Prospero's Books

An empty library

Reading Chadwick Seagraves's blog InfoSciPhi, and finding the illustration for my preceding post (a reconstruction of the Library of Alexandria), reminded me of the single most moving sight on my first visit to Berlin several years ago. In the center of the Bebelplatz, on the historic campus of Humboldt University, is a square glass panel. A paragraph from VirtualTourist tells the rest:

Bebelplatz is the site of one of the simplest, and most powerful, monuments that reflect on the evils of the Nazi era. On May 10, 1933, only months after Hitler’s ascent to power, a massive book burning took place here. In the center of the square, there is a glass panel (which you can walk across). It looks down into a deep cavity filled with empty white shelves, symbolizing the destruction of knowledge. At night, the shelves are lit up, and seem to go on downwards for ever. On especially dark nights, a column of light appears to rise from the glass, perhaps implying a ray of hope even in the darkest of times. There is also a plaque with an eerily prescient quotation from Heinrich Heine, written in 1820: ‘Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo Man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt Man am Ende auch Menschen’ (‘That was merely a prelude. Wherever they burn books, eventually they will burn people too’). There are rarely many people around this spot, but we found it to be one of the most eloquent commentaries on the darker recent history of Germany (the memorial was designed in 1995 by Micha Ullman).

What this paragraph doesn't mention is that the empty library shelves look disturbingly like the ultimately empty bunks in the death camps.

(Link: Unter den Linden- Berlin, Germany - VirtualTourist.com.)

Librarian as archetype

On his blog InfoSciPhi, my friend Chadwick Seagraves, a librarian at Marian College, adds to my recent posts on archetypes his own remarkably thorough exploration of  The Librarian as Archetype.

It's not simply that we do bad things

Richard Smoley, in Forbidden Faith (see What I've Been Reading) writes

At some point, we come to realize that the human condition has more than a moral dimension. It also reflects a lack of insight, a primordial ignorance or loss of awareness that certain Gnostic texts represent by the fall of Sophia. It's not simply that we do bad things, but that our minds have become distorted by fixating on a mistaken view of reality.

Seeing the fundamental problem of the human condition as cognitive rather than moral is often regarded as an "Eastern" teaching, but it also has ancient roots in the West—in Socrates' contention that all evil is due to ignorance, in Plato's famous metaphor of the cave, as well as in the teachings of the Gnostics (207).

Don't let go

Watching part of the HBO film of Tony Kushner's Angels in America with my students last week reminded me of a powerful scene I had forgotten in the film and play. Prior Walter, the central character, sick with AIDS, is visited by an angel. Like Jacob in Genesis, he refuses to let go of the angel until she has blessed him.

And that scene reminded me of a line from a sermon I heard in the last couple of years: "When you're wrestling with a problem, don't let go of it until it blesses you."

Verona October

Another poem, a little more serious, that I wrote for the same class, this time for analysis on an exam. I must have made its allusions too subtle: only one or two students recognized it as based on the previously read Romeo and Juliet.

Verona October,
and evenings are cooler at last.
No one remembers a hotter summer
than the one just past.

Business was off,
Gregory tells me.  During that spell
of drought in August they closed the east wing
of the Grand Hotel.

Still, things were as usual
for the people who come every year—
the masked ball at Signore Martino's,
the cruise to Algiers.

There were rumors, of course,
of a notable increase in crime.
But, as Gregory says, "Blood on the piazza?
It's not the first time."

Verona October,
and nobody stays for the fall.
The birds and the tourists have scattered—
lark, nightingale, all.

What's left for November?
Dead leaves, two statues of gold.
Gregory tells me December
will surely be cold.

A riff on Hamlet

I've just stumbled across an untitled poem I once wrote for a class I was teaching. In the class, I asked students to create similar poems that had intertextual (although I didn't use that word) relationships with works we had read.

The king is dead,
No ifs or buts.
Don't tell the kid—
It'll drive him nuts.

He may not notice
If we just keep calm.
After all, a boy's
Best friend is his mom.

Send for his pals.
Find him a lover.
Let him eat cake.
(There's some left over.)

Put on a play.
Hold a dance.
Will he sulk for long?
Not a ghost of a chance.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

During lunch with Scott Weeden today, I was reminded of another illustration of the point made in my preceding post. In The Wizard of Oz (the movie at least; I haven't read the novel), the Wizard is first seen by Dorothy and her three friends as the wise sage, the magus who can solve all their problems. But in fact, their expectations are met only when the Wizard abdicates his magus role and plays the trickster role, setting tasks or obstacles for the four. By overcoming these obstacles, Dorothy and her friends find within themselves what they desire: a brain, a heart, courage, and the means of going home.

The danger of an archetype

I'm having lunch today with my friend and colleague Scott Weeden, with whom I did a workshop several years ago called "The Teacher as Trickster." Our thesis, which we hope to develop into an article, is that the trickster role is an especially useful one for teachers to play. The teacher as trickster, we claim, accompanies learners on their journey, acting as both guide and obstacle.

I've recently discovered another argument for the teacher as trickster, in a paragraph from Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster, by Allan Combs and Mark Holland (New York: Marlowe, 1996):

Another archetype is that of the Wise Old Man, the embodiment of deep and ancient wisdom personified in literary and film characters such as Merlin the magician, Gandalf the Gray, and Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars. Each wields magic powers that derive from his mastery of ancient, all-but-lost knowledge. Other examples of less mysterious and more beneficent wise old men, such as the wise men from the East, touch upon another archetype, that of the God-Man, or manna man to use Jung's term. This is the ideal of a human embodiment of the essence of the divine. Projecting this image onto someone else is to give that person great emotional power over yourself. Needless to say, this can be very dangerous unless that person is a remarkably worthy individual. To identify personally with this archetype is a major obstacle to inner growth, for it virtually guarantees an absence of humility. It is fine for others to refer to Mohandas Gandhi as Mahatma, "the great soul," but beware of those who confer such titles upon themselves (70).

This observation is almost too close to home for me. As a teacher who takes pride in his age (after all, I list "sexagenarian" as one of my self-definitions in the left column of this blog), I have to constantly work at identifying myself only as a student rummaging through Prospero's library, not as Prospero himself.

The medieval 21st century

From Richard Smoley's Forbidden Faith (see What I've Been Reading):

The early twenty-first century, for all its grandiose talk of globalization and technological wonders, is not so different from the late Middle Ages. Materialism in all its forms—scientism, commercialism, the "reign of quantity"—has become vacuous and petrified. Mere technological progress no longer seems to provide meaning for our civilization, and more and more people are coming to doubt the value of progress in its own right. Moreover, if the Middle Ages showed how vicious religion could become when corrupted by almost absolute power, our own time shows how vicious it can be when it is cast out like an abused stepchild (123).

Happy birthday, Hubble

To celebrate the sixteenth birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA and the ESA have released this stunning composite photo of the galaxy M82, about twelve million light-years away.

Be sure to go to Hubble's European Web site for higher-resolution photos and especially video clips, which start with the Big Dipper and zoom in on M82.

(Thanks to EurekAlert for this referral.)