October 21st was Ursula Le Guin’s birthday. I was reminded of that by, of all people, my beloved, who is not exactly into literature and/or poetry, but knows how much it – and her authorship – matters to me. Oblivious to that date, I had actually been thinking about her a few days earlier, while hiking Altadena’s Eaton Canyon, completely transformed from how I had experienced it the first time last April.
Verdant then, with roaring water, now dry, with but a trickle. Full of bloom then, color and the songs of birds, now reduced to pattern, lounging frogs and lizards. Still heartrending beautiful.
I was thinking of the many poems I had read where Le Guin describes the very essence of landscapes, desert as well as coast or woods, and how I could not remember a single one in its accurate wording.
That stood in contrast to one about war, that for obvious reasons now rose to the fore:
The Next War
It will take place, it will take time, it will take life, and waste them.
I don’t know about you, but even when I try, when I immerse myself in beauty combined with physical exertion – something even a few miles will do these days – I cannot distract myself away from the sorrow of the extant and future loss of life in the Middle East. When I read about proposed solutions to the conflict, it seems to me that people are just throwing out words, hopes, and closer inspection reveals that no one really has a clue as to how to bring about realistic change, on ALL sides. (Ukraine, by the way, not forgotten by me, either.) Here is an essay worthwhile contemplating that tries to make a distinction between legality and morality of retaliatory actions, and here is one that talks about the difficulty of speaking to the issues without being labeled anti-semitic or islamo-phobic, rendered to silence when we need to speak up.
When I came home from the hike I tried to find a desert poem to post, but chanced on the one below, from her ultimate collection of poems, So Far So Good, finished 2 weeks before her death in 2018.
The volume offers meditations on nature, the recurring topic of so much of her work, but also on aging and the relationship between body and soul. Meditations that are moving, wise, courageous – and also seem an incredible luxury provided by peace time, not available to those tortured, killed and abducted, starved or rained on by bombs. As a committed pacifist, she would have likely agreed.
Walk with me. It’ll be the last hike in Oregon for a while. I am going on a roadtrip to Los Angeles this week, and will write from there until my return in November.
The birds were active today. Little finches busily harvesting seeds.
Raptors in the air.
Egrets on the go,
competing with a lot of blue herons for space and food sources.
This little caterpillar portends a short winter, a long winter, a cold winter, a dry winter, oh, if I could only remember.
These guys were fighting over a fish, until one gave up. The kingfisher watched on.
Lots of preening: the bald eagle, the ducks, the mud hens, the nutria.
Lots of flora still clamoring for attention,
some berries ready to provide for times of scarcity.
What I will miss: a concert that I urge you to consider – Annelies: The Voice of Anne Frank, co-sponsored by the Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Details about the Portland performance are in the link – I have heard from several friends who are singing in it that it is beyond amazing, an important reminder of what matters in times when human life is under threat. The link at the end of the blog is a recording of the concert by a different ensemble.
What you will miss (if you don’t get going…): our exhibition The Gorge Beckons: Change and Continuity is still up at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stevenson until the end of the month. Your thoughts on the work would be much appreciated.
Alternatively you could sensibly decide to enjoy the arrival of autumn in the wetlands instead.
The geese were gathering to fly formation, I wonder if they go South along side of me. I will report, stay tuned!
Music today by James Whitbourn with the MSU Chorale.
Like clockwork pumpkins beckon the photographer at the start of fall, just like sunflowers did in August and September. Like clockwork, the photographer tries to find new angles, opting for detail in some years,
the whole Gestalt in others.
Pumpkins provide never ending joy in their voluptuousness, their variability ranging from highly saturated colors
to visions of water color softness.
I am currently working on a longer essay about the new artist in residence at Portland Japanese Garden, who displays installations based on a theme of visual transposition, mitate ((見立絵))in Japanese. It is a form of literary or visual reconfiguration, seeing something old in new ways, or making allusions that can amount to puns or parody.
Mitate is of course at the core of creating photomontages – transposing the old into the new, shaping reality into something that both maintains and shifts appearances, and, at times, meaning. For today’s topic I have the perfect examples (I have posted some of these images before, long-time readers, please be forgiving.) Here are reconfigured pumpkins. Don’t dare to carve them!
Dear all – today’s post comes through with all the pictures, I believe if you go directly to the website, but not when you just open the incoming email.. I need to figure that one out – appreciate the patience.
Yes, this time of year again. A few years ago I paired the real flowers with the painted ones (see below). I figured this year we just look at the real thing, the surround where they grow and the words they bring to mind.
So walk with me, and bring a bucket, since the farm where I went near Hillsboro allows you to pick all things ripe. Grapes were beckoning – the vines laden – or is it loaded? Whatever, lots of grapes. Still dry on Wednesday, the day before the rain came.
But I had come for the sunflowers – equally attracted by the buds,
the blossoms,
This one had a drop of water in the center like a jewel
the stems and the leaves. Intent to paint with the camera:
Emil Nolde would have been proud of me – except I am not proud of him…
Daily wildlife made an unanticipated appearance. It pays, if you are old and walking slowly, so that critters like these are more curious than frightened. S/he put on quite the show.
The makeshift tents to protect against the sun had their own structural beauty, folded and unfolded, plastic, metal rods, netting all claiming attention.
I can never decide if the poem below is full of wisdom or soppy (or both.) But in August, with the annual radiance of sunflowers, it speaks to me. (Although I’d prefer to embrace the present rather than reveling in memory. Move forwards. not backwards.)
You Can’t Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam’s twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.
The sky filled with clouds, the rain would appear in force the next day.
Music today played by the talented Sol Gabetta, who was seemingly dressed in a cloud, but her cello sounded more like thunder, appropriately Shostakovian. If that’s a word. They seem to be reticent today!
“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.
The grasses will recover.
So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.
The trees, though, are suffering.
Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!
The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.
A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.
I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.
Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.
In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
On Auden’s grave marker, in Kirchstetten, Austria.
***
Their Lonely Betters
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade To all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that words Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
A robin with no Christian name ran through The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third party waited To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying, There was not one which knew that it was dying Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters Who count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words are for those with promises to keep.
W.H. Auden’s 1951 poem depicts him thinking out loud in the garden shade, less praise and more lament, in my opinion. At first sight, the poem is presumably about language, which makes us “betters” as a sign of evolutionary development, but also introduces lying and consciousness about how much our days are numbered. Is language something that improves our existence or is it a curse, and we would be better off to be like plants and critters, who thrive in the absence of language?
Our tomatoes
Underneath it is, as so much of Auden’s poetry, about love. The one we wait for, the one which is withheld, the absence of which is felt as loneliness. Words manifesting in broken promises. Auden was known to connect over and over again to Freud’s writings in ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, which posits a negative relationship between how civilized we are and how happy we might be. The rule, Freud claims, is that humanity will show increasing unhappiness the more civilized we become. Human progress, and note I am oversimplifying his claims here, is closely linked to increases in loneliness and depression. So, there is this whiff of sadness lingering around Auden’s words.
I, on the other hand, was sitting in my garden chair in the shade, too hot to venture anywhere else, eternally grateful for words. They made it possible to read Auden and noticing the link to words written in the 17th century by another poet, Andrew Marvell, in his renowned poem, The Garden. Here is my favorite line:
“(To) a green thought in a green shade.“
Salvia on its way out
The next stanza after this line describes a paradisal state (and he refers indeed to the biblical paradise) until it becomes clear in the stanza after that that a solitary existence won’t do – and things go downhill from there, with Eve’s appearance. But let that wait for another day, for now let the soul glide into the boughs.
Zillions of zinnias
Pictures today obviously from my garden, with eternal gratitude to our friend M. who donated all the tomato starts. We now have regular salad nights with homegrown lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, unless the deer got to the beds first. Speaking of which – one of them, plunked under my plum tree, surely had green thoughts in a green shade, of green plums shifting to a sweeter blue, most likely.
And given that we prefaced this today with an exhortation to praise: I am so eternally grateful for a tree- lined place in the heat, and my heart goes out to the houseless who fight this on asphalted streets and dusty roads. We are so privileged.
Walk with me, in the wetlands around the Tualatin River, during almost 90 degrees at 10 am on a quiet Sunday morning. That was before we had 104 degrees. Wetlands? Dry lands, with a bit of water now shared by creatures in close proximity.
Some still have the energy to show off in front of a mate.
Much of the water is covered by a carpet of duck grits, or algae, enough to reflect the shadows of adjacent vegetation, greeting you with the most saturated chartreuse imaginable.
A lot of plant life is dry, on verge of crumbling, leaves, grasses, a wistful beauty.
Birds still out to find that morsel, before the full heat of the day. A Cedar waxwing, a brown creeper, perfectly camouflaged and an osprey showing off above me, flying from his perch directly to the space above me, so I get some footage even with the small camera, since I couldn’t schlepp the large lens in the heat.
Yet the views I was most enthusiastic about were the thistles. At this time of year you have all stages visible at once, still some blossoms, some flowers, and then all going to seed. The ground is carpeted with the fluff. It flies in the air, like little ghosts swarming the fields. It shimmers silvery, I believe gossamer is the word, something delicately spun, not by spiders, but by the plants that use air currents and weightlessness to propel their offspring to new worlds where they can settle and sprout. The next cycle begins.
In German I would say: “sie begeistern mich,” a word indicating an enthusiastic approach to something or someone. Literally translated it means, they fill me with ghost(s), but it is used in the sense of something touching your soul, or activating joy. Incidentally, you could also say “ich schwärme four see,” I adore them. The term literally means to swarm, like bees forming a swarm or swarming out – just like these seed fluffs do. The medieval usage turned from the verb associated with insects to one describing the ways of religious sects, deviating from the pre-determined church requirements to think along traditional paths and becoming free thinkers instead, around the 16th century. In the literary developments of the 18th century, the term became a commonplace for all kinds of wild enthusiasm and phantasmic thinking.
Why do I bore you with the etymology of German words? For one, because it is quite similar for English, when you look at the roots for the word enthusiasm. The original meaning had to do with religion, transferred from the Greek enthousiasmós, from enthousiázein “to be inspired or possessed by a god,” around the 17th century. Secondly, because I have been wondering what it means to be strongly, enthusiastically preoccupied with, in my case secular, matters all the time and expressing those feelings with abandon. Since childhood, really, I was easily excited about so many things, adored them, absorbing them as well as treating them with enthusiasm. Does that make you less critical? Impede judgment? Is it going to be interpreted differently by others, because I am a woman, seen as overly emotional rather than in possession of a trait that has components of both, affect and cognition?
As it turns out enthusiasm predicts satisfaction in life and positive relationships. If you’re up for it, here is an extensive but well written review of what we know about the cumulative effects of experience, interpretation, and regulation of positive stimuli and emotions that ultimately lead to the experience of happiness, life satisfaction, and wellbeing. The paper gives an overview of how wellbeing and happiness were defined across the centuries and how contemporary psychology is now looking at the underlying physiological processes that are at work – or that are missing. “Experiencing positive emotions (likeenthusiasm) benefits psychological and physical wellbeing in numerous, intersecting ways, including modulating neurophysiological correlates within the central and peripheral nervous systems.”
So there. I enthusiastically photograph thistles, marveling at their beauty. I also enthusiastically welcome the latest news out of a courthouse in Georgia. I enthusiastically watch the video clips of a grandchild learning to crawl. I enthusiastically count the hours until the thermometer lands on something under 90 degrees. (Luckily I can count that high. Turns out, enthusiasm is also a prime motivator for learning, so having had that in my tool kit for various forays into schooling was not a bad thing.)
Then again, I unenthusiastically read what Merriam-Webster had as an example for the use of the word enthusiasm on their website:
The criminal charges appear to have done little to dampen Republican voters’ enthusiasm for Trump, who remains the leading candidate for his party’s 2024 nomination for president.—The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 Aug. 2023
Let’s enthusiastically hope that on this August 16th things have changed! (Fat chance.)
And here is a passionate piece of music. Hard to believe it was composed during WW I, in 1916.
A Bird, came down the Walk – He did not know I saw – He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass – And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass –
He glanced with rapid eyes, That hurried all abroad – They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, He stirred his Velvet Head. –
Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb, And he unrolled his feathers, And rowed him softer Home –
Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, Leap, plashless as they swim.
***
I’ve been hanging out in the garden far too much, not able to brave the heat for more adventurous excursions. But I shouldn’t complain, given the number of visitors happily parading in front of the camera, as long as the plants provide sustenance or I bring out the bird seeds….
Quite a few youngsters,
and one of the butterflies makes my heart beat faster, since he comes every day, a relentless survivor given that someone ate half of his wings.
Squirrels now letting me come so close I could practically give them a manicure, or is that a pedicure?
Bees, in contrast to last year, are leaving me alone, too busy in the lavender.
An occasional newt
Summer. An oasis. Not even a slug to fight with. I feel blessed.
Then again there is always a mouse that needs transport far away from my basement….lest it comes back the next day.
Music matches the mood – maybe Mother Goose comes down the walk next. In the meantime, the chickadees get fed.
Walk with me, on a hot day of wispy, white clouds and lines of dry grasses.
It was sparse in the bird department, because I unwittingly managed to pick a day at the refuge where landscape restoration was in full progress, chainsaw noises and large number of workers driving them into hiding. Or maybe the smoke from the nearby wildfires had displaced them, the smell still lingering.
For every missing bird there were about ten dragon flies and a hundred mosquitoes, at least in the more wooded areas of the Columbia River Delta.
There were butterflies galore,
but the real magic came from the air – it was filled with wisps of cotton seed and thistle down, flying about like snowflakes, in literal clouds drifting before a soft wind and getting caught on the vegetation eventually.
Seeds clung to plants, thoughts clung to seeds. In particular, the effects of war and greed on the seed repositories of the world. How will the increasing temperatures due to the climate crisis affect the Swalvard Seedbank, assumed to be safely storing humanity’s survival crops in permanent frost? You can now take a virtual tour of the vault here, by the way.
How will farmers recover their seed stocks when war manages to destroy seed banks and generally disrupt food production? Think of seed banks this way:
Seed banks represent genetic reservoirs of adaptive traits. By knowing the conditions under which the seed’s ancestors had developed, botanists can identify characteristics signaling where else a plant might thrive.For instance, wheat from regions getting only a few rains a year might point to some form of inherent drought tolerance. Similarly, strains of legumes that offer bounty crops when others succumb to blights might signal natural disease resistance. Those that fruit early may prosper where growing seasons are short. Those whose fruits ripen in cool to cold environments might survive high altitudes. And those with deep roots may anchor erodible hillsides.
As climate changes or communities begin extending a crop’s production into new areas, growers may need to find existing cultivars that match their current environment–or breeders may need to develop news ones by crossing varieties with a mix of desired features.
For each case, calls to the regional library of genes, a seed bank, may be in order. (Ref.)
This was written 10 years ago when the Afghan seed bank was destroyed by thieves. (To add insult to injury, the robbers took only the plastic and glass containers, emptying seeds, collected for decades, indiscriminately onto the floor, making them unusable.) Not having cataloged seeds that indicate their usability for a certain region is particularly dire in a country where so many farmers were displaced due to the war, and now have to work in regions unfamiliar and without seed starts that would flourish or at least survive there. How will Afghan farmers, now fully back under Taliban rule, get the seeds that were provided by NGO’s for the last decade, now barred from the country? I had written at length about a comparable situation not so long ago, if you recall, in regards to Syria, where at least scientists managed to save some catalogued repositories, smuggling them to safer countries.
I was reminded of it all due to this week’s report on Ukrainian losses from the Russian invasion. Last year Russian missiles destroyed part of an enormously precious Ukrainian herbarium at the University of Kherson. It served a vital role in the study of species extinction, invasive pests, and climate change The collection held specimens that can only be found in Ukraine and that are now at the brink of extinction. After all, about a third of all protected Ukrainian areas have been destroyed by bombing, burning, and military maneuvers. According to the non-profit Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG, whose Logo I adore, ) Russian troops have scorched tens of thousands of hectares of forests and put more than 800 plants at risk of extinction, including 20 rare species that have mostly vanished from elsewhere. And because they mined large swathes of land, scientists won’t be able for decades to see what can still be rescued, should this war ever stop.
What was left of the herbarium was rescued under somewhat harrowing circumstances by two devoted botanists this January, and moved to a different university in the country, some 1000 km away – also not entirely safe under war conditions. You can read about the efforts here.
I am usually not a fan of Eliot A. Cohen, but his deliberations on the West’s need for admitting Ukraine to NATO, a step severely curtailed by the U.S. and Germany during the recent summit, strike a chord with me. As he wrote in The Atlantic yesterday:
The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states that, like Ukraine, were once subject to rule from Moscow.
The noise of the chain saws stopped during lunch break and the quiet was noticeable, encouraging the deer to emerge, close enough to where I was resting in the shade that I could see the hair in their ears.
I was thinking about how war changes both, the soundscape of the environment and the way people are listening, with silence often more threatening than actual sounds, heralding an anticipated attack, the moment before the (fire) storm. It was interestingly an aspect of war that both of my parents were willing to talk about (in contrast to abiding silence on many others), from the perspective of living in Berlin during bombing raids (my mother) and the battlefield (my father.) There is a fascinating literature emerging on the issue – you can download an edited volume about the Sounds of War and Peace published a few years ago, of interest to me in its relation to memory research. A groundbreaking book by Joy Damousi, Sounds and Silence of War, is on my list to read about the topic from a cultural historian’s perspective. And now we have artists and historians record the sounds experienced in Ukraine, during the war, at very different locations and occasions. I am linking to the description of the project here, and it is worthwhile reading the essay. Some of the links to the sounds (found in the bolded titles) are working, others not so much, I believe the acoustics.net server might have limited capacity. Worth a try, though.
Here is music by a young Ukrainian composer. One of her new scores was chosen to be among the ones played by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra for the 2023/24 season after an open call for scores this January.
