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Poetry

Painting Pumpkins.

A two-and-a-half year-old of my acquaintance is by all reports besotted with pumpkins and other Halloween decorations. I have been sending her photographs of pumpkins and some considerations for how to explore different colors, since painting is another current cherished activity.

Today’s images, then, are the results of my trying to keep up with the creativity of my favorite toddler. They are also related to the poetry of Richard Brautigan, the master of observing everyday occurrences and putting them into innocent, childlike, anti-poetic words that can be grasped by everyone, exert an incredibly strong visual pull, and are deceptive in their simplicity.

—

The Pumpkin Tide

I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea.

BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

***

It is the time of year, where walks around the neighborhood are dominated by Halloween decorations. Plain, messy old pumpkins have been replaced by plastic ones, inflatable figures waste electricity, and attempts at humor compete with gruesome skeletons and jumping monster spiders.

How do you explain to a child what this is all about? Do you explain the pagan origins of Halloween, coming from the Celtic world of ancient Britain and Ireland? A celebration of the beginning winter period, a day where the souls of those who had died were believed to return, and those who had died in the preceding year were on their journey to the afterworld? With bonfires lit to frighten away evil spirits, and disguises and masks worn to not be recognized by the ghosts among us?

Or do you center the 7th century Christian attempts to supplant pagan rites with the introduction of Allhallotide, a three-day Christian triduum dedicated to remembering the dead that begins with Halloween (October 31- the evening before All Saints’ Day became a holy, or hallowed, eve, from which the word “Halloween” evolved,) and is followed by All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2)? (Ref.)

Protestant Reformation, by the way, put an end to this for non-Catholics. Majority Catholic countries, like most of Mexico and South America, still celebrate, often happily and vividly, the Day of the Dead.

Or do you stress the notion of a now secular holiday, devoted to fun costumes and endless candy, if your parents let you….? So how to explain the ubiquitous skeletons?

***

These are the same questions I ask myself when thinking about fairy tales, or kids exposed to adults teaching them to take the bible as a literal document to be believed. Does it make a difference in how children learn about these things if and when the adults themselves believe in the tales they tell or not?

I suppose the function of fairy tales (or biblical lore) as instructions for how to understand the world, behave in the world and perhaps change a world that is unjust and menacing, is enhanced by a belief that the threats are for real. If you trust that you’ll end up eaten by the witch if you abscond to the woods, or fry in hell if you covet your neighbor’s possessions, you might be indeed more inclined to follow the rules.

Note, though, that it is not always about punitive actions. Fairy tales in particular often stress the positive outcomes of courage and risk taking, the questioning of hierarchical oppression, the power of empathy and reciprocal aid. And in modern versions, the Disneyfication of the old stories, if you will, evil powers and their reach have certainly been tamped down, compared to what the originals contained, stressing agency instead of assured victimhood.

The German fairy tales I heard as a child were assuredly different than the ones I read to my American children, more brutal and more inclined to stress the consequences of misbehavior. And fear was a palpable experience, in the absence of Halloween decorations, for a non-Catholic child in my catholic village during All Souls’ Day in the beginning of November. I have written about it before, but the flickering of remembrance candle lights on the graves of the local cemetery, breaking through the darkness of the flat, misty landscape of beet fields and meadows, gave me bone-deep shivers as a child. It was not about ghosts. It was about death. Death in the context of a too recent war, with evil at its roots.

Now, ignoring ghosts, specters, witches and all the other symbolic stand-ins, we are focused on the existence of evil again, in the context of war and in the vicinity of cease-fire agreements, in unadulterated crimes against humanity, as just one example picked for its sadistic timing. Could come up with uncountable more, all over the world, all sides.

How do you preserve the innocence of a young child, model courage and foster their fearlessness, provide them with a moral compass with a true north of all humanity in our current world? How do you celebrate the memory of the dead when we are all implicated in bringing about their demise, be it by action, indirect financing, or simple silence and averting our eyes?

Any answers out there?

I was thinking hard about what music to include today. There is the heavy, if beautiful piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, Give us Peace. It is a war protest, and includes the Catholic Agnus Dei, three poems by Walt Whitman, a speech by Quaker politician John Bright, and excerpts from the Biblical book of Jeremiah.

But in the interest of lifting us all (and preserving a young child’s chance to listen to some really cool music!) I think I’ll recommend this. Maurice Ravel wrote this to commemorate friends and acquaintances who died in WW I, and was accused of doing it too light-hearted. His response: “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.”

It is us, the living, who need this musical consolation. Music, painting pumpkins, watching kids blossom – creativity and connectedness help us to get through hard times in one piece. They are the tools to guard ourselves against the pain, the hopelessness, the fear at our doorsteps – feelings that surface way too often these days, at least for me.

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And in the interesting people department….

About time we introduce some new members to that idiosyncratically chosen group, don’t you think?

The first person should have been known to me, but wasn’t. I only learned about them when a dear friend sent me a bundle of postcards from a current blockbuster exhibition in Hamburg, Germany. She knew how much I wished to see Rendevous of Dreams at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, celebrating a century of Surrealism and juxtaposing some of the works with those of German Romanticists who were influenced by some of the same inspirations as the more modern movement.

 “The supernatural and irrational, dreams and chance, a feeling of community and encounters with a changing natural world were vital sources of inspiration for German Romanticism and shaped international Surrealism differently a century later.” (Ref.)

Toyen The Dream (1937)

If you live in northern Germany, go see paintings by Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Toyen, André Masson, Paul Klee and Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810,) while I longingly stare at the postcards.

So: here is Toyen, a name that means “it is he” in Czech, but could also be a play on the French citoyen,) chosen by a painter originally named Marie Čermínová (1902 -1980) who refused to use any feminine endings in her own language (which contains linguistic gender differentiation). They were a firebrand, left home as a young teenager and followed progressive political movements while attending  UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design) in Prague. They worked closely with fellow Surrealist poet and artist Jindřich Štyrský until Štyrský’s death, collaborated with the future Nobel prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert, and poet František Halas. Living for some years in Paris, they and Styrsky founded an artistic alternative to Abstraction and Surrealism, which they dubbed Artificialism.

Toyen Among the Long Shadows (1943)

Their output was prolific, in paintings, drawings and book illustrations even during the years when they went underground during the Nazi Occupation in Prague, sheltering Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler. The two moved to Paris permanently after the war and joined the Paris Surrealists. Even when fascism struck and attacked a person and their work, they did not give an inch, much less capitulated. I am so grateful for models that indicate you can – and must – follow your passion, even under the most dire of circumstances.

The work is ravishing. If you live in Great Britain, you had a chance to see some of it at Richard Saltoun Gallery in London. Dreaming in the Margins was up until October 4th (this blog got delayed, alas, by reports on more pressing current events…) You can still look at the website, though.

Toyen THE LAW OF SILENCE (1953)

Toyen’s sexuality is unknown, since they avoided revealing any details about their personal life, creating a mysterious persona, but their public styling cut across gender boundaries. This fluidity was one of the factors that led to an artistic focus on themes of gender, politics, and eroticism, but they also created highly political art that addressed women’s experiences, misogyny and the destructive effects of war and authoritarian regimes. Here is a longer biographical sketch of the artist which labels Toyen as transgender.

Toyen Eclipse (1968)

***

I really can’t figure out how that artist escaped me, given my preoccupation with Surrealism this year with all those centennial celebrations (and prior to that just my affinity to some of the female artists of that movement before they were introduced to mainstream audiences.)

I am less perturbed by the fact that I had never encountered Frank Menchaca, the second person for today’s addition to the interesting people department, a composer who turns out also to be a visual artist, a poet and writer, with a foot in the sustainable energy business and education. Talk about a renaissance man. His visual art work can be perused on his website (link in name) that offers some 14 galleries. I came across his music first; just like Toyen cross-referenced poetry in her illustrations and other works, Menchaca links some of his compositions to poetry, in direct and indirect ways. As you know, I am a sucker for cross overs. And I feel certainly encouraged by people who do not restrict themselves to one creative or intellectual area only, even if standards of excellence might differ across media. I allow myself too often to beg off of some project just because I am not good (enough) at it, and it is so easy to retreat to the familiar.

What brought me to Menchaka is a piece titled Crows listening to Wallace Stevens. It can be found on an album The Demon rubs his Palm which I have listened to so often now that I can whistle in the demon’s company. By all descriptions, the music relates to multiple contemporary composers like John Luther Adams, for example. I wouldn’t know. I do know Steven’s 13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird, though, given that I spent an entire spring 15 years ago creating drawings and montages for the stanzas of this poem that I found wonderfully challenging to interpret. Early days for me regarding the craft, but I still like the ideas.

Here is my exhibition statement from 2011:

Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, first published in 1913, has been hailed as an imagistic masterpiece. Stevens himself called it “a collection not of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” A first reading of the 13 stanzas, each mentioning the blackbird, offers indeed a multitude of sensory modes and perceptions. On closer inspection, though, the poem hints, as so much of Stevens’ work, at the relation between the perceivers and the world they perceive, extending our focus beyond perception to thoughts and feelings as well. Yet the text is challenging, frequently switching perspectives between who does the looking and who beholds whom in knowledge of the world. For good measure, Stevens adds the occasional barb, sufficiently opaque to leave the reader even more unsettled. Who would know that “the bards of euphony” refers to his critics (Stanza X) or that the men of Haddam, a hamlet in Connecticut, embarked on a futile search for gold (Stanza VII).

My challenge was to provide sufficiently representational images to echo the content of the stanzas, but to stay abstract enough to mirror the reticence of the poem’s language. I tried to convey my sense of the poem as a whole, taking as my guide the notion that our perception inevitably goes “beyond the information given,” such that the phenomenal world can never be objectively represented but consists rather of a chain of apperceptions guided by interpretation. To accomplish this goal, I, among other things, replaced the poem’s blackbird with glass marbles that were montaged into my drawings and photographs from my daily environment.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.



II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.



III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.



IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.



V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.



VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.



VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?



VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.



IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.



X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.



XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.



XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.



XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

BY WALLACE STEVENS

Again, here is the full album, best listened to without interruptions, and on multiple occasions, when the connections become ever more visible, or should I say audible, rooted in a poem performed at the end.

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Left in the Dust.

Want to walk with me? Meet me about 30 miles east of San Francisco, at the Alamo Oaks Trail, a small hilly enclave in the middle of suburban developments of the city of Danville, CA.

The hills are conscientiously tended to for fire prevention, grass mowed to a stubble, dry branches piled up for removal. It still has a feel of open nature, not manicured park, though, enhanced by the fact that I seemed to be the only soul around hiking the steep slopes.

The cracked grey dirt on the path visually mirrored the cracked grey bark of the oak trees, no bird song around other than the occasional chittering acorn woodpecker, calling for company.

Dust everywhere. Even though the oak leaves looked green from afar, they were coated with it, oak galls dropping left and right.

Brought me back to the images along the Interstate Highway on our drives, going south from Portland, going north back home all the way from SoCal.

Dust plumes whipped up by the wind, and more so by tractors and other farming equipment.

Which led to thinking about agriculture and the tragedy of all those 2.5 million people ruined and displaced by the 1930s dust bowl, following the late 1920s crash and subsequent Great Depression. At the time, poor farming techniques caused the soil to erode. A seven year drought starting in 1931, together with the erosion, led to desert-like conditions, unfit for growing food or keeping animal stock alive. When the winds came the dust was carried away in huge clouds, sickening people and depleting the once fertile grasslands.

Archival image showing dust storms in OK

Climate change brings, of course, increasing droughts but also increasing flooding events that make farming just as impossible. I urge you to read in-depth reporting on what farm families face these days, in the mid-West and increasingly California as well. Pro-Publica has a two part series that reveals how much farming should change, given the current and future conditions, but is stuck in a senseless place of doing the same old, no-longer-working thing, due to federal farm policies. (Part 1/ Part 2) The shortest summary: subsidies, including federalized crop insurance, are keeping farmers on land that is no longer productive. Programs that could help to pull out destitute farmland from production are cut by the Trump administration.

It is not the only problem farmers face (or berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants employed exploitatively and with unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state, never mind the current rash of ICE deportation.) Farmers continually loose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. (The following statistics are culled from an in-depth, devastating article in High Country News.) Four grocery giants – Walmart, Albertsons Companies, Kroger Companies and Costco – now control most of the markets, even if they run under diverse store names, which gives them power not just over consumers, but producers as well.

Farmers’ Markets are a desperate counter weight to these monopolies, but there are way too few to make a real dent (California has only 2, Oregon 5.9 per 100 000 people.)

In terms of production, 78% of the market share is held by 6% of U.S. farms, with ever larger scale production driving out family farmers. 1.8 million small farms constitute the remaining 22 %, many of them on the brink of ruin now with the tariffs. Farm bankruptcies already swelled under the first Trump administration, things are worse now. Up to 30% of Arkansa farmers are facing bankruptcy this year if not rescued by emergency funds (and they voted overwhelmingly Republican.) Expanding tax subsidies, of course, benefits not all equally.

Subsidies, once introduced to ease the pain during the Great Depression, now lead to overproduction and discourage innovation in farming practices.

Approximately one-third of U.S. farms receive regular subsidies, with larger farms benefiting more significantly. The top 10% of subsidy recipients receive about two-thirds of total farm subsidies, in direct payments, crop insurance and loans, often favoring large agribusinesses over smaller farms. They also contribute to environmental issues, as large-scale farming often relies on monoculture practices that can harm ecosystems. 30 billion $$ spent, but no talk of welfare queens….

With the new congressional bill, environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food commodities, combined with stubbornly high and rising hunger rates, particularly among children, will be intensified and prolonged.

As reported by MOTHER JONES: “The consequences promise to be devastating for the economy, the environment, and public health. The BBB slashes food aid for poor people while showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers…. The new law slashes $185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, a 20 percent reduction. While low-income people got kicked in the teeth, large-scale commodity farmers cashed in from Trump’s bill. Driven largely by billions of dollars of annual incentives for all-out production embedded in decades of farm bills, farmers in the upper Midwest have maximized corn and soybean production in ways that have pushed this vital growing region to its ecological limits. Soil is rapidly eroding away there, and pollution from agrichemicals fouls drinking-water sources and feeds harmful algae blooms from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly warming climate makes both problems worse.“

Not yet taken into account is the fact that even monopolist producers are starting to feel the pain of Trump policies. Just as the soybean harvest begins, there are no orders – zip – from one of the largest clients: China. They account for 25% of all soybean sales and more than half all soybean exports.

***

There is much heartbreaking, perceptive poetry written about the displacement of farmers, and the yearning for a return to the land that they were driven from through a combination of climate, governmental actions and the results of ruthless capitalism. The land calls, in Hughes’ poem below, despite the evident hardship, promising the freedom of a migratory bird in flight, in contrast to the caged one, mired in poverty. (Best read in conjunction with his poem Let America be America again. It also compelled me to offer one of the two musical choices today, a wonderful rendition of I know why the caged bird sings by Buckshot Le Fonque, reciting Maya Angelou’s poem of the same name.)

By Langston Hughes

Smoke from 21 wild fires in the vicinity of Dunsmuir lining the horizon.

View of Mt. Shasta.

I was equally drawn to more modern allusions to the hardships of the dust bowl, by Steven Leyva, a poet new to me. Very much attracted by his determination to stay hopeful under the veneer of his play with language, encapsulating the vagaries of defense against what this world has in store for us, including existential threat.

What You Need to Survive Vernon, OK


Sheer luck. Dumb-as-a-hammer-
without-the-handle luck. Two-yolks-

in-the-egg luck. The fourth leaf on
the clover isn’t enough. Leave the rabbit’s

feet alone. Beginner’s luck. One
bounce of the Plinko chip into the bonus.

The universe’s casual lagniappe. Crossing-
the-platform-and-catching-the-other-train luck.

Even-better-when-late luck. Onion-ring-
in-the-fries luck. The penny’s street resumé.

Hard worn, back-country luck. The creek unrisen.
The anti-Lazarus creek. The-glint-against-

the-barrel luck. Luck to see the sniper asleep.
Oil-derricks-never-went-dry luck. All-sevens-

and-a-pineapple luck. Good fortune to defy the odds
of hypertension or hair loss. Arm of the lucky cat

scratching the air forever. Unambitious Icarus Jones—
boy was lucky as a broken wishbone. Oh to match his lack

of fear, his letterman swagger [All State, Triple Jump Champ],
his young, gifted, and Black luck. A palm itching, money-on-

the-way luck. An ear burning, willing-to-fry-anyone-
who’s-talking-shit-around-the-way luck. An ace in the hole type.

A rueful magnanimity toward what is out of control.
An ease with being at ease while the state becomes the dust bowl.

BY STEVEN LEYVA

And here is Woody Guthrie with the Dustbowl Blues.

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Don’t zero in on the Bees.

Too hot to hike. Too hot even for a walk around the corner. So I photograph in the garden, bees and bumblebees visiting the flowers in their late-summer state, a mix of full glory and early decay.

Not a random choice, of course. It all started with a book by Christian Wiman, award-winning poet, editor, translator, essayist, and theology professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

A compilation of diverse entries, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, finds ways to communicate the complex relationship between hope and despair even for those of us who do not share the faith – or any faith – so central to its author.

Part autobiography, part poetry, part analysis of the importance of a moral and ethical existence in a world where many have turned away from these criteria to protect their own comfort and/or lust for hierarchical status and power, the book instructs, challenges, affirms, and repeatedly uses terrific wit to make the medicine go down.

I was drawn to the text of someone as different from me as possible – deeply religious vs. completely agnostic and missing pretty much any spiritual bone – because I heard an interview where he voiced something after having undergone a bone marrow transplant, something I could not agree with more, having experienced serious cancer:

I hear that kind of carpe diem language — there’s a famous line from Wallace Stevens: “Death is the mother of beauty,” meaning that we can’t, can’t ever perceive our lives until we look through it through the lens of death, but if you look through the lens of death, then it’s suddenly much more abundant and beautiful and sharp. And I have come to think that that is just a load of crap. [laughs]

I was also drawn to what I sensed amid his profusely proffered doubts and tribulations: a steadfastness in trust in a higher power that I can only dream of, actually truly envy. I found his entries against despair in some ways helpful, nonetheless, by pure association, however distant from the core approach.

As it turned out, the title of his book refers back to a phrase in a poem by Emily Dickinson, A narrow Fellow in the Grass (#1096) which is the gold standard when it comes to describing a sense of constriction and fear, the encounter with a snake leading to tightened breathing and cold (zero) seeping through the bone. For Wiman, zero refers to other things as well, often in relation to despair, it can be a name given to G-d, or an empty soul.

There’s much to learn from his writing, much that spoke to me as an artist as well.

“Why does one create? Two reasons: an overabundance of life and a deficiency of it; a sense that reality has called out in such a way that only your own soul can answer (I create “in return” said Robert Duncan,) and in a simultaneous sense that in that word “soul” is a hole that no creation of your own can ever fill.” (p.73)

In any case, I assumed that I was not going to review the entire book (previously done by others here and here, for one), just highly recommend it. I tried to find a poem by the author instead, that would convey the central themes of his thinking, the depth of his way of honing himself, refusing to go under, if only with proud sarcasm (note that the last word in it is entirely ambiguous – it could refer to his first name, or his faith.)

Here is the poem: (and here is a convenient link to the scientific research that has shown bees to have not just numerical skills – they can count up to 4 landmarks – but also a concept of nothing (zero) to be a number below the ones they could identify. Bringing real world applications and insights into the framework of asking the big questions is something I found – and liked – frequently in Wiman’s poetry.)

Even Bees Know What Zero Is

That’s enough memories, thank you, I’m stuffed.
I’ll need a memory vomitorium if this goes on.
How much attention can one man have?
Which reminds me: once I let the gas go on flowing
after my car was full and watched it spill its smell
(and potential hell) all over the ground around me.
I had to pay for that, and in currency quite other than attention.
I’ve had my fill of truth, too, come to think of it.
It’s all smeary in me, I’m like a waterlogged Bible:
enough with the aborted prophecies and garbled laws,
ancient texts holey as a teen’s jeans, begone begats!
Live long enough, and you can’t tell what’s resignation, what resolve.
That’s the bad news. The good news? You don’t give a shit.
My life. It’s like a library that closes for a long, long time
—a lifetime, some of  the disgrunts mutter—
and when it opens opens only to an improved confusion:
theology where poetry should be, psychology crammed with math.
And I’m all the regulars searching for their sections
and I’m the detonated disciplines too.
But most of all I’m the squat, smocked, bingo-winged woman
growing more granitic and less placable by the hour
as citizen after citizen blurts some version of
“What the hell!” or “I thought you’d all died!”
and the little stamp she stamps on the flyleaf
to tell you when your next generic mystery is due
that thing goes stamp right on my very soul.
Which is one more thing I’m done with, by the way,
the whole concept of soul. Even bees know what zero is,
scientists have learned, which means bees know my soul.
I’m done, I tell you, I’m due, I’m Oblivion’s datebook.
I’m a sunburned earthworm, a mongoose’s milk tooth,
a pleasure tariff, yesterday’s headcheese, spiritual gristle.
I’m the Apocalypse’s popsicle. I’m a licked Christian.

BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

And let me just get a bit of snark in at the end:

When I searched for the poem on google, the Search assist box popped up on top, as it is now wont to do. I never use these LLM for queries, forever raging at the amount of resources, water and electricity in particular, wasted by Chat GPT. An even better reason to ignore it: just look at the crap it delivers in the automatically appearing summary!

The poem: What looks like a satisfyingly irate tirade is really a call to recalibration. Shifting our focus away from self to soul might be quite the intellectual challenge, given how much we – I – have been tied to questions of the self, the way it is generated, mirrored in the approval of others, feared to be lost when body starts to rule mind, but it could just be an antidote to despair. Anything but what bees can and cannot do….. and if there is an intersection, it’s the one between suffering and the power of faith (whatever it might be you believe in.)

“Live long enough, and you can’t tell what’s resignation, what resolve.” I will cherish this line from the poem, during any and all periods of resigned or resolved eye-rolling!


And here are Satie’s musical vexations.

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Il Tempo Fermo.

I have been absolutely hooked on an album by Fabrizio Cucco, called Tempo Fermo. It unfolds slowly, getting more powerful with each subsequent listening, creating and simultaneously satisfying a sense of longing. It is sung in Italian, so you might wonder why I am posting it with pictures of Portland Japanese Garden, an altogether different culture. Well, depending where you inquire, the English translation of the title says Down time, or Time Standing Still.

That is the garden for you: it forever offers down time, a shelter from thinking hard, feeling hard, worrying hard.

It provides beauty, in so many different dimensions, differences in patterns, from whole vistas to the smallest details.

Light,

and color.

It offers calm, as only nature can do, even if nature is pushed into defined configurations by mostly invisible sources (from garden designers to the knowledgable gardeners, who one encounters occasionally.)

It provides the comfort of familiarity, a place to return to that greets you with old standbys, or that you proudly assess for seasonal changes, like the familiar decorations alternating across holidays in your childhood home. Except here it is not decorations, it is nature itself that changes with the shifting amounts of daylight and temperatures. Change that is of the essence, not some imposed by-product of celebrating seasonal events.

Visiting the garden, like yesterday morning, also elicits, on occasion, my hopes for the other translation of the phrase tempo fermo: time standing still.

For a short moment I wished for time to stand still, to be preserved, just like my photographs preserve my way of seeing the world around me. I wanted not to have to leave the hazy light of the early morning, the still cool air before the heat settles in, the company of a friend who relishes quietude just as much as I do. I wanted to put that moment into a piece of amber, a moment when I could still walk and climb stairs, when pain was perfectly manageable, when news were tuned out and my brain switched away from analysis to simple, grateful awareness of nature’s beauty.

I wanted to hold on to a moment where the world can still be healed, in theory, where gardens can still defy the challenges brought on by climate change change, where frequent outings are not a luxury out of reach. Time standing still, so that no more deaths are accrued on the battlefields, the regions of genocidal starvation, the areas of natural disasters.

That wish – Time, stand still! – is of course one that has been shared by many people across the centuries. It has been experienced, most often in the context of love, longing, separation. Listen to one more piece of music that encapsulates the notion – from the 17th century by John Dowland.

Then again, here is the thing: if time stood still there would be no music. After all music is an unfolding in time – we have to switch from stand-still to procession, if we want to experience that art form. Beauty, then, offered in development rather than permanence, in “becoming” – I take that as a major consolation for futile longings of halting time!

And here is yet one more perspective on time:

On Meditating, Sort Of

 Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?
 
Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place – half-asleep – where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter –
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.
 
So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.
 
Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints –
all that glorious, temporary stuff.

By Mary Oliver

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All Kinds of Sisters.

You know how it is, one thing leads to another. This time it started with the birds, so many of them, different ones. The vultures dominated, though, hanging out in the trees along the Columbia river among the bald eagles and ospreys, all ready to swoop down, all eerily quiet.

Then I saw the object of their concentration, or, more likely, their desire. A beached sturgeon, still fresh, no visible wounds other than a torn fin. A spectacular specimen. Perhaps killed by the ever surging water temperatures and dropping water levels – that warming was one of the causes for the recent die-off of sturgeons in our waters, both in 2015 and 2019. Sturgeons can get to be up to 100 years old, but they only spawn every 8-12 years, so their populations are extremely vulnerable at this point, despite many efforts by states, fisheries and environmental organizations to protect them.

In any case, I had just read a book review that started with the phrase “a beached sturgeon of ungodly proportions,” a phrase I found enticing. What followed had me rush to put my name on the library wait list (54 holds on 3 copies – what are you thinking, Multnomah County library?) for The Hounding, a debut novel by Xenobe Purvis. Set in 18th century England, it describes the fate of five sisters who are accused to be witches or worse, having caused a “season of strangeness,” claimed to transform themselves into dogs, now hunted by their neighbors. They try to save that fish, to no avail, and a man eventually kills it by violently stomping on the sturgeon’s head.

Apparently – again, I have yet to read it – many literary examples of sisters are invoked, from Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park to Hester Prynne. The main theme, though, seems to be the traditional one: the way society treats women, assigns them magical powers for which they are subsequently prosecuted, harms them by clinging to beliefs of malevolent witchcraft. And this brings me to a book about a different group of siblings that I just finished, The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

It is a long, complicated novel, with constant shifts in time and several narrators, one of whom, the single male and potential half-brother to Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia, increasingly reveals himself to be quite the unreliable chronicler of the tale. Set in our own time, across Sweden, Tunisia and the U.S., its plot – if there is one, really – is also driven by superstitious beliefs in the supernatural. The sisters themselves believe that their family was cursed, and this guides their lives and decision making. The novel ropes us into deeply detailed worlds, both of behaviors and emotional interiors; it also makes it very clear that self-fulfilling prophecies interact with structural characteristics of misogynistic, patriarchal societies, exponentially affecting outcomes for women.

The book was not expressly plot-driven. I was more reminded of Susan Sontag’s adage that novels are education of feelings – they help us to escape the ever narrowing versions of ourselves, tied to habits in thinking and interactions. It certainly reminded me of how sibling relationships are fundamental to our existence, but their mechanisms are much more easily discerned when you observe other sibling relationships from the outside. In this case, the author managed to make each one of them increasingly more sympathetic, despite some being closer to me, the reader, in personality than the others. He also showed the futile or destructive power of competition, when they could have helped each other all along. But the novel’s real success lies in the ability to convey how potentially neutral or positive life outcomes can be thrown into disarray by the persistence of false beliefs, no matter how rational you try to be. Let that sink in.

***

I have one sister who I admire, and we love each other deeply, despite being very different from each other, but I also feel sisterly bonds to several of my friends. I thought this was described best in Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In the first poem, she alludes to a shared history (siblings are, after all the ones who know you longest and suffered the same family dynamics, even if in different roles), but does that allow you to claim true knowledge of the sibling? Is the stranger she uses as comparison really a travel acquaintance, or another version of the sister, or is it the poet herself, claiming we are unknowable even to ourselves in the end? Too complicated for my heat-addled brain.

By Adrienne Rich

Much more decipherable, then, and a hymn to sisterhood whether by biological bond or not, is this for me:

“Women”

My three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.

My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.
She is going as the Transparent lady
and all her nerves will be visible.

My second sister is also sewing,
at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely,
At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.

My third sister is gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.

By Adrienne Rich

Here are three sisters sitting at the water’s edge, (no sturgeon in sight, alas,) on rocks of black obsidian. Obsidian is, of course, sharp volcanic glass formed by quickly cooling molten lava, used since the Stone age for weapons, daggers, spears and knives included, but also as ornaments. In the realm of supernatural beliefs, it is associated with healing, protecting us from negative influences. “Its reflective properties are thought to help us recognize false beliefs we may have about ourselves so they can be released.” (Ref.) Hmm.

So, here they sit, on top of those symbols of mostly violent destruction, and yet healing dominates associations. Stitching together a costume that reveals rather than masks you, vulnerabilities and all, being true to yourself, in public no less.

Stitching the scars of your broken heart, sewing as reparative action, such a familiar trope for women’s duties, but now these women mend themselves.

The third sister has gone far beyond: she can leave the torn stockings as they are, seeing the scab from her wounds drift off towards the horizon, self-generated skin a strong enough renewal. She might have fallen, but picked herself up. She might have been violated, but wounds will heal.

And given how most women I know see themselves reflected in one or the other of “our” sisters depicted here (on the mirror surface of the obsidian and in the hurt), this poem is a gift of encouragement and manifesting, with no further need for belief in talismans or other mystical powers. We might be fumbling towards repair, but we do have the power to heal ourselves.

Then again, being able to turn yourself into a dog on occasion, hunting with the pack of your sisters, might be quite the thrill, no?

I’ll report more when I’ve read The Hounding.

Music today is a phenomenal collaboration: Sisters doing it for themselves….

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Peaches

Last week I went peach picking. To reach the orchards you had to drive some miles across dusty dirt roads, arriving at a little farm stand in the shadow of a gargantuan oak tree. Acres and acres of peach trees, bending over from the weight of the fruit, to the point of boughs breaking off. A spectacular abundance.

iPhone pictures today – I did not want to be encumbered by camera while picking fruit.

I was the only one there, surrounded by the buzzing of hundreds of wasps and bees, all feasting. Was thinking about how these fruit are depicted in art, which paintings I remembered. Rachel Ruysch came to mind, her glorious still lifes, probably triggered by the fact that she has a major retrospective now traveling in the U.S. (will open August 23, 2025 at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston) and smart people writing about her life and career. This 17th century painter was more successful in paid commission at the time than many of her more famous contemporaries, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vermeer, Frans Hals and other titans of the Golden Age.

She was, however, not as free to pick her subjects as her male counterparts, constrained to painting flowers and fruit by fiat of her elders and other men in her life. Managed, though, to smuggle in the occasional reminder of the vagaries and dangers of life, in the form of sneaky salamanders, bees ready to sting, all kinds of eerily realistic creepy crawlies. And yet forgotten for the longest time, as so many other women artists.

Telling women what they can and cannot do: why would that remind me of the news that our Secretary of Defense, Peter Hegseth, reposted a preacher’s cry for the revocation of the 19th Amendment? Women should NOT be allowed to vote, was the demand. We have long known about Hegseth’s ties to Peter Wilson who advocates for a Christian nation and the need for women to be submissive to men, “head of household” in particular. According to Hegseth, women are obviously not welcome in the military, either. He has fired them left and right, all the while instituting weekly Christian prayer meetings at the Pentagon. But I digress.

If you look at Ruysch’s paintings, the peaches express hints of their extreme vulnerability, these fruits prone to bruises, splits, mold infestations like few others. Here is one she painted at the age of 19 (!): they are showing little scars and brown discoloration already.

Rachel Ruysch Peaches, grapes and plums with a dragonfly, snail, caterpillar, butterfly and other insects on a stone ledge (1683)

Rachel Ruysch Flowers in a Glass Vase, with Insects and Peaches, on a Marble Tabletop (1701)

In both paintings, she documents peach leaf curl and leaf rust; the trees are extremely susceptible to blight, which often leads to diseased fruit, rotting when still connected. At the orchard, the views of decaying fruit, on the trees and above all, or should we say below – on the ground, were upsetting. So much food gone to waste.

Some of the ones that had fallen were still perfectly intact, good for canning if not eaten fresh. I wondered, of course, if the help that used to pick these orchards in time, has disappeared for fear of deportation. A quick look at the statistics confirmed some suspicions: we have a significant shortage of peaches in the stores this year (down almost 25% from the average year), due to a combination of adverse weather conditions, labor availability and shortages, increased production costs, and economic disruptions, each intensifying the pressure on peach production in key regions such as Georgia, South Carolina, and California’s Central Valley. So could they not allow gleaners in, at least, collecting for the food bank?

***

When I perused painting of peaches, the depictions were, overall, divided. Many show the glory of the fruit on the trees or the voluptuous, velvety globules completely intact.


Wittregde Worthington Peaches (1894)

William Vareika Still Life of Peaches (1867)

Auguste Renoir Still Life with Peaches (1881)

Some reveal canning habits that seem to put the whole fruit with pit inside into the mason jars. Seems strange given the high cyanide content of those pits.

Claude Monet Jar of Peaches (1886)

Others acknowledge reality: peaches bruise all too easily.

Henri Matisse Peaches (1945)

Paul Gauguin Still Life with Peaches (1889)

And then there is Cézanne, always to be counted on when longing for transformation of a natural object into something altogether different, luminous from the inside, abstracted to its essence.

Paul Cézanne Still Life with Apples and Peaches (1905)


Compare this to D.H. Lawrence’s poem below.

The Peach

Would you like to throw a stone at me?
Here, take all that’s left of my peach.

Blood-red, deep:
Heaven knows how it came to pass.
Somebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets
And hard with the intention to keep them.

Why, from silvery peach-bloom,
From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem
This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?
Why hanging with such inordinate weight?
Why so indented?

Why the groove?
Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision?

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?
It would have been if man had made it.
Though I’ve eaten it now.

But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball;
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.

Here, you can have my peach stone.

by D.H. Lawrence, from his Birds, Beasts and Flowers collection of 1923.

In this modernist (almost) prose poem, he insist on describing the perceived features of the single fruit in verisimilitude, demanding that we ignore man’s desire to make everything perfect, without nooks and crannies, slightly misshapen, indented and heavy – let’s take the peach as is, not round and unblemished.

I wonder if there was the temptation to read slight sexualized connotation into these lines, if it weren’t for the name and thus the reputation of their author. I also ask myself why did I remember and pick this poem from an acknowledged misogynist, a man full of rage and struggle, linked to a hard life full of poverty, illness and persecution by those who did not want his truth telling and revolutionary upheaval of literature to succeed?

Here’s why. He was curious about the world and courageous, traits I value above all. His travel writing speaks volumes to openness to the new, the different, to search and exploration, a keen observer if there ever was one. And the poem itself has that wonderful sense of defiance – “Hey, wanna throw a pit at me? I’ll even provide one, but it won’t change my mind that the imperfect wins over perfection any old day! Let nature rule.”

All of this, and more, I wish for the newest member added to the family, the day after the peach picking excursion. May he be curious and courageous, open and flexible, perceptive and defiant when called for, in a life that will not all be peaches and cream in this world of climate change, wars and the rise of authoritarianism. May he enjoy music (which I listened to on the day he was born) by a composer who shares his birth date.


István Szelényi‘s Sonatina is full of energy, resolves discordances always with an element of surprise, is full of humor and deadly serious at the same time. Good things to be developed in a new life as well, don’t you think? Welcome to this world, little A.

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Two poetic reminders.

The Trees (1967)

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

By Philip Larkin

Leave it to Larkin to imbue the glory of renewal with melancholic reminders that nothing will last, not even trees, not time, least of all we, ourselves. Even greenness is a kind of grief. And yet: here is a new round, let’s start from scratch, if only for this cycle, knowing full well that all cycles eventually cease.

Afresh, afresh, afresh.

It sure felt that way when I walked my first full round of 2025 at Jackson Bottom yesterday. Trees in leaf, wildflowers covering the pathways and meadows, dog roses climbing ever higher.

There were the last of the irises, the first of the asters,

mallows and forget-me-nots – and varieties of small sunflowers.

There were clover and clumps of hemlock,

cowslip and my beloved daisies.

The darn infection of my ribs, refusing to heal completely, made it painful to lift the camera, but how could I not?

Wildlife was fully present to greet the sunny day, bunny ears lined with blood vessels,

wood ducks tending their young,

as were the swallows.

Minnows darted around,

Scrub jay brandished a nice morsel, and the little guys tried to come into their own.

Deer was shy but present until it wasn’t,

and the crowning encounter was that of a coyote hunting, giving me the eye in no uncertain terms that I was interfering with his lunch.

***

That morning a local artist who I respect a lot for who he is as much as what he creates, had posted something on IG, with multiple comments of people acknowledging that they felt the very same way.

I certainly don’t feel like a coward – that would imply that there is the possibility of effective action and I were too scared to take it. But I do feel the same helplessness in view of the tremendous suffering all around us – I simply don’t know what I could do.

Then again, witnessing is a first step, acknowledging the horrors unfolding is a commitment to truth, and focussing on the fact that throughout history things have been evolving to the cyclical nature of ALL there is, helps to not succumb to despair. It is not just the living beings – whether trees or people – that die. It is also tyrants, war mongers, colonialist or generally oppressive systems that eventually bite the dust. Rome fell, so did the Spanish Inquisition. Stalinism is gone, so is Mao; republics have supplanted kings. Yes, some ideologies have only gone underground, ready to reemerge, and yes, there are scum who would like to reintroduce segregation and continue to use indented labor in the penal system if not outright slavery. There are those who pursue ethnic cleansing and genocide for clinging to personal power. But change has happened across Millenia, and human rights have surged in places previously very dark.

Afresh, afresh, afresh. Nature (and poetry) as a reminder that cycles will unfold, no matter how inevitable everything looks like now with power in evil hands. It will not bring back to life those who were brutally killed, it will not change our helpless mourning that currently colors every aspect of our lives, but a more just world can evolve along this historical spiral.

Maybe the artist’s simple uttering of those words allowed some other people not to feel alone, hearing sentiments that matched their own. That is the first step to build community that shares an assessment of facts, making us less vulnerable to manipulation of how we experience reality. There is nothing cowardly about the paralysis so many of us experience, but we have the choice to put our energy into hope, instead, and into local action. Do something for someone – here I cling to the words of Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

by Emily Dickinson

Jasmine sweetness was suffusing the air.

Music for walking through this world….

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For these Streets.

Must admit, I felt lousy yesterday. Not sure if I am coming down with the crud or if the regular culprits are acting up, fact is, I was in pain and I needed a boost. So I splurged, bought a new album on Bandcamp and can now pretend that my head spinning comes from some truly captivating music, rather than a shot immune system.

Not so many words then, today, to give you more time to listen. Just an introduction to the young composer who posesses what I count as some of my most admired attributes: curiosity and an integration of learning across categorical boundaries. Said more simply: during the isolation of the Covid epidemic, the guy devoured literature, poetry and film from a particular historical era (the 1930s), listened to classical music from same period, and then synthesized all of this into music for an octet. The jazz album has now come to fruition: For these Streets, by Adam O’Farrill.

His trumpet is embedded in a stellar cast, with Tyrone Allen II on double bass, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, David Leon on alto saxophone & flute, Kalun Leung on trombone & euphonium and Kevin Sun on tenor saxophone & clarinet. So much talent in one place, often split up in sub-sections, so it always feels intimate, not overpoweringly loud.

So much insight, too, into the realities, despair and precoccupation of an era some 60 years before the composer was even born, now just 30 years old. From what I have read, he explored books about wanderers, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, describing the loneliness and isolation of the expat walking the nightly streets, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath witnessing the misery of the Depression (4 tracks echo this novel, Swimmers, Migration, The Break had not come, and Rose, like a mini Suite.) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was absorbed, as was the poetry of Octavio Paz.

The track Nocturno, 1932 riffs off one of his poems, “Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso,” that is a contemplation of the evolution of one’s life time, a circular tale about origins and endings, walking the streets of Mexico. It is a tricky feat of temporal dislocation, embedded in the poet’s ever recurring theme of searching for one’s identity. The central square in Mexico City is focal, thus today’s photographs of the Zócalo and surrounding streets. Linked to at the end of the post.

The musician watched Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and listened to various classic composers who found their way into his tracks: Carlos Chavez’s Preludes for Piano, Messiaen’s “Diptych,” Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” chamber concerto among them. Probably my imagination, but I hear late Frank Zappa here as well. Christopher Laws at Culturedarm has a more learned review. (I would not be able to identify the particular pieces, just the likely classical composers.)

This was a poster I photographed at the Hotel Majestic. My shots of the Zócalo were from their restaurant balcony.

I can only describe impressions, after just a few rounds of listening, obviously. The music captures some of the despair of the era, the hectic brought on by industrialization and the introspective quality of artists thrown into a time not unlike our’s, when big changes loom, and external forces close in, depriving us of the ability to prosper psychologically as well as existentially. But the album also conveys, besides the imagery of walking the streets at night in anguish, the freedom of walking through environments that stimulate you and feel like home. I used to walk in New York at night, during the various years I lived there, and remember that feeling of both, being safe among all those people, part of some amorphous sense of shared humanity, but also alone, always a foreigner.

Very, very grateful to this music for bringing back those memories. I am reminded of a freer, more adventurous, more optimistic self, instead of today’s aching crone who hasn’t walked at night in I don’t know how long. Must change that. Except here I’d be in the company of coyotes…

Then again, I am determined not to get sucked into reminiscence tunnels, leaving that to Paz. Here and now: a brilliant album by one of Brooklyn’s most promising young musicians. I feel better already.

Here is the original Spanish version and here the English translation of the Octavio Paz poem. Yes, I lied. More to read. I’m keeping up with posting long poems this week…)



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