School life
Mar. 20th, 2005 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Feast of St. Wulfran
Dearest friends, I am currently in the throes of library research, and to be more specific, it is in what one might call the "honeymoon" stage. In other words, I am thrilled by my topic, by my sources, and most of all, by the dusty odor and the frail crumbling pages of the oh-so-ancient books I've just borrowed from the bowels of Widener and Lamont. And I mean bowels: I walked all the way to Pusey stacks to get Lambot's compilation of Œuvres théologiques et grammaticales de Godescalc d'Orbais.
The story of this unborn paper has already been something of a minor saga. I was looking through the course's primary source anthology, the Carolingian Civilization reader, and desperately trying to avoid any source that would require in-depth exploration of a religious topic because I consider history to be an empirical discipline (regardless of the uniqueness of events that one presupposes even if one does not subscribe to a linear model of human history). I would like to pretend, despite the inevitability of a historian's bias, that historical judgments/analyses/conclusions/what-have-you are still as much a posteriori as possible, which clearly cannot be the case if I research Western medieval religion, since I am Catholic. But despite this firm resolution, this one particular poem, written by Gottschalk of Orbais (also spelled Godescalc) haunted me and refused to let me go.
Trans. by P.E. Dutton
O my little friend, why would you ask me,
Why would you demand, my tiny son,
That I sing a sweet song,
When I am an exile, far from home
On this distant sea?
Oh why do you order me to sing?
My miserable boy, it would be better for me,
To cry, O my little friend,
Better to wail than sing
Such a song as you order me to sing,
My dear love.
O why do you order me to sing?
You had better know, tiny one,
That you should, little borther,
With your kind heart pity me
And, with your humble mind,
Lament along with me.
O why do you order me to sing?
You realize, my little student,
You realize my little companion,
Just how long I have been here in exile
Just how long I have suffered here,
Just how many days and how many nights.
O why do you order me to sing?
You realize that the little people
Known as Israel,
Were once commanded
To sing in Babylon
Far away from the borders of Judea.
O why do you order me to sing?
Not even they could sing,
Nor should they, therefore, have to sing
A sweet song
Before the people
Of a strange land.
O why do you order me to sing?
But because, my distinguished friend,
You continue to demand it,
I shall sing to the Father and to the Son
And to the Holy Spirit,
That proceeds from both.
Of my own accord I now sing.
You are blessed, O Lord,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Triune God, One God,
Highest God, kind God,
Fair God.
Of my own will I now sing.
For a little while [longer] I, an exile,
Am set on this [distant] sea, my Lord.
It has been almost two years already,
But it is time now
To take pity on me.
Most humbly I ask for your mercy.
In the meantime, with my little boy and I
Set down in this place,
I shall sing to you, kindest King,
A sweet song,
With my lips, with my heart,
Every day and every night.
Some background: Gottschalk had been given to the monastery of Fulda as a child, and once he reached adulthood, he petitioned to be set free from the monastery. His petition was refused. Later, he became notorious for espousing the doctrine of double predestination, which was denounced as heresy by major bishops such as Hincmar and Hrabanus Maurus. Double predestination, stated simply, means that people have been predestined from birth for salvation or condemnation, and although I don't know all the theological details, I can see why the Catholic church leaders disliked it so much: it essentially negates the concept of free will. There is apparently some debate over how much Gottschalk's concept of predestination is similar to the Calvinist definition, but in any case, he apparently got it from a close study of Augustine. There was a huge controversy that resulted, and Gottschalk even ended up flogged for his heresy by his ecclesiastical superiors. O_O Although apparently he had submitted willingly to the flogging...what can I say? I think the poem is heartwrenchingly sad, and he must have been a melancholy man.
In any case, the poem refused to leave me alone, and so, I decided to do my paper on the predestination controversy. Of all things. (Please note that I really dislike the concept of predestination on many levels.) At the time, I was not aware that most of Gottschalk's writings have not been translated into English. I was also not aware that most of the famous rebuttals, written by Hincmar and Hrabanus Maurus, are also not available in English. >_< I did find a translation of Eriugena's De divina praedestinatione...in Italian. The only English translation was checked out. -_- Anyway, thus commenced the grand saga of searching for sources. I had a blast though. I love walking through libraries in any situation, but there's something special about looking up books for research. It is indeed a hunt, and Widener, with its floors and floors of stacks, is the equivalent of the Serengeti.
Anyway, I now have nearly all of Gottschalk's writings, both prose and poetry, but all in Latin. >_> I also have the translated correspondence of Lupus de Ferrières, the translated Annals of St-Bertin, a book on medieval theology, a book on medieval Latin poetry (which unfortunately quotes Gottschalk without translation--why, oh, why is Latin no longer taught by default in secondary schools anymore?), and a small sourcebook on Carolingian society that will probably prove utterly useless. On the other hand, I've just discovered that there's an online translated copy of the Annals of Fulda, which does mention Gottschalk four times (yes!), so that plus the material in Dutton should be enough. I figure the Latin sources will serve as my backup--I can at least look at the original poems that any secondary sources may reference--and as soon as I get my hands on that one sourcebook of Carolingian renaissance poetry that someone took out before me, I'll probably have all the English translations of Gottschalk's poetry available in the published world. Hah! Triumph in spite of linguistic obstacles! I love research papers. (No, I did not write that sarcastically. They're fun when you only have to write one a semester. ^_^)
I haven't finished up Belated Fanfic Author Appreciation Week, and I don't think I'll have a chance to do it today because I still have to finish the pre-paper. The rest of the week, unfortunately, will be equally busy because I just realized that the Paschal Triduum is going to consume all my evening time. >_> I still have hopes of finishing it, although I fear that I'll probably end up putting in a massive update at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dragondormant instead. >_> But it's been fun trying to describe different writing styles; I think I've actually learned something in the process.
Speaking of learning, two pseudo-biological thoughts of the past week (warning: the following are the ramblings of a half-educated student):
1. One of the major "paradigms" in biology is specialization: from cellular differentiation to ecological niches. I was reminded of that the other day when I was thinking about Orson Scott Card's fuzzy literary interpretations of evolutionary biology as applied to human civilization. There is this passage in Speaker for the Dead when Jane makes snarky comments about celibate priests and their uselessness to the species, and Ender replies by citing Demosthenes (i.e. his sister, not the Athenian demagogue) and explains that priests, despite not contributing to the species reproductively, provide structure to a society (well, as long as it's a religious one, like Lusitania, a predominantly Catholic planet) by administration, authority, education, etc. And I realized that this explanation is in fact a projection of the selective drive for multicellularity, as explained by Prof. Lue in lecture. He presented a model where different cells in colonies became specialized for either motility or reproduction because one cell did not have sufficient resources, but an organism with both motile and germ cells would be capable of both functions simultaneously. In other words, multicellularity is not a matter of numbers, but of specialization. Social animals, like humans and bees, therefore underwent the same transition except at the populational level rather than organismal. Sociobiology states pretty much the same concept except they construct what I think are unnecesssarily complicated strings of genetic benefits and kinship theories for altruism. Those make sense in the context of genetically identical, sterile worker bees, but not in the context of human civilization. Human societies also selectively benefit from specialization, but at the species level. Thus, societies can afford to support nonreproducing members, and cultures that require celibacy for certain classes are still viable and in some cases even efficient. Not that I want to reinterpret all of human history in evolutionary terms. But metaphorically, it works, I think. I do wonder though if the degree of genetic variation in the human species is less than in others (I think I once read statistics on this, but don't quite remember what the conclusion was)...anyway, food for further thought.
2. My lab P.I. was interviewing candidates for summer undergraduate interns this week, and I was invited to sit in on the meetings and give my little pitch about how wonderful it was to work in the lab. (Well, it is wonderful, but I did feel a little awkward.) Still, listening to the interviews was very instructive because I got a refresher overview on the lab's research as a whole (we have so many projects going on all at once that it's easy to lose track of the ones that are not so related to your own). In particular, it was interesting to place certain pathways we'd been studying in a larger context. Hsp90 is a chaperone protein essential for adapting to environmental stress (namely heat) and can buffer the effects of genetic variation on phenotype. In other words, it is a stabilizing protein, maintaining balance, homeostasis, equilibrium, what-have-you. However, when Hsp90 is reduced, whether chemically or genetically (using RNAi techniques), other stress-response pathways seem to be upregulated. Two that the lab is exploring at the moment are cold tolerance and resistance to herbivores. Our P.I. explained that in a sense the phenomenon is not entirely unexpected because in plants, mutations in regulatory networks tend to result in constitutive activation of signaling pathways. However, that in itself is kind of bizarre. I was wondering how to explain it. On the one hand, it seems that plants would be less able to tolerate mutations because of the enormous waste of resources that occurs when stress response pathways are activated. However, would the opposite scenario be necessarily better? If mutations tended to inactivate pathways, plants would have reduced ability to withstand environmental changes, and that would be particularly dangerous for plants since they, well, can't move. Better to be overprepared than not prepared at all? Anyway, I would like to read more on the topic, if I ever get the chance this summer.
These days, I think I learn the most in tutorial, even though it only meets once a month. Why can't tutorial count for course credit and replace physics? Physics feels even more utterly useless these days. There was a time when I was actually interested in electromagnetism, but my perspective has sadly narrowed. I would like to know exactly the physics necessary to understand biological applications and no more. Anyway, my tutorial sessions are usually one-on-one and focus on discussing papers, which I feel is much more interesting than this mass absorption of background information that no one expects you to remember in any great detail after the course ends. Well, I mean, I don't mind so much when the details are interesting, but I feel as if all the really sophisticated concepts will be rehashed and retaught at higher resolution in upper -level courses, while the simpler concepts are not particularly new at all. ::sighs:: But I should really get back to the pre-paper. >_<
Yours &c.
Dearest friends, I am currently in the throes of library research, and to be more specific, it is in what one might call the "honeymoon" stage. In other words, I am thrilled by my topic, by my sources, and most of all, by the dusty odor and the frail crumbling pages of the oh-so-ancient books I've just borrowed from the bowels of Widener and Lamont. And I mean bowels: I walked all the way to Pusey stacks to get Lambot's compilation of Œuvres théologiques et grammaticales de Godescalc d'Orbais.
The story of this unborn paper has already been something of a minor saga. I was looking through the course's primary source anthology, the Carolingian Civilization reader, and desperately trying to avoid any source that would require in-depth exploration of a religious topic because I consider history to be an empirical discipline (regardless of the uniqueness of events that one presupposes even if one does not subscribe to a linear model of human history). I would like to pretend, despite the inevitability of a historian's bias, that historical judgments/analyses/conclusions/what-have-you are still as much a posteriori as possible, which clearly cannot be the case if I research Western medieval religion, since I am Catholic. But despite this firm resolution, this one particular poem, written by Gottschalk of Orbais (also spelled Godescalc) haunted me and refused to let me go.
Trans. by P.E. Dutton
O my little friend, why would you ask me,
Why would you demand, my tiny son,
That I sing a sweet song,
When I am an exile, far from home
On this distant sea?
Oh why do you order me to sing?
My miserable boy, it would be better for me,
To cry, O my little friend,
Better to wail than sing
Such a song as you order me to sing,
My dear love.
O why do you order me to sing?
You had better know, tiny one,
That you should, little borther,
With your kind heart pity me
And, with your humble mind,
Lament along with me.
O why do you order me to sing?
You realize, my little student,
You realize my little companion,
Just how long I have been here in exile
Just how long I have suffered here,
Just how many days and how many nights.
O why do you order me to sing?
You realize that the little people
Known as Israel,
Were once commanded
To sing in Babylon
Far away from the borders of Judea.
O why do you order me to sing?
Not even they could sing,
Nor should they, therefore, have to sing
A sweet song
Before the people
Of a strange land.
O why do you order me to sing?
But because, my distinguished friend,
You continue to demand it,
I shall sing to the Father and to the Son
And to the Holy Spirit,
That proceeds from both.
Of my own accord I now sing.
You are blessed, O Lord,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Triune God, One God,
Highest God, kind God,
Fair God.
Of my own will I now sing.
For a little while [longer] I, an exile,
Am set on this [distant] sea, my Lord.
It has been almost two years already,
But it is time now
To take pity on me.
Most humbly I ask for your mercy.
In the meantime, with my little boy and I
Set down in this place,
I shall sing to you, kindest King,
A sweet song,
With my lips, with my heart,
Every day and every night.
Some background: Gottschalk had been given to the monastery of Fulda as a child, and once he reached adulthood, he petitioned to be set free from the monastery. His petition was refused. Later, he became notorious for espousing the doctrine of double predestination, which was denounced as heresy by major bishops such as Hincmar and Hrabanus Maurus. Double predestination, stated simply, means that people have been predestined from birth for salvation or condemnation, and although I don't know all the theological details, I can see why the Catholic church leaders disliked it so much: it essentially negates the concept of free will. There is apparently some debate over how much Gottschalk's concept of predestination is similar to the Calvinist definition, but in any case, he apparently got it from a close study of Augustine. There was a huge controversy that resulted, and Gottschalk even ended up flogged for his heresy by his ecclesiastical superiors. O_O Although apparently he had submitted willingly to the flogging...what can I say? I think the poem is heartwrenchingly sad, and he must have been a melancholy man.
In any case, the poem refused to leave me alone, and so, I decided to do my paper on the predestination controversy. Of all things. (Please note that I really dislike the concept of predestination on many levels.) At the time, I was not aware that most of Gottschalk's writings have not been translated into English. I was also not aware that most of the famous rebuttals, written by Hincmar and Hrabanus Maurus, are also not available in English. >_< I did find a translation of Eriugena's De divina praedestinatione...in Italian. The only English translation was checked out. -_- Anyway, thus commenced the grand saga of searching for sources. I had a blast though. I love walking through libraries in any situation, but there's something special about looking up books for research. It is indeed a hunt, and Widener, with its floors and floors of stacks, is the equivalent of the Serengeti.
Anyway, I now have nearly all of Gottschalk's writings, both prose and poetry, but all in Latin. >_> I also have the translated correspondence of Lupus de Ferrières, the translated Annals of St-Bertin, a book on medieval theology, a book on medieval Latin poetry (which unfortunately quotes Gottschalk without translation--why, oh, why is Latin no longer taught by default in secondary schools anymore?), and a small sourcebook on Carolingian society that will probably prove utterly useless. On the other hand, I've just discovered that there's an online translated copy of the Annals of Fulda, which does mention Gottschalk four times (yes!), so that plus the material in Dutton should be enough. I figure the Latin sources will serve as my backup--I can at least look at the original poems that any secondary sources may reference--and as soon as I get my hands on that one sourcebook of Carolingian renaissance poetry that someone took out before me, I'll probably have all the English translations of Gottschalk's poetry available in the published world. Hah! Triumph in spite of linguistic obstacles! I love research papers. (No, I did not write that sarcastically. They're fun when you only have to write one a semester. ^_^)
I haven't finished up Belated Fanfic Author Appreciation Week, and I don't think I'll have a chance to do it today because I still have to finish the pre-paper. The rest of the week, unfortunately, will be equally busy because I just realized that the Paschal Triduum is going to consume all my evening time. >_> I still have hopes of finishing it, although I fear that I'll probably end up putting in a massive update at
dragondormant instead. >_> But it's been fun trying to describe different writing styles; I think I've actually learned something in the process.Speaking of learning, two pseudo-biological thoughts of the past week (warning: the following are the ramblings of a half-educated student):
1. One of the major "paradigms" in biology is specialization: from cellular differentiation to ecological niches. I was reminded of that the other day when I was thinking about Orson Scott Card's fuzzy literary interpretations of evolutionary biology as applied to human civilization. There is this passage in Speaker for the Dead when Jane makes snarky comments about celibate priests and their uselessness to the species, and Ender replies by citing Demosthenes (i.e. his sister, not the Athenian demagogue) and explains that priests, despite not contributing to the species reproductively, provide structure to a society (well, as long as it's a religious one, like Lusitania, a predominantly Catholic planet) by administration, authority, education, etc. And I realized that this explanation is in fact a projection of the selective drive for multicellularity, as explained by Prof. Lue in lecture. He presented a model where different cells in colonies became specialized for either motility or reproduction because one cell did not have sufficient resources, but an organism with both motile and germ cells would be capable of both functions simultaneously. In other words, multicellularity is not a matter of numbers, but of specialization. Social animals, like humans and bees, therefore underwent the same transition except at the populational level rather than organismal. Sociobiology states pretty much the same concept except they construct what I think are unnecesssarily complicated strings of genetic benefits and kinship theories for altruism. Those make sense in the context of genetically identical, sterile worker bees, but not in the context of human civilization. Human societies also selectively benefit from specialization, but at the species level. Thus, societies can afford to support nonreproducing members, and cultures that require celibacy for certain classes are still viable and in some cases even efficient. Not that I want to reinterpret all of human history in evolutionary terms. But metaphorically, it works, I think. I do wonder though if the degree of genetic variation in the human species is less than in others (I think I once read statistics on this, but don't quite remember what the conclusion was)...anyway, food for further thought.
2. My lab P.I. was interviewing candidates for summer undergraduate interns this week, and I was invited to sit in on the meetings and give my little pitch about how wonderful it was to work in the lab. (Well, it is wonderful, but I did feel a little awkward.) Still, listening to the interviews was very instructive because I got a refresher overview on the lab's research as a whole (we have so many projects going on all at once that it's easy to lose track of the ones that are not so related to your own). In particular, it was interesting to place certain pathways we'd been studying in a larger context. Hsp90 is a chaperone protein essential for adapting to environmental stress (namely heat) and can buffer the effects of genetic variation on phenotype. In other words, it is a stabilizing protein, maintaining balance, homeostasis, equilibrium, what-have-you. However, when Hsp90 is reduced, whether chemically or genetically (using RNAi techniques), other stress-response pathways seem to be upregulated. Two that the lab is exploring at the moment are cold tolerance and resistance to herbivores. Our P.I. explained that in a sense the phenomenon is not entirely unexpected because in plants, mutations in regulatory networks tend to result in constitutive activation of signaling pathways. However, that in itself is kind of bizarre. I was wondering how to explain it. On the one hand, it seems that plants would be less able to tolerate mutations because of the enormous waste of resources that occurs when stress response pathways are activated. However, would the opposite scenario be necessarily better? If mutations tended to inactivate pathways, plants would have reduced ability to withstand environmental changes, and that would be particularly dangerous for plants since they, well, can't move. Better to be overprepared than not prepared at all? Anyway, I would like to read more on the topic, if I ever get the chance this summer.
These days, I think I learn the most in tutorial, even though it only meets once a month. Why can't tutorial count for course credit and replace physics? Physics feels even more utterly useless these days. There was a time when I was actually interested in electromagnetism, but my perspective has sadly narrowed. I would like to know exactly the physics necessary to understand biological applications and no more. Anyway, my tutorial sessions are usually one-on-one and focus on discussing papers, which I feel is much more interesting than this mass absorption of background information that no one expects you to remember in any great detail after the course ends. Well, I mean, I don't mind so much when the details are interesting, but I feel as if all the really sophisticated concepts will be rehashed and retaught at higher resolution in upper -level courses, while the simpler concepts are not particularly new at all. ::sighs:: But I should really get back to the pre-paper. >_<
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 06:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 07:47 am (UTC)agh. it's too late for me to think rationally. *runs off*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 12:51 pm (UTC)Oh, I should lend you the volume of short stories that Card wrote recently about Ender's parents. It has this whole long pseudo-scientific discussion where they talk about human culture in terms of evolution. It is full of fallacies, but interesting nonetheless.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 11:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 10:19 am (UTC)I hated Latin with a passion. I had it for two years in school and hated every second of it but now, almost ten years later I have to admit that it has its uses ^^;; Did you, by chance, have French in school? Since in the 9th century there was a close connection between every part of the Catholic church and the empire of Charlemagne wasn't yet divided for such a long time in France and Germany, I think you might find more on this topic translated in French. I made a quick google-search for translations in German and sure, there are many but they are not online (after all, today Fulda is in Germany).
I think the early Middle Ages are a fascinating period and it's interesting what kind of theories people came up with.
Many societies supported nonreproductive members, even in times when they couldn't really have afforded it. Especially regarding Catholic priests I think that it was originally introduced so that they couldn't give all their wealth to their children and had to give it to the church instead but I know, this is just speculation (however since Bavaria is still very Catholic there have been many debates about this recently). They say priests have to live this way to be really 'free' so that they can concentrate on the community and don't get distracted or be unfair to certain people, just because their family doesn't like them or whatever. It was the same for other groups, forced to live like this, like the Vesta priestesses in ancient Rome (and basically it's not really different in Fushigi Yuugi either ^^;;).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-21 12:47 pm (UTC)It's of course an established fact that many societies support nonreproducing members, and the historical and social reasons for celibacy is pretty well-known. The question arises because from a biological point of view, this initially makes no sense. The force driving natural selection is amplification of characteristics for fitness by and for reproduction. Why would any culture that encouraged members of its population to not reproduce and not contribute any potential valuable genes to the next generation's gene pool be biologically viable? It's a bit of a trite question because natural selection can't really be applied to humans so simplistically, but it's still an interesting question. ^_^