Europe

Europe
Cord
Rope
Western
Mediterranean
Luxembourg

Prov.6:21

"Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck."

Luxembourg

Chess:  "Europe" "Cord" "Rope" "Western" "Mediterranean" "Luxembourg"

Archimedes

Psalm
David
Kant
Sing
Song
Eureka
Watermelon
Archimedes
Ross
Ford
Cord
Word
Board
Gourd
Lord

Psalm 32:3
 "When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long."

"As the water began to splash over his...he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was about four, he read a book about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who'd discovered that volume could be measured by water displacement when he sat down in the bathtub. Upon making this discovery, Archimedes supposedly shouted 'Eureka' and then ran naked through the streets.."~~~ John Green : An Abundance of Katherines

Watermelon 

Katherin Rodríguez

Stories of discovery and invention often begin with a problem that needs solving. Summoned by the king to investigate a suspicious goldsmith, the early Greek mathematician Archimedes stumbles upon the principle that would make him famous. ... 

"To seek the natural implies a consciousness that forbids all naturalness forever"~~~James Russell Lowell

 Westminster, London, UK

 Westminster Bridge, London, England

 

Ross Castle, Ireland

 

Santuari del Sagrat Cor, Tibidabo, Barcelona

July Crop Circles 2009; obviously a hummingbird....what's strange is that there are dessert carvings in south America dating over 1000 years ago...one of which is almost identical to this crop circle.

Famara, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain

 Chess:  "Psalm" "David" "Kant" "Sing " "Ross" "Ford" "Cord" "Word" "Board" "Gourd" "Lord" "Archimedes" "Eureka" "Watermelon"

Extract

(one)
The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a bath. Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down. He climbed into the tub as soon as the water got hot, and he sat and watched with a curiously blank look on his face as the water overtook him. The water inched up his legs, which were crossed and folded into the tub. He did recognize, albeit faintly, that he was too long, and too big, for this bathtub—he looked like a mostly grown person playing at being a kid.
As the water began to splash over his skinny but unmuscled stomach, he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was about four, he read a book about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who'd discovered that volume could be mea sured by water displacement when he sat down in the bathtub. Upon making this discovery, Archimedes supposedly shouted 'Eureka!'1 and then ran naked through the streets. The book said that many important discoveries contained a 'Eureka moment.' And even then, Colin very much wanted to have some important discoveries, so he asked his mom about it when she got home that evening.
'Mommy, am I ever going to have a Eureka moment?'
'Oh, sweetie,' she said, taking his hand. 'What's wrong?'
1 Greek: 'I have found it.' 'I wanna have a Eureka moment,' he said, the way another kid might have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so close to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. 'Of course, Colin baby. Of course you will.'
But mothers lie. It's in the job description.

Colin took a deep breath and slid down, immersing his head. I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.
He opened the drain in the tub, stood up, toweled off, and got dressed. When he exited the bathroom, his parents were sitting together on his bed. It was never a good sign when both his parents were in his room at the same time. Over the years it had meant:

1. Your grandmother/ grandfather/ Aunt-Suzie-whom-you-never-met-buttrust-me-she-was-nice-and-it's-a-shame is dead.
2. You're letting a girl named Katherine distract you from your studies.
3. Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face.

It never meant:

1. A girl named Katherine called while you were in the bathtub. She's sorry. She still loves you and has made a terrible mistake and is waiting for you downstairs.

***
But even so, Colin couldn't help but hope that his parents were in the room to provide news of the Number 4 variety. He was a generally pessimistic person, but he seemed to make an exception for Katherines: he always felt they would come back to him. The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
His dad stood up and stepped toward him. 'Katherine called my cell,' he said. 'She's worried about you.' Colin felt his dad's hand on his shoulder, and then they both moved forward, and then they were hugging.
'We're very concerned,' his mom said. She was a small woman with curly brown hair that had one single shock of white toward the front. 'And stunned,' she added. 'What happened?'
'I don't know,' Colin said softly into his dad's shoulder. 'She's just— she'd had enough of me. She got tired. That's what she said.' And then his mom got up and there was a lot of hugging, arms every where, and his mom was crying. Colin extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his bed. He felt a tremendous need to get them out of his room immediately, like if they didn't leave he would blow up. Literally. Guts on the walls; his prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread.
'Well, at some point we need to sit down and assess your options,' his dad said. His dad was big on assessing. 'Not to look for silver linings, but it seems like you'll now have some free time this summer. A summer class at Northwestern, maybe?'
'I really need to be alone, just for today,' Colin answered, trying to convey a sense of calm so that they would leave and he wouldn't blow up. 'So can we assess tomorrow?'
'Of course, sweetie,' his mom said. 'We'll be here all day. You just come down whenever you want and we love you and you're so so special, Colin, and you can't possibly let this girl make you think otherwise because you are the most magnificent, brilliant boy—' And right then, the most special, magnificent, brilliant boy bolted into his bathroom and puked his guts out. An explosion, sort of.
'Oh, Colin!' shouted his mom.
'I just need to be alone,' Colin insisted from the bathroom. 'Please.'
When he came out, they were gone.
For the next fourteen hours without pausing to eat or drink or throw up again, Colin read and reread his yearbook, which he had received just four days before. Aside from the usual yearbook crap, it contained seventy-two signatures. Twelve were just signatures, fifty-six cited his intelligence, twenty-five said they wished they'd known him better, eleven said it was fun to have him in En glish class, seven included the words 'pupillary sphincter,'2 and a stunning seventeen ended, 'Stay Cool!' Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich. Presumably, those seventeen people were kidding. He mulled this over—and considered how twenty-five of his classmates, some of whom he'd been attending school with for twelve years, could possibly have wanted to 'know him better.' As if they hadn't had a chance.
But mostly for those fourteen hours, he read and reread Katherine XIX's inscription:

Col,
Here's to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou.
yrs forever, K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e
2 More on that later. Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed 'yrs forever' until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word—forever—and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.

Charlemagne

Cord
Mecate
Courage
Prov. 3:5
" Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

Calangute beach, North Goa
Calangute Beach, North Goa, India

Chess: "cord" "mecate" "courage" "CE" "Civil Engineering" "Charlie"

Excerpts from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation"

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. Quite apart from discomforts and privations, there was no escape from it. Very restricted company, no books, no light after dark, no hope.

When one considers the Icelandic sagas, which are among the great books of the world, one must admit that the Norsemen produced a culture. But was it a civilisation? . . .
Civilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence.

Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back.

But the pages of pure ornament [in the Celtic illustrated gospels] are almost the richest and most complicated pieces of abstract decoration ever produced, more sophisticated and refined that anything in Islamic art. We look at them for ten seconds, then we pass on to something else that we can interpret or read. But imagine if one couldn’t read and had nothing else to look at for weeks at a time.
Charlemagne . . . with the help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York, he collected books and had them copied. . . . Charlemagne felt strongly the value of education, and in particular he saw the importance of an educated Italy.

CHAPTER 3

ROMANCE AND REALITY

I am in the Gothic world, the world of chivalry, courtesy and romance; a world in which serious thigs were done with a sense of play - where even war and theology could become a sort of game; and when architecture reached a point of extravagance unequalled in history. After allt he great unifying convictions of the twelfth century, High Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious - what Veblen called conspicuous waste. And yet these centuries produced some of the greatest spirits in the history of man, omongst them St Francis of Assisi and Dante. Behind all the fantasy of the Gothic imagination there remained, on two different planes, a sharp sense of reality. medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality.

The fantasy strikes us first, and last; and one can see it in the room in the Cluny museaum in paris hung with a series of tapestries known as the lady with the unicorn. poetical fanciful and profane, its ostensible subject is the four senses but its real subject is the power of love. which can subdue all.

We have come a long way from the powerful conviction that induced knights and ladies to draw carts of stone up the hill for the building of Chartres Cathedral. And yet the notion of ideal love, and the irresistible power of gentleness and beauty, whcih is emblematically conveyed in the tapestry can be traced back for three centuries; we may even begin to look for it in the north portal of Chartress dedicated in 1220.

Only a very few years before, women were thought of as the squat, bad tempered viragos that we see on the font of wichester cathedral; These were the women who accompanied the Norsemen to iceland. The figures on chartres are amongst the the first consciously graceful women in western art.

Of the two or three faculties that have been added to the European mind since the civilisation of Greeece and rome, none seems to me stranger and more inexplicable than the sentiment of ideal or courtly lobe. it was entirely unknown in antiquity. Passion, yes. desire, yes of course; steady affection yes. But this state of utter subjection to the will of an unapproachable woman, this would have seemed to the Romans or the Vikings not only absurd, but unbelievable. But it lasted for centuries. Even up to 1945 we retained a number of chivalrous gestures; we raised our hats to ladies, and let them pass through doors first. And we still subscribed to the fantasy that they were chaste and pure beings, in whose presence we couldn't tell certain stories or pronounce certain words.

Well thats all over now. But where did it come from. nobody knows. Most people think, with the pointed arch, it came from the east. that pilgrims and crusaders found in the Moslem world a tradition of Persian literature in which women were the subject of compliment and devotion.

Less directly the lady of a castle must have had a peculiar potition with so many unoccupied young men who couldn't spend all their time hunting, and who of course never did any work, and when the lord was away for a year or two, the lady was left in charge.

One troubador poem known as the siege of the Castle of love, in which the ladies leaning on the battlements put up a weak defence as young gallants climb up on rope ladders is on ivory mirror cases.

I ought to add that the idea of marriage doesn't come into the question anymore than it would today. A 'love match' is almost an invention of the late 18th century. medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property, and , as everybody knows, marriage without love means love without marriage.

Then i suppose the cult of the virgin probably had something to do with troubador poetry. You often don't know if the poetry is to the Virgin or to a mistress. The greatest of all writings about ideal love, Dante's Vita Nuova, is a quasi-religious work, and in the end it is Beatrice who introduces dante to Paradise.

For all these reasons, i think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Its certainly what their husbands and admirers wanted ladies to look like. So it is all the more suprising to learn that these exquisite creatures got terribly knocked about. it must be true, because there is a manual on how to treat a woman, actually to raise daughters that was widely used from 1370 to the 16th that says disobedient women must be beaten and starved and dragged around by the hair. But the confident look of Gothic women makes one thing they cuold look after themselves.

One can't say romance was a gothic invention: i suppose that, as the word suggests, it was really Romanesque, and grew up in those southern districts of France where the memories of Roman civilisation had not been quite obliterated. But the chivalrous romances of the Gothic time were a specialty of the gothic mind.

Civ in the late 14th century shows us that the delicacy and refinement of the thirteenth century lasted over one hundred years. It survived the Black death and th eHundred years war and the economic revolution of the first enclosures and became completeley international. There is a spring and tension in the early fourteenth century which is lost after 1380; in compensation there is an increase in subtlety.

The greatest patron of art and learning of the gothic world were four brothers: Charles 5 of France. The Duke of Burgundy, the slyest and most ambitious and ultimately the most powerful of the brothers; Loius d'anjou and the Duke of Berry. All were frilly.

That the Duke of Berry was brutally murdered shows us how civilisation seems to fly in at one window and out another in the middle ages.

The duke of Berry's manuscripts illustrate another capacity of the human mind which had grown up in th epreceeding century: The delighted observation of natural objects. leaves and flowers, animals and birds. The odd thin about the medieval response to nature was that it saw all of those things in isolation. Birds were a medieval obsession.

He found one group of artists that saw life as we see it (without the isolation) and painted realistic scenes of peasants peasanting that are one of the miracles of art history. They show an aspect of life that went on unchanged until the first ww. Another illustration from his book "the very rich hours" shows him having a grand dinner. During it they indulge in a little mild sourtship, so called because it was only in courts that one had time for those agreeable preliminaries.

Those French and Burgundian courts were the model of fashion and good manners all over Europe. "courtesy"

The most courteous of men wasFrancesco BErnadone "st francis d assisi. One day he gave a poor man his coat and he started giving stuff away his father diowned him and he lived in poverty there after partly because he felt that it was discourteous to be in the company of anyone poorer than oneself. From the first everyone recognised that St Francis was a religious genius. His favorite saying was "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air nests ; but the son of man hath not where to lay his head."

Francis's cult of poverty could not survive him - it did not even last his lifetime. It was officially rejected by the Church; for the Church had already become part of the international banking system that originated in thirteenth century italy. His disciples were called heretics and burnt at the stake.

Yet his belief that to free the spirit one must be poor is the belief that all great religious teachers have in common. Rousseau and Wordsworth brought it back. The folk tales "the canticle of the sun" about him are good reading.

But already during the lifetime of St Francis another world was growing up, which for better or worse, is the ancestor of our own, the world of trade and of banking. The banker types were realistic and the proof is that they survived. Florentine banking is similar to today , except that double entry wasn't invented till the fourteenth century.

And just as their economic system was capable of an expansion that has lasted till today, so the painting they commissioned had a kind of solid reality that was to become the dominant aim of western art up to the time of cezanne. It continued to grow because it involved a third dimension. Two dimensional art- is enchanting. But instead of decorative jumble Giotto concentrates on a few simple solid looking forms. When Dr Johnson wished to refute he kicked. Giotto made em look solid.

Giotto was born near florence in about 1265 when italian painting was really only a less posished form of Byzantine painting. Giotto has no predecessors. We know absolutely nothing about him till the year 1304, when he decorated a small, plain building in Padua known as the Arena Chapel, and made it, to anyone who cares for painting, one of the holy places of the world. Its one of the first instances of the new rich commissioning works f art as a kind of atonement, a practice that has benefitted the world almost as much as vanity and self-indulgence.

Almost in the same year that he was born Dante was born. In a way Giotto and Dante stand at the junction of two worlds. Biotto belonged tot he new world of solid realities, the world created by the bankers and wool merchants for whom he worked. Dante belonged t the earlier Gothic world, the world of St thomas aquinas and the great cathedrals. He's more like gothic sculpture.