Into the Woods – Page 128 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Gaulish, Latin, and the French language

Notre Dame de Paris

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the almost complete destruction of the Celts in Gaul (which had roughly the same boundaries as today’s France). I mentioned that this genocide was so complete that the Gaulish language was wiped out, though linguists have worked hard to recover what they can of Gaulish. I also reflected a bit on how arbitrary our cultural inheritance is, dependent on the twists and turns of history.

As it is with culture, so it is with language also. Language and culture follow pretty much the same tracks down through the ages. Elements of the past are always there, right under our noses. This is particularly true of language.

In an odd way, the influence of the Gaulish language lives on in the modern world. French, of course, is a Romance language. Like all the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian), French developed out of Vulgar Latin in places beaten down by the Roman empire. Latin is not a dead language. Far from it. It merely changed over time into something bearable and sustainable. Latin was too complicated and too dry, so, where common people were forced to speak it, the language changed according to the linguistic habits of the conquered people. Only the church retained formal Latin. Only the Roman church, frankly, could stand a language as stuffy and arrogant as Latin.

And so, today, insofar as the French language differs from Latin, the differences mainly reflect the linguistic preferences of the Gauls. I am going to quote a long paragraph from a classic work in linguistics, The French Language, written in 1933 by Alfred Ewert of Oxford. Ewert’s political assumptions would not pass muster with most Celtic historians today, and that’s one reason I want to quote this passage. It reveals the habit of Rome-worship that persists in many quarters even today, and it reveals the degrading attitude toward the Celts. After all, the conquerers get to write the histories. The very first sentence is hugely revealing, because it refers euphemistically to the “romanticization” of Gaul:

The romanticization of Gaul, which may be taken to begin with the formation of the Provincia Narbonensis (120 B.C.) and the conquest of the rest of Gaul (55 B.C.), brought with it the substitution of Latin for the native idiom of the Gauls. The latter was a Celtic tongue which it is impossible to characterize in detail, as only a few inscriptions of doubtful interpretation have come down to us. The examination of Celtic elements in various languages and the historical study of Celtic languages and extant Celtic monuments have not yielded results which place beyond doubt the contention that certain developments in the Latin of Gaul are to be ascribed to the persistence of linguistic habits of the Celtic population. We do know that the language of the Gauls presented affinities with Latin, and this fact accounts in part for the readiness with which they seem to have abandoned their native idiom. Among other inducements to do so one may cite the advantages of Roman citizenship, the hope of advancement and material benefits generally, all of which were contingent upon the adoption of the official tongue. To these must be added the fact that with the spread of Christianity the diffusion of Latin was furthered by the Church, which employed Latin solely, at first in the form of Vulgar Latin and subsequently in the form of Low Latin. Before these combined forces the native idiom, inadequate for the new conditions of life and identified henceforth with an inferior culture, yielded ground rapidly, although it lingered on in the country districts as late as the third or fourth century.

Roman citizenship?? Celts were carried off as slaves by the tens of thousands. And of course there is the usual stuff about the inferior culture. Whatever. But Ewart is right when he sticks to his field — linguistics, though he hedges the point a bit because of our lack of knowledge of Gaulish. But it boils down to: Insofar as the sound and structure of the French language differ from Vulgar Latin, the difference can largely or mostly be attributed to the persistence of the Gaulish tongue.

Once I realized this, my fondness for the strange music and the grammatical and syntactical logic of the French language greatly increased. And ever since the Norman conquest, when the French conquerers exerted a major influence on the English language, a touch of Gaulish came to be found in English too.

The magic of feathers

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People often ask me if I worry about the chickens getting cold during the winter. Actually, no. The breeds are supposed to be New England hardy, and the girls huddle up on the roost. Summer heat seems much harder on them than the winter cold, and they go right on laying in winter.

Now the poor tiny birds, that’s something else. Chickens have a much more favorable surface-to-mass ratio and dense layers of feathers. Whereas the tiniest of birds have a relatively large surface area and can afford only so many feathers if they hope to fly. But, somehow, the birds get through the winter.

I’ve often meant to lurk outdoors on a winter evening with binoculars to observe just where the birds sleep. I do know that they love cedar trees. There are lots of wild cedar trees nearby, though there can’t be enough to go around. Plus we’ve planted 17 arbor vitae trees, large and small (mostly large) at the abbey, and that should help.

Sometimes on the coldest mornings I’ll make an extra large batch of grits and serve them to the girls while the grits are still warm.

The lost Celtic civilization: does it matter today?

A detail of the Gundestrup caldron. Source: Wikipedia

The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts. By Graham Robb, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013, 396 pages. Published in Britain as The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe.

Most people — certainly most Americans — never stop and reflect on culture, as though somehow the way we live (and the way we think) today was somehow inevitable. But a bit of travel, a bit of history, and a bit of reflection make it pretty obvious just how arbitrary culture is. Many of us despise American culture. Western culture as a whole is seriously screwed up, though there have been many gifted people over the centuries who have, in large and small ways, managed to make Western culture a little less ugly than it otherwise would have been. But culturally we remain what we are, and some of us don’t like what we are. Our relationship with nature is completely broken. All the magic has been driven out of the world. Our culture and religion have warped our psyches and trampled our instincts (just ask Freud). We are a mess.

A Mozart or a Thomas Jefferson or an Einstein have only a limited effect on culture, the grandeur of their individual achievements notwithstanding. But there are major turning points in culture. One such turning point in Western culture — and I would argue that it was the most important turning point, though it happened 2,000 years ago — was the almost total destruction of Celtic civilization by the Roman armies and the Roman religion. If this had not happened, we in the West would be living in a completely different world today. I think it would be a better world.

The Roman destruction of Celtic culture — genocide is not too strong a word — was so complete that we know very little about the Celts today. Long after the Roman armies had defeated the Celts in Gaul (France) and Britain and hunted down and killed the Druids, the Roman church continued the work of cultural annihilation. The destruction of the Celts in Gaul was so complete that their language was wiped out. Today, we have two main sources of information about the Celts. The first source is the record left by Greek and Roman historians, including a history by Julius Caesar himself, who spent several years away from Rome with the army, waging war against the Celts. But this written record must be interpreted very carefully, because much of it was anti-Celtic propaganda meant to justify the destruction of the Celts. Plus, many of those historians never set foot outside of Greece or Rome or even met a Celt. They just repeated what others had written. The second source is archeology.

Anyone who is seriously interested in the Celts must include a disclaimer, so I include it here. I am not interested in the neo-Druids, the people who put on white robes and show up at Stonehenge at the equinoxes. There is a vast body of romantic, imaginative and speculative material about the Celts and the Druids. We must ignore all that. And by the way, Stonehenge is not even Celtic. Stonehenge is thousands of years older than Celtic civilization. Celtic civilization was contemporary with classical Greece and Rome.

Graham Robb’s book is one of the most important new books about the Celts to come out in years. It is meticulously researched, with something like 500 sources cited in the notes. Robb’s focus is on Celtic astronomy and geometry, and how those things affected the physical layout of the Celtic highway system and Celtic towns. But along the way, Robb’s story touches on many other areas of Celtic life and Celtic culture.

Were the Celts primitive compared with the Romans? Ha! In many ways, Celtic technology and Celtic science were superior. The Celts already had a well maintained system of roads and bridges, which is one reason the Roman armies could move so fast and why it was so easy for the Romans to lay down Roman roads on top of existing Celtic roadways. The Celtic wheeled vehicles were so technically superior to the Roman vehicles that virtually every word for wheeled vehicles in Latin comes from the Celtic language. The Celts’ communications system was faster than the Romans’. The Celts could transmit news from one end of Gaul to the other in a matter of hours, using a network of acoustically well-placed shouters, with protocols for ensuring accuracy. The Romans used runners, which was slower. Robb makes it clear that the Druids were scientists as well as politicians, religious leaders, and diplomats. Celtic society, says Robb, was an intellocracy. It was governed by people who were selected for their merit and who spent as much as twenty years in training.

Why would the Romans (including the Roman church) have gone to so much trouble to completely wipe out the Celtic civilization? The answer, I think, is clear. It was because the Celtic way of life, the Celtic way of thinking, and the Celtic religion were deadly dangerous to the Romans. The Roman culture and the Roman religion simply could not have survived unless Celtic civilization was destroyed. If the Romans had not destroyed the Celts, those of us of European descent would be very different people today.

The abiding ugliness of Roman culture and the Roman religion is an important theme in my novel Fugue in Ursa Major. I’ve had to do a great deal of reading about Rome, and the Celts, to make sure that what I’ve written is historically defensible. Graham Robb’s book, though it was published while Fugue in Ursa Major was undergoing its final editing, was a godsend, not least because it gave me greater confidence that I was on the right track.

So, today, as heirs to the cultural poverty and systems of hierarchy and power bequeathed to us by the Romans, is there anything we can do to retrieve what was destroyed when the Celts were destroyed? There may be. The first step: read. But be sure that what you read is from serious historians. Then, when you have a good foundation in Celtic history, use your imagination. How might your life be better if Celtic, rather than Roman, ways of thinking had prevailed?

Clothes dryers: Just say no

When I moved into the abbey, I bought a washing machine with the intention of buying a dryer later on. It has been more than four years, and I’ve still not bought a dryer. I just haven’t seen the need for it.

There is a clothesline that is convenient to the back door. I hung out a load of clothes this morning when it was 38 degrees, and it’s really not that bad. If there’s a run of rainy weather, the laundry can be draped over the upstairs railings. It may look a little sloppy for a while, but it works just fine.

Dryers, of course, use a huge amount of energy. Dryers also eat clothes. My guess is that dryers wear out clothes almost as much as wearing them. Who needs them. At the very least, who needs them all the time.

The high existential cost of being rich

Source: careerassessmentsite.com

Do you know your personality type, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test? If not, with a little Googling you’ll probably find a way to get a quick and dirty assessment, if not the trademarked test. But the odds are that, if you are reading this blog, then you are not rich, and you are not an ENTJ.

So what’s an ENTJ? Of the 16 personality types described by the Myers-Briggs, ENTJ’s are the type most likely to get rich. Let’s look at the categories.

Extraverted vs. Introverted (E/I)

Intuitive vs. Sensing (N/S)

Thinking vs. Feeling (T/F)

Judging vs. Perceiving (J/P)

There are 16 combinations of these attributes. According to a report by the Career Assessment Site, ENTJ types are most likely to make a lot of money. That is, people who are extraverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging. There also was an article about this at the Motley Fool web site.

If there’s a kind of person that I just can’t stand, it’s ENTJ’s or ESTJ’s. They’re the opposite of people like me (and probably the opposite of people like you, if you are reading this blog). I am an INFP – introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Guess which type makes the least money? People like me — INFP’s. I’m pretty sure that’s because INFP’s don’t much care about money beyond what it takes to live reasonably well and to travel a bit.

I want to clear up some common misconceptions, though. Introverts are not shy. In fact, in my experience introverts often have more social skill than extraverts, simply because introverts pay attention, and extraverts never stop running their mouths. There is another misconception that holds that, if feeling is predominant over thinking, then you must not be very smart, and that if you are very smart, then feeling must be subordinate. That is extremely not true. The IQ’s of feeling types follow the same bell curve as all IQ’s. To be able to think sharply does not imply a devaluation of feeling. Feeling, after all, is the key to meaning.

So is money all that matters? Not to an INFP. It is meaning that we seek in life, not wealth and power. If there is anything that strikes existential terror into the heart of an INFP, it’s the thought of the inner poverty that can almost always be perceived in the lives of those who seek wealth and power. I don’t envy them. I feel sorry for them. They seek to fill their emptiness with things, and to compensate for meaninglessness with power.

Now, as for my income, I did OK. To be an INFP is not necessarily to be sentenced to poverty. I never got rich, that’s for sure. But I retired early, and I own my own time and my own thoughts. If an INFP can find the right niche, then creativity, kindness, and insight will be rewarded, even in corporate America.

I wouldn’t trade places with an ENTJ for all the money in the world.

Fire tower — like a lighthouse in the woods

I have long been fascinated by fire towers. Like lighthouses, they appeal to introverts because of their isolation and because they are found in appealing places — beside a coast, or in a forest. They have all the magic of promontories. Plus, fire towers have a certain nerdy appeal, because of the observation and communications apparatus that they contain.

It happens that, in Fugue in Ursa Major, I use a fire tower as a setting. When writing the descriptions of the fire tower, I had to rely on research. But on a recent trip to the North Carolina coast, I had a chance to examine this fire tower up close and verify that my descriptions of the fire tower were accurate.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on fire towers, also called lookout towers. They vary in height, but the tallest one in the United States is 175 feet.

The cabin

The landing

One of the eight landings on the way up

Ender’s Game: Fantastic filmmaking

I fully expected to be disappointed by Ender’s Game. Still, I did something I have rarely ever done: went to see it on opening day. In IMAX.

It is true to the book. It is visually stunning. The performances are excellent. The soundtrack is impressive. This film could have ruined itself in a hundred different ways — for example, by diluting the intensity and darkness of the story by trying to make it suitable for children. But, as Ken said, it’s one of the most adult films he has seen lately.

Any criticisms I can muster would be nitpicking.

In a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned my previous association with Orson Scott Card, so I won’t go into that again. But I’m not cutting the film any slack because of that. If anything, the opposite would be true, because Card’s politics baffle me. But Card’s politics have nothing to do with this story or the film.

For most films, I wait for the DVD (or Blu-ray). But Ender’s Game is worth seeing in the theater, in IMAX if possible. You’ll also get trailers for some other good science fiction and fantasy films coming out this fall and winter, including the second part of The Hobbit and the second installment of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire.

I think I’m in love with the cinema again. And the Academy Awards should be worth watching next year.

Halloween work day

Ken has done a lot of traveling and has had a number of public appearances to prepare for, so there hasn’t been a lot of time for farm work this fall. But this week he has started catching up. First step: clean the litter out of the garden. Second step: throw on some compost. Next: Till the garden, plant winter rye, and wait for rain. Not only is a crop of winter rye good for the garden, it also provides winter greens for the chickens.

Ken lets the chickens out to roam when he’s outside working and can keep an eye on them. The abbey has six chickens at present.

A late, shabby rosebud

Late bees working a camellia blossom

Free clover, all you can eat

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Everybody eats the abbey’s clover — rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, chickens, deer. And who knows who comes in and eats it in the dark of night.

I’ve seen this chipmunk several times lately outside the abbey’s side door. I’m wondering if a family of chipmunks has taken up residence under the side porch.

Sourdough in winter

During a couple of early cold snaps, I learned that making sourdough bread takes forever in a cold kitchen. Though all the experts seem to like the idea of a long, slow rise, I don’t have forever. The leaven process must complete overnight, and the rest of the job must be done in time to bake by 5 p.m. or so the next day.

The method I’ve hit upon is to let the dough rise in the oven with the oven light on. Then things seem to happen at about the same rate as during the summer. And while I’m at it, I set a jar of clover sprouts in the oven with the dough. All seeds (as far as I know) germinate better when they’re warm.

The standard abbey sourdough loaf is big — about three pounds. It’s half whole wheat. The whole wheat dough rises nicely, but I don’t get much oven spring with half whole wheat. The crumb is far from dense, though, and it’s great hot, cold, or as toast. When there’s company, or for a showy loaf, I use unbleached flour. That makes a much higher loaf with dramatic oven spring.

The thermostat on a typical winter morning

The dough doubles after about four hours in a warm oven

Ready to put the lid on and bake. The parchment is for lifting the dough out of the bowl into the Dutch oven. Lining the dough-rising bowl with parchment, then lifting by the edges of the paper, is the only way I’ve found to transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, which is preheated to 500 degrees. Upending the dough bowl over the Dutch oven deflates the dough.

Another finished loaf of abbey bread