Here is another video of German lit geekiness. Werner Herzog is a well-known German filmmaker since the 60's that,--well, if you know him I don't need to explain this, and if you don't know him or his works, this won't be funny to you anyway.

some videos of the plane below

Did I mention it was fast?

Reallyfast

But at least it is still in one piece



By the way, that is my dad breathing hard into the camera. I, of course, was completely calm and in control. . .

Noch ein Flugzeug!

Here is the latest attempt to put together a pylon racer that will be able to compete this year. The last two I built have glow-powered engines. I have had a little trouble keeping those engines running This one will compete in the speed 200 class. The pictures are from its maiden flight Saturday morning. The plane feels fast and the first flight was really hairy until I was able to trim it out for level flight. Even at 1/4 throttle, it was almost all I could handle. I landed and adjusted the elevator to move only half as much as it did on the first flight. The reduced twitchiness was very welcome.
The motor is a 1900Kv Turnigy brushless outrunner motor. I am using 1350 mAh 3-cell lithium-polymer batteries--the same type as is used in cell phones, except with a higher discharge rate. the propeller is 6.5" Graupner propeller (made in Germany!). As you can see, I have decorated it with the German colors. The speed controller (a computer chip that controls the battery-motor interface and acts as a throttle) can be programmed to play various songs when it is powered up and ready to fly. In keeping with the German theme, I set it to play Beethoven's Ode to Joy. I don't think many of the people I fly with will get the joke.
The design is my own, although I took a lot of cues from others that are also flying. The plane has a V-tail and a slightly forward-swept main wing. It feels really fast, although I am not sure exactly how fast. Others who have similar designs have clocked their planes at between 100-110 miles per hour. I need to get used to flying at this speed at about 20 feet off the ground. This last picture is my favorite.

You may not get it, but to me this is really funny

Where my October went

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. November 9th, 1989 is a pretty important date for me personally since the fall of the wall and the opening of East Germany meant that my mission call to Switzerland was changed to the Dresden mission. It shaped my understanding of German culture and has had a profound impact on the course of my professional development. In the past few years it has become a marker to me of how old I have gotten as my students were born closer and closer to 1989, and their memories of the fall become more and more vague. This year a majority of my students were born after the wall fell and the event that plays a central role in my personal identity might as well be ancient history to them.

At the beginning of the semester I had a conversation with Stephan-- a local high school German teacher who also served in Dresden with me and shares my sense of identity with Wende-Germany-- that we really should do something to commemorate the 20th anniversary. It would help both of our programs and raise the profile of German studies in Utah, and give us a chance to share our experiences. Both of us think big and of course things quickly snowballed until they were nearly out of control. But in the end I think we put on a nice event. I had to coordinate for all of the space at UVU, organize the schedule, arrange for prizes and "schwag" for the participating students. Here are a few pictures of the event. We built a replica wall out of cardboard posters. There were over 150 entrants making a wall nearly 200 yards long. we filled up the Hall of flags at School. I was really pleased with the art work. Some of the students copied things that had appeared on the wall, like this series of weird faces. Others did other historical or political messages in a style that might have appeared on the wall. Others were completely creative.
I like the picture of a butterfly through a hole in the bricks that the German Club president did--thanks Cindy.





I invited the Honorary German Consulate, Charles Dahlquist to participate in our event, and he was very helpful. He provided us with cases worth of material to give away to the students--Over one hundred t-shirts, cases of water bottles, magazines, pens, pins, markers, etc. This necessitated the creation of a "Wheel of Schwag" that we used to give it all away fairly.
It was a lot of fun and my student volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves. The prizes were a big hit with the students. Over all the event was a success. We had over 500 high school and junior high students in attendance, and things got a little chaotic from time to time. But every one had a good time. KUER radio came and interviewed me, and I made the hourly news, so I only have about 14:30 left of my 15 minutes of fame
This is Mr. Dahlquist and I at the wall. His remarks were very nice and well-thought-out. I was glad that he was able to find time to come and participate.

We had other activities as well. We had a number of presentations given by students and a woman who grew up in the east. She told of life in east Germany and brought back memories of FDJ, the Pioniere, and other youth organizations. It was very good. The student presentations were hit and miss. We showed a movie called Prager Botschaft that told about the crises at the German embassy in Prague, 1989, when thousands of east German refugees fled to Czechoslovakia to escape into the west. It went well until the scene that showed a woman's bare shoulders (that's all, I swear!!) as she sat wrapped in a sheet in bed. One of the junior high teachers promptly panicked, made us stop the movie and wanted to escort her kids out of the theater until we talked her down from the ledge.

Maybe my favorite part, however, was my friend's Trabant. The Trabi is THE icon of the communist era in east Germany and both loved and hated by the people who drove them. There are some great jokes about them here-- (only site I could find in english-the Sun's site has some inappropriate links on it though, so beware) He and I both had the opportunity to drive one as missionaries when the members bought new, western cars and didn't know what to do with their trabis. That worked great for about a month when the general authorities heard about it and shut us down. :-( A few years ago, Stephan found a trabi for sale in Minnesota and bought it. Since then he has used it in his teaching, brought it to mission reunions, and had a general good time with it--when he wasn't spending insane amounts of money fixing it.

It was a real pain arranging for permission to get it in the building, and event more trouble ensued when a couple of police officers got all territorial about it, but we brought in his car. It was a real hit. Kids got to have their pictures taken with it. Sit inside, and look under the hood at it's lawnmower-like engine.At one point in the planning, someone asked me if it would fit through a set of double doors. "Um, I don't think that is going to be a problem," was all I could reply. The car actually looks bigger in this picture because it is just kids behind the wheel. I have a picture at work (not an electronic copy, just a printout) of one of my colleagues in it--then you get a real idea of the scale. The sound the motor makes is the best part. It is only a 2-stroke engine, so it sounds something between a snow mobile and a chainsaw. Listen and enjoy

On what a stone has to say

When I was my son’s age, I discovered fantasy literature in the form of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien particularly captured my imagination with the utterly realistic world he created. The major contributing factor of this realism of course was Tolkien’s facility with language. Tolkien’s own love of languages, etymology, and literature infected me and played perhaps too great a role in my decision to study language–probably because my own love of reading blossomed in the midst of hobbits and elves on the fields and hills of Middle Earth.

Key to the hobbits’ adventures was a dwarvish map written in a runic script. The runes were a secret and magic script that led the way to treasure and dragons and access to the world learning outside the Shire. True to Tolkien’s own personality, each hobbit that leaves his home becomes in his own right a scholar of the land that adopts him, brining back the language, learning, and history of that land.

It was a pleasant surprise then, when I discovered in my courses on the history of the German language, that Tolkien’s dwarvish runes were not original to him, but borrowed from the nordic germanic tribes. For the Norsemen too, runes were possessed of a magic wielded only by the select few. I suppose the magic still holds, even if the secret is widely known: if you put something into writing, you call it into being, and therefore you gain power over it as you make it present again – re-presenting it – in the text. The Norse understood this in a way that we have forgotten.

When I went to Sweden this summer I hoped I would find some of these runes. They were often engraved into standing stones–like Stonehenge in England. The stones themselves had meaning both in the way they were arranged and in the act of erecting them. They stand, like the Norse ideal of manhood. Upright. Proud. Immovable. Strong. Timeless. They are Standhaft. When I see them, my own Viking heritage stirs. They represent all the things we cannot always be, but wish we were, and I wanted to find one for myself.

I had heard of prehistoric Norse cemetery that had been discovered south of Stockholm, and which happened to be within walking distance of my hostel. I set out to find this cemetery on a beautiful June morning; the sun was bright and the air fresh after the rain of the previous day. About a mile down the path I began to see a series of stone circles sticking up out of the forest floor. There were other geometric shapes as well, mostly triangles and quadratic figures. It was a curious experience. The stones themselves are ageless: unshaped by any hand, they seem as old as the earth itself. But at some point someone gathered them together and arranged them, and even this act is removed from me by over a thousand, maybe two thousand years. For all that time they have remained, unmoved, a more constant part of the environment than even the generations of trees that have sprung up and died around them. Their permanence served as a contrast to the transience of the human hands that placed them, and my distance from those people, despite the fact that I was standing on the very place where they must have stood long before. The signposts said they were grave markers, but if there was any significance to the layout of the stones, it remained unclear to me, except that their very placement gave the stones meaning. It set them apart so that they were no longer just stones, but a message–Remember us, even though we are gone, we were here. This was our place. We lived. We worked. We created. We were.

At the time I was only struck by the beauty of their extreme age and their stunning simplicity. I was also mildly disappointed that they lacked any runes–any writing to connect me to them. All these other meanings come to me as I sit and write about them months later, when I realize that they had much to say and indeed were able to say much despite their silence. But at the time I resigned myself to the fact that this was as close as I was going to get to Norse paganism and so I set of in search of the coast and the seagulls.

On my way to the airport, however, I made one final stop at the castle Gripsholm in Mariefeld. The afternoon was getting on, but the day was just as beautiful as it had begun. I knew nothing about the castle except that Kurt Tucholsky used to take his vacations there. However, as I walked around the castle, I was surprised to find these two rune stones standing in the courtyard. I do not know if they have always stood on this spot, or as I suspect, they were moved here by the builders of the castle. It doesn’t much matter to me either way. As I looked at them, I remembered the one with the snake’s head from pictures in my graduate classes. Between the unexpected surprise at discovering them and the delight at touching a thousand-year-old inscription (okay maybe only 900 years) it was the perfect end to my trip to Sweden.

At one time I could puzzle out the sound of the language on the stones from the runes, even if the language itself was beyond me. But now I can’t remember the value of most of the symbols. In English it reads this stone was set up by Tola in memory of her son, Harald. He was Ingvar the Far-traveled’s brother They fared like men far after gold and in the east gave the eagle food. They died southward in Serkland.” According to the marker next to the stone, “Giving the Eagle food” means they killed enemies, and the “Far Traveled’s” expedition to Serkland is mentioned in many other rune inscriptions. These rune stones are therefore Cenotaphs, grave markers erected in memory of one who died far away and whose body cannot be returned home. They represent an absence, a symbol of what is not there.

To me these rune stones and the standing stones that predate them become a metaphor for language. Words are symbols for ideas or objects that are not there. The words we use re-present an absence, and even though the sound or shape of a word is meaningless in itself, the use we put them to–the way we arrange them opens them to an infinite number of possible meanings.

The stones do nothing. They just “stand there.” They exist in the moment of nunc stans (Thank you Scott Abbott), of “standing now” in the present. Yet they carry with them a connotation of extreme age, of events long past, of the people who touched them and placed them and wrote upon them. The language of a good book or a good poem does the same thing for me. The words only exist as I read them–before that they were just marks on a page. But as my eyes pass over them, the words connect me to an author who is absent–sometimes long absent. Whatever other message they might bear, Their texts become a monument that says, remember me. I was here. This was my space. I worked. I lived. I created. I am.

100 miles in the desert

So here are some pictures of my century ride in Moab. I finally have a few minutes to blog about it. It was absolutely beautiful, and the hill wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be--either that or it has already faded from memory. The pace started out really slow, and since I didn't know what the climb was going to be like, and since I had felt realllllly awful all week, so I took it easy too. In all there was about 7000 feet of climbing. The weather could not have been better. For the climb the clouds were out and kept it cool. The sun came out later, but it never go too hot.










This guy you see here next to me is Steve. I caught up with him at about the half-way point as we came on to the Colorado river road. We were doing about the same pace, so we were able to take turns breaking the headwind for each other. The company made the ride a lot more pleasant and the guy, despite having 20 or 30 years on me, was an animal.








Moab was smaller than it was when I was growing up there. But as soon as I got some of that red dirt under my fingers, it felt like I had come home. I have always wanted to do a ride down the river road in Moab. I have also been thinking for the past few years that I wanted to have some sort of goal for my workouts instead of just riding for fun. The century in Moab was perfect because it gave me an excuse to achieve two goals in one: It was far enough out of reach to be a real challenge, but in a great location that let me return to where I grew up.

I was tired when I finished, but not as bad as I expected. My arms actually hurt more than my legs. Probably a combination of the achy flu I had and the breaking I had to do when coming down the switchbacks into Castle Valley. The only real excitement came ten miles from the end when my front tire blew out violently. It sounded like a gunshot. We were going to boot the hole with a power bar wrapper when the SAG wagon showed up with a new tire. So I went home with a brand-new tire worth $40, that I was going to have to replace soon anyway.



And just so you know, after the ride, we went to Arches where Dallin found what was according to him "the perfect spot" and told his mom to take a picture. Which she did.

my latest ride

This week, in getting ready for the Moab Century Tour, I tried to do a little extra mileage. I did three rides over 40 miles, including this one




and this one. Even though it shows only 37 miles, I went a couple of miles further toward New Harmony than this map shows.

Last week I also climbed to the summit of American Fork Canyon, which should imitate the climb on the Moab Century.
All total I have done over 150 miles this week and over 860 since returning from Berlin in June.

And Now For Something Completely Different

For all of you who wondered what the communists were up to all those years.



Or this Swiss "rocket Scientist" I suppose it could be real.

Poetry and living life

Several years ago, one of my professors introduced me to a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “Selige Sehnsucht.” (Maybe blessed yearning). It is one of the staples of German literary history and well known by most in German Studies.

Sag es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet:
Das Lebendge will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.

In der Liebesnächte Kühlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.

Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reißet neu Verlangen
Auf zu höherer Begattung.

Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du Schmetterling verbrannt.

Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Once again my poor attempt at a translation. Sorry for the lack of rhyme and meter:

Blessed Yearning

Tell no one, only the wise,
For the masses will only mock:
That which lives I will praise,
That yearns for death in flames.

In the cool of the nights of love
That begat you, where you begat.
Falls over you the foreign feeling
When the silent candle shines.

No distance is too far,
Spellbound, you come flying,
And at last, covetous of the light
You, butterfly, are burned.

And as long as you cannot grasp that,
This: Die and Become!
You are but a dreary guest
on the darkened Earth.

There is far more in this poem than I can probably discuss at the moment. Obviously the final stanza makes a powerful statement for roll death plays in one’s life and in one’s existence. The butterfly’s flaming death suggests that it is not just death but the manner of death–the striving toward light–that brings meaning to life.

But the part that has always made me wonder was a claim by my professor that the Greek word for butterfly was psyche , a fact that I have had a hard time verifying, but that may be substantiated here. In Greek mythology (at least as we have this story handed down by the Romans–nothing is ever simple) Psyche is a mortal so beautiful that all the worshipers of Aphrodite have left the temples to go and worship Psyche. Angered, Aphrodite sends her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest thing possible. Instead, Eros pricks his own finger with the arrow intended for Psyche and falls in love with her. The two are married, but Eros refuses to appear in daylight, coming to her only at night. Her sisters, jealous of her happiness, convince Psyche to light a lantern and discover her husband’s identity. In response, Eros flees and Psyche is left heartbroken (and angry at her sisters). Eventually, Psyche must enter into Aphrodite’s service and perform a series of impossible tasks in order to win back her husband. In the last of these, she must descend into Hades and bring back a jar containing Persephone’s beauty. When she tries to partake of this beauty, however, she falls down, as if dead. In the end, Zeus intervenes, and she is reunited with Eros and becomes immortal with him as she joins the other deities.

On my recent trip to Germany, I ran into Psyche once or twice and it got me to thinking. In the Berlin museum of art, there is a statue in one of the stairwells of Pan consoling Psyche. It is hard to imagine the debaucherous Pan of having very pure intentions in his efforts. The statue is intensely sensuous and seeing it, I wanted to warn her against what the old goat had on his mind. But Psyche is more resourceful than one might think looking at her and I suspect that in the end her beauty (so often a stand in for goodness, a trope I have no desire to deconstruct at the moment--and excuse me for using the words deconstruct and trope in the same sentence) will save her again.

My second encounter was a family grouping outside the Zwinger in Dresden. Here, Psyche, Eros, and presumably Aphrodite appear to have reconciled and the happy end seems assured. I wonder at the placement of the statue and what the sculptor intended with his composition, but I like this one, too. There is also this representation that I found on the web that is intriging.

In both sculptures, Psyche’s butterfly wings are clearly visible, establishing the connection that I had wondered about earlier. The word “psyche” in Greek means breath or air and has by extension connotations of spirit and soul.

So in this context, the figure Psyche becomes a symbol for the longing of a mortal soul to be joined with the divine, and the efforts one will take, even if it means descending into death to do it. The more I learn of the story, the more impressed I am in Goethe’s ability to weave the various elements of it into his poem. For me there is something vividly mystical about the poem and the mythology in the idea that the soul, psyche, wants to be united with the heavens. At first reading, Goethe’s poem may seem to be a justification for suicide. But in reality, I think it is an appellation for life lived to it’s fullest, for a Thoreauean effort to suck the marrow out of life and live deeply and deliberately so that in the end, we will not discover that we have not lived at all.