Before we get to today’s musings, here is an urgent request (and please share the information.)
With the grocery shelf shortages, please remember NOT to buy WIC marked items. (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) I think we used to call them food stamps.) The people who use WIC benefits to get their food are not allowed to switch to other brands or types. When those items are gone (usually labeled on the shelves) people go hungry.
Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,
Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!
We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.
Yes, this poem was actually used by the Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom, a program of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry and the Oklahoma State Department of Education to teach about mushrooms. (Ref.) Together with an instruction page on the biology of mushrooms and how they grow.
No, this poem is not really all about mushrooms. Some see it as a gender metaphor, a feminist allegory about the fate of women kept small in a misogynist world, asking little or nothing. Others see it as veiled description of the fate of immigrants.
“… it was really about immigrants making their surreptitious way into a country. Hence ‘Nobody sees us’ because of their movement by night, or ‘We diet on water’ which suggests their impoverished state. The choice of vegetable is witty as these people are a ‘mush’ in the cabins through which they travel and the places they will have to secretly live in.
Plath herself is an immigrant to Britain. But it doesn’t matter if she did or didn’t mean this, the point is that mushrooms seem metaphorical for, for example, women’s rights and many other issues regarding the powerful and the powerless.”
Judge for yourselves…
Here is a lovely analysis of the poem by a biologist and poet who tries to give weight to the voices of nature as much as those of women who might try to be seen through the lens of the verses. Worth a short read.
All photographs were taken last week in my immediate vicinity. Fall has arrived.
Music today is recommended by no other than the scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Here is the link to their work and playlist when trying to figure out the effects of psilocybin (shrooms!) on patients living with depression.(carefully tailored to ascent, peak, descent of the experience.) I chose the Gorecki piece since I’ve always liked it. I think Sylvia Plath would have approved.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum’d by that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Is there such a thing as melancholy goosebumps? I’d wager yes, when judging my reactions to this sonnet set in fall. They prompted a quick turn-around to the glorious colors found on quotidian walks last week, promising that in every season there is radiance, whether we have to leave it behind or not.
The real reason I was thinking of Shakespeare, though, came from a mind boggling linguistic analysis of another of his creations that is giving us more than goosebumps, instead creeping us out: Macbeth.
Researchers set out to find the source of the fact that actors and audiences alike find the language of the play unsettling, in addition to the horrors unraveling in the plot, or the horrors imposed on us by thinking through the psychology of the main protagonists.
“Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.”(Ref.)
They looked at the rhythm of the words spoken, some jarring ones like the witches’ spells. They looked at the frequent repetitions of phrases, moving from one set of characters to the next. And they counted words and the frequency of their use.
Some results of the statistical word count were unsurprising – yes there are creepy words galore, like “knock”, “cauldron”, “tyrant”, “weird”, “trouble”, “dagger”, “fear”, and “horror”.
Astonishingly, though, there was also an unusually high frequency of the simple word “the.” So they went back and read the play to see where it appeared when unexpected.
Consider the lines, spoken by Lady Macbeth when she is already nervous and distraught:
“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, which gives the sterns’t good night..”
The owl? Not an owl, which would be normal phrasing if we hear such creature in the night? Do we know which owl she’s talking about, since she assumes our familiarity with “the” owl? Something is off here; is she referring to a real thing or the proverbial idea of that messenger?
Many of those examples can be found throughout the text, and they transfer the play’s theme of equivocation – one of the reasons why it is not just a tragedy but something more akin to horror – onto the audience. “The Scottish Play” – how people who fear they might be cursed when performing, refer to it, is not just a horror play because of its body count (although if you consider, there are so many deaths caused directly or indirectly by the protagonist.) It’s not the horror of a good man corrupted into nihilism by a lust for power in front of our very eyes, or the fateful demise induced by guilt of those who share his lust for power. It is not the supernatural horror, potentially induced by real witches or real ghosts and other apparitions. It is the psychological equivocation of what is real and what might be hallucinated, what was truly prophesied or self-enacted by way of (mis)interpretation of the witches chant. It is about losing one’s mind, the greatest horror imaginable.
So much ambiguity, so much fear induced by not knowing the nature of it all. The equivocation was likely enforced by a raging debate in 1606 about the nature of witches. Shakespeare might have likely read the Discovery of Witchcraft published by Reginald Scott in 1584, arguing that it was all a hoax, contradicting royal beliefs of the times that witches were real and to be persecuted.
This ambiguity is now extended to the audience, when subtle use of words like “the” which signal that we should be familiar with the item mentioned – are we? Why would we be? Do we know ourselves or have we missed something? Uncertainty hinted at, established. Disquieting creepiness ensues. (More examples can be found here where I was alerted to all this in the first place.)
Clever, clever. Back in goosebump land, however.
Below are some stunning performances of the play.
Music is – one of my favorite of all times – Verdi’s Macbeth.
Newspeak. Doublethink. Thoughtcrime. Big Brother. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when reading these words? George Orwell, 1984? I had planned to write about how the author, frequently misquoted no less, is claimed by the extreme Right these days. They are raging about all things “Orwellian,” cancel culture and authoritarian moves by a democratic administration.
While I pursued that topic I chanced on a biography of Orwell’s first wife which turned out to be much more interesting, revealing snippets rarely found in the hagiographic descriptions of the famous author. It also provided general food for thought about what happens – and I guess it happens frequently enough – when women subordinate their own interests, careers, needs to those of their (to be made) famous spouses. Mercedes Barcha Pardo, wife of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, comes to mind, or Sophia Tolstoy, Zelda Fitzgerald, Elias Canetti’s wife Veza or, in the realm of science, of course Albert Einstein’s wife, Mileva Marić. We see no or little corresponding acknowledgment of their contributions, even if they heavily impacted the intellectual output of the spouse in question, and not just served towards his comforts.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, one of the first women to graduate from Oxford with a degree in English, met George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) while she was pursuing a degree in child psychology. Apparently rocky from the start, their relationship was not made easier by the fact that she moved in with him into a damp, moldy little farmhouse in rural England. Their cottage at Wallington – “The Stores” – was supposed to enable them to live a self-sufficient life, with animals and vegetable gardens, crops sold in their store a well. The bulk of the hard physical labor fell to her, even if he chipped in occasionally, and then there was the typing and editing she did for his manuscripts. (Photographs today of what she might have planted, weeded, and harvested.)
Their marriage was supposed to be open, although it seems that he took advantage to have numerous affairs, while she mainly devoted her time to help him flourish as a writer. And not just her time – she introduced him, who had never finished a higher education, to modern English writers and all she had learned for her degree at Oxford. Several ideas or even whole phrasings and passages from her own writing made it into his later work. She followed him to Spain, nursed his wounds incurred in the Civil War, and helped him escape back to safety when his political leanings endangered him.
She took on jobs to supplement his meager income, long before he became famous for his major novels, something she did no live to see. She agreed to adopt a child – their shared desire for a family likely scuttled by his infertility. He was unwilling to get tested due too his abhorrence of masturbation (needed for the testing procedure.) His additional squeamishness regarding female sexual organs led her to keep a secret of her diagnosis of uterine cancer, (also played down so it would not interfere with the adoption of their son Richard.) Here she was, settled with an infant, riddled with tumors, living in London which depressed her to no end, and Orwell took off on assignment for reporting from Europe. Only a week before her hysterectomy – she died on the operating table at age 39 – did she write and inform him of her condition, worried that he might also balk at the monetary cost.
Here is a biography that delivers the details. The author, Sylvia Topp, argues that O’Shaugnassy could have had a successful academic or clinical career. Enrolled as a postgraduate student in educational psychology at University College, London, she was a protege of Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was ahead of his times, having demonstrated, against the contemporary consensus, that girls were intellectually equal to boys, and who had, in addition, argued that all children, male and female, should have equal access to education. Eileen could no longer pursue the degree when her time, energies and focus were absorbed by the needs of her husband – whose talent she clearly recognized and supported, though she did not live to see his fame.
Beyond the sacrifice, though, she was deeply unhappy in the relationship, with the two of them violently fighting more often than not. What keeps women from pursuing their own fates? It is not necessarily a circumstance influenced by any given historical era. We see it often enough in modern times as well. At the time, perhaps the stigma or divorce or living in separation might have been too large to bear, although much of it was spent during the war years where society was much more in flux with so many men absent.
And if anyone was aware of female capability, it was Eileen who had been raised in a household unusually devoted to giving both sexes equal educational opportunities, and who was the one who financed the couple with her work. I am stumped why the pattern persists, just looking at the unevenly distributed numbers of hours spent with domestic work nowadays, even among couples where no-one is particularly gifted.
Here is a poem she wrote, long before the two of them met. Engulfed by news of the growing horrors of governments led by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, she feared that the world of scholarship and cultural life that meant so much to her, was being destroyed. Orwell took part of its title, after her death, for his most famous novel – and certainly you can find some of the seeds of the novel’s concepts and dystopian visions in the poem as well.
End of the Century, 1984
Death
Synthetic winds have blown away
Material dust, but this one room
Rebukes the constant violet ray
And dustless sheds a dusty doom.
Wrecked on the outmoded past
Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,
Shakespeare’s bones are quiet at last.
Dead as Yeats or William Morris.
Have not the inmates earned their rest?
A hundred circles traversed they
Complaining of the classic quest
And, each inevitable day,
Illogically trying to place
A ball within an empty space.
Birth
Every loss is now a gain
For every chance must follow reason.
A crystal palace meets the rain
That falls at its appointed season.
No book disturbs the lucid line
For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought
To Telepathic Station 9
From which they know just what they ought:
The useful sciences; the arts
Of telesalesmanship and Spanish
As registered in Western parts;
Mental cremation that shall banish
Relics, philosophies and colds –
Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.
The Phoenix
Worlds have died that they may live,
May plume again their fairest feathers
And in their clearest songs may give
Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.
Bacon’s colleague is called Einstein,
Huxley shares Platonic food,
Violet rays are only sunshine
Christened in the modern mood.
In this house if in no other
Past and future may agree,
Each herself, but each the other
In a curious harmony,
Finding both a proper place
In the silken gown’s embrace.
Music today by Stevie Wonder from the album Talking Book, which is a favorite. One of the tracks, Big Brother, is in reference to 1984.
“I want things to unfold slowly, often my things are quiet and simple enough that it takes time—a kind of slow overlapping—before people feel it.” – Anna Valentina Murch
Unfold slowly it did. It took me a full decade not jut to feel the art but to actually see it.
I’ve walked by that elevator shaft on the waterfront for years without ever noticing that the windows contained images of water, different configurations of waves illuminated by differences in light depending on cloud formation or time of day.
Created in 2011 by Anna Valentina Murch (lovingly remembered (and quoted) after her untimely death in 2014 by a friend here,) the unassuming public art is called River Wrap. It consists of 40 photographic images on glass that frame the corners of the ten story elevator tower that connects the Darlene Hooley bridge to the Moody plaza below. The photographs are of reflections of light moving across the surface of water echoing the bordering landscape, the Willamette river.
The idea of water seemingly filling a tower might have had different connotations in 2011 compared to 2021. Then it represented beauty, perhaps intended to be soothing, a reminder of waves lapping gently. Now I can but think of the hurricane-induced flooding of buildings, or memorials to rivers run dry, if not the drowned – art does change when historic context changes.
The elevator is currently closed, so I had no chance to explore what they would look like when you travel up and down at slow speed, or if they can be seen from within at all.
Murch was a British installation artist based in San Francisco. Solo works or those together with her husband Doug Hollis often focussed on ways to make people spend time and look: accentuating reflections, sparkle, glow and change in color of light on various surfaces, often water. A more familiar work here in Portland is the light art attached to the Tillicum Crossing Bridge. It uses 178 LED modules to illuminate the cables, towers, and underside of the deck. The base color is determined by the water’s temperature. The timing and intensity of the base color’s changes, moving the light across the bridge, are determined by the river’s speed. A secondary color pattern is determined by the river’s depth, that changes on the two towers and the suspension cable.
Other notable art installations by her can be found here.
So why did I notice River Wrap now and not before? A possible proximal cause: the light hit it just right to sparkle. But it was a gray, diffuse afternoon.
A two part answer could be:
(1) Distraction.
The elevator tower is across the street from the aerial tram station, where comings and goings of those futuristic looking passenger capsules draw your attention. There is also a never-ending stream of people entering or exiting the OHSU medical building, bound to draw your gaze. There is the new(ish) bridge glimpsed in the background at the river, usually the destination for my walks, beckoning the camera. So I never attended to the west side of the Moody Plaza before.
(2) Increased Attention.
Due to restricted movement, my radius of exploration has so incredibly shrunk. No more travel, no more visits to indoor spaces including exhibitions in galleries and museums, alike. No more walking or photographing where crowds of people congregate, all due to the pandemic. Those spaces, then, that are still open to me therefore are looked at in search of anything that is new, or worthwhile thinking through, or good for surprises while I walk there over and over and over again…
After all, the poem below does not apply to me (although I love it, like so much of her work.) I do behave in the cosmos as advised. At least I try to think so of myself…
Distraction
I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday. I lived around the clock without questions, without surprise.
I performed daily tasks as if only that were required.
Inhale, exhale, right foot, left, obligations, not a thought beyond getting there and getting back.
The world might have been taken for bedlam, but I took it just for daily use.
No whats — no what fors — and why on earth it is — and how come it needs so many moving parts.
I was like a nail stuck only halfway in the wall or (comparison I couldn’t find).
One change happened after another even in a twinkling’s narrow span.
Yesterday’s bread was sliced otherwise by a hand a day younger at a younger table.
Clouds like never before and rain like never, since it fell after all in different drops.
The world rotated on its axis, but in a space abandoned forever.
This took a good 24 hours. 1,440 minutes of opportunity. 86,400 seconds for inspection.
The cosmic savoir vivre may keep silent on our subject, still it makes a few demands: occasional attention, one or two of Pascal’s thoughts, and amazed participation in a game with rules unknown.
Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Distraction, from Colon (2005), translated by Clare Cavanagh in MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015
One thing is clear, though. So much public art is so in your eye, so prominently placed or gaudily executed that it is almost impossible not to be aware oft it. The quieter kind, like today’s example, then packs the punch of discovery, unbidden, serendipitously,creating a louder and longer lasting emotional echo, at least in my case. A gift.
The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)
I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.
The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)
What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.
What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?
The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:
“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“
Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)
Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.
Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)
Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.
Let’s read up on our history!
Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.
Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.
On those days where my body is off and my brain stuck in first gear, I have to practically force myself to go out for a walk. I’m so glad I did this last Saturday, one of those days, and chanced on a garden planted for butterflies while walking along the tree-shaded streets of the Irvington neighborhood.
As luck would have it, the owner of the property, attired in a butterfly sweatshirt that distracted from her porcelain features and clear blue eyes, was out there weeding and perfectly happy to show this stranger around.
Ida Galash has been interested in butterflies all of her life, a passion that led to the decision to plant a serious butterfly garden about 2 years ago. It hosts zinnias, dahlias, Japanese anemones, fuchsias, coneflowers, lantanas, fig tree, roses, crepe myrtle bushes and so many more, arranged with an artistic eye.
The crucial ingredient is, of course, milkweed. This plant is the singular food source for Monarch caterpillars, and it comes in a variety of shapes and forms. Poisonous to the core, it took one of those evolutionary miracles that the monarchs adapted to this plant by only three simple genetic mutations, storing its toxin in their body as a defense against birds.
My luck in finding this garden pales compared to the owner’s when a monarch actually deposited eggs in her garden some weeks ago.
Or maybe it was not luck but nature’s grateful reciprocity towards someone who has become a guardian of dwindling resources in a world where monarch butterfly habitat disappears by the minute. Between climate change, forest fires and ever-more built-up environments, the butterflies are under enormous stress in their migrations.
Ida carefully collected the eggs, sharing them with another monarch enthusiast and protected them against predators and suddenly cool nights in various forms of shelter. They did hatch after a few days and the larva (caterpillars) happily munched on freshly provided milkweed leaves.
Two weeks later they attached themselves to a leaf or stem via little threads of silk that they spin and then the metamorphosis into a gold-flecked chrysalis began. Eventually a fully formed butterfly will emerge, about 10-15 days later.
Here is the chrysalis.
During the course of a summer there will be 4 generations of monarchs going through this cycle, with all but the last one having an average life span of about 6 weeks. The 4th generation, emerging from eggs usually laid in September or October, will live many months, enough to migrate to California or Mexico to survive the winters in warmer weather, before it returns to the NorthWest in early summer.
If it returns. Monarchs, although weighing less than a paperclip, make their way South and back along three butterfly “highways,” but the numbers are steadily falling. It is not just the loss of their habitats, which have been subsumed by intensive monoculture, orchards, vineyards and farms, but also the decline of species of the milkweed plant, the only one that can sustain their breeding. Pesticide use has decimated them. Warming ocean waters intensify hurricanes that kill the monarchs on their flight. Trees used for roosting are sickened by unusual heat and diseases that flourish with climate change, or logged for insatiable commercial interest.
If you want to read a spirited book about their quirks and voyages, borrow a copy of Wendy William’s The Language of Butterflies – How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect.
If you want to read an intensely moving essay about conservationists and their fight for the survival of monarchs, check out the attachment below. It is long, but worth it, and includes for us Oregonians a depiction of a local miracle: a female monarch defied the “disperse your eggs widely” rule and laid some 600 eggs in one garden in Brookings, OR. Over the next months they counted 2700 in that yard, and more than 5000 across the small town.
Individual actions matter, whether planting a garden with the appropriate habitat, or helping others to do so. I found various suggestions on this informative website. In general you can think about distributing seed packages to Halloween trick or treaters, to schools, to restaurants or any community organization. You can also spread the seeds in public areas in hopes some will take, rewilding, in some ways, what was once the natural habitat. You can get kits and together with your children grow butterflies at home and release them after they emerge. You can fill goodie bags for wedding guests with seed packages instead of chachkas. More tips can be found on the Portland Monarchs FB site, where I also discovered this visual time line:
And all this can be done in the relative safety of these Northwest parts. Actually, I should not treat the topic of safety lightly. As it turns out numerous key figures in the preservation movement for monarch butterflies have been either threatened severely or killed outright last year.
“Mariana Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has endured months of escalating rape and death threats in response to her butterfly conservation work along the Rio Grande. The center is an ecological mecca and home to 240 species of butterflies, a third of the total found within the United States…she has found herself in the crosshairs of white nationalists hellbent on erecting a border wall…By the time of a restraining order, though, Build the Wall’s three-and-a-half-mile “border” wall in Mission was well under way, and the National Butterfly Center estimates that for every mile of barrier, twenty acres of habitat are obliterated. The sanctuary’s ecological value exceeds the life within its boundaries, for it serves as a vital natural corridor, not least for monarchs on the move. The towering wall and razed habitat threaten far more than human and butterfly migrants. If the Rio Grande floods—as it did in 2018 when the river rose sixteen feet overnight—fleeing wildlife such as bobcat, coatimundis, and peccaries will literally hit a wall and drown en masse.” (Ref.)
Some 700 miles south, two butterfly preservationists were actually killed. Homero Gómez González, who managed Mexico’s El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, got in the way of illegal logging – the desirable oyamel firs down south anchor the butterflies’ life cycle and are already stressed by climate disruption – as well as clandestine avocado growing, making enemies of those who saw potential earnings dwindle.
Raúl Hernández Romero, who worked as an ecotourist guide in a section of the vast Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that UNESCO declared a world heritage site in 2008 and who vocally denounced logging as well, was stabbed to death in the same week. Both murders occurred in the Mexican state of Michoacán, directly west of Mexico City. Michoacán is home to the world’s largest monarch roosts, but it is also a hotspot for violence stemming from organized crime.
They are not the only ones. The annual report of Defending Tomorrow chronicles the persecution and assassination of environmental defenders worldwide. The international organization focusses on abusive actors, misuse of power and financial flows, but also now on the climate crisis. In 2019 Mexico ranked as one of the most dangerous societies in which to take a stand for environmental and human rights.
The threat to butterflies really comes from all angles. Let’s give them a hand. Or a plant, as the case may be. Got milkweed?
O patient creature with a peasant face, Burnt by the summer sun, begrimed with stains, And standing humbly in the dingy lanes! There seems a mystery in thy work and place, Which crowns thee with significance and grace; Whose is the milk that fills thy faithful veins? What royal nursling comes at night and drains Unscorned the food of the plebeian race? By day I mark no living thing which rests On thee, save butterflies of gold and brown, Who turn from flowers that are more fair, more sweet, And, crowding eagerly, sink fluttering down, And hang, like jewels flashing in the heat, Upon thy splendid rounded purple breasts.
Photograph from poison control website.
What I saw in real life across the last weeks were a California Sister, an Admiral and a Western Swallowtail if I read the guide books correctly.
Here sings Schubert’s butterfly. And here are hands made by Chopin to flutter like a butterfly.
I intend to keep my promise to write this week about nothing but uplifting, constructive or beautiful things that I find right under my nose. Here is the second installment, triggered by the beauty of thistles that are in full thistle-down stage in the meadows around me. The fluff formations always remind me of neuronal networks and so it was no coincidence that I ended up looking at neuroscience art. What I settled on, though, were not images, but a truly fun experience with language that you all can have as well.
Among the contestants of the 2021 Art of Neuroscience Contest was an entry by Simon Demeule and Pauline Palma from the University of Montreal/McGill University, an interactive program called
If you click the link it will bring up a few words of explanation and then the invitation to start writing – just type in your first line (no need to click anywhere) and you will see what unfolds. The program is an interactive poetic experience that explores themes of artificial intelligence, language, psychology, and intent. Here is their explanation:
Through a simple text-based interface, this piece creates a game of exquisite corpse between the participant and a text-generating AI, an altered version of GPT-2 trained on the vast Gutenberg English literature corpus. As the synthetic responses unfold, words cascade through all configurations considered by the algorithm, partly unveiling the black box process within. The human tendencies captured by the algorithm resurface, produced by a machine that fundamentally lacks intent.
As the participant is presented with ambiguity and absurdity, their cognitive ability to bridge gaps and construct meaning becomes the guiding force that steers the evolution of the piece. In turn, participant’s input feeds the algorithm, thereby prompting interpretation again. Through this cyclical, almost conversational process, a unique poem emerges.
This project was created through the Convergence Initiative, an organisation dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary work between the arts and sciences.
I tried it out immediately and realized it would not give me the whole poem at the end. I then took screenshots of the evolution of the next “poem”. Here is what AI and I came up with, our combined brilliance now preserved for all posterity …(Their text on white background):
It is really a fun process if a little disjointed, so I tried once again. Note it is an AI program that was trained on literary Greats, randomly sampling and weighing and spitting out these words.
And here is a poem when a gifted, emotional, no-holds barred wordsmith attacks the thistle theme:
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men Thistles spike the summer air And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst Of resurrection, a grasped fistful Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking. They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects. Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey like men. Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
Can we all agree we should leave poetry to actual human beings on their own???
If you still have time and inclination, go back to the art of neuroscience site and look at the other entries – there is so much ingenuity to explore, photography and sculpture included. 175 contestants from over 20 countries submitted nearly 300 submissions, of which one winner and several honorable mentions and staff picks were published.
Album today is Robert Burn’s poetry set to music. The thistle is Scotland’s national flower.
These days I am often forced to compromise. I can, for example, walk with my heavy camera for a few kilometers in beloved places if I am willing to pop some pain meds afterwards to calm down angry surgery incisions, and make the following day a rest day. I can also just walk a short round or two in the neighborhood woods without camera and be fine.
On a glorious morning like Wednesday, before the heat descended, I drove out to the wetlands early, willing to pay the price in pharmaceuticals down the road. And was I rewarded! The place was filled with birds doing their morning toilette, visible to all on large snags, fishing for their breakfast in the water. Kingfishers, herons, egrets, hawks and even a Virginia rail (my first ever) – my bet paid off that this would be worth a try.
KingfisherHawk Blue Heron
A favorite stanza (in bold below) of Traherne’s praise of walking sang in my head – to mind the good we see, to taste the sweet, observing all the things we meet, how choice and rich they be….
Was true in the late 1600s when he lived, is true today. The way he expressed his love for nature anticipated romanticism by some 200 years; those words and sentiments about mindfulness seem perfectly at home in 2021 as well.
Egret got the fish!
We had our share of dismaying musings this week, from the expressions of power in naming to the futility of getting people to leave cults (here is another provocative piece that should have been added to the latter topic.) So I thought we’d end the week on this note of rejoicing, to mind the good we see….
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet.
Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange The glory that is by; Dead puppets may Move in the bright and glorious day, Yet not behold the sky.
And are not men than they more blind, Who having eyes yet never find The bliss in which they move; Like statues dead They up and down are carried Yet never see nor love.
To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro; To mind the good we see; To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet How choice and rich they be.
To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey; Admire each pretty flow’r With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell The marks of his great pow’r.
To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees, To cull the dew that lies On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade Our minds, as they their thighs.
Observe those rich and glorious things, The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs, The fructifying sun; To note from far The rising of each twinkling star For us his race to run.
A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, May rich as kings be thought, But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight, To which we shall be brought.
While in those pleasant paths we talk, ’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk; For we may by degrees Wisely proceed Pleasures of love and praise to heed, From viewing herbs and trees.
Pity he forgot to mention birds…..
Music by a contemporary of Traherne’s, Johann Jacob Walther, titled Wohlgepflanzter Violinischer Lustgarten – beautifully planted pleasure garden for the violin.
And here is a Virginia Rail doing morning stretches….
In the two previous blogs I wondered about ways to predict the future and ways to remember the past. So it seems fitting then to round up this week with a way to see the present.
I had connected the former to science, would like to introduce the latter with poetry, along the maxim lodged in my head by the unforgotten, unforgettable Ursula LeGuin (1929-2018):
“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates.”
These lines come from an essay, Deep in Admiration, that precedes the poems in LeGuin’s penultimate book of poetry, Late in the Day. (2015.) (So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018 was published posthumously). In typical fashion the small volume inspires and lifts up, even though it centers around finiteness, both personal and ecological. The poems urge us towards awareness. My mindfulness will never reach the height of observational precision and depth of forming connections among all in the natural world, as did her’s. Nor will I ever succeed in emulating the driest of dry humor that pervades so many of her writings. But it is good to be reminded to try and focus on the here and now. Since as we know it might not exist much longer. The here as much as the now.
Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.
Time makes room for going and coming home and in time’s womb begins all ending.
Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding.
And here is to doing all that with elegance and gusto during advanced age…
Artemisia Tridentata
Some ruthlessness befits old age. Tender young herbs are generous and pliant, but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage stands unforthcoming and defiant.
by Ursula LeGuin
Photographs include sage and Eastern Oregon landscapes; music, from a collaboration between LeGuin and Todd Barton, is mind boggling.
“Music and Poetry of the Kesh is the documentation of an invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time, and the soundtrack of famed science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. In the novel, the story of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Kesh, is woven within a larger anthropological folklore and fantasy.
The ways of the Kesh were originally presented in 1985 as a five hundred plus page book accompanied with illustrations of instruments and tools, maps, a glossary of terms, recipes, poems, an alphabet (Le Guin’s conlang, so she could write non-English lyrics), and with early editions, a cassette of “field recordings” and indigenous song. Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined; she embarked on an elaborate process with her friend Todd Barton to invoke their spirit and tradition.”
In other words, the music and language were invented at the same time the book was written. Listening to it while reading Always coming home was the idea. Details here.
In truth, what I was looking for was simply some justification to post pictures of the crows that have joined the squirrels, doves and sparrows on the rainy balcony. Poe came to mind, his famous poem about the Raven. Before you know it, I was sucked into essay after interesting essay of Poe’s influence on French artists, in particular Ravel. The composer claimed many times over that Poe’s Philosophy of Composition (which describes the process of creating the Raven in meticulous, almost mathematical ways, and can be read in full in the link) was a key influence on his own principles of composing.
Just as the Anglo world despised Poe (Henry James wrote that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection,” Paul Elmer More thought Poe “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men,” Yeats thought “The Raven” to be “insincere and vulgar,” and Aldous Huxley thought it “shoddy and slipshod,”) the French thinkers and artists embraced him, Ravel, Debussy and Baudelaire among the biggest fans.(Ref.)
Apparently there is debate how seriously Ravel meant it when he said that his own work in composing was built on Poe’s methods, with some convinced of it, and others claiming that he was the eternal trickster, pulling off pranks and maybe luring people in wrong directions. Unclear if their shared interest in being Dandies forged a bond. I wouldn’t know. Nor do I care.
I do care for the music and everyone agrees that some of Ravel’s compositions are in direct reference to some of Poe’s writings. “A Descent into the Maelstrom” was among them, an inspiration to La Valse in 1920, for example.
What is also established, and that is interesting to me, is that Ravel refused to be roped into the rising French nationalism and its focus on ancient and regional French music. He was open to trans-nationalist influences, and looked outwards for inspiration, borrowings, and appropriations from international sources. A good role model in times, then and now, when tribalism, insularity and traditionalism try to constrict art and education on all fronts.
In 1928, Ravel’s extended, successful concert tour of the U.S. introduced him to Gershwin who took him to hear jazz in Harlem. He also visited New Orleans. The harvest of those encounters can be found in his later compositions, the Piano Concerto in G among them. It includes some jazz elements that are profoundly beautiful. Well, the whole piece is. Played by one of my heroines. (Alas, video has ads in-between movements. My favorite is the third movement, if you have only so much time.)
For a detailed biography of Ravel’s life, sexuality, artistic output and philosophy one can turn to Benjamin Ivry’s biographyMaurice Ravel – A Life, reviewed here, or Roger Nichols’ Ravel, the most recent one.
Or one can simply listen to his music, with its many layers just like the crows feathers.
