Of Grammatology, Chinese Style the Final Rhyme in the Poem Is Also Meaningful
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EvepyEia: The activity in which anything is fully itself I ._, / , 11 ... vou EvcpyELa ~WY) ... (Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1072b) Staff: Assistant Editors: Cover: The character for the word tao, "way," "course," Matthew Holtzman in the sense of a way one travels on-a road, path or water course. Tao is a key term in traditionalChinese intellectual Kristin Masser discourse, where its meanings range from anormativewayof Anne McShane conduct to the dynamic principle that underlies the move Zachariah Swindler ments of nature. The character was written by Ch' en Po-chin. -note by Cordel/Yee Junior Editor: Eve Gibson Senior Editor: Danielle Tabela Faculty Advisor: Chaninah Maschler The Energeia staff would like to extend its gratitude to Chris Colby, the St. John's Print Shop, and Barbara Goyette Energeia is a non-profit, student magazine which is published yearly and distributed among the students, faculty, alumni and staff of St.John's College, Annapolis and Santa Fe. The Ig98 issue contains a sampling of the student work from the previous school year which the prize committees have selected for public recognition, and submissions from members of the community. Energeiawelcomes essays, poems, stories, original math proofs, lab projects, drawings, photography, and the like for the I999 issue. 3 CONTENTS K.I57 Chris Colby 6 DRIVING IN VENEZUELA Alexandra Boozer 8 PARABLES AND FABLES Anne McShane 10 CLASS DAY SPEECH I997 Chaninah Maschler 12 EXCERPTS FROM: ''BECOMING HUMAN: A DIALECTICAL JOURNEY TOWARDS SPECIES BEING" Lydia Polgreen 14 UNTITI..ED Marianne Thompson 23 THE TENSION BETWEEN MERCY AND JUSTICE IN SHAKESPEARE'S MEASURE FoR MEASURE Heidi Jacot 24 THE KING OF ISRAEL Samuel Davidoff 36 A TRANSLATION OF EMIL VERHAEREN'S "ONE NIGHT" Eli Wiggins 42 Two TRANSLATIONS OF WILLIAM VoN Gomrn's "NATURE AND ART" Eli Wiggins 44 ANOTEON WILLIAM VON GoErHE'S "NATURE AND ART" Eli Wiggins 45 CHINESE GRAMMATOLOGY Cordell Yee 47 MooN CRATER DEPTII ExPERIMENT Anna Milazzo and Jill Nienhiser 54 THE HALF-DAY Aaron Pease 56 LANGUAGE AND MIND: AN ExAMINATION OF THE PHAEDO AND 0mER DIALOGUES Alan Rubenstein 60 VIRGIN MARY (MOTHER OF Gon) Marianne Thompson 71 EXCERPTS FROM: ''PARADOX AND EVOLUTION: IMAGES OF THE DEMANDS OF MODERNITY" Matthew Braithwaite 72 4 5 he mourned the loss of his own child}iood, when music-mak ing was no longer simply fun , but had become work. The An· K. i57 dante evokes feelings of great sadness, lost innocence, and pathos without the mind-numbing stillness that comes with melancholia or depression. No wonder Schweitzer played this * at the end of a day without anesthesia, perhaps too full with the misery of chi1dbfrthing and of the pain of the dying. This Christopher Colby nameless, numbered, second movement written two hundred years ago, sang to me in my jungle as it must have sung to Schweitzer in his . I remembered the Kaminskis. My childhood memories of "The Kaminskis were musicians in Poland," my mother classroom on a stage where a lectern was centered. Next to it . 1 them flocked back to me like mourning doves at sundown. I explained to me one day. "They came here after the war. was a table upon which he placed his suitcase, and he opened remembered hearing the story about musicians playing string They're refugees, you know, and their son will go to school it as if he were opening ajar of formaldehyde. In ithe kept his quartets by Mozart at a concentration camp in Germany dur with you this fall." They had been among those freed from a lecture notes: dead, sterile things, drained oflife. On and on ing WWII. Perhaps the Kaminskis played while naked women concentration camp at the end of the war. I was six or seven he droned in his dry, lifeless voice: mummified notes read year and children flocked past them on the way to their suffocat years old then and about to begin school. They lived several after year to each suffering generation. All from the same jar ing showers. Those who listened heard a moment of beauty blocks awayfrom us, but in the smallcommunitythatwelived of preserved, dead feelings. "This isn't music," I thought, before their screaming final solution: lives flamed into smoke, in outsiders made ripples like stones cast into a pond. Even "this is mortuary science." Soon, I dropped out of school, anonymous ashes turned into sludge and dumped into a though he was older than me, Christopher, their son, and I disillusioned, and fell into the wild chaos that was rock music nearby swamp. How can we, in our own personal concentra had become great friends. He played the piano, and could say and the anti-war movement tearing apart 196o's America. tion camps that are our work-a-day lives, understand such his prayers in Latin. On his forearm a black and blue number Music of the '6os was loud, sometimes gentle, mostly an madness? was tattooed: it was an enormous curiosity to me, but he al gry and always heard best while taking drugs. I was not like "Arbeit mach das leben suss" -"work makes life sweet," was ways kept it covered. the wanna-be politicians yet to come, who, for their future ca written above the entrance of one such notorious death camp. In the way that children often do, we had somehow discov reers, and a gullible public, did not inhale: I did. Afterwhile, No, not work, but music makes life sweet. Between the little ered each other; I don't remember how. Heliveddownarut the warm summer glow of drug-induced blue skies and deaths we all suffer during the counterpoint of our lives, mu teddirtalley, across asumac-studdedandgrassyfield. "Watch Woodstock faded into the cold, gloomy, and lonely grey of sic offers moments of beauty and rest, and provides a link to out for the ditch with barbed wire," he used to say, or, "Re solitary Minnesota winter nights. I was unemployed, unedu the immortal. It cheats death. K.157 sounds the same to me member the fallen log where Grey Boots the cat lives? She's cated, and burned out after years of protest marches, rock as it did to someone else while black smoke filled the sky in had her kittens." On a comer was his tan-colored stuccoed concerts and all the youthful silliness that comes with drug another land. Whenever the Kaminskis played their music, house. In one of the trees nearbywe built a tree fort. We were abuse. The highs and lows came closer and closer until I was whoever listened shared in the wonders of the eternal and the quiet children, always careful of the witch living next door, in always high. immortal, in the great terrors of the here and now, in the for a house with a basement where she threw little children and On one of my endless wanderings, lost like a refugee, ex ever gone and yet to come, with all its sadness and happiness. wicked boys. iled even from myself, I came across a record store in an area In the same way as music, time moves forward. Ifirstheard Christopher practiced his piano lessons nearly everyday, known as "the Left Bank" ofMinneapolis near the Mississippi K.157 a quarter century ago when I was 22 years old, almost as and while his mother tutored him, I had to leave. So I wan river. It was notorious for rebelling students, smoke-laced young as Mozart was when he wrote it two centuries before. I dered home alone or waited in our favorite treetop for him to coffee houses, and a thriving trade in drug trafficking. There gave up drugs then. Like Schweitzer, music was what I really finish. Often, while we played together in his room or else on a shelf I found K.157. The music didn't have a name, just a needed. My eight-year-old daughter came home today from where around his house, I could hear his mother playing her number, tattooed as if on the forearm of some forgotten boy. school. In her hand, a violin in its case swung carelessly as viola and his father playing the cello. I was entranced. They K.157. It was a string quartet in C major by Mozart, written she chased two mourning doves by the side of the road. Now were like two mourning doves warbling their tunes: they very early in his life while he was in Italy, and the recording her fugue begins. chased each other, they played together, and sometimes they was an old DGG record in a yellow dust jacket with dark blue danced alone. When I was older, I learned the musical term lettering. On the back, it said K.157was particularly loved by fugue came from an old Italian word, Jugere "to chase or Albert Schweitzer, who played it on his violin. "Albert dance". The music they made was full oflife: sweet and calm. Schweitzer?" I wondered. The jungle doctor who helped the It filled me with joy, full of the here and now. I didn't know poor in Africa, and who, of necessity, sewed torn human flesh what the music was they played or who the composers were, together with the snapped-off heads of soldier ants. I bought but the quiet peacefulness of them playing together cast a the record. gentle, magical spell over me. Three years later, my parents I find it difficult to describe nowwhat I heard, lest I in turn moved our family away to another city and I never saw the become another embalmer. I can t1y to describe my feelings Kaminskis again.