Steadfastness.

“A Third Way: Between mute submission and blind hate – I choose the third way. I am ṣāmid. – Raja Shehadeh, A Journal of Life in the Westbank (1982).

I am writing this on the last day of Hanukkah, the Jewish celebration of a miracle during ancient times of war (between two Jewish factions, no less.) It is a minor holiday for us, in contrast to Christmas for others, coming up in a few days. The promise of peace through a newly born savior is central to Christianity, even though one might wonder about the seeds of conflict already inherent in the Christmas story per announcement in Luke 2:14 : “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” Favoring one set of people over others is a recipe for conflict, in my opinion, and currying favor in order to be in the desirable in-group has often implied exclusion of others. But I digress.

Today’s thoughts are about peace, the absence thereof, and the steadfastness of those who try to dream about a just world amidst war and violence, including the anti-Semitic mass murder in Australia last week and the ongoing genocidal actions in Gaza for the last 2 years.

There is a term in Arabic, Sumud, which means “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance”. In one interpretation, it encompasses everyday nonviolent resistance against injustice imposed on you. Sumud is an alternative to and rejection of passive submission to oppression and dispossession. It became an important aspect of Palestinian existence under Israeli occupation, summarized early by Edward Said as work which “becomes a form of elementary resistance, a way of turning presence into small-scale obduracy.” (Ref.)

Folks at the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem defined the sumud concept as, “on the one hand, [relating] to a vertical dimension, ‘standing strong’ on the land, having deep roots. On the other hand”, sumud indicates “a horizontal time dimension – an attitude of patience and persistence, of not giving up”, despite the odds. (Ref.) I chose photographs of roots and trees for this reason today.

A person who practices sumud is called ṣāmid, and I can think of no better example right now than Ahmed “Muin” Abu Amsha, a musician, sound engineer, composer, and music educator from Gaza. He has steadily worked with children under the onslaught of bombs and drones, teaching them music that incorporated the sounds of the drones, making something terrifying into something beautiful. He insists that music is just as important as finding shelter and food, a steadfast focus on something more than war. His choir, Gaza Birds Singing, has provided meaning for so many youths living under excruciating existential threat. Watch for yourself.

Sumud is also the title of a new, short film by documentary film maker Jan Haaken, featuring a Portland anesthesiologist who regularly travels to Gaza to provide assistance to a medical system under systematic attack, and Omar El Akkad, a now Portland-based author whose most recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the 2025 National Book Award for non-fiction.

Truth be told, I had to force myself to watch these 27 minutes, given how overwhelmed I feel by my mix of emotions every time I think of Gaza. The sorrow over the Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks; the subsequent killing, maiming and psychological torture of Palestinian men, women and children for two full years. The horrid and completely counterproductive Israeli response, with our tax dollars supporting an indiscriminate war against civilians. The lack of will of the political establishment around the world to put an end to the slaughter. The undeniable fact that the current “cease fire” is a sham, with more than 360 Palestinians, mostly kids and the elderly, killed since it was announced 10 weeks ago. I just want to hide my head in the sand.

I did watch, though, and learned a lot, much of it new to me, including the report of the anesthesiologist on the systematic nature of the injuries they encountered with victims all waiting in lines at food distribution centers. But much of the film also gave me renewed hope that there are people out there who can and will help, with their courage, their wisdom, their insights and longing for justice, to move ahead. These are, of course, people who need us, in return, to join for collective actions that might have an impact on ending the war. In an earlier print interview, author Omar El Akkad outlined his observations and recommended action, asking: “How does one finish the sentence: ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …’”

Pondering this sentence might be a first step towards overcoming the tendency to avoid facing what is going on in the Middle East, a tendency otherwise fueled by the need to keep one’s peace of mind somewhat intact in the face of the onslaught of bad news in our world. If we want to be agents of peace, we likely need to leave our clinging to peace of mind behind. Period. It’s our turn to embrace the concept of steadfastness, not as cultural appropriation but as an expression of solidarity with victims everywhere.

If you are interested in screening this documentary with a group of friends or colleagues for free, you can go to the website. In the lower left corner is a red square where you can apply for a free link to see the film.

***

People who decry the extent of Palestinian suffering are constantly challenged to justify themselves, particularly so if they are Jewish. Anyone standing in solidarity with Palestinians is tagged as suspicious, as if support for this devastated population necessarily involves anti-Semitism. This challenge, though, is incoherent, and there should be no obstacle to asserting two simple concepts at once: a respect for Jewish lives and a respect for Palestinian lives; a rejection of anti-Semitism, and an abhorrence of the indiscriminate killings of Gazan civilians. Why do I have to defend myself for these simple, humanistic statements? Why do I have to justify them and defend myself against the bizarre notion that these views are anti-Semitic?

Just look at the table of contents of the current issue of Jewish Currents, the award-winning quarterly of politics, culture, and ideas. There you will find a plethora of reports and analyses authored by people raising their voices against those who have distorted all discussions of the war in Gaza and the future for a Palestinian homeland, deliberately (and falsely) equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and falsely condemning calls for Palestinians statehood as anti-Semitic. Amid the horrors of the reality in Gaza, it is dismaying that so much time and energy are now spent defending against how the notion of anti-Semitism is instrumentalized to push through political projects that are rooted in very different considerations.

A poignant summary comes from Will Saletan at The Bulwark, noting how supporters of contemporary Zionism, ever more exclusionary and territorially expansive, play into the hands of anti-Semitic terrorists like the Bondi Beach murderers.

“Supporters of Israel have shifted their position again. Any endorsement of Palestinian statehood, they contend, is an invitation to antisemitic violence.

This is a false and dangerous argument. If you tell people that accepting Palestinian statehood is tantamount to promoting or provoking the murder of Jews, you’re erasing the nuances that make coexistence possible. You’re conflating Palestinian autonomy with opposition to Israel. You’re conflating opposition to Israel with hostility to Jews. And you’re conflating hostility to Jews with murder.

All of these conflations serve the interests of antisemitic terrorists. Their goal is to polarize the issue. They want to equate supporting Palestine with killing Jews. Prominent supporters of Israel are now, in effect, endorsing that equation.“

***

I started with references to the sound of drones, and I will end with another one.

Let me close with a poem by Mosab Abu Toha, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary with essays published in the New Yorker this year (2025). His first volume of poems won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press’s 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

I
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

II
The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.

BY MOSAB ABU TOHA

Music today is more by the Gaza Birds Singing – here, here and here.

The entire album, Wings over Wire, can be found on Bandcamp for a pittance. All proceeds for purchase go to the Gaza Bird project.

Go on, sing!

Culture, Music, Poetry
Dec 15, 2025
1 Comments

The essay below was written before the horrific events of the last days, the mass shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, the stabbing of a righteous couple. I wondered this morning, if it would be frivolous to post it. But it ends with thoughts of having to create light when there is none, reminders of making a world shine during difficult circumstances. I think that core message is what we need. So here goes….

_____________________________

Hah! The universe tells me to think, not mope.

I had barely started to whine about the fact that I miss live singing, both as a participant and a listener, when, within 24 hours, interesting pieces about singing popped up in my news feed, in publications as diverse as The Guardian, Nature and High Country News.

It began with listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, familiar from childhood. In retrospect, it seems as if we sang not just in this season but all the time in the 50s and 60s – in class rooms, at services, at demonstrations, at parties, on school field trips in the busses, and eventually at live performances. Belting out the newest hits from the Beatles or the Kinks, Procul Harum, the Stones, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Traffic, Jonny Halliday and Gilbert Bécaud, you name it. Informed by listening to Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg under the covers on contraband tiny transistor radios, strictly prohibited in my boarding school. No matter how much I loathed being stashed there, when we sang, a sense of community took over.

(Portraits today of people of that – my – generation. I always wonder what someone’s musical taste might be, why I stereotype many of them as (Grateful)Deadheads, and if I’ll ever find a match to my idiosyncratic musical preferences.)

Later I joined choirs, until chemo wrecked my voice; then regularly attended choral concerts, until the Covid pandemic shut down my ability to be in close proximity to large crowds. These days what goes for singing is croaking along to my Bandcamp collection in the privacy of my car on solo rides to my nature outings. Oh well. Could be worse.

I was squarely reminded of that, when I read about people who have made it their business to sing to people on their deathbeds. The assumption is that it calms the dying, and allows them to cross the threshold, accompanied by soft, slow melodies and harmonies sung by up to 4 practiced people who travel to homes and hospices. Importantly, they only sing their own compositions, assuming that more familiar tunes would “keep” you from letting go, clinging to or (re)living the past. Hmmm.

I am firmly convinced that we have no agency in the choice of timing our exit, as I have discussed previously, and so nothing we do or don’t do, will have any influence. But would a music lover feel more comfortable with simplistic, if sweet tunes by these threshold choirs, than the familiar sounds of, say, a Mahler or Schubert song cycle? For that matter, would one feel comfortable with strangers in the room (though still better than the traveling harpists so prevalent in local hospitals…)? You can read all about the choirs here.

***

As it turns out, not surprisingly, hard times, punctuated by traumatic events like 9/11 or the pandemic, have an impact on songs. Interesting research, recently published in Nature, analyzed 50 years of song development (1973 – 2023) for the lyrics of songs on the US Hot 100 Billboards. (Heads up for sampling bias: certain genres are not reflected in these charts, from rap to early punk, which was censured, just think Ramones or Sex Pistols. Reggae and Latin music was extremely popular but did not make it into these charts since at the time based in club culture.)

But for the general popular music we see clear trends: across time, themes of stress and negativity increased, while simultaneously the lyrics got less and less complex. Across the same 50 years, rates of depression and anxiety increased, as did the negative tone in the media and fiction books, amidst recent drops in IQ and PISA test scores.

Preferences in music consumption could mirror what is going on in the surrounding culture and one can speculate about what emotional regulation we choose in response to what is happening around us. We can select music that aligns with our current affective state (stressed), or we can listen to music that brings us closer to a goal state (happy) – in short, we can regulate our moods by choosing particular musical coping mechanisms. The research here was interested if that happens in ways we can predict for society as a whole, particularly during periods of traumatic events.

As it turns out the prevalent mood congruent trends were NOT amplified during 9/11 or Covid; in other words, people did not listen more to upsetting music when they felt particularly frightened. If anything, people chose to listen to more positive music instead, modulating their mood perhaps in ways that allowed them to make it through these hard times.

The complexity of lyrics – or absence thereof – is currently affected by yet another variable: the arrival of AI on the scene. Here is Timothy Snyder’s description of the AI renditions of classic Christmas songs, musical score intact, lyrics changed, as experienced in a coffee shop just a few days ago. In his inimitable prose:

My guess would be that someone, somewhere, entered an instruction to generate winter and Christmas songs that avoided “controversial” subjects such as divine and human love. And so we get mush. In a reverse sublimation, the sacred becomes slop. …

The carols bear a message about love, one that that no machine will understand, and that those who profit from the machine perhaps do not want us to understand. Love begins humbly, takes risks, recognizes the other, ends in pain, returns as song. And begins humbly again.

As always, his essay is worth a quick read.

***

Let’s end on a more positive note, though, keying in on A or C major (preferred keys by Earth, Wind and Fire, one of my favorites, as it turns out.)

I found the poem below about singing songs that are also centered on love, incredibly perceptive as well as motivating. The poet Valencia Robin was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her poems have appeared in a wide-range of journals, anthologies and podcasts including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Daily. Here she cites a quite familiar line from The Essential Earth Wind and Fire, album 2002, track 9 All About Love, a song that inspired the poem:

“And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty,”

Have Mercy,

Listen to me Y’all……

Ars Poetica

I woke up singing
my favorite song as a kid
and I mean, really singing,
catching myself all morning,
asking myself what it means,
a reminder perhaps
that we can be strange
— we wake, we sing,
we wonder why we’re singing,
we realize how seldom we have a song
in us anymore, remember how we
used to play/be Aretha and Anita
or Earth, Wind and Fire — Maurice
bringing it, sending us on one of the few oldies
where the words ‘right on’ don’t sound silly,
standing in the middle of the room
giving our all to the olive-green sofa
and wood paneling, mama at work
— we even had his little laugh down
and when’s the last time we believed
what we were saying so completely,
all that 70’s positivity, all that gospel
pretending to be the devil’s music
— and is that what ruined us, why we’re so bad
at real life — practically screaming the last line,
And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty,
deciding without even knowing we’d decided
that that — Lord help us — was the dream.

by Valencia Robin.

It’s still the dream. And about time, that poems titled Ars Poetica don’t just give a nod to Horace (he wrote the very first poem with that title about the craft of writing poetry), but acknowledge the likes of Maurice White whose poetic lyrics motivated and uplifted generations.

And now excuse me while I slink off to hum this and grab the camera to make some beauty out of a dreary winter landscape. You can come along, if you sing!

Song for the Rainy Season

Nature, Poetry
Dec 11, 2025
2 Comments

Looking at the wondrous waterfalls and an old, abandoned house at the White River in WA earlier this fall, I was reminded of Bishop’s poem Song for the Rainy Season. The poem’s short lines and enjambment establish a kind of breathless rhythm, matching my breathless climb back up from the river, once I had explored the ruins. The poet describes the beauty of a wet landscape with a home embedded within, in the tropical forests of Brazil where she lived for some 15 years. The rainy season has arrived here in the Pacific Northwest and adjacent High Desert regions as well, and before you rush to wish for a return of the dry, read the 6th stanza. Some of the magic and coloring will all dry up….

Song for the Rainy Season.

Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.

In a dim age
of water
the brook sings loud
from a rib cage
of giant fern; vapor
climbs up the thick growth
effortlessly, turns back,
holding them both,
house and rock,
in a private cloud.

At night, on the roof,
blind drops crawl
and the ordinary brown
owl gives us proof
he can count:
five times–always five–
he stamps and takes off
after the fat frogs that,
shrilling for love,
clamber and mount.

House, open house
to the white dew
and the milk-white sunrise
kind to the eyes,
to membership
of silver fish, mouse,
bookworms,
big moths; with a wall
for the mildew’s
ignorant map;

darkened and tarnished
by the warm touch
of the warm breath,
maculate, cherished;
rejoice! For a later
era will differ.
(O difference that kills
or intimidates, much
of all our small shadowy
life!) Without water

the great rock will stare
unmagnetized, bare,
no longer wearing
rainbows or rain,
the forgiving air
and the high fog gone;
the owls will move on
and the several
waterfalls shrivel
in the steady sun.

By Elizabeth Bishop

Music today is by Brahms, the Sonata contains motifs of his Rain Song.

Pillars of Color.

Nature, Poetry, Science
Nov 20, 2025
1 Comments

Walk with me, before I take off for Thanksgiving, driving South to see the kiddos.

The trees were in full glory, emanating golden light, or sometimes green-tinged yellow brilliance.

A few reds thrown in, here or there, claiming attention.

I had no clue that there is a huge difference between the yellowing of fall leaves, and those turning red. Scientists apparently understand the biological process of the former, and have only speculations about the latter, (or so I learned here.)

When trees start to retrieve nitrogen they need for photosynthesis in fall, they break down the green chlorophyll in their leaves. This exposes the yellow pigments that were there all along. Case solved.

For red (or orange) looking leaves, trees have to produce a brand-new chemical, just before the leaves fall from the tree. Why take on that energy cost?

Scientists are divided about the likely options. Many of them believe that it has to do with protection against the sun, a kind of sunscreen that helps shelter the trees against surplus light when chlorophyll activity is declining.

Susanne Renner at Washington University in St. Louis explains: “There are a lot of high-tech, biochemical, physiological experimental papers showing that one function [of red pigment] is photoprotection.” Arguments in favor come also from correlational observations: Northern Europe, with much less solar irradiation in fall, has fewer trees turning red than we have in the States.

Alternatively, red pigments might be protecting the tree’s ability to recover nitrogen from the leaves. Tree species that co-exist with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which give them abundant nitrogen, generally do not turn red.

Other scientists are not convinced and suggest a very different cause: insects. It turns out that aphids can tell the difference between red and yellow, and much prefer to lay eggs on the latter. Trees, then, could protect themselves against these pests if they evolved to turn red. As a bonus, there is the chance that the red-color pigments have anti-fungal properties that would serve trees well.

Not knowing the right answer, or the list of them, doesn’t faze me one bit. I am just so incredibly happy to look at the beauty, to understand that it has a purpose in addition to making my heart sing – once again grateful for fall.

Soon there will be no leaves left.

In Blackwater woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

By Mary Oliver

The sandhill cranes added to the joy of the day.

Music today “Der Einsame Im Herbst” (the Lonely one in Autumn) from Mahler’s Lied von der Erde.

Have a good Thanksgiving week – I’ll be back by beginning of December.

“Did Women Ruin Men Blaming Women For Ruining Things?”

I borrowed that title from writer Celeste Ng who posted it in response to the inane opinion piece by Ross Douthat in the NYT, wondering if women ruined the work place (I will not even link to it – they later shifted the titled to liberal feminism instead of “women.”)

Low energy on my end this week, so you get to look at some portraits I took of strong women, and a collection of publications (I found ready-made) that blamed women for ruining – well, everything.

It would all be laughable, if the bigotry wasn’t so scary.

Portrait of a Woman

She must be a variety.
Change so that nothing will change.
It’s easy, impossible, tough going, worth a shot.
Her eyes are, as required, deep, blue, gray,
dark merry, full of pointless tears.
She sleeps with him as if she’s first in line or the only one on earth.
She’ll bear him four children, no children, one.
Naive, but gives the best advice.
Weak, but takes on anything.
A screw loose and tough as nails.
Curls up with Jasper or Ladies’Home Journal.
Can’t figure out this bolt and builds a bridge.
Young, young as ever, still looking young.
Holds in her hand a baby sparrow with a broken wing,
her own money for some trip far away,
a meat cleaver, a compress, a glass of vodka.
Where’s she running, isn’t she exhausted.
Not a bit, a little, to death, it doesn’t matter.
She must love him, or she’s just plain stubborn.
For better, for worse, for heaven’s sake.

by Wislawa Szymborska translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

A short piece for music today, introduced as: “Being a woman writing music in the early 20th century was an act of feminism in itself. In the 1920s, a critic at one performances remarked with surprise that Ruth Crawford Seeger could “sling dissonances like a man”—because, you know, what could a woman possibly know about discord?”

Or music. Or anything…..

A King who couldn’t stop the Tide.

Green King tides on the Pacific coast this weekend. Blue waves in other parts of the country a few days later.

(Photographs from the outing – note how the light shifts in the span of just 48 hours and how the trees are shaped by their environment.)

Got me thinking about William Makepeace Thackeray’s insights about the power (or lack thereof) of men to stop the tides and his savage novel, Vanity Fair, converted into a brilliant movie (2004) by the mother of New York City’s newly elected mayor. Convergence!

Thackeray was an interesting character – born in India, sent to England at age 5 after being orphaned, educated in brutal school settings, gambling away much of his inheritance. A smart, extremely perceptive satirist, allergic to hypocrisy and liberal to the core – he fought for suffrage, legislature term restrictions and an end to classism. Some of his social critique of Victorian society is almost too on the nose for our own times.

His poem below is often misinterpreted to claim the King thought he was almighty and tried to stope the waves, when it really says the opposite. His immoral life full of raids, killing and looting, he gets cold feet towards the end of it. Caught with remorse and fear of consequences (thoughts of will I get into heaven, one might wonder,) he, I speculate, tries to appease the judging power with submission. The sycophantic parasites surrounding him being too dense to even catch his drift. Plus ça change….

King Canute

KING CANUTE was weary hearted; he had reigned for years a score,
Battling, struggling, pushing, fighting, killing much and robbing more;
And he thought upon his actions, walking by the wild sea-shore.

‘Twixt the Chancellor and Bishop walked the King with steps sedate,
Chamberlains and grooms came after, silversticks and goldsticks great,
Chaplains, aides-de-camp, and pages,—all the officers of state.

Sliding after like his shadow, pausing when he chose to pause,
If a frown his face contracted, straight the courtiers dropped their
jaws;
If to laugh the king was minded, out they burst in loud hee-haws.

But that day a something vexed him, that was clear to old and young:
Thrice his Grace had yawned at table, when his favorite gleemen sung,
Once the Queen would have consoled him, but he bade her hold her tongue.

“Something ails my gracious master,” cried the Keeper of the Seal.
“Sure, my lord, it is the lampreys served to dinner, or the veal?”
“Psha!” exclaimed the angry monarch, “Keeper, ’tis not that I feel.

“‘Tis the HEART, and not the dinner, fool, that doth my rest impair:
Can a king be great as I am, prithee, and yet know no care?
Oh, I’m sick, and tired, and weary.”—Some one cried, “The King’s arm-
chair!”

Then towards the lackeys turning, quick my Lord the Keeper nodded,
Straight the King’s great chair was brought him, by two footmen able-
bodied;
Languidly he sank into it: it was comfortably wadded.

“Leading on my fierce companions,” cried he, “over storm and brine,
I have fought and I have conquered! Where was glory like to mine?”
Loudly all the courtiers echoed: “Where is glory like to thine?”

“What avail me all my kingdoms? Weary am I now and old;
Those fair sons I have begotten, long to see me dead and cold;
Would I were, and quiet buried, underneath the silent mould!

“Oh, remorse, the writhing serpent! at my bosom tears and bites;
Horrid, horrid things I look on, though I put out all the lights;
Ghosts of ghastly recollections troop about my bed at nights.

“Cities burning, convents blazing, red with sacrilegious fires;
Mothers weeping, virgins screaming vainly for their slaughtered
sires.—”
“Such a tender conscience,” cries the Bishop, “every one admires.”

“But for such unpleasant bygones, cease, my gracious lord, to search,
They’re forgotten and forgiven by our Holy Mother Church;
Never, never does she leave her benefactors in the lurch.

“Look! the land is crowned with minsters, which your Grace’s bounty
raised;
Abbeys filled with holy men, where you and Heaven are daily praised:
YOU, my lord, to think of dying? on my conscience I’m amazed!”

“Nay, I feel,” replied King Canute, “that my end is drawing near.”
“Don’t say so,” exclaimed the courtiers (striving each to squeeze a
tear).
“Sure your Grace is strong and lusty, and may live this fifty year.”

“Live these fifty years!” the Bishop roared, with actions made to suit.
“Are you mad, my good Lord Keeper, thus to speak of King Canute!
Men have lived a thousand years, and sure his Majesty will do’t.

“Adam, Enoch, Lamech, Cainan, Mahaleel, Methusela,
Lived nine hundred years apiece, and mayn’t the King as well as they?”
“Fervently,” exclaimed the Keeper, “fervently I trust he may.”

“HE to die?” resumed the Bishop. He a mortal like to US?
Death was not for him intended, though communis omnibus:
Keeper, you are irreligious, for to talk and cavil thus.

“With his wondrous skill in healing ne’er a doctor can compete,
Loathsome lepers, if he touch them, start up clean upon their feet;
Surely he could raise the dead up, did his Highness think it meet.

“Did not once the Jewish captain stay the sun upon the hill,
And, the while he slew the foemen, bid the silver moon stand still?
So, no doubt, could gracious Canute, if it were his sacred will.”

“Might I stay the sun above us, good sir Bishop?” Canute cried;
“Could I bid the silver moon to pause upon her heavenly ride?
If the moon obeys my orders, sure I can command the tide.

“Will the advancing waves obey me, Bishop, if I make the sign?”
Said the Bishop, bowing lowly, “Land and sea, my lord, are thine.”
Canute turned towards the ocean—”Back!” he said, “thou foaming brine.

“From the sacred shore I stand on, I command thee to retreat;
Venture not, thou stormy rebel, to approach thy master’s seat:
Ocean, be thou still! I bid thee come not nearer to my feet!”

But the sullen ocean answered with a louder, deeper roar,
And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling sounding on the shore;
Back the Keeper and the Bishop, back the king and courtiers bore.

And he sternly bade them never more to kneel to human clay,
But alone to praise and worship That which earth and seas obey:
And his golden crown of empire never wore he from that day.
King Canute is dead and gone: Parasites exist alway.

By William Makepeace Thackeray

What he said.

***

Before we expect miracles to follow Tuesday’s election outcomes, here are some reflections on what is ahead of us – not meant as downers, but as a reminder that work lies before us.

Election lawyer Marc Elias predicts Republicans’ reactions and further assault on voting rights.

Hadas Thier at Hammer & Hope writes thoughtfully about the challenges to Mamdani’s delivery of much that he promised voters.

Both reads highly recommended.

He will have help, though, from a lot of accomplished women on his transition team:

Former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, nonprofit president Grace Bonilla and city budget expert Melanie Hartzog will be his transition co-chairs. Progressive political strategist Elana Leopold, a de Blasio alum and senior Mamdani campaign adviser, will serve as the transition’s executive director.

Together, they have backgrounds in social services, finance, city budgeting and housing development. Their roles on the transition team — meant to smooth the mayor-elect’s path from election in early November to inauguration in January — often serve as a de facto audition for appointments to City Hall. (Ref.)

Music today promises unity in diversity, jazz from Sweden, not too far from King Canute’s home in Denmark, to celebrate what the electorate managed to pull off.

Barbie lost her surf board….

He, on the other hand, is looking for Barbie…

Slow Time.

Nature, Poetry
Nov 3, 2025
5 Comments

How It Seems To Me

In the vast abyss before time, self
is not, and soul commingles
with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
soul brings the misty self to be.
Then slow time hardens self to stone
while ever lightening the soul,
till soul can loose its hold of self
and both are free and can return
to vastness and dissolve in light,
the long light after time.

by Ursula LeGuin

Music today is Vortex Temporum….

Clouds out of Balance.

I seem to be coming back to clouds. Not a surprise, surely, for a photographer. I wrote about them, among others, in the context of poetry of exile, or metaphorically linking them to the insights modern genetics can bring us.

What approach shall we take today? Start with Aristophanes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land (nephelokokkȳgía (νεφελοκοκκυγία), a satire of a bird-built city in the clouds meant to ridicule Athenians for living in a fantasy world rather than facing reality? Now used as an insult for naive, slightly deranged people bent on conspiracies that the impossible might happen?

Or start with Anthony Doerr’s novel of the same name, which links multiple narrators across 600 years in a time-traveling puzzle celebrating the power of stories? A puzzle that provides the hope – or fantasy? – that some permanence of tales told echoes the permanence of our world, despite predictions to the contrary? (I am not a fan of his, I think I reviewed All the Light that we can see here earlier in not too friendly a way. But Cloud Cuckoo Land is beloved by many readers who cling to the bit of optimism it provides.)

Shall it be Shelley, the poet famous for his poem, among others, that personified a cloud as a sentient narrator? The Cloud is a long poem (thus linked, not posted here in full,) beautiful, wistful, complex and, as it turns out, not entirely true.

By Percey Bisshe Shelley

The fourth line in the last stanza of the poem is both true and false – it turns out certain kinds of clouds ARE changing (at least where they are operating), and not for the better, leaving dead zones behind. Functionally dead clouds, then, in a challenge to Shelley. (And yes, as you might have anticipated, we are ending up with science, after all these longwinded throat clearings.)

Here is a summary of findings as reported in a long read from the NYT last month.

Basically, different clouds have different roles in the regulation of our climate systems. Some have a cooling effect of land or water, some warm the earth’s surfaces.

Low clouds – puffy cumulus, stratocumulus and flat stratus layers – help with cooling by reflecting light back upwards from their white surfaces and casting shade onto the world below due their density. They absorb heat from the earth and also radiate it back into space in equal measure, because the water droplets they consist of are warm, thus not trapping warmth overall.

High clouds – cirrus and cirrocumulus – on the other hand, are warming our world, counterintuitively so, given that they are much colder, filled with ice crystals. The sun permeates them, because they are less dense. And they act like a blanket to earth, not sending the warmth back into space.

Until serious global warming began, the clouds protected us on net, with the lower ones outweighing the damage done by the higher ones. But now we have a feedback loop where global warming is making the low clouds steadily disappear where they are needed, while the high ones further heat up the planet. Climate change has shifted wind patterns and expanded the tropics, the storm systems with cumulus clouds are drifting towards the poles, and so leaving large stretches open to sunlight. With heat thus increasing, it feeds into drift patterns that expand vulnerable land areas even further.

Succinctly put: the delicate energy balance of sunlight coming in, some of it being reflected, and some of it being absorbed, no longer holds. When low cloud cover diminishes, the scales tip. More solar energy gets trapped in oceans and land surfaces, leading to higher temperatures, more intense heatwaves, and increasingly unpredictable weather. (Ref.)

What can be done, specifically regarding cloud covers? We could certainly try and reduce contrails, (short for condensation trails), which are formed when hot exhaust from an airplane’s engines meets the cold upper atmosphere, causing water vapor to condense into visible ice crystals.

“When the air at cruising altitude is cool enough and moist enough, these contrails spread into high, thin layers that contribute to atmospheric warming. It’s entirely possible for airlines to avoid flying at altitudes where the air is conducive to forming contrails. A 2020 study found that adjusting the cruising altitude of just 2 percent of flights could reduce contrail warming by nearly 60 percent, without using much more fuel.”

(Not to be mistaken for the conspiracy theorists’ assumption of “chemtrails,” the idea that these trails are composed of harmful chemicals intentionally sprayed into the atmosphere for nefarious purposes, spreading Covid or other viruses, poisoning our environment with other chemical or biological agents. Cloud Cuckoo Land….)

Contrails can clearly be harmful in terms of producing blanket clouds aggravating global warming. Flying less, overall, might be suggested as a solution, rather than simply wishing for flying at lower altitudes! But we keep our head in the clouds….

Images from a series – Fragility – currently in the works, that contextualizes environmental harm and protection.

Music matches the mood.

CRISPR Ants?

Biology, Poetry
Oct 24, 2025
1 Comments

One of my favorite short poems as a child was by a poet with the pen name Joachim Ringelnatz (a.k.a. Hans Bötticher.) A contemporary of George Grosz and Otto Dix, his work was declared degenerate by the Nazis. He died in 1934, so was spared to see the horrors unfolding further, but his writings and cabaret performances were prescient and subversive. Many of his poems rhymed and so are difficult to translate – in fact I have found nothing but really bad translations.

The poem in question described two ants who decided to travel to Australia, starting in Hamburg and realizing that their legs hurt in Altona, then an adjacent town, now an integrated neighborhood of the larger city in Northern Germany. Aching legs made the ants “wisely decide that they should forgo the rest of the trip.”

He concludes: one often desires and rarely succeeds, perfectly happy to let go in those cases.

Die Ameisen

In Hamburg lebten zwei Ameisen,
die wollten nach Australien reisen.

Bei Altona auf der Chaussee

da taten ihnen die Beine weh,

und da verzichteten sie weise
dann auf den letzten Rest der Reise.

So will man oft und kann doch nicht
und leistet dann recht gern Verzicht.

by Joachim Ringelnatz

Hier is the most frequently cited translation:

There once were two ants in Westphalia
Who wanted to go to Australia.
But cursing their feet
In a Belgian street
They gave up the trip as a failya.

Man. Hamburg is not in the state of Westphalia, and rhyming must be found elsewhere. They didn’t curse their feet, and were nowhere near Belgium, – the hole point was about walking a distance of a mile or less – and actually welcomed the end of the trip. The translator ignored the last two “moral of the tale” – lines altogether. — Failya.

The last lines ignored here as well. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that they are not exactly the approved moral in a protestant work-ethic country that urges us to strive regardless, forever.

—

Detour: another German poet with work much comparable to the linguistic mischief of Ringelnatz’ hast just been translated into English in a superb volume of collected poems. Max Knight translated Christian Morgenstern‘s The Gallow Songs with wit and the skill of a preservationist, wherever he could.

If you don’t want to splurge on the book, here is a treat for free: Ogden Nash reads an earlier translation of the poems on the Internet Archives.

—

Back to the Ringelnatz ants: a commissioned, supersized sculpture of those two travelers was created by sculptor Peter Schröder and unveiled in Altona at the (Elb)chaussee in 2014. Made from bronze, and attached to an 150-year old copperplate rescued fron the roof of a church, on which part of the poem was engraved (they again left out the “moral”,) the sculptor soon attracted thieves, out to glean metal. A replacement version was erected in April 2022 and stolen in September 2022. In 2023 they anchored the latest replacement into a wall of the guest house of the foundation who had it commissioned in the first place.

“So will man doch und kann oft nicht…..” you can’t always have what you want!

—

In any case, why am I reporting on German nonsense verse? Well, ants, of course.

Not only is a poem remembered, the cold weather is driving them into bathrooms and kitchens to the dismay of the human inhabitants. More importantly, I learned a new fact about ants that blew my mind.

It turns out that Iberian Harvester queen ants of the species Messor ibericus produce offspring that is either their own species, or a totally different one.

Two brothers of different species, produced by the same mother: Messor ibericus (left) and Messor structor (right). Jonathan Romiguier

“Scientists recently discovered that Iberian harvester ant queens (Messor ibericus) mate with males of another species, the builder harvester ant (Messor structor). When they do, the M. ibericus queens store the M. structor male’s sperm, then use it to fertilize some of the eggs they lay. Researchers think the M. ibericus queens remove their own genetic material from the eggs’ nuclei, so that when those eggs hatch, they effectively turn out to be M. structor male clones.

The queens produce males of both M. ibericus and M. structor, and all the worker ants in M. ibericus colonies are female hybrids of the two species.” (Ref.)

That defies a fundmental principle of biology, or the way we have been defining what a species is. It is also particularly strange in evolutionary terms, since the two species diverged more than five million years ago. It is, as someone said, as if a woman gave birth to both, a human child and an Orang-Utan baby.

The scientists had their work cut out for them. Trying to find males and analyzing their DNA was not easy. They dug up multiple nests in France with ten of thousands of ants and found only 132 males, which turned out to be indeed M. ibericus AND M. structor. (Maybe ants are far advanced relative to our own society – where we hear non-stop argumentation about women replacing men these days – just read “How Women destroyed the West” from yesterday’s NYT…. oh well, I did try to stay away from politics. My bad.)

According to the article in Nature, the researchers had to come up with a new term to describe the behavior exhibited by M. ibericus queens: “xenoparity,” which essentially means “foreign birth.” All useful citizens of the great ant nation, one presumes, since there must be some adaptive value to this.

M.structors make for good builders, and their own colonies are in a very specific, remote locale. So traveling with their sperm for further use across Southern Europe might help spread their DNA and allows M. Ibericus queens to choose their own timing and locale to produce builders.

Anyhow – you now have totally disconnected and non-essential new bits of knowledge to fill up your brain. 1o minutes of distraction from our world, though, producing wonder. Hopefully appreciated.

Alternatively, we can go right back to an “undercurrent of anxiety, themes of decay, consumption, or overwhelming infestation” – all of which were implied by art reviews assessing Dali’s painting below. Hm, I just see some shiny ants happily feasting.

M.Structor or M. Ibericus?

Salvador Dali The Ants (1936-37)

Music today by one of Hamburg’s famous sons: Brahms‘ string quartet No. 1 in C minor.

Photographs of leaves today in honor of leaf cutter ants.

There is some interesting work done with and about them by artist Catherine Chalmers who filmed and photographed them at work, ending up with “collages.” Here is a fun clip documenting her approach with wild ants in Central America.