Blackouts in the Area

On Wednesday an ice storm hit and the power went out. I wrote the following in a pocket-sized Zequenz notebook with an enormous ornate Jinhao Pendragon pen on Thursday, the 23rd. It's Saturday now. DTE, the utility, first estimated my power would be back on by Thursday, two days ago, the day I wrote the following. Later they revised their estimate to Tuesday next week. Currently they are making no estimate. My place was one of over a million homes and business without power for some time this week. Yesterday over 750,000 of them still had no power.

23 February 2023 My brother said he will pick me up today after work and let me stay with him until the power is back on. DTE emailed me and said my power is estimated to be back on today. 

I don't believe DTE. 

Does my brother? I've been hoping to see my brother F2F, been a while, hope it still happens.

It was colder than a welldigger's ass last night inside my home. The night seemed very, very long. I suppose that means I didn't sleep well.

Standing on my porch around 5PM even though it's a little warmer inside, because it's too dark inside to write, writing this in my Zequenz. Capping and uncapping this Jinhao Pendragon feels like a nice little ceremony. Perhaps not an entire Japanese tea ceremony, but still. 

5:01PM, my brother called to say he's on his way. My neighbor has agreed to look out for Amazon packages, and to put them inside the porch, in case Amazon leaves them outside despite my standing instructions. Amazon usually leaves them inside the porch. But it's nice to know my neighbor will look out. She easily wins Neighbor of the year, year after year.

Visible from inside my porch: Streets, sidewalks, cars, trucks, SUV's etc, a "telephone" pole which I believe carries only electricity, grass, grass re-seeding where DTE tore it up putting in new gas lines this summer, masonry, plastic trash bins, movement of tree limbs in the wind, wooden outside staircases with wooden railings outside duplex residences, roofs, both shingles and... metal? Definitely not shingles. Street signs, chimneys. Those plain narrow metal gas exhaust pipes in roofs of buildings which run wholly or partly on gas power, are those also called chimneys?

I haven't seen any birds today.

Truth and Prejudice, and Steven Runciman

I've read a lot of historians who have the best reputations, who've written over the course of the past 2,500 years, in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, English and some other languages, and the one who has impressed me the most, by far, is Steven Runciman, born 1903, died 2001. (The historians wrote in those languages. In the case of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and some other languages, I've read them in translation.) At the beginning of Chapter I of his first book, The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus & His Reign, published in 1929, Runciman lays out a lot of what his career is going to be about. He begins:

"In the battles between truth and prejudice, waged on the field of history books, it must be confessed that the latter usually wins."

So right away, he admits that he's fighting an uphill battle which he doesn't expect to win.

 

Also right at the beginning of his first book, he lays out the field of battle where he's going to struggle to put the facts across and defeat prejudice. It's a field my brother and I have often discussed recently: the image, in the West, of the Eastern Roman Empire (usually referred to in the West as Byzantium), after the Western Empire fell. Runciman describes how crude, warlike Westerners, the Crusaders, came into contact with Byzantium and found

 

"[...]a society where everyone read and wrote, ate food with forks and preferred diplomacy to war."

  

Runciman states flatly, here at the beginning of his first book, that up until shortly before his own time, prejudice had trounced truth even in the best history written in the West when it came to Byzantium. And then he spent a very long and brilliant career backing up this flat statement. Rather than admit that Byzantine society was more advanced in many ways than their own, Western historians made "byzantine" an adjective meaning decadent, flabby, lazy, cowardly, cunning, etc, etc. Runciman's mentor JB Bury (1861-1927), a pioneer in bucking this pervasive trend, went so far as to refuse to even use the term "Byzantium" to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire after the Western Empire had fallen. 

 

Bury, Runciman and some like-minded Western historians have made some headway in changing the attitudes of historians, and somewhat less, so far, in the consciousness of the general public. It's still quite common to encounter very well-educated Westerners who talk of the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, who refer to the Catholic Church before the Reformation, and Catholicism plus Protestantism since then, as "the whole of Christendom," completely ignoring Greek Orthodoxy, not to mention the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian and Nestorian churches who never acknowledged Catholic or orthodox supremacy.

It seems to me, now, simple enough to recognize that, for example, the Romans who were represented at Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate and a garrison of soldiers in the time of Christ did not go anywhere in AD 476, and to grasp why Christians who already had their own written languages were not inclined to accept either a Latin or a Greek spiritual overlordship. 

But did I see any of this before people like Runciman and Bury pointed it out to me? No, of course I didn't, any more than I saw how obviously Gothic cathedral towers, all built after the Crusades began, mimic Muslim minarets, before that was pointed out to me.

You have to see a truth first. Then it can become obvious. Not the other way around. Which usually means that someone else has to point it out to you. 

Anabaptists, Mennonites, Amish, Pietists, Brethren *and Calvinists

In the part of northern Indiana I come from, there are quite a few Amish, and also quite a few members of the Church of the Brethren, the church in which I was raised, and also several other denominations which have "Brethren" in their names: Conservative Grace Brethren, Fellowship of Grace Brethren, Dunkard Brethren and others.

The Church of the Brethren and the Amish both are Anabaptist denominations. Anabaptists are pacifists. They do not believe in infant baptism. The children of their congregations grow to a certain age, and then they may be baptized and join the church, or not, supposedly of their own free will and with no coercion. I'm sure that the actual measure of coercion varies greatly from congregation to congregation, and from one family to another within that congregation. I have to say that, in my own particular case, as I no longer hold certain religious beliefs with which I was raised, most of my extended family, and other Brethren whom I happen to meet, have continued to accept me as I am, with a really remarkable lack of either judgment or shunning.

Anabaptists split away very early from the main Lutheran church. The first Anabaptist martyr, Felix Manz, was drowned by Lutherans in Zurich in 1527. That's just six years after Luther himself, then a Catholic monk, was declared a heretic. Lutherans wasted no damn time at all in persecuting their own heretics.

Mennonites are also Anabaptists.

The Amish are named after the Anabaptist leader Jakob Amman, born 1644, died early 18th century. The Mennonite church goes all the way back to one of the very first anabaptist leaders, Menno Simons, born 1496, died 1561.

However, the Church of the Brethren are not directed descended from that very first group of Anabaptists. Rather, it came from the Schwarzenau Brethren, who left Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist* churches and joined the Anabaptist movement during the 17th and 18th centuries. Alexander Mack was an early leader of the Schwarzenau Brethren.         *Calvinists do not call themselves Calvinists. They call themselves members of the Reformed Church. They are extremely annoying nit-pickers who love to correct people about things that don't mean shit, such as that they (supposedly) are not Calvinists.

The Schwarzenau Brethren are part of a larger Protestant movement emphasizing pacifism and a personal understanding of God, known as Pietism. 

Right from the first, denominations split off from the Schwarzenau Brethren. There are some churches called "Brethren" which did not come from the Schwarzenau Brethren, and a lot which did. There were numerous splits during the 1880's and afterward. It gets really complicated. The Church of the Brethren, the church of my family, one of the Brethren denominations who chose the "progressive" path rather than the rejection of modernity, adopted that name in 1905, changing from German Baptist Brethren. Which denomination is the true inheritor of the Schwarzenau Brethren, and which have left their path, is, I am fairly certain, a matter of some dispute, and often highly influenced by which denomination one happens to belong to or feel most sympathetic to.