John Matel's Memorial Blog
All the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.
We are in Cordoba today and the city comes to life after dark, same as I wrote about Seville.
My first four pictures are from around Cordoba at night. Last one is for Dorothy & Barbara. Lots of cats around here. Seem well fed and content.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Carthaginians were the first empire builders to show up. The Romans pushed them out and held onto Spain for more around 700 years. Spain was among the most Roman of the provinces. Emperors Trajan & Hadrian were born in Spain, as was the philosopher Seneca.
The Romans had the first dominant influence on Spain. They gave it the name & language. The Empire collapsed in the 5th Century, but the culture and people hung on. And there were constant reminders of the old Empire. Nobody ran the lands of the old empire better than the Romans had for at least 1000 years. It must have been humbling to see the “rhetoric in stone” of that great empire.
You see the Roman bridge in my picture. It has been repaired many times, but the general structure has endured. Romans built to last. They showed their power in stone.
We easily see how Roman affected our own Western culture and institutions but we sometimes forget that Rome was the major influence on every subsequent civilization in its former Empire and through those outside it. Orthodox and Islamic Civilizations are heirs to Rome and anybody who speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French or Romanian is speaking a language evolved from Latin.
I am very much a fan of Rome. I know of their many faults and their brutality, but I also know that for their time there were none better, and there were none better for a long time after. The Roman genius was in governing and assimilation of the ideas of others. They absorbed, assimilated and passed along the great cultures of the ancient world. Our civilization is heir to all that and we are heirs of the Romans.
I thought about these things as I admired the Roman bridge in the pictures. You can see me with the bridge and river in the background. On close inspection of the bridge, notice how they built the upstream supports at sharp angles to deflect the water and rounded the downstream ones to support the structure and slow the flow. They built for the centuries.
Many churches in southern Spain were once mosques, that were once churches that were once Roman temples. History is layered here.
I think it is useful to think of a kind of time line to show the really long years were are talking about. Roughly:
— 500 years as Roman temples
— 400 years as Christian churches
— 500 years as Muslim mosques
— 700 years as Christian churches
Some of the people in Cordoba evidently object to their Cathedral being called a mosque, since it has not been one for more than 700 years, since 1236. On the other hand, lots of people still call it a mosque and if you search on internet, that is what you find.
When you visit the cathedral, you see the layers, not only layers of Muslim and Christian but layers among Muslim and Christian. It never ended. The Muslim rulers who build the famous arches you see in my pictures and have seen in so many pictures were wise and tolerant rulers. They were replaced by others not so good, and you can see it in their construction. As you get farther away, the construction gets cheaper and more slip-shod.
When Christians reconquered this place, they left most of the Muslim things there, but added Christian symbols. They also added more features, so you have influences through the Renaissance and in the Baroque.
It was not always Muslim v Christian. The Umayyad Muslim rulers in Spain were often on good terms with the Byzantine Christians, since they shared a common enemy in the Muslim rulers of Syria, who had murdered the family of the Umayyad ruler and forced them to flee to Spain in the first place. The Byzantines sent skilled artists to help decorate the place. So Christians decorated the Muslim mosque. After the reconquest, the Christian rulers employed Muslim artists to decorate part of their cathedral, so Muslim artists decorated the Christian church.
It is all very beautiful and the diversity hangs together well, as you can see in my pictures. The decorations and forms are very similar. You can easily tell the difference, however, in that Christians often depict human or animal forms, something Muslims never do.
It gets hot in Seville and so people have adapted by doing more in the morning and at night. It was not that hot today, but the night was still very wonderfully pleasant.
Spaniards eat their evening meal very late. We were on that time-table because we were jet lagged. The result is that we hit the restaurants at around 9pm, the peak time. All the tables outside were taken, even thought there were so many spots. We wanted to eat outside, so we ended up in our own hotel courtyard.
My other pictures are from around town at night.
The movie theater near my house when I was a kid was called the Avalon. It was in the Moorish style and the main auditorium featured a Moorish courtyard, complete with fake stars in the sky. I know it was corny, but I liked it. Seville is like the real thing. Truly an enchanting place.
Tired from jet lag and a full day. Will write more tomorrow. For now, I will note the Seville is a delightful city, certainly one of the most pleasant I have ever seen.
Evidently, it was the set for many movies and TV shows, including “Game of Thrones” where it was the headquarters for Dorne.
Bryce Canyon is very nice, but more a theme park than a wild place. Alex and I went down into the canyon for a short hike. It was pretty easy until the last part.
It reminded me of some kind of science fiction movie, with people trudging up to some high goal. You can see this on the first picture. Next shows some big trees in the narrows. You wonder how they got their starts, but they are impressive. Next two are Alex and me. Last is Alex with some big old ponderosa pines.
Wandered Chicago a little and met Michael W. Fox for a few beers and pizza.
We passed the statue of a giant Boomer, so Mariza can see in the first picture.
Christine Johnson will be pleased to know that we went to the original Pizza Uno, as you can see in the second picture.
Picture #3 shows the Trump building. He insists on putting his name on the side. Bad form.
I took the Metro into town from my hotel near O’Hare. I like to take the train better than driving. Driving in the cities makes me nervous. Last picture is from the Metro window.
Finished our Forest History Society board meeting. The evening program included a Durham Bulls baseball team. The local team did not do well. The stadium is very nice but a little small. The other team, the Gwinnett Stripers, were able to hit the ball out of the park on a couple occasions.
First two pictures are from the game. Last shows some shortleaf pine at the FHS headquarters.
We are the original “green deal.” The American Tree Farm System has been conserving forest land in the USA since 1941 & I think we have done a good job.
The ATFS logo includes the four things our land produces: wood, water, wildlife & recreation. We know we need to make a profit on our land, else we are not doing our duty as part of the productive economy. But profit is not the only or even the primary motivation for holding land.
Clean water is a product of forest land. Our forests filter rain water and the natural processes of a forest actually clean water flowing over it. A well managed forest produces wildlife habitat. That is a big part of my forest goals. And forest are undeniably beautiful places.
My often repeated slogan is that trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. We need look at the total ecosystem and the total ecosystem includes more than what we would usually call nature.
The human ecology is also part of our system. If our products go into long lasting buildings, they continue to hold the carbon they absorbed and create a habitat for humans.
Lately, I have been thinking of it in terms of the triple bottom line. We need a money profit, a community/cultural profit and an ecological profit. Failing any of these is a general failure. Succeeding in all this is the success we seek.
My pictures are from around Louisville. The Ohio River is very high.
In Louisville. CJ & I went to visit Jim Beam and then had supper at the local Gordon Biersch. Also visited Louisville Slugger. They are moving away from ash. More bats are made of harder maple these days. On the way to the National Tree Farm conference in Louisville. We are spending the night in Cambridge, Ohio. There is not much here, but the hotel is convenient and inexpensive.
We had supper at a place called Steak and Ale. They had the standard fare and we have the standard pictures.
The other pictures are Braddock’s road and Braddock’s grave. As you recall, General Braddock came to western Pennsylvania to fight the French & Indians during the French & Indian War. The British eventually won, but not this time. As was standard at the time, he built a road so that his troops could move in good form. This tipped off the French & Indians. A small force of French and Indians ran into the larger British force and defeated them. It is called Battle of the Monongahela or sometimes just Braddock’s defeat. General Braddock was killed. Then Colonel George Washington helped hold the army together as it retreated.
The British troops did not have the capacity to take Braddock’s body home. Not wanting it to be dug up an mutilated by the French & Indians. They buried the body under the road, unmarked. The movement on the road covered the grave. The precise grave site remain unknown until 1804, when workmen found the bones. The site of the grave is marked and you can see it in my picture with me standing near it. Souvenirs hunters stole some of the bones and artifacts until they were reburied on a hill above the original grave. A monument was erected in 1913.
