Caspar David Friedrich x 2.

Last night I had a horrid dream, likely tied to the day’s reading and writing about Caspar David Friedrich. Emotionally depleted from curating a show of Holocaust photography at a German Jewish museum, I took the wrong train, ending up traveling through Poland. Once we reached the Baltic Sea shore, the train stopped. Throngs of people, me among them, scrambled down the dunes and cliffs to the beach to see Orcas (! they live in all oceans except the Black and the Baltic Sea…) swimming in what looked like jet-black, glassy waves that were suspended in slow motion. Friedrich’s Sea of Ice had melted, but the water was not behaving naturally. I could not really see much given the wall of people, all with their back turned to me and then realized I had left my backpack, wallet and iPhone as well as my heavy coat in the train – what if it left? You can anticipate the rest – trying to scramble up the cliffs, heart pounding, stone crumbling under your feet…

My former hometown museum, Hamburger Kunsthalle, currently offers a blockbuster retrospective of works by Caspar David Friedrich. By all reports it is a curatorial masterpiece, guiding you through the evolution of the work by this preeminent romanticist painter, while the drawings and paintings are simultaneously grouped by thematic content, making for a more comprehensive visual experience. A whale of a show where you can see nothing on opening night because of the masses of visitors celebrating the occasion.

The cherry on top can be found on the second floor of the museum – a selection of contemporary artists whose work references, or is derived from, or parodies Friedrich.

I’d give an arm and a leg to see it, but my days of travel to Europe are over. Luckily we can get some glimpses on-line. Here is a general tour of the exhibition. And here is an audio tour for selected works – the second entry from top in the link is the english version. One below that is one for children, which I find an extremely cool idea.

Alas, nothing visually available in my cursory search on the modern artists who relate to Friedrich. But here is a recent review that goes into more depth.

Concurrent with the exhibition, a darling of Germany’s current literary scene, author and art historian Florian Illies, published a book about Caspar David Friedrich (CDF), Der Zauber der Stille – Caspar David Friedrichs Reise durch die Zeiten (The Enchantment of Silence, CDF’s travels through time – not yet translated.) I am halfway through it and must say it provokes a lot of different reactions.

For one, I have certainly lost my ability to concentrate across the years of the pandemic. Maybe it is just aging, maybe it is the lack of conversational interaction, or the stress levels that impede sustained reading. If the structure of a book is complicated I often get lost and/or frustrated. Well, this book does have a complex structure, but it held my attention by the sheer force of curiosity it instilled: where is the author going next? What seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge will be imparted in unexpected juxtapositions?

Like one of his successful previous books, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39, which described the fates of numerous famous couples during the ascent of fascism in Europe, drawing relevant parallels to our own times, the new book is an accumulation of vignettes which constantly shift between times and perspectives. The book is divided in chapters referencing fire, water, earth and air as elements relevant to both life and work of CDF. A very helpful time table is in the appendix, as are recommendations for further writings by specialists on the topic. It is a book that helps you learn, without sacrificing amusement.

Reconstructed Frauenkirche that was destroyed in the allied fire bombing

If you ignore the somewhat self-congratulatory tone of an author who knows how clever he is, and his insistent descriptions of what and how Caspar David Friedrich thought and felt – a bit too presumptuous for my taste – you are in for a ride that elates. You learn so much about the artist, his times, the trauma that defined his development, the strange interactions with women (he decided he needed to be married in his mid-forties when the neighbor who kept his wood stove going while the artist went on his daily hikes, went on vacation. He asked for the hand of a 20+ year younger woman, who he had encountered in the store where he bought his art materials, and could not even remember her first name during the 2 year-long engagement…)

The kind of house CDF likely rented an apartment in.

Florian Illies is a quintessential story teller, and weaves tales that help us understand an artist whose rebirth into public consciousness, after long eras of almost complete obsoleteness, is no coincidence. Then and now a longing for something that juxtaposes or lifts the despair du jour was pretty central to people’s existence, and his work captured that longing (and its potential remedies) in ways not seen before.

But the author also makes us think about historical interconnections, often occurring by chance. For example, Walt Disney, during trips to Europe, collected art books galore and shipped them back to the US. When he was told by Thomas Mann, while both received an honorary doctorate at Harvard or some such, that Felix Salten’s tale Bambi would be a great script for a movie, Disney promptly acted on the suggestion and told his artists to use the CD Friedrich landscapes from the art books as the background for the movie. Hitler, a Disney fan, adored the movie. Never mind, that Felix Salten’s book, written by this Jewish author and perceived to be a cloaked substitute for Jewish persecution, was one of the first to be publicly burned.

The Nazis later appropriated Friedrich’s oeuvre into their canon of true Germanic art, to the point where every young soldier sent to his death at the rapidly deteriorating Russian front received a booklet called Caspar David Friedrich and his Homeland, containing black and white prints of his paintings of oaks and the sea. The introduction contained the assertion that the artist carried a life-long, unmovable, holy belief in Germany.

View of Dresden from the surrounding hills

Anecdote after anecdote, one art-history related morsel after another. The extreme colors of the sky, reminiscent of those of his contemporary Turner? Why, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island, now Indonesia, erupted in 1815, and ash particles that traveled across the world had an impact on how colors in the atmosphere were perceived. The theme of fire and ash replicates itself through out Friedrich’s life. So many of his works lost to fire, so many of the places he was connected to, burned.

The landscapes all constructed, rather than true life depictions, painted in a darkened basement room, fixed with the famous backside views of wanderers and women because the artist felt he could not draw people correctly, the back view being a welcome simplification. On and on it goes, deflating myths, augmenting admiration for a man who struggled with life-long depression, pathological shyness and poverty.

The river Elbe that crosses the city, where he walked during dawn and dusk, every day.

Until you have a chance to read it in English, here is some compensation for the wait: here is a link to a website that has accumulated titles of books that have a truly interesting or innovative structure. I can highly recommend Life after Life and The Warmth of other Suns.

Photographs today are from Dresden, where the artist lived his adult life.

Music today by Carl Maria von Weber, musical champion of the ideals of Romaticism. He overlapped with CDF in Dresden, where he became the director of the German Opera in 1817 and where he wrote the Freischütz. I selected an earlier composition, a beautiful piece for clarinet, though.

Kitsch and Kunst – the Visual Representation of Consolation.

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.”

In a recent interview Rebecca Solnit talked about hope amid the climate chaos. She defined the term: “Hope, for me, is just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.” She added the observation, “many people are very good at imagining everything falling apart, everything getting worse; they’re good at dystopia, they’re bad at utopia.” Sometimes, I thought, a word of consolation would help, rather than the exhortation for all of us to try even harder during times when despair sets in. The thought was probably triggered by my current reading – I came across the interview while starting a recent book by Michael Ignatieff, The Art of Consolation. How to find solace in dark times. (The link gives you an excerpt of the preface.)

I had liked Ignatieff’s brilliant biography of Isaiah Berlin, but am currently irritated, two chapters into these meditations, about his devotion to religious attempts at consolation with the imperative to just accept the unknowable. No takers for “all has a hidden meaning – only a higher power knows” on this end here. The chapters are organized around a summary and analysis, ordered along a historical time line, of famous people’s dealing with catastrophe and defining forms of consolation, a veritable gallery of the broken and bereaved, as a clever review in The Guardian phrased it. More skeptical review in the NYT here.

Maybe I am just currently irritated in general. Who knows.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to find some examples of visual representations of consolation. How do you visually translate the moment when we attempt to help someone reverse or shift despair into something more resembling a somewhat normal life, if not hope? The moment when someone or something opens a perspective towards this shift, providing a sense that it is possible, or probable, or even guaranteed that life will be easier to bear at some point?

The search resulted in a mix. It arches from representations of the texts that governed the belief systems of different eras to impressionistic paintings that captured the human interaction associated with comforting, from mannerist paintings to some modern photography. What is art and what is Kitsch I leave to the eye of the beholder.

I’ll start with miniatures from The Getty relating to Boethius’ Consolation de Philosophie, around 1460-70. The Roman philosopher’s book was the most read in Europe after the bible. It contains “a dialogue between its author and the personification of Philosophy, in prison while awaiting trial for treason. Discussing the problem of evil and the conflict between free will and divine providence, Philosophy explains the changeable nature of Fortune and consoles Boethius in his adversity.”

Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?) (French, active about 1450 – 1485), Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (called Boethius) (Italian, about 480 – 524/526), Jean de Meun (French, about 1240/1260

Compare that with this:

Matthew James Collins The Consolation of Philosophy (2016)

Here is another consolation of the imprisoned:

Conrad Meyer Consolation of the Imprisoned – I could not find the date, in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

More hollow eyes in a lithograph counterpart:

Georg Ehrlich Consolation (Tröstung) (1920) from the periodical Genius. Zeitschrift für werdende und alte Kunst, vol. 2, no. 1

Here is as academiscist a depiction as they come:

Auguste Toulmouche Consolation (1867)

And something, what can I say, 150 years later:

Laura Makabresku Consolation (2014)

There is Munch, there is always Edvard Munch, who we can count on.

Edvard Munch Consolation (1894)

Compare:

PDX photographer, now based in Brooklyn, Olivia Bee Consolation (2020.)

Any thoughts? And what to make of the image (“Consolation”) of a fetus…. at the center of the exhibition Colpo di Folmine (Struck by Lightning) by Dutch photographer Arno Massee?

I, personally, find solace in the somewhat sarcastic poetry of Heinrich Heine, who, in 1832, reminds a woman staring at the sea with setting sun, that the sun will rise again….translated by no other than Emma Lazarus!

Here is one of Kaspar David Friedrich’s back views, alternatingly titled: Woman in front of the setting sun, Sunset, Sunrise, Morning Sun, Woman in the morning sun. No sea in sight, but the solace of a world still turning. That’s my kind of consolation. Then again, that painting might also be a premonition of a burning planet due to unending fossil fuel consumption – wouldn’t you know it, despair is here to stay.

For music today: Here are Liszt’s Six Consolations.

Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.

Today’s musings will be all over the map, geographically, emotionally and with regards to content that has preoccupied my brain for a while. It all leads back to Octavia E. Butler, a writer who I admire for her exquisite, creative world building, her focus on in/justice, and her ability to transcend genres. I am even more grateful for all of her modeling of what it means to have courage and persistence, to stick to goals defying racist, patriarchal, professionally closed systems, while skirting existential poverty and loneliness during formative years.

Mural at the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School in Altadena, CA.

All over the map: Let’s start with Trieste, Italy. Why Trieste? I was somewhat condescendingly amused during my 2018 visit there to see flocks of fans follow the footsteps of their hero, James Joyce, who lived and wrote major works in Trieste for years. Selfies with his statue, tour lines in front of his lodgings, photographs of the multiple plaques conveniently placed by the Bureau of Tourism: Joyce walked over this bridge here! More than once!

Well, I was wrong, I’ve joined the multitudes and never should have sneered. Not pursuing Joyce, nor taking selfies, but I am now trying to walk along the paths of someone I wish I’d understand, taking in the neighborhoods and buildings that were part of her daily life, reading about her struggle, and visiting places that keep her memory alive.

Pasadena, CA, then, is next. No plaques here, but a helpful map laying out routes frequently taken by Butler, prepared by people at the Huntington Library which holds the author’s archives. An even more helpful book by journalist Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky – the World of Octavia E. Butler, which introduces the canvas on which Butler drew both herself and the worlds she constructed from the insights captured by her daily struggles, the physical environment in which she labored, and the mental landscapes that she traveled while growing into the writer some of us now devour. George describes the author with exceptional sensitivity and intuition, during the years before Butler would go on to become a MacArthur (Genius) Fellow and win a Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Hugo and Nebula Awards for her trailblazing work in science fiction—the first Black woman to win both awards.

Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA, to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who was a shoe shiner and died when she was very young. She was dyslexic, isolated in school and not particularly supported by the majority of her teachers. Later she turned to menial jobs, often physical labor, that did not require much thought so she was free to do her own thinking, and could use the rest of her time to walk or visit libraries, some involving hours on the bus.

Historic center Pasadena, including the post office where checks, manuscripts acceptance or rejection letters might have arrived in her P.O.Box.

Lynell George’s account of these early years is, among other things, based on archival items that Butler saved over the years: lists. And lists. And lists. On scrap paper, or any other expandable surface she could write on, perhaps compulsively constructed to organize and likely ward off a flood of fears that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Lists to evaluate what could be pawned to head off starvation. Lists of goals. Lists of dreams. Lists of exhortations or promises to Self, or incantations about how the world should be and how to make it so.

An eternally slow start to find her way into publishing, with 2 small manuscripts sold in 5 years, interminable stretches of professional drought, and yet this author went on to write and publish over a dozen books, with artists, play-writes, musicians and film makers increasingly inspired by the work since her death from injuries sustained in a fall at the age of 58 in 2006. Her novels are taught at colleges and universities around the country (well, where there are not yet banned, I should hasten to add…) and you can now watch adaptions of her books on TV. (Coincidentally, this weekend’s NYT listed an introduction to some of the essential works, so you can see for yourself how much ground was covered or where to start.)

***

Many of Butler’s books can be found in a small book store on North Hill Avenue in Pasadena, Octavia’s Bookshelf. It opened about a month ago and offers a range of works by BIPOC writers, and a welcome space to sit down and explore.

Here I meet Nikki High, owner of the store, who is helpful in recommending books when I approach her to pick her brain and perfectly happy to spend some of her valuable time chatting with this stranger. Which brings us to the Republic of Ghana, the west-African country where sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois resided during the last years of his life and is buried. He died on the eve of the civil-rights march in Washington,D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream”speech and where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP announced Du Bois’s death from the podium. I mention to Nikki that I am currently reading a thought provoking, beautiful novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Lovesongs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and she tells me about her recent travels to Ghana to visit Du Bois’ grave and the house he lived in, visibly moved by the reliving of that memory.

Jeffer’s novel revolves around the concept of Double Consciousness that Du Bois introduced in his seminal book The Souls of Black Folk (1903.) So does Kindred, (2003) Butler’s historical fiction/fantasy novel introducing a heroine who time travels between the 19th and 20th century, between the slave plantation where her ancestors suffered and her interracial marriage in 1976 L.A.. The novel has become a cornerstone of Black American literature.

Du Bois argued that living as an African American within a system of White racism leads to a kind of fragmented identity. The double consciousness refers to “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

“It is a socio-cultural construct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributed specifically to people of African descent in America. The “two-ness” of which it is a consciousness thus is not inherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here as both imposed and fraught with psychic danger.” (Ref.)

The socio-cultural existence is defined by a racial hierarchy that includes hostility and suspicion, subtle or outright exclusion, a life lived in uncertainty and guardedness. The individual’s identity, both novels argue, is also affected by the historical fact that harm extended beyond the individual to whole family structures and networks of kin. Only when you understand the legacy of historical trauma and merge it into your own sense of self will it cease to afflict you. Past and present need to be integrated to mend a disjointed self.

***

As luck would have it, the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School‘s library celebrates an OEB science fiction festival the next day. Previously Washington Middle School, the institution’s new name (since Fall 2022) honors its famous alumna. Since I have to avoid crowded indoor settings during the pandemic (it is NOT over, folks!), I cannot join the activities, but manage to get a few photos in a ventilated hallway. New generations are introduced to a role model that leaves you in awe for the obstacles overcome.

On to Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, CA, where Butler is buried. It is a peaceful place with beautiful old tree growth, als long as you ignore the coyotes that they warn you about, patrolling in packs, by some reports.

Butler’s grave marker is unobtrusive, not easy to find. The inscription is one of her most frequently cited insights, from the book The Parabel of the Sower (1993), where she turned her attention to climate catastrophe and the subsequent militarization of state and rapidly shrinking chances of survival. Set in 2024, it seems utterly prescient in retrospect, its descriptions outlining the contours of our lived or soon to be lived reality.

Allow me one short digression, and some speculation, you’ll see why in a minute. Butler’s last resting place sports numerous strange grave stones, if you can call it that, artificial tree stumps carved with the emblems of a maul, wedge, axe and dove, as well as markers inscribed with repeat phrases, the Latin motto “Dum Tacet Clamet” which translates to “though silent, he speaks.” A bit of research brought me to Omaha, Nebraska, where one Joseph Cullen Root founded The Woodmen of the World (WOW) in the early 1890s. It was essentially a mutual aid society, a beneficiary order that provided death benefits and grave stones to its members by essentially passing around a hat.

That turned out not to work exactly, and so shifted thirty years later to become a regular life insurance company. By 1901 it was the largest fraternal organization in Oregon with 140 camps and a membership of 15,000. Membership conditions: you had to prove yourself in various ways, be older than 16 and – White. A subdivision, Women of Woodcraft, is captured in this photograph.

Women of Woodcraft (likely a drill team), ca. 1910. Object ID: 2011.033.001; Copyright Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center

Would Butler be turning in her grave, surrounded by valkyries like these? Likely not. She would point to the importance of the idea of mutual aid, and to change: if you look at the website of the WoodmenLife Insurance Company that grew out of WOW, you find images of Black, Asian, Brown and other faces among the White beneficiaries, carefully assembled to stress diversity. It might only be on the surface, who can tell, but change nonetheless. And in any case – she might stay silent, but her work speaks to millions, in contrast to the wood people of the world….

***

This brings me to the reason why I, an old White European woman who can take privilege seemingly for granted, am so preoccupied with a Black writer who envisioned change and imbued her heroines with strength and refusal to give up, forever pursuing humanistic goals. She instills hope.

I feel like living in an era where, here as well as internationally, change is pursued or co-opted to move us backwards. The powers that be (or wannabe) want to affirm or re-install structures – and I mean STRUCTURES – that go beyond individual racist impulses or acts, to dominate on top of a hierarchy and use that dominance to extract riches and suffering. These forces are insisting that “differences”exists, be they racial, religious, gender, sexuality or simply cultural. Don’t ever believe in equality! Put a value label to these differing categories, with some “better,” others “worse,” with the dominant category, of course, being the superior one. This valuation is extended to an entire group, depreciating not just single humans, but a whole category. “Negative valuation imposed upon that group becomes the legitimization and justification for hostility and aggression. The inner purpose of this process is social benefit, self-valorization, and the creation of a sense of identity for the one through the denigration of the other. And as is evident, the generation and expression of hierarchy run through it from beginning to end.” (Ref.)

Whether you look at the Nazi play book, present-day Hungary, Russia, India or other authoritarian movements, these principles are at work every single time, with the content attached to the “difference” changing according to local need du jour and historical hierarchies, including colonialism. In addition, progressive movements so often weaken themselves by intra-group strife instead of collaborative fighting against a common enemy. I can think of no better explanation of those principles than in Arundhati Roy’s speech last week at the Swedish Academy.

It is so easy to lose hope, to withdraw by feeling overwhelmed, helpless, powerless to achieve true equality. And yet there was a person who faced obstacles beyond description, who believed in hope and the power of community.

Here is someone who put it in words better than I ever could, Jesmyn Ward, a formidable writer in her own right:

“This is how Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, and browbeats: she writes her way to hope. This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair. This is the real gift of her work… in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.”

Against the backdrop of a legacy of trauma she provided us with a legacy of optimism, that the lessons of successful collective action and resistance in the past will guide us to the right kind of change in the future, with the help of courageous and resourceful Black women.

Art on the Road: The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

Art, Literature
Mar 13, 2023
4 Comments

Ursula K LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986)

LeGuin’s essay on narrative theory is a masterful example of analytic prose describing different types of stories, explaining how and why archetypal heroic tales long held place of honor in our collective imagination. The analysis is interspersed with first person, sometimes lyrical, sometimes funny contemplations by a gatherer who with wit and expressed contempt compares stories of “killing” with stories of “life,” namely stories of origin, myths of creation, trickster stories, folktales or novels. These latter narratives can be seen as a carrier bag, the author argues, gathering up and distributing, saving and sharing, in a non-linear fashion and not necessarily tied to a hero who needs to prove himself in violent combat, linearly leading to victory or defeat, forever memorializing acts of war and destruction.

Barbara Hepworth *Assembly of Sea Form, 1972*

We need alternative stories, and we also need places that hold them, carrier bags of diverse kinds, museums being among them. At least that is what I thought when I approached the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena,CA, wondering if it was empty enough for me to dare enter, masked and all. I was in luck, on a late Thursday afternoon, after a Covid-imposed three-year hiatus of such visits, and, frankly, emotionally roiled by the simple fact that I would see art, and art new to me, in the original. So take subsequent ruminations with a grain of salt, they were affected by giddiness, no doubt.

Barbara Hepworth *Four-Square (Walk Through)* 1966

Parallels between the museum as a vessel and my own carrier bag, a small, beloved backpack given to me by a dear friend years ago, were easily drawn. Both are unpretentious, nicely segmented, and filled with an abundance of seemingly unrelated items. This is of course where the similarity ends – the museum scores with offering an impressive variety of art across several centuries, while my bag simply holds things that might or might not have predictable value. (You never know when that flashlight or that mini umbrella, iron reserve stale candies or a spare camera is needed.)

While the museum’s wings exposit orderly, period- or artistic style-based curations, chaos rules in Heuer’s pouch. Most importantly, the Norton Simon collection contains a mix of masterpieces, as well as an overall remarkable number of lesser, but important works that speak of the eponymous collector who knew what he liked, knew how to acquire it, and knew that the lack of specialization would make this a more, rather than less interesting collection. In contrast to your’s truly who is also an omnivore with regard to liking things, he knew what he was doing – and had the funds to do it.

***

Formerly the Pasadena Art Museum, the building was constructed by the architectural firm of Ladd and Kelsey, with the interior architecture changed in the 1970s by Craig Ellwood, after the industrialist Norton Simon had taken over, changes lost in the 1990s after Frank Gehry redesigned the interior with Simon’s widow, Jennifer Jones Simon, overseeing the renovations in tribute to her late husband. The outside is beautiful: a curvilinear complex of numerous modules, tiled with 115,000 Edith Heath-designed custom brick red and onyx glazed 5 x 15-inch tiles that reflect the light and colors of the surrounding.

The building is surrounded by a sculpture garden with a small pond and outdoors seating area and cafe. The inside contains major exhibition halls lit with skylights and a theater on the main floor, a basement devoted to the Asian art collection, which I did not visit.

You approach the building by running the gamut between rather tall, imposing males, bronze castings of multiple Rodin sculptures. Have your pick: expressions of fury, defiance, status, pride, or vanity in one’s intellectual or physical prowess are all on offer,

Auguste Rodin *The Burghers of Calais*, 1884-95

Auguste Rodin Monument to Balzac, 1897 — Jean de Finnes, Vetu, 1884-95

although the latter might be short-lived, as the shadow tells a foreboding story of crooked aging.

Auguste Rodin *Pierre de Wissant, Nude*, 1884-95

A fitting welcoming committee, one might argue, for the founder of this institution as it now exists, Norton Winfred Simon, a wealthy industrialist who discovered art in his 40s and never turned back from collecting it with a passion. Simon was born in 1907 in Portland, OR, into a family of European Jewish immigrants, learning business practices in his father’s store Simon sells for less, a profitable business that allowed Meyer Simon to build a big house in Portland Heights, and Lillian Simon to drive the first ever Cadillac in Portland, by all reports. (I am summarizing what I learned among others from a biography by Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture and from a 2009 lecture by the museum’s then chief curator, Carol Togneri.)

Equipped with a photographic memory and an uncanny ability to do complicated math in his head, the young Simon was fascinated by and stellar at acquisition: a life-long preoccupation developed with finding bankrupt, or weak, or poorly managed businesses, buying them on the cheap and turning them around with harsh reigns, radical cuts and minute personal decision making until he’d extract enormous profits. A 6 week stint as a college student at Berkeley, once the family had relocated to San Francisco after the death of his mother when he was only 14, was ended by Simon with the declaration that he could do without the education. Which turned out to be true. He became a tycoon, rising from scrap metal collecting business to building the Hunt Foods & Industries empire, quietly buying undervalued stock and winding his way onto Board of Directors to ultimately swallowing organizations whole, extending to truck fleets, real estate, cosmetic giants, and the publishing business in later years.

Simon the art collector was clearly driven by more than Simon the businessman’s lust for acquisition and success, but the methods with which he built his collection were inseparable from those used to create his business empires. He was a demanding boss to his staff and advisors, requiring presence at all times and expecting tolerance for micro-managing each and every decision. He was a hard bargainer once he had caught the scent of something that he thought would enrich his collection. The purchases ranged from individual art pieces to the take-over of entire inventories, like the Duveen Brothers Inc. in New York for $15 million. Over the years he amassed close to 7000 pieces – but was as ruthless in selling what didn’t fit, as he was in using unusual methods to buying what he wanted (reports of episodes of aggressive, if not scandalous behavior during auctions abound.) Sales produced enormous profits – in turn, he was one of the first to establish several tax-exempt foundations to buy art for public display. Before he had a museum, he created a “museum without walls” that loaned works from the foundation’s collection that enabled traveling exhibitions.

His involvement in, build-up of and generosity towards the L.A. art scene was appreciated, and the fact acknowledged, that he offered one of the most important collections of the West Coast, but he did not necessarily make only friends. Controversy raged when he took over the museum we are looking at here, then the Pasadena Art Museum deeply in debt, and badly managed in his eyes. Supporters of the failed museum who saw their donated art sold at auction because Simon did not think they belonged in the collection were in uproar, with the remaining Board members resigning and former Trustees bringing a civil suit “charging Simon with cannibalizing the permanent collection and manipulating the museum’s assets for personal gain,” a suit which they lost. (Ref.)

The museum itself is no stranger to lawsuits either – there was a protracted multimillion-dollar battle over two Renaissance masterworks—”Adam” and “Eve”—painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and acquired by the museum in the early 1970s. The art was looted by the Nazis after their invasion of Holland, and the heir to the robbed art dealer sued multiple agencies, the Dutch government and the museum included. She lost her case after it was heard eventually at the 9th U.s.Circuit Court of Appeals 5 years ago, based on a legal technicality of U.S. Courts not being allowed to invalidate the official acts of the Dutch Government. “The act of state doctrine,” limits the ability of U.S. courts, in certain instances, from determining the legality of the acts of a sovereign state within that sovereign’s own territory and is often applied in appropriations disputes which immunizes foreign nations from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts when certain conditions are satisfied. (9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 16-58308.)The art stayed at the Norton Simon Museum.

The 1970s saw a few few years of personal upheaval for Simon, a divorce after 37 years of marriage, preceded by the suicide of one of his sons, a failed bid to be elected as a Republican for the Senate, a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a movie star, Jennifer Jones, and eventually being afflicted with Guillain Barre, a neurological disorder that confined him to a wheelchair. Why there isn’t a Hollywood movie depicting this quintessential (not quite)rags-to-riches American biography is a mystery to me.

***

The collection is truly impressive, much of it focussed on beauty rather than art historical education or particular fame or theoretical richness, although some famous paintings are present and admirably placed without ado or spot-lighting among the rest of the art (like Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy – Titus, for example.) The absence of fanfare allows for an unbiased approach and appreciation of those who do not know the genesis of these paintings. Distinguished paintings by pre-Renaissance and Renaissance artists, Old Masters, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, an extensive assembly of South Asian sculpture; monumental bronzes by Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore; bronze studies of ballet dancers and related works on paper by Edgar Degas are all placed in ways that signal the collector’s focus. As it turns out, during his life time Simon would often rearrange the curation by himself during visits, curious what would emerge in novel placements.

Rembrandt van Rijn *Portrait of a Boy*, 1655-60 (Titus)

If we apply LeGuin’s distinction between literary fiction’s stories that “contain sticks, spears, and swords, the things to bash and poke an hit with, the long hard things,” and those about “things to put things in, the container for the thing contained” to the visual art on offer, Simon gifted us with a few types of the former and very, very many of the latter. Just as an example of the ancient hero worship template, we have Peter Paul Ruben’s 1618 painting of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar. Plenty of long hard things to poke and bash with, plenty of embedding in a cultural scaffold that needs to be known in detail to makes sense of the scene opening up in front of you (predictably triggering my “oh, another Where’s Waldo?” association that tends to rise up when I see these kinds of mythological depictions.

Peter Paul Rubens *Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar*, c. 1618-19

As an example of visual narratives that rely on your emotional reaction, rather than your cognitive assessment or general learnedness, we have many to choose from, including renaissance still lives, some fine Lionel Feiningers (I’m partial – here a street scene from Weimar:)

Lyonel Feininger *Near the Palace* 1914-1915

and the one I eventually settled on, painted by American painter Sam Francis in 1956: Basel Mural I (and two fragments of Basel Mural III.) These paintings are containers that invite you to fill them with new kinds of stories, offering to hold your spontaneous experience. You project your interpretation, if one emerges, or simply your feelings about the beauty that surrounds you into the empty or, perhaps more accurately, quiet spaces of these vessels, spaced that leave enough room next to the configured patterns to hold your connection and absorb it. The beauty loosens something, granting the freedom to abandon demands for deciphering. You can immerse yourself and be moved, without fear of appearing moronic to self or others, because you are unfamiliar with the canon.

Released from analysis you tend to be more open for surprises – the discovery, for example, that in the clouds of primary colors of red, blue, yellow hovering over the white negative spaces all kinds of dots and spots and sparks of other colors hide, including purples and turquoise darkening into some shade of cyan, joyful hints of a diverse universe to be found by looking closely. New stories unfold – well, I am describing my own reaction to a painter I had never seen before outside of print.

More information and exposure will be available to people in this area when a new exhibition, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with the Sam Francis Foundation, opens on April 9th at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum: Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing, organized by yet another Portland-linked person, Richard Speer, who also wrote a book about the Painter: The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan.

Sam Francis Basel Mural I Excerpt and Basel Mural III, 1956 – 58, Fragment

Norton Simon, who died in 1993, was after beauty, and knew when he found it. He was also aware what beauty does with people, what it teaches them and how they are able to change under its tutelage. To accomplish those interactions was the core goal, and ruthless methods of amassing the necessary funds can be forgiven, in my book, when building a brilliant collection, and endowing organizations like the museum to display and share it, serve that goal.

“Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.”

The collector would have probably agreed with this closing sentence of Ursula LeGuin’s essay, forever searching for the seeds of beauty, perhaps these days collecting them in bags among the stars, riding on the extraordinary Bird in Space by Brancusi, one of the central sculptures in the museum’s collection. We are quite fortunate to be able to experience what he left behind.

Constantin Brancusi Bird in Space 1931 Excerpt

The Norton Simon Museum

411 W. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91105

Hours: 12-5 pm Sunday Monday, Thursday, Friday. 12-7 pm Saturday. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Detailed visit information here.

Peter Voulkos, *Black Butte Divide 1958*

Muddy Considerations.

I’m not asking you to walk with me today. Rather, sit back and let me regale you with a tale of failure: the failure to hike to a seemingly easy destination, Cape Falcon at the Pacific coast.

The sign should have been a warning, the generously left behind walking sticks not been ignored. The path seemed perfectly fine, until it wasn’t. Landslides that had felled trees could be ignored, climbing over the trunks was not a major effort.

But then the mud set in, in depth and fluidity that you really could not walk on it without sinking in to the ankles. So you had to find stepping stones, utilize the root systems of the old growth trees or make side detours, only to find your way back to a path that was now covered with mall rivulets of running water.

Jumping puddles….

I gave up halfway in, saying good bye to the dream of seeing the Pacific ocean from high up, off cliffs that I had never visited before.

Let me hasten to add that of course it was not a failure. It was an adventure in a damp, dripping, moist, muddy universe that provide innumerable shades of intensely saturated greens, gentle rain that was barely felt, squishy noises that echoed delightful childhood memories of stomping around in your ladybug rubber boots.

The forest verdant. Wet. Full of new growth, pretending spring was already here.

It was also a reminder of how privileged we are to live at the threshold of so many different micro climates, the dry, steep cliffs of the Gorge on Wednesday, the temperate rainforest at the coast on Friday, all easily reached with a short drive.

Failure, as a concept, was on my mind because of two things I read recently. Both told stories about the consequences of failure, with both acknowledging that our society is particularly, grossly even, success oriented, with success structurally reserved for a few. Failure, then, can lead to compensating mechanisms that prove to be intensely destructive. At least that was the upshot of a thoughtful, well argued article by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men. The essay discusses the misfits who become killers, sometimes mass murderers,

“show(ing) them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies…. But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.”

Highly recommended reading, which, in my case, was paired with an essay by Costica Bradatan, a Romanian immigrant and Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University discussing his new book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.”

In a tongue in cheek assessment of his own predilections he writes:

“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.”

The book is devoted to four major historical figures actively courting failure in their pursuit of meaning and transformation (or religious transcendence.) I have only read the chapter on Simone Weil which is available here, and was much taken by Bradatan’s narrative approach (and skill) and not at all by his conclusions. There is something about the proscription to be humble, to let failure lead you inwards on some self discovery journey that rubs me as too convenient in a society that is set to clamp down on anger and resistance provoked by injustice. (I must also admit that I will never be able to be a neutral reader on the saintliness of Ghandi, one of the four figures discussed in this book. Remember, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime—and to give up their own lives as sacrifices. He told the Jews to pray for Adolf Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus,’ he wrote, ‘he would salve his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.”(Ref.)

Yes, excessive anger leading to mass shootings is catastrophic. But humble cowing in front of oppressive forces that promise enlightenment and salvation if you keep your voice down and obey, is not desirable either. There are too many requests for being humble in the air right now and I always wonder about the underlying societal frictions. I do believe it is important to experience failure (and not shelter kids from that experience, in particular) and learn from it, perhaps grow through it, but let’s not tie it to humility beyond curbing our narcissistic streaks. There’s a slippery slope from humility to servility to conformity and consent, in my not so humble opinion.

One last glimpse of Friday’s wondrous views: neither humble nor proud, the elks were taking it easy, some as mud-caked as their photographer by the end of the day. Pretty amazing.

Music today is America by Jewish (immigrant) composer Ernest Bloch who lived at the Oregon Coast.

PS: This WOULD have been the view, photograph from internet:

Of Courage, Consciousness and Coconuts.

Literature
Jan 9, 2023
0 Comments

Phew, just in time. Needed a birthday present for a young woman dear to me, an avid and thoughtful reader. Having waded through more junk than I cared for, I finally chanced on a beautifully written, riveting saga that tackles about everything under the sun, from colonialism to capitalism to technology and tyranny of corporations, from independence and interdependence in human relationships to courage and coconuts. Actually that last pairing should be the first in the list, both are corner stones in this multi-generational epic, and the former a decided trait not just of the main protagonists but of the author as well. She did not shy away from tackling multiple existential issues with breathtaking bravura.

Happy birthday, Shels, I hope you are drawn in by The Immortal King Rao as much as I was!

Vauhini Vara‘s debut novel is informed by both her own Indian heritage and her deep knowledge of the American tech and finance domain from her years as a technology correspondent for the Wall St Journal and editor and writer at The New Yorker‘s business section. Her familiarity and insights into the workings of that world provide the basis for the first of the three main storylines winding through the novel: the effects of colonial power and capitalism as systems of exploitation and extradition. It is embedded in the story of a man belonging to the Dalit caste of Untouchables, growing up on a coconut plantation in South East India and becoming a tech tycoon in the US (his corporation is called Coconut, not Apple… and located near Seattle in the near future, thus today’s photographs.) He eventually develops technology and algorithms that run the world as a share holder system which assigns “social capital,” with a governing Board that he chairs until his downfall. Instead of accomplishing its stated goal of enabling people to live in harmony, the shareholder system perpetuates and exacerbates economic divisions, with the global South falling into complete disrepair, poverty across the world unabated.

The man, the King Rao of the novel’s title, is both a victim and a perpetrator, conceived in violence and killed the same way. Before it dawns on you how he adapts to the hardships of his life by becoming transactional and rapacious himself, you have already been emotionally drawn into championing this underdog who is courageously fighting against seemingly overwhelming forces. This is remarkable when considering that his story is told through the eyes of his 17 year old daughter, Athena, who is herself a victim of his exploitation and narcissism. The relationship between father and daughter, and various other marital, familial and collective (dis)connections, is the second strand of the narrative. Sensitively explored but without pity, we are made to witness how love and despair can live hand in hand, longing for connection is mitigated by desire for independence, fear of loneliness transformed into possessiveness.

By the time we enter this story, the world is approaching its own demise as Hothouse Earth, with no scientific tools available to remedy what the Anthropocene’s despoliation produced. Small groups of resisters have decoupled from the system and live on small islands trying to be self-sufficient as collectives, facing rising sea levels with defiance. They are joined by Athena who escapes a life in isolation on another island where her father, outcast himself after scientific research produced tragic results, raised her completely alone. As it turns out, and this is the third main strand in the complex weaving of this novel, she is never able to completely disconnect from her father. His desire for immortality – his own consciousness transferred into next generations – led to his decision to implant a mechanism in his (embryonic) daughter that forever allows his memories and thoughts to appear in her mind. She, in turn, uses the tools he provided, to access the mind of others to exploit them for needs of her own, until that is put to an end, canceling “immortality” once and for all. Perhaps. We’re left hanging, confronted with hubris all too familiar, and the unanswered question of what life is really for.

If all this sounds too complicated, a convoluted mix of Bildungsroman, Sci Fi leanings and history lecture on the evils of colonialism/capitalism, rest assured: it is a romp to read, with no didactic finger wagging, just subtle invitations to think through some of the big issues that have affected the course of history. Vara’s depiction of the downfall of India’s flourishing economy and independence with the arrival of the British East India Company in the 18th and 19th century leave out some of the most horrifying statistics: Scientists now estimate that at the height of British Colonialism, more than 100 million people died prematurely as the result of institutional exploitation. That is more than the combined famine deaths in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Cambodia and Ethiopia. The way colonialism changed production, consumption and export is made visible (and graspable) in the description of the fates of coconut plantations.

The author’s description of the perils of technological advancement are balanced by depictions of some of its gains. Her’s is not a moralistic voice, strident declarations from a pulpit, but one of warning about hubris. The fact that she manages to give the various narrative strands equal weight is reflected in the reviews of the novel. Some focus on the economics, some on the relationships (men and women both nurture and abuse power, remarkably balanced depictions,) some highlight the unwillingness of the world to heed the warnings of science. All agree that this book is a marvelous accomplishment.(1, 2, 3, 4)

I find myself still thinking about the whole issue of seeking immortality, a desire not just now emerging when we’re facing the end of the world as we know it. Why, I asked at the dinner table, are people so obsessed with it, the early pharaohs of the world awaiting the next move in their gold filled pyramids, the Elmo Musks of the present investing their fortunes into neurotech companies like Neuralink, hoping to fuse brain content, memories and all, to machinery? For the foot soldiers, the rest of us across history, there’s always been an offer of “immortality” that doesn’t require imperial or tech billions: just buy into belief systems of rebirth, or religious visions of eternal afterlife in paradise, in corporal form, if so desired. All you have to do is obey, submit, and never challenge the hierarchy.

“What don’t you understand,” was the laconic reply. “People don’t like to think of their plans, hopes and desires will meet a final point of no return. The mystery of what happens after death might very well be filled with optimistic visions of renewed (or continued) existence until we have solved the riddle. And besides,” I was told, “neuroscience is nowhere remotely close to being capable of providing any of the things needed to transfer consciousness. We don’t understand how it is produced in our own minds, much less how to spread it amongst other living beings or computational machines. Write a blog,” I was encouraged, “on the promises and limitations of the field of neuroscience as it stands now. “

I’ll get to it, one of these days. First I have to wrap a book and come up with a birthday cake!

Indian Music today by Anoushka Sankar, Ravi Sankar’s daughter, playing the Sitar.

Cheating

I am knee-deep in several independent writing projects and so, this once (or once again?) I will cheat and put someone else’s review of a book (Orwell’s Roses) I recommend up here, instead of my own. You still get the photographs of last week’s wonders in the mystery garden, though. And, in case you missed it, here are my own thoughts on Orwell, gardening and the disappearance of marital labor, from some time back.

Here is the link to the review of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses by Gaby Hinsliff. I am attaching the full text below for those who do not have access to The Guardian where it was published last year. If you have read it already, you might also be interested in the 2022 winner, announced yesterday, of The Orwell Society‘s Political Writing award: Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned. Here is a review from March.

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit review – deadheading with the writer and thinker

Inspired by George Orwell’s love of gardening, Solnit’s suitably rambling book should appeal to the green-fingered and the politically committed alike

The roses are in dire need of pruning. My rambler in particular is getting very tangled; too many whipping tendrils snaking out haphazardly at all angles. But it’s so pretty it’s hard to be properly brutal with it, even though it would probably benefit from some judicious thinning. And yes, it is the experience of reading Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses that has jogged my memory.

The book simultaneously is and isn’t about George Orwell, just as it is and isn’t about roses. It belongs in a whimsical category of its own, meandering elegantly enough through lots of subjects loosely connected to one or the other; more of a wildly overgrown essay, from which side shoots constantly emerge to snag the attention, than a book. But at its root is the fact that in 1936, the writer and political thinker planted some roses in his Hertfordshire garden. And when Solnit turns up on the doorstep more than eight decades later, she finds the rose bushes (or at least what she takes to be the same rose bushes) still flowering, a living connection between past and present.

From this blooms the most enjoyable part of the book – a reflection on what gardening may have meant to Orwell, but also what it means to gardeners everywhere; beauty for today, hope for tomorrow, and a desire to create something for those who come after – all of which find an echo in the best of politics.

To make a garden is to feel, in Solnit’s words, more “agrarian, settled, to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years and the latter would bear fruit in decades to come”. By the time Orwell’s roses flowered that summer, the Spanish civil war had broken out. As they grew, Europe spiralled closer to conflict. But the buds would still swell and the petals would still fall, and in the midst of death there would be new life, a cycle that helps explain why gardens and nature more generally have been such a comfort to so many through the grief and loss of the pandemic.

But roses, in Solnit’s story, don’t merely symbolise the eternal. They also symbolise joy, frivolity and a kind of sensual pleasure not always associated with Orwell, so often presented as a rather dour and austere figure; a chronicler of hardship in his writings on the low-paid and exploited, and in his fiction a prophet of doom, warning against the evils of totalitarianism. By choosing to focus on the gardens he planted – in Hertfordshire and, later, on the farm he bought on the Scottish island of Jura – and the happiness they brought him, Solnit restores something often missing not only from Orwell but from the political tradition of which he is part.

But not all the branching diversions of this book are so successful. A chapter on coal, which ends by arguing that Orwell’s planting of a garden half a century before climate change entered the public consciousness could be interpreted as the nurturing of “a few more carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing organisms”, feels at best tortuously grafted on to the rest. I could have happily taken the secateurs to Solnit’s musings on the coincidence between being served Jaffa Cakes on her British Air [sic] flight to Britain and then reading an article about Palestinian children visiting the beach at Jaffa – an anecdote that tells the reader nothing of any significance about either.

But then into every garden a little bindweed creeps. The green-fingered and the politically committed alike will want to curl up with this book as the gardening year draws to a close and we reflect on a time during which nature has been more of a solace than usual. It’s been a good year for the roses, at least.

“A rose is a rose is a rose,” said Gertrude Stein. Well here is a musical bouquet of a rose and a rose and a rose. Fauré, Schubert in a Fritz Wunderlich performance, and Berlioz.

Disaster Porn

Literature, Movies, Politics, Psychology
Jun 22, 2022
2 Comments

Disaster-porn: “to satisfy the pleasure that viewers take in seeing other people’s misfortunes, as by constantly repeating vision of an event, often without commentary or context”. – Australia Macquarie Dictionary

My morning readings include the news from Europe, brought to me among others by Der Spiegel, a German weekly and the country’s largest news platform on the web. All photographs but one today were seen on their site last week, and elicited decidedly mixed feelings. They lure with beauty while depicting disaster, simultaneously drawing attention to human suffering as well as away from it.

An ice vendor waiting for customers during the worst heat wave in decades. In neighboring Nawabshah (Pakistan) the highest value ever recorded: 128.7 F on May 1st.

Somehow the term disaster-porn came to mind. It is a phrase often used to define depictions of suffering in the developing world, but also applied to the increasing number of end-of-world or other catastrophe movies coming out of the film industry, and not just in Hollywood. Is it ethical to depict, create and watch all this stuff? Let me put the answer right in front: it can be, theoretically. At least this was what I concluded after reading the essay that I am summarizing today while trying to solve my dilemma.

The remnants of a container depot in Bangladesh that stood in flames and then exploded, throwing heavy objects through the air for hundreds of yards. Dozends dead, hundreds injured. Foto: picture alliance / dpa / AP

The term disaster-porn can be found as early as 1987 when a Washington Post editorial about the stock market crash. It described that those of us doting on the disasters in cinematic action dramas are lured into believing that it is either all fake, or that we personally will escape bad fate in the end, never mind the millions we watch dying in catastrophic scenarios. The term has been popularized ever since, sometimes in specific ways, like in Pat Cadigan’s 1991 Sci-Fi novel Synner which used “porn” as a suffix denoting an excessive, overly aestheticized focus on a single topic. (The award-winning novel, by the way, envisions a world where the line between machines and reality becomes porous, a possible disaster scenario now in the real-life news 30 years later…just google AI.) The phrase is thus applied not just to fictional descriptions of disasters but also to round-the-clock depictions of round-the-world catastrophes by the media.

Iraqi boys herding sheep in a sandstorm. They are not allowed to enter into the province of Najaf, to avoid spreading the Crim-Congo fever. They are stuck at the border in the middle of the storm. Foto: Quassem Al-Kaabi / AFP

What is the problem? On the one hand, in an ever more interconnected world where we might be called on or able to help with disasters even at distant locations, information about them helps our collective mind to make decisions. In other word, the depictions might elicit empathy and understanding, which can turn into human solidarity.

On the other hand, there are multiple problems. Disaster-porn can be gratuitous and exploitative – published to sell clicks, or used as justification to simplify complex geopolitical realities, and thereby encourage military operations under the guise of humanitarian action.

In addition, over-exposure to images of doom can lead to a muting of your reaction, draining our reserves of pity, desensitizing us to others’ pain. It can be experienced as damaging our own sense of well-being, thus having us turn away from the suffering in the world. Compassion fatigue elicited by a pity crisis.

Boy amidst storks sifting garbage in the Indian province of Guwahati. Dangerous because of the extreme heat – several garbage dumps have spontaneously caught fire and combusted. Foto: Biju Boro / AFP

There is some inherent psychological truth to the fact that we better protect ourselves from too much exposure to bad news. If we feel that there is absolutely no way we can interfere with the starvation, drowning, imprisoning, wounding, torture, and killing of people, seeing them exposed to these situations will create a sense of anxiety that we will try to resolve by averting our eyes. A barrage of doom scenarios leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, both associated with depression, and subsequent paralysis when we think about possible action – just no sense left, that we could make a difference. Here is just one of the studies that lays out that scenario.

Another way to cope with extreme heat across Asia.

And yet…

“Disaster porn, then, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of others. It connects public issues like war, famine, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks to the private lives of those they affect, and shows us how disruptions of social structure become disruptions in individual biographies. This is the case in even the most seemingly stereotypical news reports of suffering in the developing world, and in even the most outlandish Hollywood disaster epics as well.” (Ref.)

Literature and disaster movies contribute in an odd way: they do describe the role chance plays with some people being more endangered than others, some surviving when others don’t. Yes, there are heroes (or villains) who manage to suggest that with some amount of smarts and vision you can still control the outcome (echoing our sense of exceptionalism in U.S. culture), but there are all the others who are not so lucky, because it is often determined by the vicissitude of geographical location alone, rather than specific talents or skills. Chance confers the privilege of survival. It might make us think about our own privilege and so raise compassion, since so far chance has spared us, amidst the forest fires, or floods or infectious diseases.

The Clark Ford River flooded the houses of many of the inhabitants of Fromberg, MO. This is a lawn ornament submerged in the waters. Foto: David Goldman / AP

Leave it to me to read and watch these kinds of novels and films, if only to spare you to have to do it yourself…..

My current target is a 1973 science fiction novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, which took 9 years to write. It has been made into numerous films, a highly praised animé version among them. Some had altered endings, some were withheld during certain time periods because they were too close on the heels of real life disasters in Japan, given the exposure to earthquakes and the Fukushima catastrophe. The latest, a Netflix production, is so bad that I recommend it on a day where you need help to erupt in laughter – the acting – if you can call it that – guarantees that you will.

The book, however, is worming its way into my brain. The basic story concerns a scientist’s discovery of the likelihood that all of Japan, the entire archipelago, is going to go under due to earthquakes, ocean floor faults, and what not. One of the narrative lines concerns how the government is handling the crisis, from negligence to obstruction to panic. Don’t look up, this year’s U.S. disaster movie that I discussed here, probably took a page out of that book. Another line focusses on the distribution of millions of people around the world, with nationalist impulses against immigration vying with empathy for a drowning people. The philosophical question it raises, though, is one that we will have to think through in climate change migrations to come: what does it do to your identity, as member of a nation, or a tribe or a culture or a language group, when the place that defines you ceases to exist? Literally is no longer there to return to? Is it destructive to lose that connection to place which is a base for underlying sense of self, or is it empowering because you can shed the debt you incurred as a member of the nation (say of an imperialistic or fascistic past) and start from scratch?

Think it through – time not spent doom scrolling…

We could also focus on the message conveyed by a random stranger who was kind enough to let me photograph her t-shirt 2 days ago.

Here’s to The End of Time, in music at least.

Windows to Worlds

Art, Literature
Mar 14, 2022
1 Comments

There are good days. Last week one of those saw two of my interests – art and literature – aligned, when these images arrived in my inbox while I was contemplating writing a review of a spell-binding piece of literary fiction, The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. The novel provides windows into past, present and future worlds, all shaped by entropy, directly or indirectly related to cosmology, our planet’s exposure to climate change and humanity’s love affair with to power. Sounds heady? It’s a stunner!

Michel Saran Begegnung/Encounter (2020) Acryl on Canvas

Paintings first. Michel Saran is a German painter, trained at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1950s. (The academy boosts an incredible list of alumni, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Gerhard Richter among them). Saran came from East to West Germany in 1961 when the wall was built, and continued his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, known among others for Joseph Beuys and, again, Gerhard Richter.

The artist and I have been friends since 1969 when he taught me art history, and we managed to sustain the friendship despite having lived on different continents for over 40 years now. Friends or not, I have always had strong reactions to his art. The new series is no exception: the works embrace a dialectic, feeding on the tension between serious, sometimes grave underlying themes, but expressed with a visual joy and playfulness that let you forget the darker thoughts.

Michel Saran Diagonale und Rechtecke/ Diagonal and Rectangles (2020) Acryl on Wood

The rectangles remind me of windows, as individual motifs or as groupings pointing to more collective associations. Windows are cross-culturally symbols of so many things, again capturing a dialectic – letting light and fresh air in, but also the opposite, allowing access to dread (window of vulnerability). Come in by the window represents romantic but also illicit access. A window of opportunity points to gains, out the window, on the other hand, refers to an escape route but also loss, something non-retrievable. In painting and literature alike, they have often represented hope, or freedom (Caspar David Friedrich and Leora Carrington among my favorites here,) the longing for and ability to escape (think Rapunzel, or Wuthering Heights). Windows, of course, also frame the border between outside and inside, and for those of us aware that the longest stretch of life lies behind us, a reminder of a choice of time focus: we can look out to a past, or focus on the present view, or dream about an unknown future, a window to a veiled existence if only in our minds.

Michel Saran Ländliches Fenster/Rural WIndow (2017) Acryl on Wood

And then there is the window on the world. This brings us squarely, pun intended, to today’s book review about a novel that helps us view different cultures with powerful strokes of imagination, matched by an equally astute intellectual analysis of history and our role in shaping that history. The Actual Star spans 2000 years, from the ancient Maya kingdom in 1012 B.C. in what is now Belize, a depiction of events in the U.S. and Belize in 2012, to a fictional society in 3012 that is formed by some 8 million humans left over from climate catastrophe, trying to fashion a life on earth that is sustainable.

Each of the three time periods are introduced through a trinity of characters: a pair of twins and a (de)stabilizing third corner of the triangle, a sibling, a lover, a child. Each twin represents an opposite, one who favors the status quo and preserves tradition, the other who is a risk taker and pursues the necessity of change. The eras are depicted within their contexts – the Mayan kingdom is on the brink of dissolution due to climate emergency droughts (giving rise to extreme violence within and beyond human sacrifices). The contemporary Belize is affected by its history of colonialism and capitalist exploitation. The future humans are struggling with the conflict that despite all attempts to prevent previous societies’ errors and eliminate violence, some deep seated psychological needs cannot be eradicated. Common to all three cultures is a longing for knowledge about a place that extends beyond the realm of the real – call it rebirth, paradise, Nirvana, Hades, Xibalba (the Mayan place of fright where the Gods (of death) reside). Humans simply cannot accept that there is finality to our existence and so forever search for the window (as knowledge and passage) into the workings of an afterlife.

Michel Saran Freie Rechtecke/Free Rectangles (2020) Acryl on Wood

The novel is intensely sex-positive, there is not a type of sexual interaction not included, and described in detail. None of it is sordid, and much of it helps to question taboos, given that we are hooked on sympathizing with almost all of the protagonists from the start (who are clearly having a good time in this regard.) It becomes particularly interesting in the future world, where scientific advances have given all humans the relevant body parts of both sexes, and they can choose which gender expression or sexual preferences they’d like to have dominant, with the ability to switch frequently.

In one regard our future descendants have no choice, though. They have to adhere to a kind of religious/moral/ethics code that requires the absence of any personal possession, a life of nomadism, and a separation from birth family, so there is no hoarding of goods, land or emotional tie to lovers and even blood relatives. If they reject those choices, they become stigmatized outsiders, deprived of much the society has to offer. In fact, all are not allowed, except for special occasions and festivals, to ever congregate with more than a few people in their steady wandering across the face of this earth. Conflict ensues, wouldn’t you know it.

Michel Saran Toscana (2020) Acryl on Wood

It is no coincidence that Byrne salutes her favorite SFF authors, Ursula LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson, in her preface. She has absorbed much from them, the painstaking research of historical and scientific facts, the focus on human psychology within the political parameters that shape parts of it, the generating of languages that serves multiple purposes. (The novel uses a lot of Spanish and pretend-Spanish, invented words helpfully explained in a glossary. Dialog in the contemporary segment is sometimes in Kriol, not translated, and hard to understand even if sounded out loud. A perfect choice for a Western readership: we can completely intuit the meaning of the language of the colonizers, but the speech among the colonized is somewhat inaccessible.) The role religion – its dangers or promises – plays in the works of all three is surely no coincidence. The authors’ works also all acknowledge the importance of place, both locally, geographically and in a cosmos that reacts to physical changes.

Michel Saran Dämmerung/Dusk (2020) Acryl on Wood

What is all her own, is Byrne’s imaginary power to envision worlds, past and future. A lyrical voice when describing the joy and sorrow of emotional attachments. A probing of entropy. A willingness to upset, to judge, to question. And, importantly, in this novel an instantiated promise that there can be hope attached to loss, and promise to painful change. It is a remarkable book.

(PS: She also has a nicely sarcastic sense of humor – here she reads excerpts from bad reviews of her novel. Stellar review in much more detail can be found here.)

Music today is Joaquín Rodrigo’s symphonic poem A la busca del más allá (In Search of the Beyond).

Michel Saran Verwoben/Interwoven (2020) Acryl on Wood

Discovery

I believe in the great discovery.
I believe in the man who will make the discovery.
I believe in the fear of the man who will make the
…. discovery.

I believe in his face going white,
his queasiness, his upper lip drenched in cold sweat.

I believe in the burning of his notes,
burning them into ashes,
burning them to the last scrap.

I believe in the scattering of numbers,
scattering them without regret.

I believe in the man’s haste,
in the precision of his movements,
in his free will.

I believe in the shattering of tablets,
the pouring out of liquids,
the extinguishing of rays.

I am convinced this will end well,
that it will not be too late,
that it will take place without witnesses.

I’m sure no one will find out what happened,
not the wife, not the wall,
not even the bird that might squeal in its song.

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.

These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

by Wistlawa Szymborska
from View With a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace 1993
translation: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

I wonder if this poem seeded the idea of a book, a remarkable book that looks at the consequences – intended and unintended- of scientific discoveries. Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World is a small volume describing mathematical and scientific research, ruminating about the psychological states of those engaged in the work, and weaving fact and fiction in ways that meander between horror story and lyric poetry.

The last time I felt like this when reading a novel grounded in history, was decades ago when I couldn’t put Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy down, never mind babies screaming for attention, house wanting to be cleaned, lectures needing to be written and exams to be graded. Both authors share the skill of sending readers on two parallel paths, leaving it to us to drop and pick up the strands where truth ends and imagination begins, where facts are overshadowed by psychological analysis or feelings discarded in the light of facts. Both also excel in alternations of intensity and subtlety, in itself a weird combination.

Barker succeeds in sustaining our attention to history, social structures, identity (before that became a political concept) across three complex volumes, never letting up tangential brilliant confabulation,. She thinly veils her portraits of historical people behind pseudonyms and graphically imparting on us the horrors of World War I and what they did to the soul of artists.

Labatut, in contrast, keeps it short – perhaps aware of contemporary attention spans. His subjects are famous scientists, although the pages are sprinkled with some names less familiar, and some characters are completely made up. He has a knack to impart scientific facts in ways that do not frighten even the math- or physics-phobic reader, partly because the narrative swings endlessly back to the human interest story at the heart of the tales – how do you accept the fact that your discovery brings suffering and ruin to the world? Do you continue to proceed?

Both authors do not shy away from delving into details of horrors, yet the texts themselves have a certain serenity as if we are watching our own history unfold from the safe location of a distant star. That in itself is, of course, a trick, since it indirectly suggests that our own responsibilities need not be considered when focused on those who wreaked the actual havoc, or do they? The wishful thinking of Szymborska’s lines (admitted to be without justification in fact,) should it not be headed by us, in the ways we should be willing to obstruct, to risk, to endanger our standing by unpopular but necessary actions?

Szymborska’s “I believe in the refusal to take part” is less wish than command. One that is faintly echoed in the last chapter of Labatut’s work which introduces us to a night gardener, a former mathematician who has given up on the world, too clear-eyed about the catastrophes awaiting us, in a society that uses the principles of quantum mechanics without ever truly understanding them. The very last parable of the book describes the final demise of lemon trees cut down by their own excess riches. It somehow all came together, and I felt humbled by it.

Szymborska, again, sarcastically:

“I am convinced this will end well,
that it will not be too late,”

How many more reminders do we need by brilliant writers that clinging to this belief simply won’t do?

On a more upbeat note, here is a fun compilation of unintended, positive consequences of scientific discoveries.

Music today by Bartok who was enchanted with mathematical principles and symmetry, particularly the Golden Mean. The ratio appears in this piece. Give it a chance, it grows on you.

YDP – your daily picture

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YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Literature

Caspar David Friedrich x 2.

Kitsch and Kunst – the Visual Representation of Consolation.

Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.

Art on the Road: The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

Muddy Considerations.

Of Courage, Consciousness and Coconuts.

Cheating

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit review – deadheading with the writer and thinker

Disaster Porn

Windows to Worlds

Discovery

Discovery