<![CDATA[von Gumppenberg - Johannes Speaks]]>

<![CDATA[von Gumppenberg - Johannes Speaks]]>Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:14:16 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[A Fare-Well until We Meet Again]]>Fri, 09 Sep 2016 17:30:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/a-fare-well-until-we-meet-again

I have spoken to you in these little written compositions of some rather weighty matters. Other inclusions meant to provide a bit of drollery and fun as a respite for both you and me.

Here I want to offer you a final picture – not specially related to this or any text – but solely shown to you for your enjoyment.

Ahead of me now lie writing tasks which I cannot fit into a tight-spaced deadline plan.

I hope you liked my weekly series of reflections, as I surely treasure your attention to it.

]]><![CDATA[The Bent for Merriment]]>Fri, 02 Sep 2016 14:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-bent-for-merrimentI am told that volumes are written on humor. Somewhere, decades ago I read, “Incongruity inspires laughter.”

We know that not all which exists can be personally meaningful to us. When we encounter something which thus captures us it is because this something engages our minds or touches our hearts. Similarly, to inspire mirth, mere incongruity is not enough. The need is for an unfolding remarkably surpassing daily commonplaces.

The lovely smile gracing features in a tranquil, happy moment, as well as festive merriment, are – I think – relatives of humor, for they take us, however briefly, above the mundane dullness of existence.

When humor in its biting form is put into an utterance, someone will be someone’s prey whose day no longer will be dull. The benign tease looks upon himself as masterful, but does so peaceably and without inflicting pain. It seems an amiable way to have this fun when one’s victim is only pretended, but not real.

Harmless Cyclops Breathing in the Cold

A Cyclops is a gigantic, man-devouring mythological being with but a single eye. My Cyclops here is “average-man” – a little plump – bald – middle-aged. But if he resembles closely someone another someone knows, that other someone’s laughter can be more gloating than well-meaning.

Let me now recall a masterful political cartoon by MacNelly – masterful because there was no victim: a sturdy housewife, during the Bill Clinton years says to a baffled-looking pollster, “I like the dirt-bag.”
The “LIKE”-ing and the presidential “dirt-bag” make odd company. Yet the liking takes out all sting from the unwashed name. So some of us, at least, smiled or even laughed indulgently and fondly.

Is not such jesting a deal more loveable than that which gains a triumph through sharpening the claws of ridicule?

Summary

Mirth includes always the endeavor to master the occasion which arouses it. By that feature humor supplies a true and valuable recourse when hard adversity taxes our courage. And it is a fine conceit indeed to find a way to feel indulgently forgiving toward the President of the United States.

Even our gift of receptivity, to happy hours we can regard with smiles, subdues for us the drab, and maybe troubling, every-days.

A number of the topics in this series were familiar ground of which I sought to improve my understanding. Though I have had my fun, I have never studied how I had it – never studied humor. So I have to hope that this, my first attempt, has not been too awkward and inept.

]]><![CDATA[Modern Art -- Forbidden Art]]>Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/modern-art-forbidden-art

In Hitler’s Germany Modern Art was a forbidden art.

In the first years following the war I saw samples of this art with only uncomprehending eyes. Then in the USA took place at Rhode Island School of Design my first meeting with the art of my own time. It was “love at first sight.” I felt I had arrived to take a part in a sun-rise burst of color and an unprecedented inventive excellence of form.

Sometimes that fulfillment seemed in reach just around the corner. Hitler’s stranglehold was the obvious tyranny. Many tyrannies of fashions advancing ever like invasive weeds into the art community bring to us a slyly sneaking, but also more enduring, trouble.

The Art Student and the Art School

One kind of art in vogue or another dominates from time to time. There is also a seeming plenitude of variety. We note, however, a fashion in our schools which has grown a weighty burden. It is, contempt for what we name “academic learning.”

From Modern Art can arise – and partly have arisen – insights of fundamental learning useful to the valuation of any period.

In our time all profess admiration for the excellence of Paul Cézanne. That achievement was three-fold: composition, solid form, and color. These are the essentials of the painter’s art.

At Yale Josef Albers set up the course for a right study of color and composition. This gain, now lost mostly to neglect and then oblivion, needed to be cultivated and enlarged.

Solid form has been my chosen work. This was not a mere modeling in light and shade. Instead, the aim was the precise description of the volumes while taking possession of each surface as a field of action to be creatively explored for free display.

It is an oddity that all our art community talks admiration for Cézanne but treats negligently that to which Cézanne gave his industrious care.

There are several helps where our talent is not quite enough.

My illustration demonstrates that any shape arrangement can be made to fit the perspective situation of any form. Thereby, every surface is made usable as the designer-artist’s personal field of action.

Form Description

Alert and sharpened eyes must contribute here accurate observing. So is made available a treasury of shape and color combinations our brain cannot invent. These serve best when we re-design in order to improve, not copy, them.

By the simplicity of overlap and by seeing background and figure separations, we can discern near and distant. Solid structures in precise perspective and in the perspective of intervening atmospheric mist supply the facts of actual space.

Shaping Lines and Tone Here or There as Intervening Mists

The space of picture-making is not a featureless void. Ruled by inventive purpose, the mist of atmosphere may overlay what is our will to keep somewhat – but not wholly – out of sight. Thus we remind the viewer of these two perspectives, that of the vanishing point and that provided by the atmosphere, but employ them entirely to carry to completion a creative goal.

We step forward with our best designs.
The nearest point of the sphere lies in the center of the circular perimeter. But the weight of this display shows well above that middle point.

Our burden is not the occasional dominance of one art form in short-lived vogue. It is that our schools have enslaved their students to a needless ignorance. Yet the learning that I speak of might have been unfolded excellently with a modern outlook on shape and color and design.

Because our schools have been thus negligent too often, their students abide still in chains – less visible than those of past dread times – but I think they do exist.

The art of the galleries may inspire us, but must not lead. For the galleries are a commercial corner-cutting world. Composition, solid form, and color, supported by a treasury of profound observing, are the indispensable-best study plan.

Note: The structure of forms and the causes by which we judge near and far derive from observation. These may therefore be joined in one class of learning with the pattern-play of shapes and colors on the surfaces of solids.

]]><![CDATA[Dear Reader . . . .]]>Fri, 19 Aug 2016 09:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/dear-reader6926012

A difficulty has this month arisen interfering with the continuity of the log.
We hope you will continue reading our product in the future. We are and will be grateful for your attention.
Once more, I am asking for your indulgence.

]]><![CDATA["Kerfluffle" -- a Commotion, Fuss or Bother]]>Fri, 12 Aug 2016 13:30:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/kerfluffle-a-commotion-fuss-or-bother

Janet taught me the word. And on my own I learned how to escape the trouble that word means.

Note this example of my sterling common sense. Thus I reasoned brilliantly, I think, that the stairs to our basement make really a superior laundry chute For I pitched – as had grown my wont to do – some shirts and socks and other items down my well-loved way, when that day a stentorian voice caught me off my guard:
“I saw that, Johannes!”
“Yes, dear,” was Johannes’ meek and peaceable reply.

Was this not a crafty way to avoid a main “kerfluffle”? “Yes-DEAR-ing” is indeed a time-much-tested refuge from the Wifely Wroth.

After all, “kerfluffles” are best when they don’t happen. You believe me, don’t you, if I tell you that I never, ever raise a fuss?
So with my best superior mien I sometimes pick tenderly on Janet for “big-dealing” trifles. Now I can frame my complaints with much more eloquence: “Do please stop ‘kerfluffling’ me.”

We husbands are a brilliant lot. Or do you think it’s all low cunning?

Strange Growth on Janet's Kitchen Floor

There remains one more little thing to tell. One day I came down the basement stairs and, at the bottom, were to be seen “loveable dainties” – none of them my own – ’NUFF said!

]]><![CDATA[John Howard Benson -- Artist, Thinker and Teacher]]>Fri, 05 Aug 2016 08:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/john-howard-benson-artist-thinker-and-teacher

I entered Rhode Island School of Design – RISD, sounded with affection always “RIZ-DY” – in 1951. At that time John Benson, due to failing health, no longer offered lettering instruction. He continued, however, to teach a course scheduled for the entire sophomore class:

There has been a vogue of recording “great lectures.” These tended to be only middle-depth in content, rather neatly put together and a little too “dynamically” delivered. John Benson was much different and much better.

The course was constructed with exceptional lucid care. Singly, the talks were given with measured calm and very clear exactitude. The pace of progress was always exceedingly reliable, but never hurried. These readings by John Benson were the finest I have ever heard. Swarms of words tend to evade, not master, difficulties.

In Benson’s concentrated thinking power, and his patient and incisive discourse, lay our path ahead. The course achieved its excellent success meeting once a week for merely one semester.

I never exchanged a word of conversation with this, the most revered of all my teachers – nor did many of my classmates, for we were more than one hundred students in a great lecture hall.

A few years later John Benson died, and some years after that I became once more his student. I have two books written by John Benson: one is the translation of the La Operina, Arrighi’s “little work” . . .

. . . a great Renaissance cursive writing manual. By Benson’s masterly penmanship the whole is now a most beautiful work of art.

The second was The Elements of Lettering, written with Arthur Graham Carey. These two works gave to me a more insightful, and useful, instruction on the lettering art than any others I have tried.
In this essay my samples bear doubtless witness to the limitation of my craft, but witness also, I do hope, to the excellence of my preceptor.

The monumental stone-carved inscription was John Benson’s especial calling and he was, besides, wonderfully skilled and learned in all parts of the lettering craft.

Practice-Scroll

Though knowing much is surely very good, it is measurably better to comprehend deeply and exactly. Owing to that great talent, John Howard Benson – in his task field and at his time – was the best in the world.

]]><![CDATA[Tasks To Do, So Art Can Be]]>Fri, 29 Jul 2016 08:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/tasks-to-do-so-art-can-be

The cave painters of Altamira and Lascaux needed to know all the lore and crafts which held body and soul together in Stone Age times.

Here and now the division of labor lets us choose the skills and studies able to give close help in visual art, leaving the remoter tasks to other hands.
We learn about drawing, sculpture and painting. Some artists more than others value keen observation, lettering skills, anatomy, structure and geometry, or print making techniques.

When I was still a quite small boy, not all those studies did then yet occupy my mind. But the skill of blending colors seemed most desirably miraculous.

Artists will simulate blending through altering the frequency of markings by the brush or pen. These can be individually seen because they are separately and deliberately set in place.

“A Land of Fire and Ice”

My painting offers an extended graduation from white to blue, and several narrow passages of blending to render in blurring boundaries some of the adjoining color fields.

The blendings belong in visual art because they are visible within a work to our naked eye. Yet they are also a product of an intrusion into a microscopic world.

On Loan from the Invisible

However nimble the work of our pigment-laden brush, we cannot tell exactly where the microscopic particles of colors will fall in place.
The pattern is likely similar – though not identical to – that of my sample of the small black squares. For, whatever our finger-tip sensibility that moves the brush, the colored particles remain largely self-arranging and self-sorting.

Out of sources in nature and from disciplines of endeavor beyond art we use what can be made visible in our pictorial work.
Derived from shaded modeling seen all around us, graduated blending is a most often practiced craft in visual art.

More than 75 years ago it seemed a miracle to me, and still I name it “wonderful” that – wielded with dexterity and due diligence – the brush will cause tiniest particles of colored dust to do my bidding.
So far the occurrence is unexplained and likely to remain that way – gift of a benign Providence.

]]><![CDATA[Internal Revenue - The Lady I-R-S]]>Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/internal-revenue-the-lady-i-r-s

Americans are red-blooded, generous, and virile. They squander dollars upon beauty, but have no taste for drab.

Years ago – for the Lady’s and my own delight – I designed a jewel of an emblem, this to be worn not with garments lusterless and dull, but jointly with her “bestest” finery.

Thus we guys won’t mind much – indeed, will hardly notice – that Your Ladyship is also most costly to maintain.

Yet, regrettably, there is to be considered – red-blooded too, but not claiming to be virile – the other half of our people. These are the tigresses of our nation. To them your brightest loveliness, dear Lady, can only be an angry sore. For, the tigresses are the mature and prudent half of us and reckon the Lady is just a pesty bother, troublesome and greedy – so sorry!

Still if, with becoming grace, you wear the jewel that I made for you, you may win yet a heart or two, who knows?

]]><![CDATA[The Indivisibles]]>Fri, 15 Jul 2016 08:00:00 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-indivisiblesWhatever thoughts bounce in and out of our brains or tumble from the lips as speech all belong to their area of interest and purpose of expression.

Once my dictionary fell open on the word “atomic,” meaning – not the “super-bomb” – but the least element within each area of enterprise.

In visual art the least discernible parts are lines and shapes, and shapes in tones or colors. These can be as small as pen strokes or dots painted with a pointy brush. These “atomics” or “indivisibles” of picture-making are put in place by the artist with deliberation. They are visible to the viewer who may ponder why the artist chose them for their setting in his work.

The “indivisibles” are thus precisely determinable and also visibly and clearly separable.

Areas of painted colors and lines of varied weight can be more than their material properties. We therefore have here a cube and cone and a dense gathering of furnishings – not as physical facts, but as sights we really see.

Whatever appears and unmistakably takes shape inside the picture plane is reality and truth, but such creation is real and true solely within the realm to which it is bound – that of “pictorial art.”

Herein we are guided and helpfully instructed in two ways: One is that each path of learning and of progress belongs to its own domain.
The second leads us to the just surmise that these truly separate paths will each likely go a rather parallel course.
By their differences, and only through those differences, can the diverse disciplines make their indispensable and united contribution to the productivity of the vocations.

In a future essay I will try to tell what this can mean to the calling of art.

]]><![CDATA[Absolute Truth]]>Fri, 08 Jul 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/absolute-truth

Dogmatical self-assertion is often met with this riposte: “There is no absolute truth.”

Only un-importantly is this correct. However, that reproach against another’s speech is also entirely mistaken. For no one is ever able to even try to pronounce absolutely. All we say is inescapably bound to a subject matter. It cannot be absolute of that subject matter and, so, independent.

A runner as fast as lightning cannot exist, but the idea is derived from elements we have experienced. We may therefore picture this or speak about it. Though this runner will never become bodily real, he can become a true creation of metaphor or a magic tale.

But no one can express – rightly or mistakenly – anything empty of subject matter. To tell me meaningly, “There is no absolute truth,” is to say that, “A nothing is, in fact, a nothing.”

All we say and all we think – true or false – is bound to its own territory of regard and, in another study, I will pursue that outlook.

]]><![CDATA[A Very Lucky Lady]]>Sat, 02 Jul 2016 05:00:01 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/a-very-lucky-lady

Monika’s husband is a living “good example.” When once we came to talking, Monika rendered full account of all the helpful chores her Richard happily and always performed for her ease and for her pleasure.

So exhaustive was her numeration that I felt need to comment:

     Johannes: “This raises an interesting question.”
      Lucky Lady: “What do I do?”
      Johannes: “Yes?”
      Lucky Lady: “I look pretty.”

That, I truthfully conceded, the lady did indeed most competently and becomingly.

]]><![CDATA[The Lady Who Said, "Damn the Greeks!"]]>Fri, 24 Jun 2016 08:00:01 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-lady-who-said-damn-the-greeksOur friend Natasha industriously nurtures a conceit she is “allergic” to exercise. When I sang the praises to her of the Greek ideal of bodily excellence joined to a clear and incisive mind, the lady told me, “Damn the Greeks!”

Now great Ajax and Achilles grimly frown. Almighty Zeus from Mt. Olympus thunders wrathfully. Athena the Grey-Eyed and Bright Apollo are in tears. All Hellas mourns, and even Stony-Hearted ’Hannes grieves.

Yet there was a better and more winsome way I could have offered my appeal. Because the Greeks prized Beauty.

Our Natasha owns and travels with a store of lovely clothes to all parts of the world. For she is a pretty princess, and I think she knows it.

So, let me recommend – with humble duty – exercise as BEAUTY-TREATMENT.
Yr. Obednt. Servant,

]]><![CDATA[The Election]]>Fri, 17 Jun 2016 14:36:43 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-election

This year, as always, if I like a candidate, I will give that candidate my vote, and numbers of my fellow Americans will do the same.

The conventions and the campaigns to follow may clear away some misgivings and some doubts. So far, however, both anticipated party choices are exceptionally ill-received by the electorate.

Hence, too many citizens may avoid the polls. Please don’t do that – instead consider: a “WRITE-IN VOTE.”
Let that be Humphrey Bogart, or Maureen O’Hara, or Kamehameha the Great, King of Hawaii 1810-19, or name your favorite niece.

This will do little good in 2016. But a notable count of “write-ins” will mean a powerful message – and a painful – to the loser. For they will thus learn they likely would have won, had they offered a person better able to win the people’s trust.
But keeping ourselves at home will never do, because that will mean we do not care. Therein lies exceeding danger.

]]><![CDATA[Dear Reader . . . .]]>Fri, 10 Jun 2016 19:28:40 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/dear-reader

A difficulty has this month arisen interfering with the continuity of the log.
We hope you will continue reading our product in the future. We are and will be grateful for your attention.

]]><![CDATA[The Dwarf in the Center of His World]]>Fri, 03 Jun 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-dwarf-in-the-center-of-his-world

The panorama of the world ranges all about me – I am the unimportant midpoint of the whole.

Millennia ago a dwarf, my ancestor, faced four main tasks.

1. For mutual benefit, life in community with others.
2. To gather experience and to learn.
3. Productive creativity – craftsmanship.
4. To render care to personal love.

Around this sparse field of action lay – imagined infinite and eternal – a domain of spirit beings. The best known became the Indo-European sky gods and the single deity of revealed religion.

From occasions of good will and fellowship in the community and particles of time of happiest love, the dwarf reasoned – not provably but quite logically – a perfected heavenly abode.

That land “unknowable” is not the modern dwarf’s chief concern. His once tight field of endeavor has expanded by community growth, research and study, and by manufacture. A widening belt of philosophy, learning, and of know-how now separates me and fellow dwarfs from the transcendent realm.

Nature has set us bodily into the center of our world. Through Renaissance and Humanism, Enlightenment and Modernity, we have made that our own resolve.

]]><![CDATA[Another Lady Tells Me "No!"]]>Fri, 27 May 2016 08:00:03 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/another-lady-tells-me-no

I have long been fond of exercise and, to gain a useful layman’s lore, studied some bone and muscle anatomy and kinesiology. For, real expertise is out of my reach, and “Do this – do that” directives leave much unclear.

I therefore sought mainly “first-pace comprehension” and tried to pass it on as “first-pace explaining.” For example, it is easier to give time to warming up when I learn that warm muscles deliver more of their power. In the muscular action of breathing, this brings to us a most welcome “second wind.” The experts know all this and more, yet seldom put any of it into words.

My “first-pace explainings” are a help to a fine lady who has begun “working out” with me. Our friend has lauded me most liberally as a patient, gentle, and altogether sterling, ancient pedagogue.

As twice a week is a scanty fitness effort, I inquired: “Do you keep up with your work at home – I mean – when I am not looking?”
My nice lady: “No!”
And so, with her prettiest mocking smile, “milady” shot me through the heart.

]]><![CDATA[Relationships]]>Fri, 20 May 2016 08:00:01 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/relationships

When I say this word I am more often ignorant whereof I speak than comprehending. Talking, for example, of “orthographic projection,” we name a discipline which underlies the classical mechanics of our early industrial action. Our discourse on relationships means not nearly the clear insights and precision that are the implied sense of the descriptive geometric term.

If I think of shape and color relations in visual art only as appealing or not appealing, we close down the mind. In an able black and white design, the black renders with care also the white spaces, so that black and white separate and simultaneously unite at their common boundaries. How inventively this is done interests the discerning viewer.

We meet with relationships in ubiquitous diversity. The most fateful are those of human people. What we feel and think about, what we speak and do to one another, will either build strongly, or derail, relationships.

Preceding all will be a motivating cause. Out of this completeness of succession – of cause, of feeling, thoughts, and speech and deed, each one is not shown always visibly and truly, nor perhaps, at all. So our demeanor towards one another is a path of pitfalls and of obstacles which frequently we jointly misconstrue.
Therefore I do blunder on the path of life I share with others and name those several ignorances my relationships. So I do not much like this word. For it reminds of too much I cannot understand.
I make, however, handy use and hide behind “relationships” each time I know too little and want to say it loud.

]]><![CDATA[The Old Lady]]>Fri, 13 May 2016 08:00:01 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-old-ladyJanet and I once were friends with a lovely old lady – she has since passed away – who told us proudly how many beaux paid court to her when she was young.

At the time I noted down our exchange together with a summarizing comment.

Johannes:   “Did you break their hearts?”
Old Lady: “So they claimed.”
Johannes:   “Did you believe them?”
Old Lady: “I believed them.”
Johannes:   “Did you care?”
Old Lady: “No.”

Johannes   “Tis a hard, hard world in which we live and cruel are the times.”

For you and me, my friend, the times and world have not unfolded more accommodating since.

]]><![CDATA[Josef Albers]]>Fri, 06 May 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/josef-albers If you read my log you will have met one of my great teachers. Josef Albers is a second.
Albers’ color course at Yale was then the sole basic design study really foundational to our work to follow. Colored papers – torn or cut – gave more color learning than paint and brush could have supplied.

Colored papers taught also the “simultaneous contrast color-change.” One color may so alter upon different grounds that we give this single color different names – here, once “purple” and, once “ochre.”

Albers did not waste his words teaching us not to allow one content or another into the middle of a work, nor on recommending “balance.” What he said was more weighty and a deal more useful. Of a student’s painting he remarked, “I can read this. This is FLOWERS in a bowl.” It was not neglected bitsy pretties in a BOWL. To thus serve the theme and striving of a work teaches how inclusions either damage or support our effort.

        “I do not believe in self-expression.” Albers’ utterance here causes me to remember another by a friend to a foreign friend, both figures of fiction: “If you can’t be yourself, you’ll have nothing to put in the pot.” We easily miss that the two sayings tell the same meaning from opposite directions of regard.
        Albers held that the unimproved, uncorrected self was not the equal of educated and industrious creative individuality.
        The friend said to the friend, “Let not one of our bad examples tempt you. But bring to us the good you own and join it to the good already here in place.”
        It is what Albers once said to me of German and American traits – and said it in his native tongue: “Man muss beide im Guten vereinen.”   “One must unite the two in that which is good.”

]]><![CDATA[Frauds – Pious and Impious – and Common Sinners, Too]]>Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/frauds-pious-and-impious-and-common-sinners-too     Our hearts are but a dense, polluted pond and hold within all possibilities of Evil and just a little Good.
     Thus, Frauds and Sinners do not come purely made, so that the names we give them derive from traits we see most often and most clearly.

     A tattle-tale and backbiter – that is, the Pious Fraud – is upholding virtue at painful cost to others and rewardment to himself. One reward will be most surely a happy triumph of self-righteous Gloating.

Our Hypocrites, however, are with us in two species, and not mere one. And that other holds himself to be a Go-Getter and Sterling Fellow. A fluent Liar, his manner is Blunt Honesty, but not his purpose.
Those trustable, and also trusting, are his chosen prey. “Caveat Emptor, you damn Fool!” Is profit by Impious Fraud not glorious?

Like two species of Hyena are these two – one Spotted, and one Striped.

We others are the Ordinary Sinners – we have some Bad in us, and also just a little bit of Good. We believe in Goodness, but do it only on occasion and so, repent of faults, but not too much. “For there is no point in wearing myself out.”

Of Saints I cannot tell, as I have known but one. They are our most elusive species, because they try to keep unseen.

Comment:
Do you have some favorite "hypocrites" ?

]]><![CDATA[Reply to Nicholas Cage]]>Fri, 22 Apr 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/reply-to-nicholas-cage

        A lady poet and a friend of mine opened a series of her verses quoting Nicholas Cage. I do not recall the words verbatim, but the awful meaning was unmistakable and clear: Life is awful; we love all the wrong people; our hearts get broken; then we die.

        I trust, foolishly perhaps, for myself and for my fellows in a better turn of luck.
                                                           Our day is dire.
                                                           Right people love right people wrongly.
                                                            If your heart be broke,
                                                            do not presume to die –
                                                            repair another broken heart
                                                            imperfectly,
                                                            because you both are human.
                                                            In due time, depart this life
                                                            with Grace.

                           We are right people, you and I,
                            but bunglers in the craftsmanship of love.
                            Dreamily we look for bliss into a distant sky,
                            though our lacks need tending here and not above.

                            We are right people, you and I.

Comment:
Do today's problems come more from loving the wrong people or right people wrongly ?

]]><![CDATA[In Praise of the Concision of the Phonetic Alphabet]]>Fri, 15 Apr 2016 08:00:02 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/in-praise-of-the-concision-of-the-phonetic-alphabet

        An art historian once said: “The medieval Church was the poor man’s Bible” – a Bible for unlettered people. In the human past, art told – illustrated, in a way – much of our story.

        Pictograms can render more coherent meaning, and from Semitic pictographs descends the alphabet we write: Gimel the camel is now “c” and “g” – Yodh the hand – “i” and “j.”

        Picture-script in English explores how things may express a meaning that is not a thing. The female sheep, a “ewe,” is sound-equal to a spoken “U.” An old man may be a “sage,” a near sound-equal to the end of “u-sage,” a custom.

You may regard the circles next the hand below as a sum of silver dollars. Together, “hand” and “sum” say “hand-some,” as in “a handsome lad.”

A wig of hair is not sound-equal, but sound-similar to the possessive pronoun “her.”

        Many and more clever shifts likely conjoined with the pictograms to aid the telling of observations, ponderings, and deeds. To read these meanings by that clumsy multitude of symbols and of signals demanded vast memory and suppleness of mind. Thus the arrival of the phonetic alphabet was a liberation we may justly celebrate.
        If you speak with clear precision, your words will rightly spell – not in letters – but in sounds.
        A singular letter-shape for each sound of the spoken word is an ideal very nearly reached by ancient Latin. The accumulated lore of the history of writing was here the teacher who achieved an education excellence by the art of summary.
        English has strayed way off that perfection, so that often we misspell it. Our 26 characters are not so well on pace to render a letter to each sound of speech as are the Latin 20.
        Yet our alphabet seems still a miracle to me. For it lets me tell you all I can think and feel, see, and do.

Post Script:
I know next to nothing of historical pictography. My considerations here were inspired by opening remarks in a chapter of The Elements of Lettering by John Howard Benson and Arthur Graham Carey.

]]><![CDATA[The Ladies of the Library]]>Fri, 08 Apr 2016 08:00:03 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-ladies-of-the-libraryI am very fond of our local library, and fonder still of the learned and kind ladies there.

It is almost three years ago that the library celebrated a May as “Poetry Month.” Floor to ceiling on a hallway wall appeared a depiction of “The Poe-Tree.”

Twisted brown paper made a twisty trunk and branch, and construction paper cutouts – a leafy crown of green. A table underneath bore three supplies: scotch tape, bright red circular paper apples, and slips of white paper. Upon the slips patrons were urged to write verses of their choice, tape these to an apple, and the apple on the tree.

In time “The Poe-Tree” sparkled white on red and red on green without any contribution made by me. For this, my wayward way, I received the scolding due. I promised to improve, and here is my result:

                         I proclaim the Ladies of the Library
                         where Grace and Learning are the year-round rule
                         and old and young come year-round back to school.

Our friend, Rowena, former librarian, once said, "A library is a community of people, somewhat like a church, except that they don't all gather together at once." Would you care to comment?

]]><![CDATA[The Visual Design Inclusions]]>Fri, 01 Apr 2016 08:00:04 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/the-visual-design-inclusions

The art in this log only very seldom clearly illustrates my text.

Occasionally that work parallels the writing, in hope -- not of helping to explain -- but of enhancing, the meaning of the printed page. Some designs are shown for eye appeal alone.

There is a cause. Today I am legally blind. These mini-essays are at first brush-written in letters as large nearly as bricks.

And the artwork must be what I have in store at home.

]]><![CDATA[Fundamental Learning]]>Fri, 25 Mar 2016 08:00:04 GMThttp://johannes-von-gumppenberg.com/johannes-speaks/fundamental-learning

Of the several fine teachers who instructed me as a young man, three were truly great. One, to those who did not know him, Charles Sylvia, the Swimming Coach of Springfield College, will be a surprise. At the start of summer over an extended weekend, Professor Sylvia conducted an aquatics school to sharpen our craft for the summer’s work of teaching aquatic skills to kids.

With lucid intellect and with concision – the need to save time obvious – Charles Sylvia complemented and gathered into clear coherence the particles of our comprehension. Sylvia then named that coherence “Basic Knowledge.”

Insights and aptitudes acquired singly come together as principles – that is, as rules we use in the work we do. If from such rules is built a useful whole, we will have gained a body of fundamental lore or Basic Knowledge.

My sketch below was drawn to explain descriptive geometry to a one-time student. The rendering is a model of Orthographic Projection, the enabling tool of the early industrial age.

In level-drafting, the model delivers the three views we mostly want, thus:

By their ground plan and elevation renderings, and deep perspective views, we might mistakenly suppose the architects and artists of the Renaissance to have mastered descriptive geometry already – not so. The work was done three hundred years later at the time of Napoleon by Gaspard Monge.

Through his edifice of fundamental learning, Gaspard Monge made himself preceptor of the progressive world, and saved that student time – not to squander, but to build and to create. His is a most excellent example of that Basic Knowledge that Professor Sylvia wanted us to learn and put to use.

You might comment on a teacher whose "fundamental" teachings went well beyond the announced course subject matter . . . .

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