was author of an essay on farting, is also quite famous for his kite experiment involving lightning. He is the polymath and polyglot who I hold in highest regard. I was deeply affected by lightning near Lake Monsan in Quebec in 1996 so this strikes me as a fitting symbol to add to my emblem replete with its arrowhead-shaped tip associated with Greek mythology.

Clothespin (upper right, outside): Hundreds of patents exist as mankind has sought to perfect something of such grace and practicality that is quite nearly perfect already, like the Holy Grail. It represents a paradox: it shall never attain the level of utility which its tinkerers seek for it unless employed more widely in all households. 

The clothes peg, in British parlance, is a symbol of frugality and operates as an obvious badge of my life work with Project Laundry List.

Shield: The shapely shield used in the crest is bodacious and elegant, combining the noble with the proletarian.

Inscribed Cross: The Cross is a Christian symbol and, accordingly, for me it is a fitting way to divide the field. 

The engraved Simplified Chinese characters, meaning "The Middle Way" or in latin via media, are 中间道路. I chose Simplified Chinese over the more elaborate Traditional script because this convention, along with the adoption of pinyin, allowed a very high rate of literacy to be achieved in China. As a nod to the ancient, I have employed the vertical presentation of characters. I like that it is four characters in length

"The Middle Way" was a term John Henry Newman of the Oxford Movement defended in a famous series of lectures when he was an Anglican (Episcopalian), but which he rejected later, claiming, 

For a mere sentence, the words of Saint Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before... 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' ["the verdict of the world is conclusive"] By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized. (Apologia, part 5)

The crest speaks to the fallibility of human knowledge juxtaposed against God's infallible Way. 

The creation of this crest in the wake of the public unveiling of the Oxford Consensus this week does imbue the calligraphy with a current, powerful meaning. Furthermore, as an Episcopalian who was confirmed Catholic at age 22, I attribute my conversion to Newman, in part, and partially to the powerful writings of the Cistercian friar Thomas Merton, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism who pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. 

N.B. In this day and age, the Chinese characters meaning The Middle Way (中间道路) are exploited by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, for political purposes. I am not in the habit of publicly pulverizing others beliefs, though that could be done with some alacrity, nor am I in a geographical position to opine on this topic so I wish to distance myself from those who might thus read into their inclusion. 

Canada Lynx (upper right, inside): Born in the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Tiger, I chose instead a North American predator (Lynx canadensis) known for its ferocity and beauty. I have regarded this animal in highest esteem among felines for many years. As with the wolverine, I hope to observe one safely in the wild someday. It stands for my hopes. 

N.B. It is my pet peeve that some people refer to the Canada goose as a Canadian goose. I regard the mislabeling of this cat in like manner as an equally egregious solecism.

Another disclaimer is owing: I should not be confused with another Alex, who seemed ignorant of the species that thrives when "bunnies" have sex.

Common Loon, Cattails and Lotus (upper left, inside): The Common Loon (Gavia immer) is my totem. Its eerie, lonely cry carry me to a place of tranquility. This image also incorporates cattails and a lotus flower. 

My initial confusion coupled with ignorance allowed me to wonder if the Ark of the Covenant was like Noah's Ark, a question I posed to my more Harrison Ford-savvy trippers on the day that I was both reading about these arks and was struck by lightning while photographing a presumably non-Covenantial rainbow. Some time later, I jumbled the cat o' nine tails used for punishment in the Royal Navy with the pervasive swampland reed, sometimes called catninetail. My first cousin once-removed and the son of a favorite great aunt was the youngest man ever made captain in the Royal Navy. As a descendant of the Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins, believed by some historians to have also been the mutineer in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Hopkins is said to have shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1607 and the play to have come out of this tragedy. It seemed like a motif that would encapsulate maternal and paternal family history, as well as the predilection to subversion that seems to run deep in my blood. It is meant to remind the observer of the way that language evolves and is sometimes misunderstood. 

The lotus flower (Nelumbo lutea) which grows in the North American habitat of the Common Loon has roots anchored in the mud, but leaves and flowers that emerge above the water's surface. It is beautiful and its tuber, a food source. It is here, in part, as a representation of my knowledge of New England and Canadian edible wild plants.

Twinflower (bottom left, inside): I am a fraternal twin, so that is one apparent reason for the inclusion of this delicate specimen in my crest. The perennial stems of the twinflower are slender, pubescent, and prostrate; the flowers are paired, pendulous, with a five-lobed, pale pink corolla.  The twinflower gets its eponymous Latin name, Linnaeus borealis, from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnæus who named it as his favorite. He created the system of binomial nomenclature, a scheme that organizes nature in a somewhat orderly fashion. I teach it to my students and regard the "Prince of Botany" with nearly as much esteem as the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once did, when he wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth."

Bike wheel & crossed paddles (bottom right, inside): The bike wheel is a symbol of simplicity, like the token clothespin previously discussed. It is a rejection of the automobile but, with its sophisticated hub, shows I am not a Luddite. It becomes, like the Wheel of Samsara or the Dharma Wheel, a symbol of modern enlightenment, not to mention healthy living. It apprehends health in a corporate and individual sense. It should remind those who look upon this crest of Bill McKibben's admonition that if the Chinese could do one thing for the environment it would be to remount their bicycles and abandon the personal automobile. The Presta valve is oriented at three o'clock because the Trinity is immanent and transcendent and three is my favorite number.

The wooden paddles are a nod to the indigenous people of North America, particularly the Cree among whom I have mingled. They are a visual reminder of the summers that I dedicated to learning about James Bay and its threatened rivers, while at play in the fields of the Almighty.   

Greek Motto: As a convert to Catholicism and a student of the classics, these two Greek words, speude bradeos, which translate into the Latin as festina lente and English as "hurry slowly," adopt a connotation as powerful as their denotative meaning. Nobody more thoroughly or in a more elegiacal manner has offered a treatment of this phase on par with Desiderius Erasmu's Adagia II, 1, 1: Festina Lente. Overall, Erasmus' piety and humility combined with his sense of humor present an inimitable guide to the faithful so it is fitting to contain the penultimate nod to him at the foundation of this contemporary regalia.

Note: The artwork is all taken without permission. I apologize, but will make no pecuniary gain from this tremendous waste-of-time.

"to the bottom of seeeeeeeeeeeeea...It was sad when the great ship went down."

When I was a boy of seven, my twin sister and I were packed off to summer camp, where I would wet the bed and be a source of ridicule for my uncool clothes ("your mother dresses you funny")...but I still loved it, the hiking and canoeing, the camping and skinny dipping, the singing and orienteering, blueberry picking and washing with Dr. Bronners in Loon Lake.

We were allowed to jump off bridges into rivers (the nasty Saco), because it was the permissive post-1970s, and my favorite time, especially as I grew older, was singing at The Playhouse almost every night. Men who loom epic in my mind would strum Grateful Dead and all manner of Peter, Paul and Mary and Kingston Trio songs for an hour or so before we were paraded out to do taps and herded to cabins from which, as we grew older (and full of hormones), we would sneak out at night.

In that playhouse, we also learned a song, at age seven, "Got drunk last night, got drunk the night before, gunna get drunk tonight like I ne'er got drunk before..." Today, sadly, there would be editorials in the newspaper and social workers would be sent in to shut down the camp if such a song were taught and children were allowed to jump from bridges. We turned out all right--not perfect, but no more pot-smoking or hard-drinking or unhinged than the next guy or gal, I suspect.

There was another song, though, about the Titanic, which we sang that I must say was terrible. It was about the sinking of the great ship. "The Titanic" was made popular by Paul Newman and Brandon de Wilde acting in the 1963 film Hud. Our version ended with, "The moral of the story, as you can plainly see,/Is to wear a life-preserver when you go out to sea." (Before we called them PFDs, which would have fit better in the song.) It was to the tune of "Nearer Thy God to Thee" and was really a class warfare song in keeping with much of the rest of the American folk tradition that is the staple of my music chest still more than thirty years on.

This is all by way of introduction to the main topic of this post: Ships that sink. Deborah and I watched Bob Ballard, the undersea explorer who discovered the remains of the Titanic, in a gripping National Geographic special, called The Alien Deep. Last night, the episode called Ocean's Fury was full of tales of lost ships. Here is the official synopsis of the program:

Dr. Ballard thinks that rogue waves – and all waves – are getting larger and more frequent on the seas. In Ocean's Fury, Ballard travels the world in search of the forces behind the motion of the ocean, meeting with scientists and practitioners along the way. He talks to oceanographers, climatologists, river boat pilots, surfers, fishers, and more – all to prove a single point: the ocean is growing more dangerous by the day.

The most stunning theory proposed for how sea water moves in its 1,000 year cycle around the planet was that fish and other sea creatures, like squirt-propelled jellyfish, create ripples that eventually compound into "rogue waves." It was unbelievable until I woke up and saw my friend Valerie's Facebook post of this fish:

Oct. 13, 2013: The crew of sailing school vessel Tole Mour and Catalina Island Marine Institute instructors hold an 18-foot-long oarfish that was found in the waters of Toyon Bay on Santa Catalina Island, Calif. (AP/CATALINA ISLAND MARINE INSTITUTE)

Ballard reported that, on average, one very large container ship sinks every month in addition to hundreds of smaller ones. We got a helicopter tour of the "Graveyard of the Pacific" where the Columbia rolls on to the deep. "The Columbia River Bar is a stretch of water in the US's Pacific Northwest where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. The Bar is also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific having taken roughly 2000 ships and 700 lives in recorded history." It was a tremendous amount of factual information, mixed with forceful editorializing about the importance of curbing anthropogenic sources of climate change.

This morning, the China Daily news clippings included a frightful picture of a Panama-registered, but Chinese ship sinking off the coast of South Korea. The title of the article: 1 Chinese dead, 18 missing as ship sinks off ROK.
 

The cargo ship CHENGLU15 is seen amid a storm in Yingri Harbor of Pohang in South Korea on Tuesday. [Photo/Xinhua]

It is time for us to get real about climate change.

Water Caltrop, Yam Beans, and "Asparagus"

Always intrigued by new cuisines and new ingredients, we stopped to buy some vegetables that I have not knowingly eaten prior to now. Outside of the Buddhist temple that abuts Nanguan Park, which is a stone's throw from where we live, a man was selling these interesting-looking vegetables.

Water Caltrops for Sale                                       Photo credit: Deborah Zhang (c) 2013

Wikipedia says of these:

The water caltrop, water chestnut, buffalo nut, bat nut, devil pod, Singhara (Hindi: सिंघाडा)سنگھارا (Urdu) or Pani-fol (Hindi: पानीफल) is any of three extant species of the genus Trapa: Trapa natans, T. bicornis and the endangered Trapa rossica. The species are floating annual aquatic plants, growing in slow-moving water up to 5 meters deep, native to warm temperate parts of Eurasia and Africa. They bear ornately shaped fruits, which in the case of T. bicornis resemble the head of a bull, each fruit containing a single very large starchy seed. T. natans and T. bicornis have been cultivated in China and India for at least 3,000 years for the edible seeds.

While I have eaten water chestnuts previously--mostly in American Chinese food--I have never seen anything like these. They are beautiful and as the Wikipedia entry states, positively bovine in their appearance with a hint of orchidness. Georgia O'Keefe would have had a field day painting them!

I just cooked four of them as a sample. They are delicious, but nearly impenetrable. Chef-A-Gogo describes his experience with these popular tidbits when he was introduced to them in Phuket, Thailand. He explains that they are not crunchy like a water-chestnut, but much more like an actual chestnut--you know, the kind that December's carolers sing about roasting on an open fire.

Chinese Nutpick with Mother-of-pearl handle

As we do not have a nutpick, we are using our tea awl to dig out the meat.

Wikipedia continues,

Water caltrop has been an important food for worship as prayer offerings since the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. The Rites of Zhou (2nd century BC) mentioned that a worshipper "should use a bamboo basket containing dried water caltrops, the seeds of Euryale ferox and chestnuts" (加籩之實，菱芡栗脯). The Chinese Herbal Medicine Summary (本草備要 published in 1694, written by Wang Ang 汪昂) indicates that water caltrop can help fever and drunkenness.

As you can see from the first picture above, our street vendor was also selling chestnuts, which are for sale everywhere in the streets of Beijing, much as sweet potatoes are, as well. He was not selling the water lily seeds of Eurayle ferox, though. These, I am quite sure, I have never seen.

"Chestnuts Roasted on an..."  Photo credit: http://perceptivetravel.com/blog/2013/02/08/wangfujing-snack-street-beijing/

Photo credit: http://www.changdashanyao.com/

I bought a ¥10 bag of the mountain yam bean. It weighs about 2 kg and will do nicely for a couple of yummy dinners. Now I must set about how to prepare them. It is not easy sometimes to find recipes.

On Sunday morning, we had brunch at a spicy fish hot-pot place with an old colleague of mine from the High School Attached to Northeast Normal University and she and her husband ordered something which the Chinese-English dictionary calls "asparagus", but is really bamboo shoots. NPR has a wonderful story about the kind of "asparagus" that I am trying to identify for you.

Photo credit: Laura McCandlish for NPR

Surname, Given Name

A suggestion for Google and others

This is a silly and short blog post, but one of the things that irritates me most in this era of the smartphone is that there are no obvious protocols for the data entry of Chinese names. Google Contacts allows me to enter the phonetic first name and phonetic last name, but in China, "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."

Would it not be smarter to say surname and given name? Is there some culture, readers, where this convention would not solve my problem? It is rather embarrassing to call Wu Zhang when I meant to call Zhang Wu (names changed to protect the innocent).

If you are more interested in this topic, there are a plethora of interesting articles available on the most popular names in Chinese. Li (or, as we spell it out West: Lee) is the fourth most popular. As usual, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Beijing Botanical Gardens

Photo credit: Deborah Zhang

Yesterday morning I rousted Deborah and said we needed to be on the train by 8:30 AM. Our destination, not Bangor, Maine, but the Beijing Botanical Gardens. It took precisely an hour and a half to get there.

The Conservatory or Beijing Botanical Garden Public Greenhouse. Photo credit: You Are Not From Around Here

One of the points-of-interest is the Conservatory. As the Confucius Institute say, in typical Chinglish:

Beijing Botanical Garden Public Greenhouse, designed by Beijing Institute of Architect, is located in the western part of Central Axis Road of Beijing Botanical Garden which is at the foot of the Fragrant Hills...Beijing Government invested nearly 260 million Yuan to construct the world’s largest single exhibition greenhouse taking an area of 9800 square meters and a floor space of 5.5 hectares. Its space is as twice as the greenhouse in Kunming World Expo, making it one of the big events in China’s architectural history.

I did not go inside, but will go back in a month when the hills are bathed in vermilion (Beijing's peak foliage season is a month later than Vermont's peak by my guesstimate).

We paid the ten yuan entrance fee and then an additional two yuan fare to see the bonsai exhibit, which had more cool stones than funky little trees, but was nonetheless delightful. It was a bit rushed so we swirled through the bonsai garden in order to allow Deborah to make a 2 PM appointment, which she learned about at 9:20 AM while we were en route.

The roses were in full bloom and were, florally-speaking, the highlight. There was also a tribute to Cao Xuexin, the author A Dream of Red Mansions--one of the four great classic novels. I have read half of it, as earlier posts have indicated.

"Making Honey" Photo credit: Deborah Zhang

A bit fuzzy, my photo of an old printing press of Dream of Red Mansions.

A neat little insect enjoying the sunshine and clean air in the shadow of the Fragrant Hills.

A group of children played delightedly in the vicinity of this detailed sculpture.

Very cool lily pads within the confines of the Bonsai Garden's inner-sanctum. 

On our way out, we bought a plant from the same vendor that was pedaling this pitcher plant. The plant will sit on our coffee table, which we call a cha ji (tea table). It is customary and proper to have a plant on your tea table to remind those sipping tea (pin cha) of nature, because tea ought really to be consumed out of doors in the verandas of Cao Xuexin's great novels or even high in the Fragrant Hills.

Concerning the Black Stones that are Dug in Cathay, and Are Burnt for Fuel

It is a fact that all over the country of Cathay [China] there is a kind of black stones existing in beds in the mountains, which they dig out and burn like firewood. If you supply the fire with them at night, and see that they are well kindled, you will find them still alight in the morning; and they make such capital fuel that no other is used throughout the country. It is true that they have plenty of wood also, but they do not burn it, because those stones burn better and cost less.

-Travels of Marco Polo, Book II, Chapter XXX (circa 1300 A.D.)

Coal for domestic use being transported by use of a tricycle. Is this saving or adding to emissions? (Wikipedia, Brian Kelley from Auggen, Germany )

They Burn Better and Cost Less

As the Line 10 subway train chugged through the station called Yuanmingyuan, which is the site of the old summer palace plundered during the Boxer Rebellion (the Chinese call it the Invasion of the Eight Power Alliance, for good reason), I tugged on Deborah's sleeve, pointing to the footnote from my edition of Polo's Travels, in which my new Kindle has allowed me to become enmeshed. It says, in relevant part, "Near the capital coal is mined at Yuen-ming-yuen, and in a variety of isolated deposits among the hills in the direction of the Kalgan road, and in the district round Siuen-hwa-fu.  (Sindachu of Polo, ante ch. lix.)"

It then continues:

But the most important coal-fields in relation to the future are those of Shan-tung, Hu-nan, Ho-nan, and Shan-si [known in the pinyin as Shandong, Hunan, Henan, and Shanxi]. The last is eminently the coal and iron province of China, and its coal-field, as described by Baron Richthofen, combines, in an extraordinary manner, all the advantages that can enhance the value of such a field except (at present) that of facile export; whilst the quantity available is so great that from Southern Shan-si alone he estimates the whole world could be supplied, at the present rate of consumption, for several thousand years. "Adits, miles in length, could be driven within the body of the coal.... These extraordinary conditions ... will eventually give rise to some curious features in mining... if a railroad should ever be built from the plain to this region ... branches of it will be constructed within the body of one or other of these beds of anthracite." Baron Richthofen, in the paper which we quote from, indicates the revolution in the deposit of the world's wealth and power, to which such facts, combined with other characteristics of China, point as probable; a revolution so vast that its contemplation seems like that of a planetary catastrophe. [my emphasis]

I am struck by the prescience of the two observations of the Baron Ferdinand Richtofen to which I have drawn attention. [The baron was the uncle of the more famous "Red Baron," a successful flying ace known to the post-WWI generation for his daring feats and to the post-Charles Schulz generation because of Snoopy.]

The Baron of whom we are currently speaking was born in 1833 in Prussian Silesia. He traveled extensively and had a mountain named for him in China; there is still an eponymous peak, the tallest in the Rocky Mountain National Park's Never Summer Mountains. He is also said to have played a role in identifying gold fields in the decade following the American Civil War.

It took him some time to visit China after his initial intrigue was drawn there, as the Middle Kingdom was, at that time, immersed in the Taiping Rebellion, which continues to be the single bloodiest war in history by some accounts, possibly claiming 100 million lives. When he did get there, his notes were voluminous. The 1911 version of the Encyclopedia Britannica records,

In a remarkable series of seven journeys he penetrated into almost every part of the Chinese Empire. He returned home in 1872, and a work comprising three large volumes and an atlas, which, however, did not cover the entire field or complete the author's plan, appeared at Berlin in 1877-85 under the title of China; Ergebnisse eigner Reisen und darauf gegründeter Studien. In this standard work the author deals not only with geology but with every subject necessary to a general geographical treatise. Notably he paid close attention to the economic resources of the country he traversed; he wrote a valuable series of letters to the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, and first drew attention to the importance of the coalfields of Shantung, and of Kiaochow as a port. [my emphasis]

It is in this second passage that I find a curious disconnect. If he thought that stripping China of its many resources was tantamount to a "planetary catastrophe," why then was he writing letters to the men he knew would be first in line to exploit them? This topic is explored in an interesting paper by Ghassan Moazzin, a graduate student at Cambridge on the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. His conclusion is simple, "It was only when he started to employ imperialism in order to develop his career and finance his work that he gradually grew more dependent on it. Simultaneously the closer his relationship to imperialism became the more his work was influenced by it." This certainly seems like a plausible explanation, unless the venerable Henri Cordier, who offered the meticulous notes on Polo's Travels, was himself making loose with Richtofen's characterization.

Anyway, these are the encouraging numbers from the government today. China is serious about climate change...or, at least, about reducing air-borne pollutants for its increasingly outspoken populous. When will the United States get down to business?



N.B. The word adits in the footnote of Cordier means the horizontal mouth of a mine, but does not appear in Bill Gates' MicrosoftWord dictionary.

Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity