Architecture is Sexy

Seoul is bustling with creative opportunities for architecture firms all over the world. In the up-and-coming Yongsan International Business District (area north of Han River across from Gangnam-gu, currently a US Military base, but the base is planned to be moved down to Pyeongtaek in 2013), several amazing structures have been conceived, pitched, and are in the process of becoming reality.

Click the links to learn more about each of the buildings you see. My favorite is the Landmark Tower, proposed to be 620 meters tall! It reminds me of the Ivory Tower from Neverending Story!  You can read my thoughts on architecture at the end after scrolling through the pictures.



http://www.ecofriend.com/design-strategies-landmark-tower-yongsan-international-business-district.html



 

 

http://www.ecofriend.com/project-r6-sustainable-space-saver-seouls-yongsang-international-business-district.html  



http://www.ecofriend.com/sustainable-high-rise-yongsan-international-business-district.html

http://www.ecofriend.com/designers-conceive-pentominium-seouls-business-district.html

http://www.ecofriend.com/dancing-dragons-merges-modern-technology-traditional-architectural-elements.html

http://www.ecofriend.com/solar-oriented-cross-towers-design-makes-commercial-centre-seoul.html

Architecture is sexy.

Admittedly, one of my favorite magazines is AD and like a teenager with Playboy, I mostly just look at the pictures. Design is a field full of ingenuity and aesthetics. The history of Architecture has a dynamic tapestry. 

Like I said, "architecture is sexy."

ACT I: The Nomads

Architecture formed from our primal drives toward survival. Maslow would include it on the foundation of our heirarchy of needs among our most basic of needs: food, water, and shelter. From the dawn of man, we've sought shelter. As our brains grew, so grew our desire and ability to manipulate and create better shelters. Eventually, man crawled out of the caves like Nietzsche's Zarathustra ready to cross the evolutionary bridge towards übermenschlich man. As nomads, humanity constructed portable shelters like the Mongolian Ger in central Asia and the Tee Pees of the Plains Indians of North America (pictured below).

      



ACT II: The Settlers

Rousseau desribed the transition of nascent man to civilized man as the act of one coming out of the woods, leaving behind the role of noble savage, putting up a fence and declaring "this is mine." Thus civilization was born. People began farming and staying in the same place. Human nature turned from being in accord with the earth and the changing of seasons to taming nature itself. Nomadism was still in our veins and so many built summer settlements and winter settlements and traveled back and forth according to the season and wild game. Some people groups, like vikings, spent time raiding others and yet still they built more permanent homes than what were previously used. Vikings build long houses across northern Europe to help sustain them as they explored the waterways. Native American of the northeastern woodlands also did this. As time passed, these settlements became more and more permanent across the land. People groups in temperate climates build grand cities and dealt with problems like population control. We see this in archeological evidence of the great ancient civilizations of Egypt and Anatolia. They learned that they must be careful not to over produce, lest the environment become unable to sustain them. This is probably what happened to the Inca before they returned to the jungles from whence they came. Also, the influx of disease comes with great populations centers. we learned this in medieval europe as plagues ravished the populations there. However, architecture withstood every epidemic and pestilence. In the end, stone remains.

Duomo in Milan, Italy
(construction began 1386, finished in early 1800s)

ACT III: Arch, Dome, and Vault

Before leaping into the age of Germanic Castles and Gothic Cathedrals, we must pay homage to the stone masons who figured out how to reinforce and stack stone so that it would reach the sky. if you have time, watch the miniseries "Pillars of the Earth." It tells the story of a medieval stone mason working on a cathedral over his lifetime. We don't realize it when we see these marvels of ingenuity, but many of the great buildings we see in famous cities in Europe took many generations of lives to build. The Duomo in Milan  took nearly 500 years to complete. Many of the workers passed the skills and knowledge on from father to son as master and apprentice. There are whole families who worked on the project continuously throughout their lives from one generation to the next!

If we think simply, the arch, dome, and vault are merely variants of the same design. An arch is first. If you make a row of arches close together, you get a vaulted ceiling. If you take an arch and spin it around on a single point, you get a dome. Each design distributes the weight from above to the blocks below to make it self supporting. However, you have have a raised arch, you must butress the sides because the weight would push the sides out when it is raised on a single wall. In the example above of the Duomo in Milan, you can see grande examples of multiple layers of flying butresses built into the design. This is how they built it so tall.

The design for the gothic cathedrals are terrificly advanced. Truly a remarkable work of genius for the medieval architects. It's no wonder the place is beheld in awe as a mark of holy and divine grace shared with man. Imagine being a poor farmer from the country-side coming into town for the first time for market and seeing this magestic site. Truly awe inspiring!

ACT IV: Castles and Palaces 

Look at these other wonders of architecture! 



Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul





Peterhof - Summer Palace of Peter the Great

   

Germanic Castles





I sometimes dream of having a family estate with servants quarters, stables, and vast grounds for gardens, woodlands, an ancient gated entrance with long carriageway leading to the grand house. And even an old stone wall surrounding the land with old gatehouses leading to old roads to nearby towns in surrounding directions. I've actually drawn plans and blueprints for this; complete with ruins, labrynth, and hidden passages.


I loved the new remake of The Wolfman because I love Talbot manor. The old estate is exactly the type of thing I envisage in my daydreams of a heritage home in the old world. This is worth a separate blog post if there is interest.



Pinnacle@Duxton
public housing in Singapore



ACT V: Enter Modernity



Back to the present. Now, as cities become metropoli and even megametropoli, we continue to shape and mold our surroundings to fit our growing needs. Cities like Tokyo and Seoul are small and so are ever crawling upward into the skies to fulfill the need for space for their copious populations. Watch this video http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20526219 to see how architects are making use of the skies in Singapore.

Are we are on our way to the fantastic future of ecumenopolis like Coruscant?

Here are the tallest buildings in the world so far..... Click here for a site with a great chart of the best as of 2013! Be sure to click next page on the right to see others. I missed this the first time I looked!

I plan to see several of these while traveling around the Eastern world this year!

Humanity's potential for creativity is truly incredible!

 ★ Architecture is sexy and so can you! ★

 





Readers are Leaders



Photo: Me with a handwritten manuscript
transcribed by clergymen in the Middle Ages

 "What are you reading?"  The brilliant Berlin philologist Wilamowitz-Moellendorff would ask this of his students upon first introductions and other visits. According to Gilbert Highet, the lesson to be learned from the question is that “a scholar’s duty is to keep reading, reading, reading.”

Literate populations didn’t reach the majority until the 1870s. This was very surprising to me. I expected it to be much sooner than that. I would have thought literacy began to reach the majority of populations shortly after the invention of paper was brought to and reproduced in Europe after the 15^th century. Second, I would have expected it to be during the Renaissance when literature and the arts were rising from potent seeds in Italy and being sown across Europe. Lastly, I would expect literacy and education to be common by the time of the Enlightenment of the 18^th century.

Having given it more thought, let us look at what we already know. During the Imperial Age of Rome (27BC-476AD), only elite nobles were educated. After Rome fell and we entered the Dark Ages, saeculum obscurum, (5^th century to 15^th century) education became a privilege of the clergy. The Church essentially held a monopoly on education throughout the Middle Ages until the Renaissance of the late 15^th – 17^th centuries and was finally overcome by the Enlightenment in the 18^th century.

During the Age of Enlightenment, there was a public shift from religion to reason. Religion was considered to be merely superstition a way for the church to manipulate and abuse both people and government. The atrocities carried out in the name of God and the church would no longer be tolerated by the people. During this time, the western world was blessed with individual thinkers such as philosophers JJ Rousseau and John Locke, physicist Isaac Newton, statesmen Benjamin Franklin and Montesquieu, and other great minds of the time. This grudge against religion also led to the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.



Photo: Me with a handwritten letter
from the Pope in 1250s AD

 
Did the Enlightenment break the Church as water splits the rock in winter? The church had already fallen far from its peak of power during the Middle Ages. Long before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church, the Great Schism had struck a mighty blow splitting the papacy between East and West. As time progressed, cracks in both doctrine and parishioners grew like fissures rent open from the colossal pressure of tectonic plates. Furthermore, the clergy was crippled by the Black Death. The Plague killed 1 out of 2 people in most major European cities. However, it killed 4 out of 5 people in the clergy. How is it the plague seemed to seek out to devastate the church? Some people thought it was God’s vengeance seeking those responsible for the Holy Wars. In fact, it was probably because priests were present for last rites to the dying and ill. They also were in close proximity to perform funeral ceremonies for the recently deceased. These activities most likely increased their chance of catching the Plague. It took the church and the rest of Europe around 150 years to regain healthy populations. During this time, the church had ongoing quarrels with several medieval kings of the European provinces.

The church, weakened by various means, finally lost its position of nearly unlimited power over the people. In the Age of Enlightenment, the people fought back hard. They took back education from the church and put it in the hands of the State. Within one hundred years, it became a right to the layman and his progeny. It has remained as such in all developed civilizations since. Blessed are the ones who lay no restriction on education. Blessed are those who share from their hearts with no requirement of class, creed, or race, and seek students everywhere their feet fall. Blessed at the teachers.

Remember, the world was not always this way.

Please be thankful that you can read this.

Now go share a book with someone.

Readers are Leaders!

On the Nature of Rebellion

As most know, I’ve been teaching abroad in different countries this year and last. Every once in awhile, I have a student that shows outright rebellion towards the teacher as an authority figure. I teach middle school age students, so hormones and identity crises are normal. However, I keep thinking about the nature of rebellion. My mind won’t just write it off to the simple explanation of puberty.

So what is this natural desire towards rebellion? Is it a nascent potential to corrupt/destroy in order to make room for other forms of creation? Is it merely to instigate change in the world around you or a superficial affect to make you feel that you are making a difference? Is it a form of Durkheim’s concept of anomie, or maybe Marx’s Entfremdung (alienation)? Would the papacy chalk it up as just another result of original sin or a chthonic voice on your shoulder whispering dark messages in your ear?

I feel my own bouts of rebellion when people become unnecessarily bossy or use demanding imperatives too often. The feeling sparks a heat of rebellion in chest. It makes me want to do the opposite action. Where does this come from, I imagine. Have I been trained to rebel against authority? As an American mind, I believe this desire was molded by a society that values and encourages rebellion. When we see authority stacked too high, we must knock it down for fear of our own liberties. This is, in most daily cases, quite ridiculous and grows from a seed of distrust. But we are a nation of rebels, united under the rebellion from Great Britain, monarchy, tyranny, and the church. We say eff your tea as we dress as Indians to avoid the blame and consequences of our party actions when we toss it into the harbor.

But this is not to be another rant on our American past. It is a question of our ever-present. Why do we rebel? Alone, the question is perhaps too broad. It would not do the question justice to answer it simply as a child answers when asked why…. “Because.”

Let us study it as Plato did in the Republic when considering what is justice and how do we create the just city-state. Rather than examine the city in the larger macro-scale, he looked instead to the man as micro-scale. He reasoned that what leads to the development of the just man, must surely also lead to the just society. So let us look not at rebellion on a global or national scale, let’s see it from the perspective of a man or family. One classic case of rebellion which we witness generation after generation is child-contra-parent. Throughout history, sons have rebelled against their fathers (and daughters against mothers). Not just on ideologies after spending time in the world outside the parent’s home as in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but as simple as taking out the trash, cleaning your room, et al. Take Henry IV of England as portrayed by Shakespeare. His son, Prince Hal (Henry V) was a dreaded little brat during his youth and well into young-adulthood. Although many times he recants his behavior in a Zack Morris-esque aside to the audience saying that he knows he is hanging with a disreputable crowd, but he plans to redeem himself publicly at a later time. However, his actions prove otherwise as he continues to share company among Falstaff and his dregs of the alleys and taverns. Prince Hal repeatedly rebels against his father’s royal court by refusing to attend public functions. His untoward reputation grows to the disdain of his father. His private asides to the audience remind me of St. Augustine’s famed prayer in his Confessions (Book VIII, chapter vii), “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (Latin Trans: make me chaste and celibate, but not yet). Augustine too wanted to be good, he wanted to respect his father (God) and follow his rules, but not just yet.

I suppose that teachers have a similar relationship with students who become true pupils or apprentices rather than just a seat-filler for the scholastic year. I’ve had a couple great teachers turned mentors who were like a father to me. In days of yore, you studied with your tutor each day and they often lived within the same estate. Let us take a side note from the rebellion of parent and child to that between teacher and student. There are several more good case studies I could mention on good teachers and bad students. I suppose that is what brought my mind to the question to begin with.

Take the case of Seneca and Nero for example. Seneca was a brilliant philosopher of the stoic school of thought during the twilight of Rome’s Imperial Age. He was a tutor to Nero as a young man, and later became an advisor to him during his reign as emperor. Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudian line of emperors. We learn from both Seneca’s own writings and the historian Tacitus that Nero was a bright student and well adjusted at a young age. However once he gained power, he began to push away those people who influenced him towards virtue. He grew in vice as his positive influences disappeared. Plutarch describes him as a tyrant during his rule. Nero later ordered the death of his dear teacher and advisor Seneca. Seneca took it like a champion stoic. If you haven’t seen it, swing by the Musée du Petit-Palais in Paris to see Jacques-Louis David’s oil painting The Death of Seneca. It is strong evidence for the rebellion of a student against his former teacher.

Antiquity likewise provides the case of Socrates and Alcibiades. We discover in the readings of Plutarch’s Lives and Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War that Alcibiades loved his teacher and yet grew up to become the ruin of Athens. Plato similarly wrote Alcibiades into many of his Socratic dialogues. Alcibiades is shown as a loyal follower of Socrates and his philosophic teachings; yet as an adult, he changes allegiances from Athens to its rival Sparta during the Peloponnesian Wars. Furthermore, he leads a conspiracy to impede peace talks between the two cities and helps to instigate the Athenian Coup of 411 BC which led to the rule of the Four Hundred Oligarchy and later to the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.  Here, a student who shows devotion for his teacher nevertheless tears down all that the teacher holds dear by dismantling both Athenian city government and the virtuous democracy it harbored. Why does this student destroy that which is so valued by his teacher? If this is the result of Socrates’ teaching, it’s no wonder the ruling class ordered his execution by charge of corrupting the youth. Given that the youth he taught grew up to sew tyranny into the Athenian city-state, I’d say warm hemlock tea was getting off light. But alas, this case does not show fault for the teacher. It is the student that chose to rebel. There seems to be no justification in it.

Sure, sometimes rebellion is justified. We Americans certainly don’t feel bad about gaining our independence through rebellion. Looking again at the familial cases, in the Royal house of Thebes, Oedipus Rex’s famous rebellion via patricide was truly accidental. In the house of Atreus, Elektra’s matricide was planned, but justified according to familial loyalties and her pious duty. These names lead us to the field of psychology. Freud, the renowned psychoanalyst, uses the historical name of Oedipus and his contemporary Carl Jung uses Elektra in their psychological writings. Each theory talks of rebellion against the parent to fulfill a natural desire of psychosexual development.

During college, one of my aforementioned teachers turned mentors recommended a writer to me by the name of Gilbert Highet. I found him to be one of the most brilliant classicists of the 20^th century. I happily devoured his book Man’s Unconquerable Mind and recently read his book The Art of Teaching. In the latter, Highet makes an exceptional argument which hints at a solution of our problem. In his book, he discusses our case studies and makes the observation that rebellion may spring from the desire for self-creation. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Prince Hal does not rebel for rebellion’s sake, he rebels because he wants to be his own man. He fears that if he does what is expected of him, he will become merely a copy of his father. He desires to be himself, so he rebels against all those who would seek to make him a cookie-cutter replica of his father. He avoids royal court functions in order to seek his own authenticity. Perhaps that’s just it, a desire to be authentic. We destroy the foundation of others so that we may create our own and feel unique and responsible for our efforts. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote extensively on the matter of authenticity. In his magnanimous tome Sein und Zeit, he describes his concept of dasein. At this point in my life, this seems to be the greatest explanation of our desire toward rebellion. Rebellion seems to be a natural effect of dasein’s endeavor toward authenticity during our developmental years when we are building our individual public and private identities.

There comes a time when we must push away from our supports.

We must set out to create ourselves.

This my friends, is why we rebel.

Inspired lately?

We learn from everything around us. Observation is an innate skill of the conscious mind. We observe, we analyze, we mimic, and we predict consequences based on past observations.

I’m a fan of the Venture Brothers cartoon. It is somewhat based on the adventures of Johnny Quest, so it draws on my yearning for adventure and super science. In the cartoon, a scientist clones his two sons and educates them using subliminal messages in an electronic sleeping capsule (bed chamber) while they sleep each night.

The image makes me think of children vegging-out in front of the television for hours from childhood to adulthood. I think the things we see on TV hold a greater influence than we realize.

***Caveat: Of course, Im not saying that if you watch it, then you’ll do it. Bad TV programming isn’t the primary cause for the atrocious dregs of society that we see in breaking news bulletins of homicidal maniacs and domestic terrorists (I blame that on parents and lack of a value driven social atmosphere during the developmental years). I’m just saying TV helps shape our personalities by the role models we observe. We pick up little things here and there. We don’t see one thing and become it entirely.

Before the digital age of reality television, a greater number of television programs contained a higher quality of positive characteristics to be observed and learned from. More shows dealt with common problems and anxieties of life. Programs gave us characters with both virtues and vices. They showed people we could relate to (positively) and aspire to be. We observed their struggles and triumphs. We learned positive solutions to common struggles in our own lives. I didn’t have the advantage of growing up in the all-American nuclear family, but neither did most of my peers. However, I found a father figure in Dan Connor and Sheriff Andy Taylor. I learned charisma from watching Zack Morris. I learned team leadership from a turtle in blue. I learned about nurturing relationships from watching Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter make their way through the transition from childhood to adulthood amidst common stress at home and at school. Even the Midnight Society taught me lessons as I observed unlikely heroes find courage to defeat supernatural terrors from week to week and Snick to Snick. The Waltons showed me life in simpler times, yet taught me lessons that hold value even today. Yeah I connected with John-boy, who else would it be?

Once upon a time, young scholars read the tomes of Plutarch to learn of the virtues and vices of those who came before them. They had to read for days to get to the heart of a lesson. We can absorb it in a half-hour afterschool special. That’s SCIENCE!!! Thank you science. Your tech boons are glorious!

Now go write your reps in Congress to urge them to support funding NASA and NOAA.

(Didn’t see that one coming did you?)

Seriously. Go do it… I’ll wait.

btw, if you see Doktor Sleepless around, ask him "where's my jetpack?"

13 months ago...

Once upon a specific time... May 30, 2011 to be exact. at 6:55am CST. I flew away from Springfield... Once again.

This time, I was going to London via connecting flight in Dallas, TX. In Dallas, I remember slipping in and out of consciousness because I only slept for an hour the night before my flight. The sandman was finally catching up to me.

I set an alarm to continue waking myself to prevent me missing the connecting flight. Once awake, I watched the Smallville finale (even though I gave up on the series after season 6, the finale was worth it though). After my super-cape fix, I watched lecture 1 on the Visual Exploration of Rome from The Teaching Company (TTC: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/ ) and a documentary on Friedrich Nietzsche. Yeah, I know. My entertainment doesn't usually follow the norm of common prime time network TV like the masses. Regardless, that's how I keep my brain awake when I need to be willfully conscious.


I made my connecting flight and was asleep as soon as my seat belt was on. I slept through take-off and woke up to the in-flight film. The flight over was pretty standard. I arrived in London around 8am. I planned to visit my good friend John H. while I was passing through. I took the tube from Heathrow into London on the Pickadilly line and transferred onto the Jubilee line to reach John's flat. I got there around 10am. He buzzed me up and we caught up for awhile and then went to lunch at a nearby pub. We both had delicious shepherd's pie with green beans and sweet mashers. After lunch I was still nappy, so we went back to the flat and I layed down to rest my eyes. I woke up at 8pm! Two days of jet lag apparently took it's toll. When I woke up, John and one of his flatmates Johnny were making 'bangers and mash' (sausage and mashed potatoes) See Aldous Snow for reference here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88bb2FQWfeM

We all sat down for the British snack. Soon thereafter, Todd (from Australia) came home and we all spent time looking at pictures from the 2008 Egypt-Jordan trip that John and I took together. Oliver, another of John's flatmates, came home around 11 and joined in when Todd and Johnny were going off to bed. We stayed up and talked about living in the UK. There is a growing population of Muslims in the UK, similar to France. There appears to be public sentiment that the British gov't has become so worried about offending Muslims that they fear violent repercussions as if they were all radicals. I heard stories about people being fired from gov't jobs because of this. There was recent news about a newly built community center that took advantage of natural light with many large windows in the architecture to cut energy expenses, and the windows were painted over because Muslim women complained about being seen publicly when using the facilities. So now, the building has been "burka'ed" which defeats any aesthetics that it had going for it. I was taken back by a story of a nurse who was fired for wearing the symbol of the cross on her necklace at the hospital when a patient said it was offensive. Her boss said she couldn't wear it at work anymore. She refused to not wear it as it was a symbol of her religious belief and she had worn it since she was a child. She was terminated from her job for this. Another news story told about a teacher that had been beaten near death because of a disagreement in class with some of her students.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My friends sounded surprised themselves in the telling of it.I couldn't believe the tension that was being described between religious people groups in London. I thought aggression on behalf of religious belief was understood as archaic and barbarous by the modern mind. All the Muslims I've known personally have been nothing but nice and considerate of others. They'd not be willing to stand against another's liberties in order to force their own beliefs.  Strange how different people can act in a varied environment. I was also surprised to find that the general concensus on the killing of Osama bin Laden was that the Americans should have brought him in for trial. That the U.S. acted too brashly, as 'cowboys' by killing him. Most headlines in the UK focused on the fear of coming repercussions rather than merit of justice served. 

In retrospect, this was at a time in London right before the Riots in the summer of 2011. A memory that still frustrates me and makes me wrench my hands into fists because of the ugly demonstration of uneducated thugs acting like animals rather than men. There were viral videos each day of the riots. While London was burning we watched online. It made me sick. Images of Rorschach's vision of the world. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? 


AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The dregs of society don't deserve this paradise that our mothers and fathers of history have labored to provide for us!


What happened to Britain? It used to be Great! Now it's a country led by a parliament plagued with worry and fear. I once spoke to retired foreign legionaires and soldiers of the United Nations. They told me British military policy used to dictate that you take out the leading aggressor of a threat first and then watch as the situation dissolves quickly and everyone else falls back in line. That was what they did on foreign soil. Now that the problem is on their front lawns, the Prime Minister wouldn't even declare martial law and bring out military to restore order. I watched a video of a student getting beaten and robbed by two thugs in broad daylight on a busy street. No one did anything about it! The person taking the video was on a residential 2nd floor balcony recording the chaos street side. Where is the justice that should be in the hearts of all good men? Where was the desire to prevent the wicked from harming your fellow man? Tyranny is a cancer to person and society. Pisses me off just thinking about it. I'll finish writing another time...

The Dithyramb

It seems I live each day swimming in many torrents of dualism. I’m not talking about the traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism. There is also the constant struggle of the Steppenwolf, man contra animal in our heart. Some envision a little angel and devil sitting on each shoulder guiding us in different directions. My troubles however are not of angels and devils. That is too simple. I can tell good from bad easily enough at most times. Nor is my problem of the animal spirit which drives me in other desiderata. My trouble lies in how I feel about things. Lately, I lend myself to the classicist struggle between Dionysian and Apollonian mindsets.

Dionysus, sometimes spelled Dionysos (known as Bacchus to the Romans), was the god of wine and agriculture. Every harvest, or festival where wine is offered, he is honored. He is often both praised and reviled for his association to intoxication and licentious behavior. The Dionysian mindset is that which is focused on emotion, whim, fancy, and is essentially epicurean. The danger here lies in the capricious nature of emotion.

Apollo, on the other hand, is the god of the sun, truth, prophecy, music, archery, et al. He is the patron god of the oracle of Delphi. He is honored in every hunt in which an arrow flies true to its mark and by every musician playing the lyre. The Apollonian mindset is founded on logic and reason. It stands in direct opposition to the emotional whim of Dionysian thinking.

While both are sons of Zeus, Apollo is held as the most honored son. Dionysus is more like the black sheep; second, only perhaps, to Hermes. Apollo is the archetypical flawless hero standing in the light of truth, justice, and reason backed by tradition and the common hegemony of patriarchal society. Dionysus is the anti-hero. He mocks Apollo from the shadows and stands by his own right. Valuing intuition and insight, he gives himself freely over to emotion. He plays when he wants to play. He loves when he wants to love. He is the flawed hero whom we can’t help but admire regardless of his faults.
(He is perhaps the reason women love jerks… I've many thougths on this subject as well, but that is another rant entirely.)

These days I find myself struggling more than usual between my own Apollonian and Dionysian mindsets. Emotions are pulling hard at me and I’m trying to battle them with reason. There has been only one girl whom I’ve loved with the entirety of my heart. I just learned that she got married last week. My heart sunk at the thought of her in the arms of another; as it always has. I find myself drowning in a thousand thoughts of “What If…” Thankfully, my mind sets in to help me to reason through the fury of emotions. I know the reasons we are not together. I know that I became broken while I was with her trying to do more than I was able. I am at peace with the fact that beyond everything I did (some of which I resent and feel the prize fool for my daily efforts), I could not make her happy. My belief that she is better off without me is dependent upon the antecedent that there exists another who can make her happy. My greatest hope remains that she find that person and become able to achieve the fairy tale ending of happily ever after. I want this for her. I love her still and will always in a way, although I concede that she is mine no longer.

All this and still my heart violently sings the dithyramb of Dionysus with a tyrants rhythm and my mind is yearning for the light of Apollo. I grow tired of the struggle. I want to become numb and fall into an exhausted sleep...

waiting for the sun

After graduating I moved back to Springfield and committed myself to my family. I chose to stay with my grandmother in the last years of her life. This was my contemporary familial responsibility and my great pleasure out of love for my grandmother. In the past, a poor farmer boy living near a coast would often join a ship screw as a cabin boy or sailor to earn enough to take care of his family. Well, I joined a crew via the working world. I wanted to support myself and my family. Along the way I heard the siren’s call.

I became enamored with my siren, my beautiful, talented siren. An experience both amazing and incredible.

And then… I was shaken out of my stupor. The image broken, the mirage began to fade, my utopia came crashing down as a silent isolated Hiroshima in my head. Anger, sorrow, pain, frustration, betrayal, and other mixed feelings and combinations of feelings I didn’t even know existed or have a name for.

After it was over. I spent two months inside dwelling in darkness. nose to the grindstone, I buried myself in work and tried not to think about anything other. Nights laying in bed staring at the ceiling alone with my thoughts were dreaded. Time can be funny. Einstein agreed time is relative. I doubt heartache was considered in his equations. It is a scientific fact that time slows down the faster we move. Sounds silly, but it has been proven (check out physicist Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Illusion of Time). My mind was moving too fast lost in thought. Two years of hoping for numbness passed strangely in the span of those two months. Two years alone. Two years of longing to forget the bad while hoping to preserve a glimmer of the good. The difficulty in this is finding the good that is not intertwined with the bad. Many are merely a path to other related bad memories. Memories tend to fall that way. I believe that memory is associative by nature. The more associations and connections, the stronger the memory. She was everything, so her memories are very strong. Ah! There is the rub! Not quite Billy Shakespeare’s mortal coil, but perhaps a contemporary social coil instead. We pick-up and carry many social coils. They are jobs, responsibilities, the roles we accept.

I accepted the role of boyfriend, i.e. a sailor to my siren. Now I’ve spent time drowned at sea beneath the tempest waves waiting to crawl out on a new beach and take air into my seemingly long since dead longs. I’ve waited for the day that the sun would once again warm my body and relieve me of the corpse-like cold.

From time to time I still dream of her, that past life, waking entangled together in our bed, in our townhome… Then I realize the dream is but a shadow cast upon the wall of Plato’s cave. Perhaps it’s just another allegory to confuse me of what is real. It is painful to wake from a warm dream of coupling to realize you lay now in a cold bed alone. It’s as if the sun never rises. Never shares its warmth. I keep waiting for the sun…