Monthly Archives

October 2016

Tales of a far away land.

Frankly, I’m torn between my desire to report on a magical place, and my longing for just sitting here and let it all sink in. I am currently staying at an old ranch house, hand-built from sandstone boulders, filled with art by the Armenian immigrant Jirayr Zorthian (1911-2004,) who built it many, many decades ago.

It is located high up in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, reachable via a one-lane, potholed, hairpin-curved dirt road. Driving it down and up once a day is enough to get your adrenalin flowing. Except that levels are high already from the sheer beauty that surrounds you, the house nestled among olive-, eucalyptus-, and palm trees, old oaks and oleander bushes, overlooking Los Angeles in the distance.

It is one of many dwellings on a multi-acres compound that is populated by people who have decided to (mostly) live off the land, many of whom remind me of my own hippie days in the late 60s. You wander amongst trailers, make-shift living arrangements, a communal kitchen, laundry and store, multiple workshops for wood and metal working, and large vegetable gardens.

There is live stock, some of which is roaming freely and becoming my occasional visitors. In fact my 14 month-old granddaughter now consistently makes goat noises when she sees me, having seen them at my place. Old goat, indeed. Happy old goat.

The toddler might as well hoot, since the owls are singing me to sleep every night, the minute the sun goes down, three different species telling by their call, a pair of Northern pygmy owls among them, with their eerie staccato whistling. It is cold up here when the wind blows and dusty, likely hot in the summer. As with every ancient house, some windows don’t open, some don’t close, and there is a resident raccoon in the ceiling, which I have come to expect – every one of my extended California trips had one seeking proximity in the walls of my rooms. True story! (I also hasten to add the wonderful folks here are in the process of chasing it out. As I said, old house, many access points.)

The creativity of Jirayr Zorthian who build up this land, and whose son and granddaughter are currently managing the rentals for concerts, meetings, weddings and lodgers to bring in some funds – and most importantly continue his legacy of celebration of art – is evident wherever you look. PBS had a comprehensive account of the history of the artist and the place he imprinted, calling it a 48 acre art junk yard, in case you are curious. He worked as a muralist, murals which can be found among others at the Pentagon. He partied with the best of them, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Segovia, Richard Feynman, and many more included, and in his last years allowed people to deposit junk on the property, which his descendants are still trying to get rid off, 20 years after his death.

The house itself is filled with paintings, drawings, prints and small cultural tableaux made from found objects. I’ve been here over a week now and still discover new details every morning. The outside walls that surround the house flank walking paths or little hidden patios, overflowing with objects cemented into the field stones, with a recurring theme of insulators. They come in all sizes, shapes, materials like glass and ceramics, likely collected obsessively since there is not a single view, anywhere, that does not include one or more of these things that are used on telephone polls and wires.

I have been photographing them in all lights and times of day, hoping there will be some creative spark to use them for montages. I feel insulated here, protected from the horrors and sorrows of the world as long as a I stay away from my computer. Insulated from the internally imposed push towards accomplishing something, going to museums, writing reviews. I have literally not done anything other than soaking up nature, and glowing from the joy that is my family here.

Oh, and of course, I have photographed birds. They visit, morning and evening, on the surrounding car wrecks transformed into installations, and the juxtaposition of nature and man-made, rusty objects has been a thrill. They land on artificial trees, blossoming with, what else, insulators. They take birdbaths in discarded bowls and hubcaps. Finches, warblers, mocking birds, hummingbirds, ravens, hawks, sparrows, acorn woodpeckers, you name them.

I can imagine that it is not easy to live in the shadow of such a larger-than-life figure as Zorthian. Not easy to make it in a community that forever changes with people coming and going, with laws restricting the ability to capitalize on the land, an initial lack of experience with animal husbandry or food farming, changing climate conditions and unreliable sources of income to carry a group of committed tenants. As a house guest I reap all the benefits of the beauty, without the cost of the conditions that come with this unusual place. But I can see the absolute thrill of being part of a legacy, of driving (art)history forwards, of maintaining an actual and spiritual independence from the norms that society tries to impose on us all. This place is infused with purpose as well as levity, peacefulness as well as stimulation. I think it conveys, for those who maintain it, a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, a social embeddedness. So important in times of experienced isolation and societal division. For those who visit: a true gift of insulation from the rest of our lives.

Here is one of the prior ranch visitors, Segovia, playing Bach. Then again, I could have chosen Charlie Parker…. but it felt like a sublime day.

Coming and Going

You have to be on the lookout – otherwise you miss all the action!

Going: yours truly, driving to L.A. for the next month or so. Dispatches are in the cards, but not on a regular basis! I am hoping for a few Art on the Road adventures, though.

Coming: spring.

At least that’s what it looked and felt like yesterday near the Columbia river when the sun finally broke through, and little puffy clouds made the sky delectable.

Lots of kestrels,

other birds pairing up, or calling for mates

Buds and first shoots emerging,

and the landscape on the cusp of exploding into color, with a few saturated spots already showing off.

Hard to imagine California can beat that. But then again…… stay tuned.

Since I didn’t burden your brain with much text today, we might as well stretch it with some unusual music from Australia. The album title translates as Now; the singer is one of few remaining Butchulla songmen, singing in their endangered aboriginal language.

What to do with the past?

· Stitching Stories at Art at the Cave Gallery in Vancouver, WA. ·

“If nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plentitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of [Walter] Benjamin is there to prove it.”Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin; Or, Nostalgia,” Marxism and Form, 1971 

Bonuspoints for a gallery that makes you wonder before you even set foot into the building! At least that’s how I reacted when I arrived in Vancouver to meet with one of the artists currently exhibiting at Art at the Cave and was greeted by a sign sporting multiple promises – some of which were indeed kept by the work shown inside.

Stitching Stories features multiple artists, loosely connected by work using stitching and weaving, their work triggering immediate associations of past, present and future for me, the flow of time signaling change.

Sharon Svec, part of the gallery team and one of the exhibiting artists.

Sam Yamauchi‘s A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity symbolizes the hazards of both, a search for and communication of identity to others. The stitched collages unfold in the here and now, boldly describing a process affected by variables all too familiar for many of us, rightly questioning if there is a permanent, identifiable self to be found.

Sam Yamauchi A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity

Sharon Svec‘s The Eyes Have It is an enchanting set of three eye-shaped, sculptural mobiles intricately woven from roots of ivy, some starting to sprout leaves in the warmth of the cavernous room. The robust material (have you ever tried to get rid of ivy roots in your garden?) takes on a more filigree appearance when laced together, light suffusing in both directions. The combination of light and eyes, three of them no less, triggered amused associations of clairvoyance, the third eye predicting the future – and the evanescence of such attempts. The German word for clairvoyance is Hellsehen, seeing the light. I have always believed that that is a much more applicable description of our take on the past when we come to inspect it, rather than a grasp on the future. But what do I know.

Sharon Svec The Eyes Have it.

***

The past, as it turns out, is what I came for, drawn by two bodies of work by Ruth Ross, Yiddish and The Doll Dialogues, respectively. More precisely, I was interested in how the artist approaches the past. Honoring the past in an attempt to defy impermanence, holding on to it to prevent its loss, turning nostalgic to retrieve remembered affect? Her frequent use of discarded fabrics, beyond their prime and found in thrift store bins or yard sales, often applied back to front, had a material feel of things dragged up, preserved to last. Yet with all her work, things go far deeper than that.

Yiddish is, in some ways, the perfect vehicle for considerations of preservation and loss, not just in the intimate sphere of what’s spoken in one’s family to which Ross refers. The language itself is about 1000 years old, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, with the name Yiddish itself meaning Jewish. It had other names as well, Taytsh (German), Yidish-taytsh (Jewish-German), Loshn-ashkenaz (the Ashkenazi tongue), and Zhargon (jargon,) but Yiddish remained the standard reference since the 19th century. Before the Holocaust there were over 10 million people in the world speaking Yiddish, a number that was, in addition to the murder of 6 million Jews, further diminished by processes of acculturation and assimilation in America and the former Soviet Union, and by repression of Yiddish and acculturation to Hebrew in Israel. (Ref.)

Ruth Ross Balabusta (Housewife) Details below

Feh signals contempt…

The language itself went through many permutations but generally allowed people who were living in the diaspora to have a shared means of communication. It consists of multiple elements from other languages, Romance in origin, German and Rabbinical Hebrew among them. Each new region where Jews settled after having been driven out from other countries, developed its own vernacular, creating hybrid words, just as we see in so many other languages. The different dialects spoken throughout different European regions were interspersed in American Yiddish, when the immigrants arrived, and standard Yiddish now contains many English words as well.

It has been a two-way street, clearly. Many of the words Ross chose, stitched with wit, subtle hints, allusions to childhood memories and an attentive eye for type-face design, are part of our own English vocabulary, used frequently without knowing their origins. That is even more true for the German speaker. I certainly grew up with everyday words that turned out to be Yiddish when I thought they were German, adjusted in their spelling. In fact there are over 1000 of them, with about 30 in heavy rotation, Schlamassel (Shlimazl – bad fortune or things gone wrong,) malochen (physical labor, from Maloche – work,) Ganove (Gannew in Yiddish, a petty criminal) or Techtel-Mechtel (a fling, derived from the yiddish word Tachti, which means secret) among them.

Ruth Ross Schlemiel/Schlimazel (A Schlemiel is the person who spills the soup and a Schlimazel is the person it lands on…)

Ruth Ross Nu? (Whassup)

Last year I reviewed Ross’ extraordinary series, Red Scare, about being Jewish, politically active and under threat during the McCarthy era. It had a strong political voice, something that is less obvious but still notable in the current exhibition. To draw attention to a language that has long served to identify yourself as a target for anti-Semitism is the opposite to what so many Jews, particularly of the artist’s parent’s generation, were told to do in order to assimilate. There are whole books written about the slogan Dress British, Think Yiddish that encouraged Jews to blend in, in order to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, in particular the Ivy Leagues. Keep your identity inside, think, don’t speak Yiddish. Variations on this can be found as recent as a decade ago, when the originally Jewish sartorial empire, Saks Fifth Avenue, teamed up with a company that made adjustable stays for men’s shirt collars, imprinted with Yiddish words, functionally hidden from view in their little collar slots. The special collection’s name? “Think Yiddish, Dress British.”

Ruth Ross Schmatta (A rag, or piece of clothing)

Ruth Ross Nudnik (A pestering or irritating person. As the artist related, her Papa used to call her that in exasperation when she disturbed his peace.)

Here is work that draws attention to identity, created during a time when people are physically attacked on the street just for speaking Hebrew, two months ago in Berlin. A time when, closer to home, Marjorie Taylor Green suspected that California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers, and exhibited during a time where Gaza has become a killing field. Plainly there are people in the world who will suspect us, dislike us and maybe despise us because we are Jewish. This point is certainly amplified by many people’s reactions to the horrors unleashed upon civilians in the Middle East. And therefore, unsurprisingly, there is some apprehension associated with letting people know that you are Jewish, and a Yiddish speaker. In addition to concern about vulnerability, many Jews feel some sense of shame or rage about what the government of Israel is pursuing in reaction to the horrifying attack by Hamas, and know we will be called anti-semitic if we voice our anti-Zionism, call for a cease fire or add our voices to the chorus of Jewish voices for Peace. To embrace an essential part of your identity then, in public, is a political act.

Ruth Ross The Royal OY and Gevalt

***

Ross’ second body of work references personal history as well, her life-long relationship with her dolls. Where Yiddish is explicit, straight forward, easily deciphered work, the Doll Dialogues appeared to me to be the opposite. Gauzy layers, combining laser prints on silk, gel prints on silk organza, and lace appliqués with occasional embroidery make for mysterious tableaux each with an obscured doll at its center.

If you are so inclined, they invite psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood memories, symbolized by the dolls, long veiled and inaccessible. After all, here is what Freud wrote:

. . . In the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influence of a variety of later psychological forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories”and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

—Sigmund Freud, “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” 1901

If you are like me, you will rather think about the symbolic value that dolls take on in their respective contemporary settings. They might not always be as explicit and creepy as the ones used by Hans Bellmer, who withdrew into the privacy of his obsessions in response to the Nazi’s imperatives about healthy rather than “degenerative” art. They might not be as culturally appropriated as Max Ernst‘s works derived from his collection of Katsina dolls of Hopi origin. But dolls do have a role within a political context, just as they had symbolic value since their inception so many thousands of years ago, first in religious settings, then as status symbols for the aristocracy and eventually as a plaything intended to shape little girls into their roles of care takers and mothers in the context of the nuclear family.

Ruth Ross On the Bus

Ross’ depiction of her dolls is shrouded in more ways than the visual one. Their titles refer to occasions down the memory lane of the artist, rather than serving as explanatory pointers. Their appearance is at times surreal, at times androgynous, hazy and dark. Lace and silk notwithstanding, there is no sense of an exaggerated female presence, a dress-up tool or emphasis on beauty. No hint of happy, innocent tea parties. These collages are blissfully free of nostalgia, even when tied to personal experiences of the doll’s owner.

Why do I celebrate that, you wonder? What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia?

We live in an era where nostalgia for the traditional role of women, playing house, being subservient, acting doll-like, enjoying the kitchen (Senator Katie Britt, we see you!) is making an organized come-back. It is signaled to a receptive public, yearning for a “traditional past” by ever so many flags, a baby voice appropriate for doll play among them. It has, however, nothing to do with how the dictionary defines nostalgia: “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”

Rather, during (aspiring) fascistic eras it becomes a political tool: Reactionary nostalgia creates a cultural identity by mystifying past and present. The myths of racial superiority and the claimed heritage of a superior religion or immutable gender hierarchy promises succor to those who are feeling deprived and demoted in their present-day existence. That was true for historical periods in the last century, be it in Germany or Italy, or Spain. It is true now for Russian claims of rights to land and resources, and we see it in our own country when we look at the justifications for political movements, Supreme Court sanctioned and enabled, that try to turn the clock back and remove rights extended to those who did not originally occupy the top of a hierarchical ladder (for that matter, who still don’t…)

Ruth Ross She laid her Baby at my Feet detail below

Rather than engaging in nostalgia, we should acknowledge that the past cannot be completely retrieved, and should inform the present only in so far as it allows us to discern what parts of the past should not be repeated. Clinging to conceptions of power that should be assigned to certain people in perpetuity, at the expense of others, is unjustifiable. So is clinging to ideas of permanent victimhood, used as justification by people to become perpetrators regardless of the horrors that they will unleash.

Ruth Ross Love this Doll to Death

The dolls in this exhibition are ambivalent enough that they invite associations to both, object and subject, good and evil. They are a welcome reminder that we need to lift the veil that obscures some version of truth, a veil fashioned out of our clinging to an imagined past, blocking our vision of a more equitable future.

STITCHING STORIES

Ruth Ross & Sam Yamauchi

MARCH 2024: Artist Talk from 1-2 pm on Saturday March 16; a reading by Ruth Ross’ guest poet Leanne Grabel on March 23 at 3 pm.

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660,

Music today, how could I not, is the mechanical doll’s aria from Offenbach’s Hoffman’s Erzählungen.

Diversion

Today is International Women’s Day. I should probably be writing something about the rights women fought for, gained, have threatened and lost. About women in Gaza who lose more than just whatever rights remain to them, losing their families or even their lives. The women in Afghanistan who no longer have access to education, much less choices to thrive in anything other than the domestic sphere, if there. The women of America whose reproductive rights and bodily freedom are under an ongoing assault. And then we are faced with a reply to the SOTU address by a Republican Senator from Alabama, who sits at her kitchen table (where women belong ?) with a cross studded with diamonds around her neck (in case you forget the goal to make this into a Christian nation after all), all drama queen, stage whispering with fake tears in her eyes, how” illegal” immigrants are murdering our wives and daughters, painting a picture that might as well have come right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.) One might wonder how someone who says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, is encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator.

For the sake of sanity – yours as well as mine – I will instead write about the most glorious sights I encountered this week, providing some diversion from our political reality. Some 40 minutes north of Portland, in the state of Washington, runs the Lewis river, emptying into the Columbia which in turn joins the Pacific. At this time of year there are runs of smelt that make their way from the ocean, up the rivers, to their spawning grounds. These small fish from the family Osmeridae live most of their lives in the sea, and when I consulted wikipedia to learn more of them I encountered this: smelt tastes like smelt. Good to know.

The runs vary in size, with climate change making a large, negative impact already. Across the last years, recreational fishing for them in many regions of the Pacific Northwest was severely regulated, they were so scarce. This year the Fish and Wildlife Administration offered people permits for their dipping nets that were only open for a couple of single days.

The bald eagles who congregate at the confluence of the rivers benefit, of course, when they don’t have to compete with fishermen for the increasingly smaller number of prey. The sight was spectacular. In a landscape straight out of a 17th century Flemish painting, they congregate on trees by the hundreds. A steady coming and going, dipping in the water, then hanging out with their lunch on various snags or branches.

Many of them circling higher than I had ever seen them. I first thought those were vultures, joining the feast, but no, all eagles, many of them juvenile who still have brown feathers instead of the symbolic white heads and tail feathers. Lots of courtship acrobatics in the air, with males and females, mating for life, eventually tumbling down in pirouettes, gripping each other’s talons before landing for the fun to begin.

To see the most amazing close up shots, done with professional equipment that I cannot match, by a nature photographer, Mike Schultz, who really stands out, look here. The pictures are from 2021, when the smelt run was bigger than today.

Images by Mike Schultz

My equipment might not live up to these standards, but my enthusiasm sure did. Standing in sunshine, if cool, listening to the sounds of these birds, as well as the sea lions joining the hunt, my heart simply lifted. There was no pretense, no play acting, no hidden agenda, no political manipulation – just nature doing what it does, surviving the day, planning for future generations and protecting them, being in the moment, rising.

A gift.

Music today is Chopin’s Heroic, dedicated to all women who are, having no other choice. And fitting for the eagles as well…..

Migrating Magnolias

I so, so, so long for spring. I guess I have to wait for April…. when in other years magnolias were already in bloom in early March.

Morning – is the place for Dew –

Morning – is the place for Dew – 

Corn – is made at Noon – 

After dinner light – for flowers – 

Dukes – for setting sun! 

 by Emily Dickinson                                                           F223 (1861)  197

Magnolias, not unlike those captured in the photographs, were planted in Dickinson’s garden over 150 years ago, species not native to the region. By now they have migrated, to neighboring towns and from there up North, with climate change making it possible for them to survive in habitats not native for them.

Looked at it the other way around, should gardeners help non-native species to survive by adding them to regions that now have temperatures and water conditions suitable for them? They are doomed to die in their original habitats, after all?

Natural range shifts have certainly been documented by living beings that are able to move to preferred locations, like birds, insects and mammals. Historically, those migrations would have brought plants with them, in the form of seeds traveling via droppings, or clinging to fur and the like. But the species that would have dispersed the magnolias – the mastodons, giant ground-sloth and other mega-fauna – are extinct.

Here is the dilemma: on the one hand you might cheer the survival of a species under changing climate conditions, and go all in to give it a horticulturally helping hand. On the other side, though, many new species might then contribute to the decline and disappearance of those that are truly native to a particular region, themselves stressed by the new climate conditions. After all we know from biology research that a species’ risk of becoming invasive increases with the distance of its historic native range from the region it is colonizing. (Ref.)

I have no solution. Let’s just look at these pictures from other years, harbingers of spring, and enjoy them. We have to take joy were we can find it in these dark, wet days, and blooming trees are among the most joyful things I can conjure.

Music offers a spring song from Dvorak’s Poetic Tone Pictures – with a few others from that Opus thrown in as a bonus for being brave and cheerful!

Papageno

One way of cheering myself up when I am about to sink into a prolonged period of the doldrums, is to look at how other people created art during difficult times. It is pretty amazing how many insanely talented people were out there – and productive – when fascism, war, and displacement ruled the day. A reminder that it can be done, with the requisite discipline and defiant attitude.

One of them who you have probably never heard of before, was Lotte Reininger (June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) who lived and worked in Berlin until she and her husband left in late 1935 to escape the Nazis. From then on they stayed in multiple European countries as long as their respective visas allowed, with a short interlude to care for her ailing mother back in Berlin, promptly being forced by the Nazi regime to help with their propaganda machine. Eventually she settled in England and became a British citizen in 1961.

Reininger, a writer, director and film maker, was friends with numerous notable artists of the time, Bertholt Brecht and Benjamin Britten among them. Her main focus, though was on making animated films with shadow silhouettes (Scherenschnitt) and a first form of a multiplane camera that she devised in 1923. They were strange films, some short, some feature lengths, with topics ranging from fairy tales, to operas, to parodies, with the occasional advertisement to make some money.

Her films were successful for their novelty and their strongly erotic atmosphere, but many of them had so many references to classical music and/or literature, that a less educated public did not exactly get all the action, irony or satirical jokes. They are genuinely fascinating, craft and creative content alike. They are playful, and integrate a number of cultural markers from different countries, referencing western and non-western art alike. The idea that all of the intricate detail was cut by hand and assembled, a century before AI where something akin could be devised in a minute, is mind boggling to me.

She pioneered “paper and cardboard cut-out figures, weighted with lead, and hinged at the joints—the more complex the characters’ narrative role, the larger their range of movements, and therefore, the more hinges for the body—were hand-manipulated from frame to frame and shot via stop motion photography. The figures were placed on an animation table and usually lit from below. In some of her later sound films the figures were lit both from above and below, depending on the desired visual effect. Framed with elaborate backgrounds made from varying layers of translucent paper or colorful acetate foils for color films, Reiniger’s characters were created and animated with exceptional skill and precision.” (Ref.)

I chose one of my favorites, Papageno, for you to enjoy.

It uses a number of tropical bird silhouettes, some almost looking like squirrels, some parrots, some emus. So I thought I’d dig out photographs of something semi-exotic, the lovely peacock. The music and the references to Mozart’s opera are self-explanatory.

If you want to enjoy the whole opera, here is a link to a 1971 Hamburgische Staatsoper production that I actually saw live. Man, I’m old.

And here is a link to a 15 minute overview of Lotte Reininger’s genius, produced by The Met.

If you interested in the art of paper cutting, here is an overview essay, that describes different ways of doing it and their historical and geographic origins, from China in the second century AD to Aztecs in Mexico, to Ashkenazi Jews in the 17th century. Scherenschnitt, cutting with scissors, as used by Reininger, was likely developed in Switzerland and then Germany in the 1500s. Pennsylvania Germans brought it to the US in the 1700s.

So, if this miserable weather does not allow for photography, maybe I should grab a pair of scissors. Or not. Too tempting to use it as a weapon, given my mood and the politics du jour…. so maybe watercolor instead.

Afresh, afresh, afresh.

Some folks by the name of Chad Crabtree and Brandon Woods in Eugene, OR, founded a small literary magazine last year, fittingly called Arboreal. Their titular choice was linked to their own names, but also to the notions of “going out on a limb” – presenting new and surprising work, and “evergreen” – the idea that art is timeless. I have found the occasional interesting new voice there, but also benefitted from the editors’ knowledge of poetry in general. A real enrichment for the literary landscape.

Today’s selection of poems, for example, came from one of Crabtree’s recent essays, called Rooted in Verse: Our Favorite Poems About Trees which I went back to after I had seen an unusual tree last week, a 300 year old Sitka spruce that is called the Octopus tree for its shape that lacks a center trunk but has unfolding tentacle-like limbs.

I picked the Brooke and Larkin poems because they both dwell on the fragility of life, the darkness that is impending, the hopelessness that sneaks up on you when you consider the fleetingness of it all, loss and mortality – but then they both rise to a version of hope, the possibilities of peace or new beginnings. I think that’s what we need: hope and the possibility of dawn or spring (or even a permanent cease fire), even if they are delivered by the minor poet, but golden poster boy of romantic lyricism, Brooke, or the major poet of dark snakiness and sarcastic leanings, Larkin. On average, they got it right this time!

Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening

I’d watched the sorrow of the evening sky,
And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,
And heard the waves, and the seagull’s mocking cry.

And in them all was only the old cry,
That song they always sing — “The best is over!
You may remember now, and think, and sigh,
O silly lover!”
And I was tired and sick that all was over,
And because I,
For all my thinking, never could recover
One moment of the good hours that were over.
And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.
And there was peace in them; and I
Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,
And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;
Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!

by Rupert Brooke

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf 
Like something almost being said; 
The recent buds relax and spread, 
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again 
And we grow old? No, they die too, 
Their yearly trick of looking new 
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh 
In fullgrown thickness every May. 
Last year is dead, they seem to say, 
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

by Philip Larkin

Music today by Brahms, son of the Northern European landscapes where I photographed these trees.

Seeing and (Dis)Believing.

Changing times and changing technology can sometime steal from us things we once had. And sometimes what they steal is hard to replace. Consider the means we have all had and used for knowing the world, and knowing what is real. The common expression is “seeing is believing.” The courts rely on witness testimony and reject as hearsay second-hand evidence. And in a range of moral and religious settings, we emphasize the importance of bearing witness.

Photographs today are from my favorite Chilean Puppet Theatre Group SILENCIO BLANCO. Make believe where it belongs: in art and on the stage.

There is surely no question that first-hand viewing of an event or a situation is enormously compelling. Consider a peculiar Gedanken-experiment: imagine that we have you stand at the edge of a roof, blindfolded, and we urge you to step off the edge. We race to reassure you, though, that you will fall only 18 inches, because there is a safe and secure net positioned so that you are in no danger. We tell you this. We arrange for your best friend to tell you this. We arrange for your spiritual advisor to tell you this. But no matter who tells you, surely you would be more comfortable if you could lift the blindfold and inspect the safety net for yourself. There really is no substitute for first-hand, visual evidence.

This reliance on first hand-experience, and the powerful visual evidence it provides, is at risk from multiple threats. In a recent NYT editorial on partisan perception, Paul Krugman lamented that in our insanely polarized world, we have to reverse the original aphorism, because now “Believing is Seeing.” In other words, people’s opinions and beliefs are so heavily entrenched that they are ready to discount, or reinterpret, or flatly refuse the evidence of their own eyes. We see this, for example, in people’s refusing to acknowledge the videos by eyewitnesses documenting the horrors and war crimes happening in Gaza, or the carnage wrought by Hamas on October 7th.

In some cases, people are so committed to their views, that they refuse even to consider, even to look at visual evidence that will challenge their view. In other cases people choose not to look, because seeing would be too painful. This is understandable, but means people underestimate, or fully fail to understand, the extent of the horrors. Importantly, in many cases, people flatly deny the truth of what they see and declare it faked. In still other cases, people are not permitted to see the visual evidence – a state or an agency monitoring what gets published, fully aware of the impact the prohibited visuals might have.

All of these points are fueled by the rapid advances in digital photography. Speaking as a well practiced montage artist, I, of course, have a sense of how easily images can be manipulated to make them show what you want to show. But what artistry allows is dwarfed by what digital technology makes available to anyone who wishes to manufacture bogus evidence for almost any claim they wish to advance.

Here is a short list what bad actors using AI have already managed to fake in order to influence the 2024 elections. We are stuck with a situation where multiple factors combine: videos are either true or false, and we are told that they are either true or false (irrespective of their actual truth content) and we ourselves have to decide if we trust them or not- a difficult task, magnified by our desire to believe those we generally trust and who tell us to adopt their claims.

(If you are interested in a deeper exploration of the legal issues around regulating media deep fakes in the political arena, the Brennan Center for Justice has a great overview here.)

What to do? The power and immediacy of first hand experience is likely hardwired into us, making us appallingly vulnerable to things like deep fakes. The apprehension that we encounter fake input and fall for it can lead to a different disaster, however: to avoid being duped, we end up trusting no input. The solution may require a set of new habits. When you encounter information, do what you can to check it against other independent sources. (This is, of course, increasingly difficult as Murdoch and Sinclair take over more and more media outlets.) When you encounter information, do what you can to scrutinize who it is that is supplying the information. Be wary of “semi-anonymous” reporting, with entries like “a new study has shown…” or “it is reported that.”

The deepest problem here, though, is that many people don’t have the skills, resources or the inclination to take these cautionary steps. And so instead, they simply latch onto a single source that they deem trustworthy. Unfortunately this choice may lead them to rely on lunatic propaganda. Furthermore, selecting different sources of input as trustworthy, with the young relying on social media videos coming directly out of Gaza, filmed by eyewitnesses, and the old relying on Fox news, or the main stream media that avoid showing videos of the suffering unfolding in Gaza in the first place, further feeds the political polarization (one only has to look at the generational divide in people’s taking sides in this conflict, which doesn’t come out of nowhere.) “Propaganda!” each societal subset shouts against the other.

The habit of seeing is believing cements in place views that may be based on incomplete or distorted input. Something that once was a valuable capacity can these days become an obstacle to the truth. I wish I had a solution.

Music to day is Quieter than Silence.

And here is a short clip of the puppetry, a performance called Pescador.

Purging the Passions

Walk with me. A slow, short amble through a park modeled after old English country estates. Weather in tune, soft rains alternating with violent deluges, making me clutch the camera under my raincoat, seeking shelter under old fir trees, since the paths are too slippery to run back to the car. Or what goes for running these days.

Signs of early spring everywhere, snowdrops dotted with rain,

scilla peaking out among them,

aconite trying to pretend sun(s) still exist.

Camelias bringing some red to the palette

Crocci abundant, some hiding from the rain.

A fragrant edgeworthia paper-bush attracts the very first bee.

Center of my attention, though, were the hellebores, pummeled by the rain, bitten by earlier frost, struggling this year to develop their full glory. I had just learned some fascinating new facts about them (you might remember that I write about them almost every spring, so partial to them.) More importantly, these facts connect to something that modern science is beginning to explore: the relationship between our guts (literally, stomach and intestines) and that of our mental health. (I am going to summarize sources from here and here, and also a recent essay in the Atlantic discussing our preoccupation with gut health.)

Hellebores were linked to madness already in Greek mythology, not as a cause but as a cure, quieting the unruly, “hysteric” young daughters of a king. We find evidence for medicinal use in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as earlier writers, and the practice of using it to “heal” hysteria, epilepsy, mania and depression, lasted for centuries, documented across Europe, from early Romans to 18th century England. Paracelsus sang its praises. Wondrous cures were reported over and over again.

The plant contains helleborine and its derivatives are cardio-toxic glukosides, similar to digitalis. Ingestion even of only the seeds can prove to be fatal. The toxic compound protoanemonin, once swallowed by humans, causes “vomiting, inflammation of the mouth and throat, [and] abdominal pain and diarrhea that can be followed by severe ulcerations of the mouth and damage to the digestive and urinary systems.” The one saving grace might be that it induces vomiting so fast that not enough of the substance remains to kill you.

The roots were pulverized and put in a concoction that led to violent purging with excrements taking on a black color, interpreted to be the evil humors that left your body, the later now ready to heal, mind included. If dosage was mistaken, it led to death. The line between panacea and poison, miracle dram and murderous draught, was a thin one. But the psychological assumptions of emotions being lodged in the belly, and needing to be driven out, if maladaptive, were anything but thin: the perceived violence of Hellebore’s laxative action were seen as the necessary equivalent of the violence and perceived grossness of mental illness, to be forcefully exiled.

In the 17th century, doctors started to discuss the problems with something so potentially lethal, advocating for its use only in the most stubborn cases, and purging with less dangerous substances, like Senna, instead. The symbol of Hellebore was however also taken up by religious crusaders, talking about the need for sinners and “spiritually diseased” people to take the hellebore cure, thus intertwining moral with medical issues, with deranged emotions being at the core of both. Cleansing was necessary both to maintain health, but also to achieve pure spiritual interiors, free from demonic possession.

Viewed in this light, a prescription of hellebore becomes about much more than just the removal of corrupted physical matter. The black substance voided from the bowels was the embodiment of the evil cast out, with the site of spiritual transformation being neither the soul nor the mind but the gut. Taking hellebore presented many of the same dangers as the condition it purported to cure: loss of control, internal corruption, and the very real possibility of death. By forcibly confronting sufferers with their own embodiment, it offered a temporary reprieve from the existential anguish of madness and melancholy. In doing so, it confirmed what many godly individuals already believed: that their bodies were vile and filthy vessels and that their best hope for deliverance lay in abasement before God.”

If we leave G-d and evil out of the discussion (although certain parts of our political establishment seem to bend over backwards to get them back in again…) what do we know scientifically about the gut-brain connection?

Gut and brain communicate through a number of pathways. There is the Vagus nerve, that sends info to the brain with neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine as messengers. Over 90 percent of the body’s serotonin—the neurochemical targeted by the class of commonly prescribed antidepressant medications that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro—resides in the small intestine, facilitating multidirectional communication between the digestive tract and the central nervous system. If our gut’s fragile microbial balance is upended, it sends a message to the immune system, which may trigger gastrointestinal inflammation.

There is also an association (not a determined causal relationship) between gastrointestinal disorders and some psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder and depression. People who live with schizophrenia have higher rates of GI inflammation than the population as a whole. People who struggle with IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] are often also diagnosed with anxiety disorders.

This explains why we have an emerging field of nutritional psychiatry that teaches patients about the appropriate foods that might reduce inflammation — namely grains and plants rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber and pre- and probiotics. No need to buy expensive probiotic supplements that have sprung up like mushrooms provided by an industry ready to cash in; yoghurt, kimchi and sauerkraut all do the job just fine. Hellebore smoothies, however, will likely not be recommended!

Music today offers a bit of madness – demons and all, Faust riding with Mephistopheles, having sold his soul….

Full Opera (Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust) here, with Solti conducting.