Yesterday I was surrounded by blue beauty – purplish and silvery hues as well, next to riotous oranges and yellows, an absolutely astounding summer garden. I was surprised by so much blue, associating it more with spring, but here it beckoned in all hues and shapes.
I think Frost was onto something here, even for the non-religious. The absence of constraint in that wide space, the promise of fair weather days, the warmth of sun associated with blue skies, the illusion of easy living – all contained in sky blue. Smoke haze, storm clouds, tornadoes, hurricanes, for now kept at bay.
Enjoy the flowers. I will be taking a bit of a break, working on an art project that fully demands my brain and looking forwards to family visiting. Will resume by mid-August.
Walk with me. Midmorning in the wetlands before the heat rises once again. Yellow meadows, blue skies, make me think suddenly of Ukraine and guilt-infused gratitude rises that here I have the luxury of peaceful meanderings, when others fight for their life. This week has been hard, with all the news in our own country as well, and the inability to decide on what might be the right path forward. When did we even last think about Ukraine, or Gaza for that matter, with our national horror show unfolding?
I chose this walk to leave politics behind me, just watch the birds, but can’t easily let go of so much I read across the last days. Here is a remarkable piece on J.D.Vance from a year ago, that might raise the stakes, if that is even possible. Ukraine will be left in the dust. Well, focus, Heuer. You came out here to recharge, not ruminate.
The bugs are out. So are the bees, legs thickly coated with pollen.
Finches waking up and breakfasting on early elderberries. Bushtits prefer mites on the oak leaves. A pair of kestrels hanging out. Bald eagle observing from on high.
Closer to the water, with slowly drying ponds, hungry nutria. Kingfisher high on his perch. Turtle taking a sun bath.
Some late ducklings, lots of shore birds, the killdeer looking like s/he has a glass eye.
Herons and egrets everywhere, eying each other, herding the geese until some fly off in annoyance.
And then, out of the blue sky, come the pelicans, diving down right in front of me, circling me, eventually coming to rest in the water and starting to preen. These infrequent sightings still make my heart race. In a good way, in this instance.
Gratitude descends. About nature. About the privilege to have access to it and the mobility to enjoy it. About a world in which so, so many people engage in trying to preserve it.
Here are words by William Stafford from over 60 years ago:
Let’s all try to meet the rage without with the wing within.
(PS: Mine is not the Selasphorous humming bird – those are red. It’s the plain Rufous.)
Since today was easy on the eyes and brain, music is going to be a bit more demanding. Truly interesting, though. A compilation of electronic music by Peruvian composers between the mid 60s and 80s.
One of those weeks. Between the heat and a body with its own intentions I had to cancel all planned outings, miffed and distraught. As luck would have it, a friend sent out a poem that shut me up and set me right. It converts disappointment into the insight that all moments matter. They all contain their very own history, asking us to value what is, not what has been or might come along. We are embedded in a timeline, each moment of its own importance.
“So it happens that I am and look.” Which is what I did. At a single plant on my balcony, a blue salvia visited by the occasional humming bird, the bees preferring its neighboring lavender and the yellow zinnias (this year’s color scheme in solidarity with Ukraine. Much good it will do, other than reminding me to be a witness. But I digress.)
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree beside a river on a sunny morning. It’s an insignificant event and won’t go down in history. It’s not battles and pacts, where motives are scrutinized, or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact. And since I’m here I must have come from somewhere, and before that I must have turned up in many other places, exactly like the conquerors of nations before setting sail.
Even a passing moment has its fertile past, its Friday before Saturday, its May before June. Its horizons are no less real than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.
This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years. The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday. The path leading through the bushes wasn’t beaten last week. The wind had to blow the clouds here before it could blow them away.
And though nothing much is going on nearby, the world is no poorer in details for that. It’s just as grounded, just as definite as when migrating races held it captive.
Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence. Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone. Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around, but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense. Ants stitching in the grass. The grass sewn into the ground. The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look. Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air on wings that are its alone, and a shadow skims through my hands that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure that what’s important is more important than what’s not.
Walk with me. Be warned, though, you need to bring your ear plugs. I, of course, had no clue that they would be needed. The one day last week that I was able to hike was also the day that the Oregon International Airshow opened. Officially it started in the evening, but planes were already practicing during the day, low in the skies over Hillsboro where I happened to make my way through the wetlands.
The noise was deafening, and since I didn’t know then that the air show was slated, my thoughts went immediately to images of training for war, or some kind of emergency. Catastrophic thinking seems to be on a hair trigger these days. I wonder why.
I have written fairly recently about the soundscape of war and its long lasting psychological implications, for people living through war and suffering from PTSD. (Link for new readers, below). So, today I’ll just be looking at the positive side of things and share with you the sights. It will distract me from the fact that only 20% or so of all Oregonians voted, and the candidates I favored were, with few exceptions, not elected. Apathy sure enables the march towards less progressive times.
Here is a link to a video from the airshow that provides a bit of the noise that visitors experience. I was immediately underneath the planes at the time during practice, as you can see from the photographs.
The rest of nature’s sounds were drowned out, particularly the soft twittering from the songbirds and swallows who I had come to photograph.
It was so beautiful to watch them loop around before they went into the nesting sites, or met with their mates on top of them, that I soon forgot the distraction and focused on shimmering cerulean blues and teals and whites instead.
Flora was ready to compete, pink swaths of mallows coloring the meadow, pink valerian (sea foam) dotting the grass, and pink bleeding hearts hiding in the underbrush. Coral bells just about to blush.
Mystery Pink
Bright yellow popped up here and there, with common toadflax, buttercups and thapsias.
There were blue lupines, purplish blue wild irises, and camassia.
Whites everywhere, a perfect match to the white clouds above, the white of the arrowheads, the blackberry blossoms, the cowslip, the dog roses in large clusters, you name it.
Piercy’s poem captures it to perfection, even though we are still in May, not June and the lilies still hesitant. The mood was matched – as long as you kept your hands over your ears, plugging them with your fingers.
Over a decade ago I exhibited Fugue – The Poetry of Exile at Portland’s Artist Repertory Theatre, photomontage work that attempted to transform poems of exile and displacement, mostly by Holocaust poets, into visual images. The show ran in conjunction with a play by Diane Samuels, Kindertransport, produced by Jewish Theatre Collaborative.
It was early days in my montage-making efforts, with still limited technical skills. But the core components were already in place: visual translation of ideas that invite us, are in need for us to witness.
Here is one of the poems that I chose at the time.
My Blue Piano
At home I have a blue piano. But I can’t play a note.
It’s been in the shadow of the cellar door Ever since the world went rotten.
Four starry hands play harmonies. The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks. The keyboard is in bits.
I weep for what is blue. Is dead. Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open The door of heaven. For me, for now —
Although I am still alive — Although it is not allowed.
by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated from the German by Eavan Boland)
(Here is a link to the German original – it is even starker than the translation, requesting permission for dying)
The poet, Else Lasker-Schüler, is one of those people I’d elect to take with me to a deserted island, an artist, activist, risk-taking, and deeply independent woman who supported socialist causes all her life. She left Nazi Germany in 1933, and ended up eventually in Jerusalem, where she wrote some of her best poetry before she died in 1945. Her friends and literary circle there included German-speaking Zionists, such as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman and Ernst Simon who, like herself, favored a bi-national Palestine.
I was reminded of the poem when I read the insightful ArtsWatch review of an exhibition currently at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, while staring at another defunct piano during my LA Sabbatical last month (today’s photographs.)
The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate is a collaboration between composer and pianist Jennifer Wright, her husband Matias Brecher and textile artist Bonnie Meltzer. The artists resurrect, refashion, in some ways rebirth a Steinway grand piano that belonged to three generations of a Jewish family whose house in Portland was destroyed by arson in 2022, fueled by antisemitic hate. The torched instrument reemerged as a kind of glassy phoenix from the ashes:
“The Glass Piano was designed to appear as delicate as a glittering butterfly, a creature more of spirit than of the earth, yet it possesses subtle strength and a range of glass rods and hammers and pitched sounds that can be orchestrally combined in unusual ways.”
Meltzer, in turn, created a large tapestry and a smaller banner with inscribed stitching, incorporating wood, torched strings and other bits and pieces of the charred piano into her work.
While the Holocaust poet looks at the remnants of her destroyed life, embodied by the defunct piano, and wants nothing more than for it to end, the two contemporary artists rely on joyful defiance, changing the ruins into some sort of vibrant reminder that the possibility of transformation has not been foreclosed.
One can speculate whether those divergent sentiments are the result of the intensity of the trauma, the actual threat to existence, compared to the reactions of concerned bystanders to the consequences of racist vandalism.
It does not matter, in my mind, though, as long as art forces our own witnessing, insists that we acknowledge the horrors brought by war and hate.
This is central to the work of Jorge Tacla, whose art I continue to explore. His focus on ruins is one of the main themes of another exhibition, A Memoir of Ruins, currently on view at the Coral Gables Museum in Florida. His paintings offer a veritable graveyard of bombed and destroyed architecture across the Middle East, war memorials of a kind that mourn the victims rather than celebrate the victors (if there are any, given the centuries of strife built into the conflicts.) I won’t be able to visit, but I strongly urge my readers in the Miami vicinity to go and take it all in – you have until October 27th, 2024. It is timely work in the light of ongoing destruction of entire swaths of land made uninhabitable by warfare, erasing life, mirrored in paintings devoid of human figure.
The imagery acutely remind us of the violent urge to reduce everything possibly connected to human habitation, urges acted upon by various warring powers. They spring from the wish to annihilate not just human beings, the declared enemy who shall be starved, maimed or killed, but also all that could provide a basis for resurrection of a group with a given identity. If you bomb houses of worship, schools and universities, the libraries, the museums, the archives, all the repositories of cultural, historical and personal memory into oblivion, you generate a displacement that goes beyond loss of place – you truly vanquish the soul of a people.
Tacla’s work is the opposite of what has come to be known as “ruin porn,” the depictions of desolation as a backdrop in artistic endeavors, be they classic paintings that centered ruins as moralistic symbolism, or the photographs of urban decay, or the film sets for dystopian science fiction movies. Capitalizing on the visual salaciousness of melancholic imagery, while ignoring the forces that brought the world to ruin, from poverty to warfare, stands in stark contrast of what Tacla does. Without being photorealistic, the canvases convey a sense of absolute erasure, seamlessly merging into the actual visuals from places like Syria and now Gaza, that hit our screens. There is nothing of the frisson we so cherish when observing something slightly alarming from a distance. There is just dread, slowly seeping into your system, if you stand for any amount of time in front of these monumental canvases.
Our fascination with ruins – as long as we don’t have to live in or next to them – has been an artistic staple since the Renaissance. The focus during romanticism shifted to the potential for renewal. After world war II it became a national rallying cry, like Auferstanden aus Ruinen, From the Ruins Risen, the title of the German Democratic Republic’s Anthem from 1949 to 1990.
We might do well to shift our focus yet again, from ruins to the looming possibility that at some point renewal is no longer possible. At an age where weapons of mass destruction can wipe out life as we know it, we can hit a point of no return. We have certainly gotten sufficient warning. If you look at the aftermath of Chernobyl, not just in the exclusion zone for Reactor 4, which has become a pilgrimage site for disaster junkies, but in the forests surrounding the nuclear power plant, you’ll find some stark revelations (hard now under Russian occupation.) The trees downwind from Chernobyl all died immediately after the disaster. With the entire landscape poisoned, the agents of decay and thus eventual renewal, have also ceased to exist. No more bacteria, fungi and insects that usually recycle a forest’s nutrients and rid it of debris to prepare for new growth. They, too have been erased, and so you are left with ruins that will practically last forever, dead matter that will not renew in any form, looming over our very own extinction when war descends in its final form.
As I have so often stated here – fully aware how many of my readers disagree – I don’t believe art per se can change things, be a political force of the needed magnitude. But it can be a canary in the coal mine, helping us to start questioning, figure out causal connections, and at least implores us to think about solutions that exclude future ruins once and for all.
Nostos There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts off crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor’s yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
I do not agree with Glück’s assessment, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” We look at the world – able to see it – a million times, if we only move about with intention. Or share in the wonder expressed by next generations. Or allow art to be more than representation, pointing us to the beauty inherent in the real world. Maybe we can’t return to the exact childhood tree, but there are plenty apples around.
In some funny way, the title of the poem, Nostos, makes that very point, doesn’t it? The term comes from ancient Greece and refers to the homecoming of the hero after a prolonged absence (one of the main themes of the Odyssey.) Not remembered, but re-experienced, connected again, the world seen, not just recalled. If it was only about a particular childhood garden, it should have been Nostalgia, the combination of Nostos /homecomingwith the word Algos/pain, although nostalgia most often descends into this sentimental wistfulness that I can’t stand.
Back to spring: In today’s images, spring has returned, after a long absence. So has this viewer, in my annual exploration of spring’s bounty, seeing it afresh. And so have paintings, that are not molding in museums, but here, in front of our eyes, conveying a shared appreciation of this season. Forget memory! Here are this week’s perceptions, on walks punctuated by heavy rains and sudden reappearance of the sun.
Max Beckmann SPRING NEAR SÜDENDE (1907)
Hawthorne blossoms shimmered through the trees, or exploded in full view.
Dwight William Tryon Spring (1893)
David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom Near Rudston (2008)
Cows were curious as to what I had to offer…
Doris Lee, Blossom Time, 1959
Plants unfurled, echoing van Gogh’s brush strokes.
Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890
Meadows exploded with Camassia, and other early spring blooms, many reminiscent of rockets, all shooting towards the light.
Janene Walkky Common Camas or Camassia quamash (2013)
Then there are the fruit tree blossoms, holding up their own against the orange bloom,
Vincent van Gogh Orange Blossoms (1890)
Claude Monet Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) (1873)
Walking through the woods was a green, dripping, wet experience, then sunbursts the next minute.
Abbott Handerson Thayer Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (1876)
Did someone say birds? Ducklings! Orioles, yellow rump warblers (butter butts!), kill deer, wood ducks, geese, barn swallows and purple martins all showing off.
Magnus von Wright Mallard Ducklings (1841)
Tracey Emin Believe in Extraordinary (2015)
AUDUBON bird Red-Breasted Nuthatch Purple Martin (1890)
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!
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!
As an antidote to my habitually bleak news these days, I thought I’d collect and present what brought me fun, knowledge and/or encouragement across the last week.
Below is what demonstrators got to see on a high-rise in Düsseldorf.
“The difference between 1933 and 2024? You!”
EDUCATION:
And also this…..
I did not know that.
RELIEF:
The International Court of Justice in The Hague walked a fine line in their ruling on the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa; here is a compilation of short, informative expert opinions on the implications, offered by the Atlantic Council (not exactly a hotbed of progressivism). Here are the take-aways from The Guardian, slightly more to the left. And here the ruling is declared a historic victory for the Palestinians by The Intercept. Then again, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir declares it: Hague Shmague. Fact is, the case is taken up, will stretch out for years, but importantly for now, the court ordered Israel to “take all measures” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza, a ruling that is, however, unenforceable.
FUN:
I discovered a site, Artbutmakeitsports, that manages to combine knowledge of art and sports in ways that had even me, the least sportive person in the world, laugh with delight.
Autumn, by Mikhail Larionov, 1912
The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.
Last, but not least,
CONTENTMENT:
I finally managed to bring some of my affairs in order, figuring out what to do in the case of eventual demise. Unlike those whose adherence to religion faiths proscribes what to do, I had to make difficult decisions myself. I’ve never wanted to imagine myself cooped up in a coffin. I did not like the idea of cremation due to its horrid environmental impact. They now offer an alternative, where your remains get literally composted and then, except what urns relatives might claim, gets used to fertilize reforesting projects in the PNW forests. “Mami Mulch!” as my beloved declared. And now I don’t have to think about it ever again…
When I am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
