Carl Jung at the Rubin

My mother taught me never to tell anyone where to find the blackberry patch. The fewer people who know where it is, the more blackberries for us.

However, I am going to break mom’s rule and tell you about a museum I discovered yesterday. I am not taking too much of a risk, though. Since no one other than me reads my blogs, there is little chance that anyone will discover the museum by way of this essay. Besides, it is in relatively plain sight – at the southeast corner of 17th Street and 7th Avenue in Chelsea – and was mentioned a few days ago in the New York Times.

I visited the Rubin Museum of Fine Art (http://www.rmanyc.org/) to see the special exhibit on Carl Jung’s Red Book, but found myself drawn into (or more precisely up to) the larger collections of Himalayan art. The seven-story museum is built around a central spiral staircase which invites visitors to ever higher layers of art and artifacts from the Himalaya Mountains.

It is obvious that the museum’s directors are intent on making Himalayan art as accessible as possible to Western visitors. The museum encloses the works behind glass so that visitors can view the art eyeball to eyeball; it even provides magnifying glasses so visitors can see the minute details of the compositions. Educational materials, in the form of books and digital media, are available throughout the building, Instead of shooing visitors away from the exhibits, staff offer tours. A website sponsored by the museum introduces Himalayan art to the uninitiated. (http://www.exploreart.org/ )

The Jung exhibit, which has been extended through February 15, 2010, celebrates the publication of Jung’s Liber Novus, more commonly known as the Red Book. This fascinating tome is filled with bright, intricate mandalas and beautifully crafted calligraphic writings, the progeny of Jung’s ‘active imaginings’. The book itself (I almost want to say the ‘ding an sich’), dubbed ‘the holy grail of the unconscious’ by the New York Times, is part of the display. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html)

The exhibit includes roughly-executed precursors to the more finished drawings, many of them sketched on theater programs or other scraps of paper, as well as diaries and notebooks that became the material for the Liber Novus.

While the exhibit is illuminating by itself, it gains even greater meaning in the context of an exhibit of mandalas, five floors above. (http://mandala.rma2.org/) Mandalas are common symbols in Tibetan Buddhism. Representing the whole universe, they are used by Buddhist monks for meditation and other spiritual exercises.

The Rubin exhibit of mandalas will be on display through January 11. Of particular interest is a computer generated mandala produced by graphic designers at Cornell and Zurich.

If you should happen upon this blog, please feel free to visit the museum, but don’t ask me where to find the blackberries.

Searching for a conversation

Somewhere in the vast realm of blogtalk an erudite and witty crowd is chatting about the classical Greek theater. Where are they?

In a matter of seconds I can find a live game of hearts just by Googling ‘live game of hearts’. But finding the analogous site to join a conversation about Medea’s infatuation with Jason is not so easy.

A few misguided searches led me to The Ancient World Bloggers Group (AWBG) http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com/ – which sounds promising, but seems to be frequented by hard core archeologists. Not my type at all.

Next I stumbled upon the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy (SAGP) web page at http://www.societyforancientgreekphilosophy.com/about-the-sagp/. The group promotes conversations - but at conferences and not (so far as I can tell) on line. Besides I didn't see anything about the Greek theater.

The Ancient Philosophy Society (APS) whose ‘official blog' is at http://www.ancientphilosophysociety.org/ promises ‘a forum for diverse scholarship on ancient Greek texts’ but again the fora seem to be mostly conferences and the texts mainly philosophical.

At last I happened across About.com’s Ancient/Classical History section at http://ancienthistory.about.com/. It contains page after page of commentary on the Greek plays – written at a level I can understand and comment on – and it includes a link to an Ancient/Classical History forum at http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?webtag=ab-ancienthist.


The instigator of the blog is one N.S. Gill, ‘a Latinist and freelance writer with a longtime focus on the classical world’. Since she looks on the up and up and the site is sponsored by About.com I signed up, found a question I could answer and posted a response.


Maybe I found a conversation. We will see. But in the meantime the experience was at least as engaging as a game of Hearts – though a bit harder to find.

Theblindseer In Search of Himself

Noone and everyone is unique in cyberspace. Because of the countless Michael McClains who started blogging before me, my name was 'unavailable'.

Thus, I became Teiresias.

But even as Teiresias I could not become a dot com. Teiresias.com was taken - not by a classical scholar, not even by a psychic - but by a service that promises 'What you need, when you need it.'

Thus it became necessary to do business at theblindseer.com.

But after a year of inactivity, theblindseer.com seems to have become defunct, leaving the address redirected to blindseer.com, an iPhone development site.



The transmutations of Teiresias - or Tiresias as he has become more commonly known - are endless.




There is, for example the flute/piano duo of Mark Takeshi McGregor and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa whose homepage sports a classy two-headed logo and introduces a young couple in a freightyard. http://tiresias.ca/index.php

Hoping to find a sample of their music, I searched Pandora, which failed to turn up Tiresias, but found instead a group called Flat Tires (no ‘ias’) with an album that Pandora was loath to name in full.

Turning from music to classics, we find Teiresias as the transexual blind prophet in the Classics Pages complete with a picture of Tiresias from an unnamed Japanese website.

Could they be Mark and Rachel?

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/tiresias.htm