Finesse mines buried listless,
(kissless)
incubate them, intubate them,
incur their greatest toll,
and desist detesting detonation,
else disarmed embrace the loss —

a few fewer joints,
no bloody knuckles,
fingerless, thus without blame,
emerging manicured in unkempt sway and
again shouldering,
soldiering,
a lovely heart’s cruel weight.

]]> http://lindsaysscribblings.com/uncategorized/some-house-ideas/feed 0 http://lindsaysscribblings.com/essays/hsi-wang-mu-queen-mother-of-the-west-taoist-goddess-during-the-t%e2%80%99ang-dynasty http://lindsaysscribblings.com/essays/hsi-wang-mu-queen-mother-of-the-west-taoist-goddess-during-the-t%e2%80%99ang-dynasty#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:10:29 +0000 lindsay http://lindsaysscribblings.com/?p=694

Using acrylic paint and a variety of brushes, I created the immortal world of Hsi Wang Mu: her garden in the mountains, with the peach tree of immortality, and divine and mystical purple clouds signifying her status. Beside her, I placed her counterimage the tiger, so that while she represents yin’s beauty, talent, and regality, it represents yin’s strength, endurance, and occasional ferocity. Together, they form a model and an ideal for traditional Chinese women, a haven by the unshown turquoise pond of a welcoming afterlife. They form a choice to neglect duty and filial piety (though priestesses were seen as quite dutiful) and become educated and independent, in effect non-traditional.

Hsi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the West, was the most influential goddess of the T’ang dynasty, though she began her rise to preeminence during the Han.  She had great status, riding in a purple cloud carriage pulled by nine chi’i-lin and being waited on by attending, highly talented “jade maidens” who served both food and entertainment.  She was considered a matriarch of other goddesses, and she kept the peaches of immortality in her palace’s garden on Mount K’un-lun, planting seeds and throwing a divine banquet once every thousand years as a peach reached maturity.    She, like the tiger she was sometimes displayed as, was a symbol of yin, the female, but she and her mountain palace by the turquoise pond also became associated with death.

Because she was the dominant female figure in the Taoist pantheon, she was considered the head of the female priesthood, and therefore had great impact on her female subscribers for she could grant the loyal transcendence. As Jowen R. Tung stated, some influential women, like poetess Yu Xuanji, and several of the T’ang princesses, such as Princess Yuhzen, moved into the Taoist priesthood in a gambit for independence and power.   Suzanne Cahill of the University of California San Diego, the chief scholar on Hsi Wang Mu’s influence, reaffirmed this claim[i].  Princesses Jade Verity and Golden Transcendent (their Taoist names) of the Li clan both entered religious life and followed the example of and were compared to the Queen Mother.  As they left their houses to join the cloister, they were referred to as beginning their ascension to the Queen Mother’s court, and as they gained authority and merit as priestesses, they were assumed to be intimately (and rhetorically) familiar with her by poets, calling her “Amah,” or “nanny.”

Nor was this the only influence Cahill claims the myth had.  Courtesans were often compared to the “jade maidens,” especially during mention of their musical skill.  Courtesans could believe in the protection of the Queen Mother for young beautiful women talented in music and service.

Therefore, between her patronage of priestesses and Taoist adepts and her patronage of courtesans and public women, Hsi Wang Mu could be considered a role model for non-traditional life in traditional China (for she was not a goddess to bless mundane happenings, like childbirth), granting a lifestyle of independence to women outside of the household and allowing them to enter the Taoist religion and convents for security, legitimacy, and prestige.

There were two problems with President George W. Bush’s central foreign policy aim.  First, the aim itself was noble but misprioritized.   By seeking to abolish tyranny and spread freedom around and throughout the world, President Bush was relying on his moral idealism, fueled by his devout faith, to determine policies for the world.   Unfortunately, this meant a move away from the Realism past Presidents had employed successfully and overlooked the dirty political realities of our time:  abolishing tyranny is not so simple as toppling a dictator, in many cases there are no established, peace-seeking leaders to fill the resultant vacuum with freedom, and a more radical, anti-American regime will emerge; in the wake of colonialism, not every country is a nation-state, many are multination-states in which bloody ethnic sectarianism is the norm, preventing cooperative elections, much less stability; since the end of the Cold War, the United States has had more might than any other nation, but it has not had enough hegemony to be above needing the aid and good will of other nations – thrusting democracy upon unwilling nations through brute force and invasion is not endearing.  Ultimately, freedom should be viewed as an end, not a means, of stability, and democracy as an end, not a means, of freedom.  Second, in pursuing these unrealistic aims, President Bush surrounded himself with advisors who would kowtow to his interests, neglect criticism, and hide their own goals.  In particular, Donald Rumsfeld’s rejection of traditional military planning tactics, especially of Stage IV planning – the formation of post-war stability and infrastructure – in Iraq not only left Iraq crippled but left America’s capital to accomplish its foreign policy objectives decimated, destroying international empathy and solidarity for American interests.  This in turn hurt the perception of the very American values George W. Bush hoped to spread, making them undesirable, because he repeatedly and with some success tried to convince the world that America’s values and interests were now one and the same.

Bush’s aim shaped his policy towards several countries, including North Korea.  By rejecting Kim Jung Il simply because he was (and is) a dictator, President Bush disregarded the advances that his predecessor, President Clinton, had made with Kim Il Sung in the Agreed Framework.  He moved instead to impose economic sanctions and a policy of nonrecognition.  In so doing, he allowed North Korea to build a stockpile of nuclear weapons made from the reprocessing of commercial plutonium pits that had once been locked away and subject to IAEA protections.  Thus, Bush’s action to protect morality by condemning a tyrannical figure and system hurt America and the world at large by allowing that very figure to acquire the same Weapons of Mass Destruction he argued were, in other cases, reason for war.

Another place he tried to implement this aim as policy was Palestine.  By refusing to take meaningful steps towards peace until after Palestine met the U.S.’s condition of establishing democratic structures and institutions, Bush prevented those very structures from coming about.  Instead of an agreement with Israel under the friendly Mahmoud Abbas, the U.S. was left with the rise of Hamas and militant extremism through the same elections that it touted would bring increased democracy.  Similarly, when Hezbollah was fighting Israel, the U.S. should have taken action to quell the belligerence and work with fleetingly yielding Arab states.  Instead, hoping to avoid dealings with states perceived as non-democratic and abusive of human rights, the U.S., via Condoleezza Rice, missed the opportunity to form a less hostile Middle East and a safer Lebanon.

In Iraq, the problem of ill-prepared and willfully ignorant advisors came much further to the fore.   In all of their strategizing, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney tried to dismiss or suppress opposition, framing all such attempts as the by-product of liberal Clinton loyalists.  In fact, though Rumsfeld was correct about the potential of technology to transform the air force into a far more vital organ of military attack, particularly for strikes of industrialized, urban nations, his desire to see a “transformational” era of U.S. foreign policy based primarily upon military muscle was misguided at best.  By refraining from interaction with opposing thinkers, he left no place in his invasion plans for a stabilization strategy.   He hoped not to remain as an occupying force at all.   But this was contrary to the true aim of the war, which Bush had stated as not merely removing Saddam Hussein from power, which Rumsfeld accomplished with astonishing rapidity and ease, but bringing democracy to the people of Iraq.  In this sense, Frank Miller, the man in charge of acquisitions and agreements for Iraq’s war effort, who attempted to enact a similar policy of preparation for the post-war transition, could have been of use.   But the Pentagon resisted his attempts.  Collin Powell, the ignored and later dismissed Secretary of State, also could have been of use.  But because Powell was unable to play to both the President’s religious sentimentalism and his “cowboy instincts,” he was disregarded.   His replacement, Condoleeza Rice, was a loyal convert to Bush’s policy, despite her own education to the contrary, and took little action to force a change in the handling of post-invasion Iraq.  Even when she did report Rumsfeld’s inaction to the President, he refused to personally intervene, and nothing was done.  Nor was Rumsfeld the only one not held to account – L. Paul Bremer, the man placed in charge of Iraq’s domestic affairs in the interim between the invasion and the election, took actions without the consent of the President, and completely contrary to all high level consensus, at the instruction of Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith. His decrees were never reversed and his authority left unchallenged.

Therefore, by cherishing freedom not merely as an ideal but as a tool to be used against other nations for what America perceived as those nations’ “own best interest,” and refusing to hire advisors who might think otherwise and promote a moderate foreign policy, President Bush inspired a mass of anti-American sentiment that promoted tyranny and denigrated freedom, contrary to his aim.

The stegoceras, like many other dinosaurs, was difficult to classify.  It received the name “stegoceras” from Lawrence Lambe in 1902 and was synoymized subjectively with Troodon by Gilmore in 1924 (1). The name stegoceras can be translated “horny roof” and is derived from the characteristic domed head (typical of pachycephlosaurs), wrapped with a single ring of horns and particularly from the “quamosal shelf and open supratemporal fossae” (6).  This skull could be up to 8 cm thick and has 29 distinct marker characteristics, encasing a relatively large brain (for a herbivore) while leaving plenty of spacious interior between brain and bone (3).

Though Lambe asserted upon discovery that it belonged to Ceratopsidae (and reasserted this in 1911), Huene assigned it to Reptilia in 1909 and Nopcsa assigned it to Acanthopholidae in 1928.  Zhao (1983) and Maryanska and Osmolska (1985) came the closest to the modern taxonomy, Pachycephalosauridae (family), labeling it Pachycephalosauroidea and Pachycephalosauria (infraorder), respectively.  In 1986, Sereno assigned it to Tholocephalidae but has since 1997 yielded to popular scientific consensus (1).    The taxonomy, then, is Animalia, Chordata, Reptilia, Dinosauria, Ornithischia, Genasauria, Cerapoda, Marginocephalia, Pachycephalosauria, Goyocephala, Homalocephaloidea, Pachycephalosauridae, Stegoceras (2). There are several species of Stegoceras: S. edmontonensis and S. validum (synonymous with S. lambei, Troodon sternbergi, and S. brevis) (1).

Like all ornithischians, the stegoceras had a pubis pointing backward, running parallel with the ischium.   Marginocephalia commonly had rings or frills of horns around their skulls, and Pachycephalosauria were the infraorder of bone-headed dinosaurs (8).

The fossils for Stegoceras validum were found in Alberta, Canada (including the Oldman Formation) and across the border in Montana, USA (including the Judith River Formation). As recently as September of 2009, the identity of a pachycephalosaurid discovered in Alberta, Colepiocephale lambei, has been disputed (5). Sullivan argued that “the holotype of “Stegoceras” lambei, and all morphotypes of this species, are unique in the construction of the posterior squamosal region” and placed them into the new genus, “Colepiocephale” (6).  However, Colepiocephale lambei might be synonymous with Stegoceras validum, or it might be a distinct species of Stegoceras (5).

Stegoceras lived in the Upper Cretaceous period, during the Campanian age (2) from 83.5 – 70.6 Ma (1), roughly the same time period as tyrannosaurus and anklyiosaurus. Stegoceras grew to be 1.2 meters tall, 78kg in weight (3) and up to 2.4 meters in length (2).  It was bipedal and like most cerapods, fast for a dinosaur.   It probably ran for defense (3).   From the fossil record, it seems to have lived in a small gregarious herd (1,3).   Its curved, serrated teeth reveal that it was a herbivore (3). It was terrestrial, living on the coast or upland (1, 3).   Its reproduction was oviparous (1).  It likely evolved from Hypsilophodon, a small, agile, bipedal herbivore (3).

There are two distinct phenons of Stegoceras validum.  The two phenons share similar braincases and dome shapes, but have different dome sizes and thicknesses.  Because of morphological similarity and probable sympatry, this heterogeneity probably represents not distinct species, but rather sexual dimorphs of the single species Stegoceras validum (7).

Paleontologist Mark Goodwin of the University of California at Berkeley does not believe Stegoceras, like bighorn sheep, Ovis canadensi, used its thick skull to headbutt others of its kind.  Like bowling bowls, he claimed, their heads would glance off each other.  Moreover, their heads are actually porous and fragile under pressure, not resilient, and he found no evidence of healed scars on pachycephalosaur skulls (3).  Though the frontoparietal dome contains radiating structures that were previously used to justify the head-ramming assertion, these diminish over time as the creatures mature and are basically absent from adults.  Therefore, it is more logical that this cranial display should be attributed to sexual selection and species recognition than to courtship behaviors (4).

In conclusion, Stegoceras was a smaller, agile, herbivorous dinosaur whose classification and bone structure both originally baffled paleontologists.   While the issue of taxonomy appears to have been resolved (and might undergo more changes and clarification over time), understanding the purpose of the stegoceras’s bone structure is still a task under review.  The analysis that its thick skull was evolved for the purpose of head butting other stegocerases during a mating ritual has been rebutted, but the conclusion that instead the stegoceras evolved such a highly specialized noggin solely to bash the flanks of larger predators also seems mistaken.   If that were the case, their skulls could be much thinner, like those of the many other herbivores who aimed to maim when under duress.  The easiest answer is that the distinctive phenon aided sexual selection by manifesting fitness, but this may not account for the full functionality of stegoceras’s most distinctive feature.

Sources

1. http://paleobackup.nceas.ucsb.edu:8090/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?action=checkTaxonInfo&taxon_no=38787&is_real_user=1

2. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/nature-online/dino-directory/detail.dsml?Genus=Stegoceras&showTaxonomy=yes&identifier=stegoceras&&beginIndex=&section=home

3. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinos/Stegoceras.shtml

4. Cranial histology of pachycephalosaurs (Ornithischia : Marginocephalia) reveals transitory structures inconsistent with head-butting behavior. Goodwin, MB; Horner, JR.  PALEOBIOLOGY   Volume: 30   Issue: 2   Pages: 253-267   Published: SPR 2004

5. THE ANATOMY AND SYSTEMATICS OF COLEPIOCEPHALE LAMBEI (DINOSAURIA: PACHYCEPHALOSAURIDAE).  Schott, RK; Evans, DC; Williamson, TE, et al.  JOURNAL OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY   Volume: 29   Issue: 3   Pages: 771-786   Published: 2009

6. Revision of the dinosaur Stegoceras Lambe (Ornithischia, Pachycephalosauridae).  Sullivan, RM.  JOURNAL OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY   Volume: 23   Issue: 1   Pages: 181-207   Published: APR 11 2003.

7. A Morphometric Study of the Cranium of the Pachycephalosaurid Dinosaur Stegoceras?A Morphometric Study of the Cranium of the Pachycephalosaurid Dinosaur Stegoceras.  Ralph E. Chapman, Peter M. Galton, J. John Sepkoski, Jr., William P. Wall.  Journal of Paleontology, Vol. 55, No. 3 (May, 1981), pp. 608-618

8. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/ornithischia/ornithischia.html

Yeah.

Don’t you realize that it is this loneliness
That pushed me over the edge to start with
The sudden and complete desolation
Of being untouched and spoken to
Spoken for
Or touched but not spoken to?
I am incomplete and unfinished.
I am corruptible and unsatisfied.
I am weak and manipulable.

The only truth is that I am alone, and have been.
We must talk.

Undying as the stars, indefatigable as a black hole?  To have been someone else, to be someone else, to only, just for now, be yourself —  but always, to be?

Or would you prefer only ever to be your current self, to grow as old as old can be,  and then to cease?