My break is not quite over, but I wanted to share a few thoughts and images, before I hibernate again.
I have been driving South to spend time with family, taking occasional photographs when nature allowed – between the heat and hazardous smoke everywhere, it was not easy to find solace in nature.
I have been mourning the rather sudden death of a close friend, and I have been pouring energy into creating and editing new montage work that is (re)imagining our world past, present and future.
As chance would have it, I came across a poem that embraces a similar approach, down to the details of using a bit of fantasy or surrealism to get across some of the points.
The poet had dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond. The ones I saw were unusually static, likely as fatigued as I was, with temperatures in the 100s, in dried-out, dusty Sacramento wetlands. Their images will end up in future landscapes envisioned while thinking about what the hell we are doing to our country, our planet, most likely.
If just one of the montages approaches the brilliance of this poem, I will be content.
Why Is We Americans
We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond. We is spinal cords shedding like the skin of a cottonmouth. We is Psalm 23 and the Pastor’s chattering chicklets. We is a good problem to have. We is throats constricting and the grape juice of Jesus. We is Roach and Mingus in Birdland. We is body electric, eyes watering with moonshine, glossy lips sticky with lard. We is half brothers in headlock, arm-wrestling in the dirt. We is Vaseline rubbed into knocked knees and cracked elbows. We is ham hocks making love to kidney beans. We is Orpheus, lute in hand, asking do we have a problem? We is the backstory of myth. We is sitting horse and crazy bull. We is brown paper bags and gurgled belches. We is hooded ghosts and holy shadows roaming Mississippi goddamned. We is downbeats and syncopation’s cousin. We is mouths washed out with the blood of the lamb. We is witch-hazel-coated backs sucking on peppermint wrappers. We is the spiked antennas of a triangle face praying mantis. We is barefoot tongue-tied hogs with slit throats and twitching bellies. We is sun tea and brewed bitches. We is the crying pussies that stand down when told to man up. We is Radio Raheem and Zoot Suit Malcolm. We is spit-slick low cuts and fades. We is scrappy black-masked coons and turkey-necked bullfrogs. We is the pits of arms at stake, the clouds frothing at the mouth. We is swimmers naked, private parts allegedly fondled by Whitman beneath the water. We is late lurkers and castrated tree limbs on the Sunday before last. We is red- veined pupils and piss-stained knickers, slack-jawed and slumped in the bathroom doorway. We is whiplash and backhanded ways of settling grief. We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths upside the head, jammin’ fingers in Darwin’s white beard. We is comin’ round yonder, pigeon-toed and bowlegged, laughin’ our heads off. We is lassoed cowboys swingin’ in the sweet summer breeze.
doesn’t come with feathers. It lives in flip-flops and, in cold weather, a hooded sweatshirt, like a heavyweight in training, or a monk who has taken a half-hearted vow of perseverance. It only has half a heart, the hope I know. The other half it flings to every stalking hurt. It wears a poker face, quietly reciting the laws of probability, and gladly takes a back seat to faith and love, it’s that many times removed from when it had youth on its side and beauty. Half the world wishes to stay as it is, half to become whatever it can dream, while the hope I know struggles to keep its eyes open and its mind from combing an unpeopled beach. Congregations sway and croon, constituents vote across their party line, rescue parties wait for a break in the weather. And who goes to sleep with a prayer on the lips or half a smile knows some kind of hope. Though not the hope I know, which slinks from dream to dream without ID or ally, traveling best at night, keeping to the back roads and the shadows, approaching the radiant city without ever quite arriving.
Last week, I set my mind to beach combing, rather than keeping it from the idea. Hope needs sustenance, and it can be found on beaches, unpeopled or otherwise. Although the one I went to seemed to be a world in its own, not a soul in sight. Only traces left via drift wood edifices. Intriguing, but not as beautiful as the drift wood itself.
It was cool, bordering on cold, with intermittent squalls. Not flip-flop weather, a rain coat over the sweatshirt. A welcome break from the heat, though, that had taken a bite out of me.
After so many decades after my arrival in the United States I am still amazed at the frequent experience of being alone in vast spaces, nature easily reached near population centers, all yours, and yours alone, for the taking.
No witnesses to loud singing with a voice cracked by chemo so many years ago, or angry screaming, or crying your eyes out – all the things I phantasize about as possible private acts during solitude. Except, once I’m in nature, those urges completely vanish, my mind and soul entirely focused on the treasures around me, the intricacies of evolutionary design.
A focused mind, until it drifts to things I’ve read about the beach and ocean when I was young and completely impressionable. Now old, and intermittently impressionable, I shudder to think about how I was moved by Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s meditations on grief adjacent to emerging environmental concerns, A Gift from the Sea.
Little did I know, beyond her tragic loss of a child to kidnapping and murder, that she was a not-so-closeted admirer of fascism and Hitler in particular, arguing that totalitarian regimes were “manifestations of an inevitable historical wave of the future.” (Will she have the last laugh, after all?) Being married to a serial cheater, sympathizer and fascist-adjacent Charles Lindbergh, and bearing him 6 children, was nowhere on my teenage horizon. I was simply eager to embrace female role models that excelled in flying air planes and being a successful writer simultaneously.
Role models that embraced science and poetry in one fell swoop, like – the political impeccable – Rachel Carson, who wrote about the oceans with a conservationist’s mind even before I was born. I devoured The Sea around Us.
Hope, at the time, was not about approaching a radiant city, like Thomas Centolella describes in his poem above, but about finding an independent place in the world to explore who I was. Self-centered, in other words, but aware of threats to nature even then.
Carson had it right:
“I wonder if we have not too long been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.”
Like the poet, I know many types of hope. Mine, as well, struggles to keep its eyes open. And it occasionally centers on the young being able to find all kinds of books and be educated, not censored; to read and comprehend early, with patience and the ability to analyze; to tolerate the hard parts of learning, because the acquired knowledge will sustain you through many decades of your life. In other words, not let their minds rot through the use of AI.
If we’re lucky, they will be able to fight the planned destruction, enabled by knowledge and critical thinking! The destruction of the radiant city, the shining symbol on the hill, for one. Before Reagan used this biblical phrase to celebrate American exceptionalism, it was meant to remind us that morality was the cornerstone of this symbol of hope.
Speaking of which (a moral approach to bolstering democracy, that is): if you are in favor of vote by mail, now is the time window to send your comments to the Postmaster regarding the plan to refuse vote mail delivery/absentee ballots in States that will not hand over their voter rolls to the Trump Administration. Here is the link for easy commenting, offered by the League of Women’s Voters. It takes two minute, max.
Music is happy today. In celebration of the (unexpected) majority decision of the Supreme Court to allow counting of mailed ballots that arrive after election day, but were post marked in time. A win for democracy and voters.
It is transition season in the garden, before the hot colors and voluptuous forms of the true summer flowers arrive.
There are feverfew, wild geraniums, hedge roses and coral bells, all sporting their pastels. This year, there is also a profusion of early fuchsia blossoms, which remind me of ballerinas, with their tutus and a general dainty flair.
Today a friend of mine enters another year in her 8th decade of life. Interested in all things ballet, accomplished critic of and writer about the art form. Published in journals like New York City’s Dance Magazine, the New York Times, encyclopedias and periodicals, or local press here in the PNW, the Oregonian, Willamette Week and Oregon ArtsWatch, among others. She wrote a deeply researched and fiercely argued book about Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Dance that came out in 2021.
Dainty she ain’t. Which I consider a compliment. It’s also a way of being that empowers those asked to master complicated and often painful lives, early widowhood included. There is a fiery intellect groomed during a New York childhood closely associated with intensely intellectual and artistic circles, and an education at Barnard. There is a ferocious quality of protecting and defending who and what she loves, at almost any cost. There is scorching rage there against the vicissitudes of aging and bodies no longer willing to comply. There is hot contempt for the unprincipled, the immoral, the compromising and the indifferent ones, in public and private sphere alike.
She has a special gift for friendship, keeping early ones alive, opening herself to the vulnerabilities of new ones, established late in life. We have known each other for some years now, old enough at the start not to waste time on frivolities and chitchat. Instead there are repeat conversations that allow exploration of topics relevant to finding closure without throwing in the towel. Conversations that sometimes venture into the territory of illness, death and dying. Topics that are rarely spoken of openly in this society, issues preferably explored with someone equally non-moribund as I consider myself. Thoughts triggered by accumulating losses in our respective social spheres. Ideas (and tears) better confronted in the company of someone curious and open, rather than alone.
In this spirit I offer one of my favorite poems as a birthday gift: an unflinching, yet positive look at what life holds for us, good or bad; an allusion to belonging to an infinite universe; a profoundly stern but also reassuring reminder that here is still here: no terrifying cracks in the wall sucking us into oblivion just yet.
Let us cherish the day, each day, fatigue, pain, irritations notwithstanding.
Cherish the memories of an extraordinary life (I AM STILL WAITING FOR THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Martha!).
Cherish the dance still left in us.
Happy Birthday!
Here
I don’t know about other places, but here on Earth there’s quite a lot of everything. Here chairs are made and sadness, scissors, violins, tenderness, transistors, water dams, jokes, teacups.
Maybe somewhere else there is more of everything, only for some reason there are no paintings there, cathode-ray tubes, dumplings, tissues for tears. There are plenty of places here with surroundings. Some you can particularly get to like, name them your own way and protect them from evil.
Maybe somewhere else there are similar places, But no one considers them beautiful.
Maybe like nowhere else, or in few other places, here you have your own body trunk, and with it the tools needed, to add your children to those of others. Besides that your hands, legs, and the amazed head.
Ignorance here is hard at work, constantly measuring, comparing, counting, drawing conclusions and finding square roots.
I know, I know what you’re thinking. Nothing is permanent here, for since ever forever in the power of the elements. But notice—the elements get easily tired and sometimes they have to take a long rest before the next time.
And I know what else you’re thinking. Wars, wars, wars. But even between them there happen to be breaks. Attention—people are evil. At ease—people are good. At attention we produce wastelands. At ease by the sweat of our brows we build houses and quickly live in them.
Life on earth turns out quite cheap. For dreams for instance you don’t pay a penny. For illusions—only when they’re lost. For owning a body—only with the body.
And as if this was not enough, you spin without a ticket in the carousel of the planets, and along with it, dodging the fare, in the blizzard of galaxies, through eras so astounding, that nothing here on Earth can even twitch on time.
For take a good look: the table stands where it stood, on the table the paper, exactly as placed, through the window ajar just a waft of the air, and in the walls no terrifying cracks, through which you could be blown out to nowhere.
by Wislawa Szymborska
Music directed by another redhead – Ballet scores by Mozart.
A lot of eggs popped up last week. First a nest with duck eggs right off the footpath – unclear who was more startled, the duck who sat on them when I walked by, or I, when the duck flew up in a panic, practically fluttering into my face. (If s/he does that every time someone walks by, I predict there will be zero ducklings hatched…)
Next I saw a number of eggs or egg-shaped forms of various materials arranged in the house of a friend. A ceramic artist herself, she creates beauty with whatever she finds.
We shared the excitement of seeing bushtit parents flying in and out of a nest next to her kitchen window. Alas, the very next day the nest was destroyed by predators. Another generation lost.
My friend sent me home with a bag of quail eggs which are now on my windowsill until they, predictably, rot and start to smell up the kitchen. The eggs, in turn, triggered thoughts about genetics, since I had just read Brian Klaas’ fascinating essay about research into genetics and the question who owns your genome. If researchers discover information about our genome that contradicts everything we believe to be true about ourselves, should we be allowed to interfere with publication of that knowledge? Should they be allowed to withhold that information from us? And how are those questions linked to potential abuse by people with racist agendas? If you find the introduction below of interest, here is the link to the whole piece:
“…..Thus began a descent down a fascinating rabbit hole into the thorny philosophical debates that define modern research into population genetics. What happens when longstanding historical narratives of identity collide with hard genetic evidence? Should DNA scientists always publish findings that could destroy a population’s sense of itself? And, if not, who gets to decide which kinds of scientific research are too sensitive to release?”
Science caught my eye, or my brain, as the case may be. But so did poetry – again related to stories of origin, linkage to tribal membership as juxtaposed to “others,” and, of course, quail eggs. The lines below were published in 2022 (link in the title.)
1. Seventeen months after I moved off the reservation, I traveled to London to promote my first internationally published book.
2. A Native American in England! I imagined the last Indian in England was Maria Tall Chief, the Osage ballerina who was once married to Balanchine. An Indian married to Balanchine!
3. My publishers put me in a quaint little hotel near the Tate Gallery. I didn’t go into the Tate. Back then, I was afraid of paintings of and by white men. I think I’m still afraid of paintings of and by white men.
4. This was long before I had a cell phone, so I stopped at payphones to call my wife. I miss the intensity of a conversation measured by a dwindling stack of quarters.
5. No quarters in England, though, and I don’t remember what the equivalent British coin was called.
6. As with every other country I’ve visited, nobody thought I was Indian. This made me lonely.
7. Lonely enough to cry in my hotel bed one night as I kept thinking, “I am the only Indian in this country right now. I’m the only Indian within a five-thousand-mile circle.”
8. But I wasn’t the only Indian; I wasn’t even the only Spokane Indian.
9. On the payphone, my mother told me that a childhood friend from the reservation was working at a London pub. So I wrote down the address and took a taxi driven by one of those London cabdrivers with extrasensory memory.
10. When I entered the pub, I sat in a corner, and waited for my friend to discover me. When he saw me, he leapt over the bar and hugged me. “I thought I was the only Indian in England,” he said.
11. His name was Aaron and he died of cancer last spring. I’d rushed to see him in his last moments, but he passed before I could reach him. Only minutes gone, his skin was still warm. I held his hand, kissed his forehead, and said, “England.”
12. “England,” in our tribal language, now means, “Aren’t we a miracle?” and “Goodbye.”
13. In my strange little hotel near the Tate, I had to wear my suit coat to eat breakfast in the lobby restaurant. Every morning, I ordered eggs and toast. Everywhere in the world, bread is bread, but my eggs were impossibly small. “What bird is this?” I asked the waiter. “That would be quail,” he said. On the first morning, I could not eat the quail eggs. On the second morning, I only took a taste. On the third day, I ate two and ordered two more.
14. A gathering of quail is called a bevy. A gathering of Indians is called a tribe. When quails speak, they call it a song. When Indians sing, the air is heavy with grief. When quails grieve, they lie down next to their dead. When Indians die, the quails speak.
(Alexie has acknowledged sexual misconduct allegations in 2018, and apologized. Many of his prizes and fellowships were rescinded or renamed. I do not know if he has written a novel since then, but his short writings appear on his substack. As always, we can debate if you can separate the person from the work, but I often go back to reading his words.)
May the quails be silent this weekend, and may lots of eggs hatch….
***
Speaking of hatching: PLEASE SAVE THE DATES:
I have two exhibitions coming up. One will hang at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stvenson, WA, starting June 24, 2026 with a reception on September 11th, 2026 ( a combined celebration of lace artist Maggi Hensel Brown and community lace makers and my photographic work.)
Fragilityis a 2025 series of photomontages that grew out of ongoing concern about insufficient environmental protection. Fauna and flora in the depicted landscapes – photographed mostly around the Pacific Northwest – are endangered. Climate change and the renewed threat of industrial extraction of resources, forests and minerals alike, will do irreparable harm. I thought the ephemeral nature of clouds and the fragility of lace (superimposed on the landscapes) were fitting symbols for why we need step up in our efforts to turn things around.
Collective Effervescence brings together the work of Diane Jacobs, Susan Murrell and my own to explore our evolving relationship with the natural world. Rooted in shared energy, connection, and interdependence, the exhibition examines how human actions shape and destabilize the landscapes we inhabit. Through painting, photography, printmaking, and mixed media, we create environments that are at once familiar and altered. Together, we invite viewers to look closely, to explore and perhaps share the artists’ fervent belief that we can have a positive impact on preserving nature, once we shift from individual awareness to shared responsibility, and from observation to action. My contributions come from a new series When We Broke the World.
I will post more detailed information closer to the dates – just put them in your calendars for now!
Music today is from all around the world, I guess every shared gene pool! A collection of modernized folksongs. A beautiful album by Marisa Anderson.
I turned around the corner, and just like that, there were two families of geese. Completely unperturbed by my presence, they walked up from the lake shore, through the grass, onto the path, not 2 meters away from me.
The German word for the way goslings follow a leader in a straight line is “Gänsemarsch”, geese march. Not to be confused with goose stepping, which in German is called Stech Schritt, literally translated as stabbing step.
Goosesteps
A collector of walks, I was practicing my llamastep when one of those white geese with the knob of cheddar on its bill honked at the goslings ignoring the art of the rank and file so adored by Mussolini and other assorted lunatics who I have trouble believing could ever raise one leg parallel to the earth they scorched without falling prey to gravity that was given a special kind of dominion over the fascist paunch, a shabby thing I have never seen hang around the waist of a goose, though who can say for sure under all that heavenly down where the hips of a goose begin and end; and even if tomorrow some budding scholar published a treatise titled The Mystery of Goose Hips to fanfare, it would be an exaggeration of the grossest kind to equate a goose’s trumpet with the barking from the balcony by the sad bullies whose love of the locked leg I will never understand since the knee was so obviously made to flex, which means locking one is most likely a kind of sin against Darwin or God, both of whom I think would disapprove of anything so unnatural as even twenty people moving in stiff unison to music unless the brass and strings were just about to sway and bend to the hot version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
I associate goose stepping with authoritarian leaders, although it originated in 18th century Prussia under Prince Leopold I. Locked knees, lifted to a 90 degree angle, brought crashing down with a loud slap, a totally unnatural and physically demanding, if not exhausting form of walk.
Originally performed by batallions or platoons, it was meant to impress with physical prowess, and disciplined determination. By the time Mussolini and Hitler made it one of their trademarks, something else was added to the mix. The synchronized mass movement of bodies was participatory without being democratic. People bought into the mass spectacles, but it was directed top down, all in service of a leader. I am thinking back to what Hannah Arendt wrote about Totalitarianism: an organized, privileged elite pushes masses together into a form of experienced unity that relieves the individual of a sense of isolation. Our need for belonging is sated by participation in a larger whole, the nation or paternalism of some charismatic leader.
Synchronized movement fosters a loss of self, a bonding to or being usurped by some larger unit, taking with it the worries and the loneliness generated by a society in flux. That kind of de-individuation might also, however, lead to complete abdication of responsibility, or upholding of one’s individual moral standards. A mass becomes a mob….. and at the center of it is always a component of fostered hatred.
Arendt, writing about a time when goose stepping was on the rise in Germany between the world wars, described it succinctly:
Enough. I have to stop thinking about urgent political, historical parallels, or I go nuts. Let’s just marvel at the fluffiness of the goslings, the nurturing parent geese, the poet’s ability to distance himself from the horrors with a good portion of humor.
And here the Boss version of the Saints marching…..
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
The greening of the trees? Really the greening of everything else as well. Whether you look up or down, the sheer saturation and brightness of every plant is the cheeriest sight imaginable. Verdant renewal.
I’ll take it all, as well.
The weeds in my garden, alas, are growing faster than everything else, and so I will make it short here today, so I can go out there and tackle them, ruthlessly.
Three recommendations for things to watch (and I might have recommended one already, if so, blame the repetition on an aging brain.
A Canadian series on Amazon Prime or Hulu, Coroner, (not The Coroner), is a police procedural from Toronto, tackling relevant contemporary themes, from racism, houselessness, queerness, military PTSD, tribal issues to the lure of cults, with a surprising amount of candor and criticism. It centers around the family story of said coroner, her father battling dementia, her gay son, and a mother who abandoned her as a child. Every time it threatens to veer into soap opera territory it rescues itself, and the cast is the most diverse cast I have seen on TV in a long time. The only downer were the last episodes of the last season, which didn’t know how to rap up, featured some deus-ex-machina concoction and a somewhat pathetic ending in the true meaning of the word pathos. Overall intelligent entertainment.
And speaking of racism, here is an astounding film capturing its essence. Black Girl is not for the faint of heart, it is enraging and very sad, but a masterpiece, created by Ousmane Sembène in 1966 to expose French Colonialism. For anyone keen on classic art films, do not miss it.
My last suggestion might be the one mentioned before: the eternally long and equally important documentary that partially explains America today as written up in this Atlantic essay. The link provided by the Atlantic does not work. Here is one I found that shows the full running time of The Sorrow and the Pity. Yes, 4 hours of your life, but none better spent. Marcel Ophuls made this film about the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. He uses interviews with a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature of and reasons for collaboration, including antisemitism, Anglophobia, fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, and the desire for power.
Yes, deep into the weeds of politics. I, on the other hand, will be deep into the weeds of my garden, momentarily.
For today I feel like traditional Senegalese music, in honor of the Black Girl.
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.
One of the highlights of spring is my annual trek to the tulip farm. This year I missed the seasonal opportunity, since I came back too late from California. However, a bouquet of tulips was waiting for me upon my return, sent by the kids, considerably brightening last week, even when the flowers reached their old Dutch Master phase of drooping heads and falling petals.
They brought nothing but unadulterated joy, starting with the loving gesture, then beauty, both in prime and in decay. Most importantly, though, they served as daily reminder that nature just produces the most incredible forms and color, each and every year again, the renewal of spring, rebirth.
I could not possibly conceive of tulips as the enemy, the intruder, a force imbued with aggression, disturbance, a bout of suffocation. That is, of course, how tulips are depicted in the poem below, at least superficially. Deep down the poet acknowledges the power nature exerts in anchoring us in life, rather than letting us slip into oblivion, even if she fights tooth and nail to be granted the latter.
Plath wrote this poem a few days after she left the hospital in 1961, where she had spent almost two weeks after an appendectomy. Some weeks earlier, she had miscarried, making me speculate that hormonal shifts and grief added to the experience of pain after surgery, the anger at a mutilated body, the rage against an “awful baby”. At this point, she had been married for 5 years, was the mother of a toddler, and her first suicide attempt safely in the distant past. Yet the darkness of depression raised its head. The ugly lure of death lurked seemingly again. With her marriage breaking up the next year, despite the birth of another child in April 1962, she told friends that a recent significant car accident had been an attempt to end her life. She saw it through the next year by inhaling gas from the stove, ending her life at age 30.
Her son followed in her footsteps, many years later. Her husband’s lover, one cause for the dissolution of the marriage to Plath, also killed herself and the 4 year old daughter she had with Hughes. So much death and destruction.
But the point I am trying to make here, is that under the guise of animosity towards the floral intruders, even in the middle of shattering sadness, Plath captures the vibrancy, the saturation of color, the intensity and above all the life force of tulips to perfection. Her desired state of white, flat, silent oblivion, described in excruciating details, just as the physical dread after surgery, is the perfect foil for the explosion of red insistence by the tulips: dragging you back into existence, wanted or not.
Of course, I cannot help but point out that the aggressive lure of tulips pushed people not just back into life but also down into ruin – the 17th century tulip mania, a speculative bubble that led to an economic crash. Plath’s poem, however, is not about general insights, but a very subjective, personal experience of the dialectic between her desire for extinction and the tulip’s refusal to grant it. Would not have worked with buttercups, or forget-me-nots, or lilies or carnations.
My tulips open my heart with joy; the poet’s words open it with empathy for someone suffering so. But I will cling to the former for a while longer, before I acknowledge that no magic flower exists that can beat clinical depression. Holding on to cheer as long as I can.
–Nerve/Effrontery//Bile//something bitter to endure//bitterness of spirit : Rancor// an abnormal outgrowth of plant tissue usually due to insect or mite parasites or fungi and sometimes forming an important source of tannin see gall wasp illustration//a skin sore caused by chronic irritation// a cause or state of exasperation.
Last weekend a severe rain storm hit the Bay area. I found large numbers of oak galls under the trees during subsequent walks. The Diablo Mountain range is full of healthy oaks, not yet hit by oak wilt, the fungal disease ravaging the eastern parts of the US.
The funny, apple-like appendages you see on oak trees during spring and summer,
and then on the ground later in the season, are actually small temporary homes of wasps.
These tiny wasps use certain chemicals mimicking growth hormone to induce growth on the leaves and branches of oak trees, reminiscent of tumors, but not really harmful. There are many species of these gall wasps (800 in the US alone), and they all produce different kinds of galls, often on the very same tree.
The larvae use the galls for shelter and food, and eventually the fully formed wasps bore holes into the wall through which they emerge. Their reproduction is pretty nifty, too:
“Many species have alternating generations, meaning all of the adults emerging from galls during one time of the year are female-only, while the adults emerging in a different season have both males and females. Most species have females that can reproduce using parthenogenesis when they emerge by themselves. This means that their eggs are essentially clones of themselves. What’s more, some species appear not to have any males at all.” (Ref.)
The galls sustain a large ecosystem of birds and ground mammals, but also had their benefits for humans. People have used them to make indelible ink for more than 1400 years. If you squash the pulp of galls and add iron sulfate ((FeSO4) and mix in a binder, usually gum arabic, you get a grey ink that will eventually darken to a purplish black. Use was widespread, and often specified by law: Great Britain and France specified the content of iron gall ink for all royal and legal records to ensure permanence. The United States Postal Service had its own official recipe that was to be used in all post office branches for the use of their customers. In Germany the use of special blue or black urkunden- oder dokumentenechte Tinte or documentary use permanent inks is required in notariellen Urkunden (Civil law notarylegal instruments) (I am told by Wikipedia).
I’d rather think about the beauty of those structures, here on my last day in California. And the poetic response they elicit, with so many subtle meanings of the term added, the bitterness of bile, the gall to spit out endless vitriol…
GALL
Those from Aleppo were bitterest, yielding the vividest ink. More permanent than lampblack or bistre, and at first pale grey, it darkened, upon exposure, to the exact shade of rain-pregnant clouds, since somewhere in the prehistory of ink is reproduction: a gall-wasp’s nursery, deliberate worm at the oak apple’s heart. We knew the recipe by heart for centuries: we unlettered, tongueless, with hair of ash, the slattern at the pestle, the bad daughter. But all who made marks on parchment or paper dipped their pens in gall, in vitriol; even the mildest of words like mellow fruitfulness, of supplication like all I endeavour end decay equally in time with bare, barren, sterile; the pages corroding along all their script like a trail of ash (there is beauty in this) as the apple of Sodom, the gall, turned in the hand from gold into ashes and smoke.
We have no other time than here and now A time that's cheating us with half-filled bowls We have to drink since refills are denied, In front of our paradise
The sword already lurks, for which we, the heirs of lost sons driven from their land, were chosen We grew old, before given a chance of ever being young Our current life a state of not-yet-dying
We once arrived naively filled with faith Into a century ravaged by storms Our prior hopes replaced by stunned internal silence Aid only possible for those who'd loudly cry
We furtively dream of woods and meadows and a morsel of happiness thrown at our feet But no tomorrow will restore the present day we have no other time than here and now
We have no other time than here and now We have no other time than here and now We have no other time than here and now, here and now, than here and now, here and now, here and now, here and now
Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko’s later writing was suffused with the experience of exile. Moving from Poland to Germany, fleeing to the US during Nazi rule, eventually emigrating to Israel where a lack of Hebrew isolated her even more, she was a chronicler of hardship, crushed hopes, victims of displacement.
Little of her oeuvre is translated into English. I tried my hand on the verses above, fully aware I’m not a poet. I kept her punctuation, but was obviously unable to maintain the rhyming scheme. I was more interested in getting the meaning across, her acknowledgement of an inevitable fate and yet an insistence on agency, amidst the most dire circumstances.
During this week in particular I have been thinking about the fate of the displaced, in all the ongoing war zones, the fate of those for whom the sword is lurking, whose lives already are or will be exposed to existential threat.
The whole of Tuesday, after the early Presidential threats of exterminating an entire civilization, never to be restored again, I was in such a state of anticipatory anxiety that I could barely function. Then I woke up enraged this morning, feeling the emotional abuse of threatened violence, keeping a world holding its breath, manipulation only matched by that of the stock market. Those thousands killed, kids included, billions spent, our defensive arsenal depleted. Our reputation in the world in ruins, international transportation made more expensive, an oppressive Iranian regime more secured than ever. A people promised liberation offered obliteration on the turn of a dime, on the whim of either a madman or an intentional manipulator. And none of it providing the security that it won’t start again at any moment in time.
The poem reminded me to stay focused on the here and now, because that is all we have, and should not waste with fears about an unpredictable future. You can go further, though, beyond the “all we have.” WE HAVE the here and now, and as such we can make use of it, with something, anything, to affect what future will arise. Maybe we can render aid to those who are muted into silence, after all, not expecting them to shout for it. Maybe we can refill the bowls of the thirsty, in defiance of the rules.
And just maybe we can unite to rip the swords out of the hands of the bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters that destroy the world for power and riches. We are in a here and now where action is still possible.
We can refuse to join the cult of lemmings bent on self destruction, reverse direction – in the here and now.
A much more elegant and extended version of those thoughts expressed by Rebecca Solnit can be found here.
I look at a typical day right now (see below) and am not surprised that I am at times overwhelmed. As you likely are. So I will take a little time off from regular posting, go visit my kids down South, and along the way gather some renewed energy.
Morning: I read poetry, made for the moment, by Lebanese-Armenian poet Perla Kantarjian. Beirut is in flames as I write this. Under the cover of another war next door. If I had the energy I would write about the long-term environmental consequences of all the burning oil, in addition to the human suffering right now, but I don’t.
So I cry.
***
Then I go for my neighborhood walk, and find a fence made beautiful with eye candy – a group of crafters probably decorated together during the recent yarn crawl. This is an annual Portland experience, an event for fiber enthusiasts — knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, and felters — who spread through the city on a particular day to explore and support the many independent shops in and around Portland, Oregon, rather than buy on-line. Such a spot of upbeat color.
So I rejoice.
***
In the evening, I think through what art I saw that lingered from this day. Without competition, it was a project filmed in 2002 near Lima, Peru. A Belgian and a Mexican artist mobilized some 800 people to shovel sand to shift the top of a dune. You are rolling your eyes? Francis Alÿs is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on shared cultural histories, urban engagement, and the human impact on the environment. I saw his work years back at the Tate Modern, and continue to follow what he is doing. Here is an older project particularly apt for our current situation: It was called Cuando la fe mueve montañas (When Faith Moves Mountains) – and really: isn’t that what we need right now? Even if change is imperceptible, going slow, needing a lot of organizing and solidarity, something IS happening? Watch the video and see how students define their understanding of art, its social context and implications, the consequences of communal action.
So I feel hope.
I also feel whiplash, with all those intense emotions shifting constantly. Time to take a break! I’ll be in touch sporadically.
