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Poetry

Transcendental Etude.

“Poetry is not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what might otherwise be.” – Adrienne Rich

A dear friend sent me a poem by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) some months ago. I have been mulling over it and tried to read up on the poet, going beyond my previous cursory knowledge. I thought about the poem again today (I am writing on Mother’s Day) because of the huge identity shift that happens when you become a parent. But it also applies to something that many artists, myself included, struggle with: how to progress, change view points, accept ruptures or even seek them out, so you don’t end up stale, but evolve.

The poem is called Transcendental Etude, and it is long, posted below in full. It is dedicated to Rich’s life-long, much younger partner, after she had divorced her husband and started to explore her lesbianism. The title is an allusion to Liszt’s Transcendental Études, a set of technically (eventually) extremely challenging studies that were composed across 25 years of his life (starting at age 13) and meant to build performing skills. They are also quite narrative, providing a glimpse into a set of images in time, and constantly moving, like all etudes.

Ken Hochfeld #40 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Rich’s mother was a performing concert pianist, until her dominant husband, a pathologist and department head at Johns Hopkins, put an end to it; he was a demanding and overbearing father as well, according to the biography I read, and both pushed the child into a life of achievement, with brilliance assumed to be a given. She played Mozart and wrote her first lines as a 4 year-old, no less. The poet later dealt in much of her writing with the issues of authoritarian dominance as a form of abuse, as well as the challenges to her Jewish identity, motherhood (it radicalized her, three sons before her thirtieth birthday, later renowned for her book on motherhood as an institution, Of Woman Born) and her evolution into a lesbian (her first, doomed, love-affair was with her psychoanalyst (ethics, anyone?), Lilly Engler, who was still closeted.

Here is a short version of her biography from The New Yorker. She succeeded early in life, surrounded by minds as brilliant as her own at Ratcliff (Ursula LeGuin among them), won publications and awards while still being rather conventional in the 1950s, then evolving as a poet, as the NYT obituary called her, “of towering reputation and towering rage.” No matter how difficult a person she might have been, burdened with chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis and the trauma of her husband’s suicide after their divorce, her intellectual curiosity and commitment to feminism are surely remarkable.

In any case, this is not about Adrienne Rich. This is about words that make you think about how life changes you, or, for that matter, your art. The first page contains lyrical descriptions of landscape, nature, man’s interference, and musings on the fleetingness of time, its short duration not allowing us full comprehension.

Ken Hochfeld #4 (Series Leaning) (2025)

The second page is more anguished: instead of being able to study our lives like the evolution of the Liszt etudes – from simple to difficult – we are thrown into the full harshness of it, after a few months of security at our mothers’ breast and lap, then nothing but wrenching apart and isolation.

“Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep us with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
– even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her What makes a virtuoso? – Competitiveness.)

The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.”

There comes a point, though, she argues on the next page, where we have to take ourselves seriously, or cease to exist. We have to be true to ourselves, in other words, rather than adhere to the scripts provided by society or fill the expectations laid out by others. We WILL find ourselves in free fall, but she argues that this fate was in store for us in the old ways of being as well – we have to take a leap into the unknown to be able to reconnect, ultimately to the love embodied by the symbol of a mother.

Ken Hochfeld #31 (Series Leaning) (2025)

And now we enter the most beautiful part of the poem: a description how we can integrate ever so many ways of beings, if we acknowledge how multifacted we are, rather than conforming to a single assigned role. I am the lover and the loved (agent and subject), home and wanderer (haven and world), she who splits firewood and she who knocks (the strong one and the one seeking help), a stranger in the storm, two women, eye to eye measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s limitless desire,” – all images of parts forming a whole. Remember, this was lived and written during the years when open acknowledgement of radical feminism and homosexuality was not yet tolerated as some decades later.

The poem goes on with a return to descriptions of what is in sight, but this time focused on the boundless ability to create – a woman constructing a quilt-like collage out of wondrous objects, natural ingredients, luminous colors. She is no longer concerned with achieving a masterwork, “something of greatness, brilliance,” but rather attends an integrative task, arranging bird feathers, wasp nests, shells and sea weed, among others. The bucolic descriptions of exterior landscape from the first page, marred by man’s destruction, now transposed into an interior realm, seemingly whole.

“pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself”

The poem has a tall order, matched by a tall promise. Cut yourself loose from societal expectations, regarding a single gendered or professional role, as well as demands of outstanding performance/mastery. Replace with a discovery and integration of facets of self, despite the price paid for defying norms. Allow it to unfold over time, (like Liszt’s program of etudes) and you will be rewarded by an unleashing of creativity and the potential of return to the unconditional love of a female, back to the beginnings.

Tall dreams.

Ken Hochfeld #38 (Series Leaning) (2025)

***

As I said at the beginning, Mother’s Day was a trigger for today’s musings. It is hard enough to discover who you are and how to bring that into the world, if it contradicts expectations and convention. It is even harder, when a new role of parenthood dominates for the mere reason that a loved, helpless little being is completley dependent on you, and the magnitude of the task is both physically and emotionally draining. It is made all the more difficult by society’s rigid proscription as to what constitutes a “good mother” (or father.) I strongy believe there are many different ways to be a good parent, all of which have room to unfold only if you are true to yourself. Ignore the performance aspect – the need to please or to oblige – and work with what you have and can deliver. After all, if you want your offspring to be tuly free to be who they are, and have the strength to reach for that even if it goes agaist prevailing rules, you need to model.

Ken Hochfeld #10 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Which is, or course, the impetus for true art as well. When you start to deviate from norms – particularly established and touted in the community of landscape photographers, I fear – you are clearly in free fall, as Rich describes it. Today’s images by Portland photographer Ken Hochfeld are a gripping example of an attempt for new ways of expression. The focus of this work, Leanings, the way I interpret it, is on the un-seen, brought into being by what is visually defined – a seeming contradiction in terms.

“A questing for what otherwise might be,” as I introduced Rich’s writings above, seems to be an apt descriptor here. The threshold between depiction and imagination is increasingly permeable in these photographs, without sacrificing defining elements of photography in terms of spatial layout, contrast effects or composition. Strong, beautiful work, and an evolutionary leap from his previous output.

Ken Hochfeld #18 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Want to guess today’s music?

Ken Hochfeld #8 (Series Leaning) (2025)

TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE

[for Michelle Cliff]

This August evening I’ve been driving
over backroads fringed with queen anne’s lace
my car startling young deer in meadows – one
gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all
four fawns sprang after her
into the dark maples.
Three months from today they’ll be fair game
for the hit-and-run hunters, glorying
in a weekend’s destructive power,
triggers fingered by drunken gunmen, sometimes
so inept as to leave the shattered animal
stunned in her blood. But this evening deep in summer the deer are still alive and free,
nibbling apples from early-laden boughs
so weighted, so englobed
with already yellowing fruit
they seem eternal, Hesperidean
in the clear-tuned, cricket throbbing air.

Later I stood in the dooryard,
my nerves singing the immense
fragility of all this sweetness,
this green world already sentimentalized, photographed, advertised to death. Yet, it persists

stubbornly beyond the fake Vermont
of antique barnboards glazed into discothèques, artificial snow, the sick Vermont of children
conceived in apathy, grown to winters
of rotgut violence,
poverty gnashing its teeth like a blind cat at their lives. Still, it persists. Turning off onto a dirt road
from the raw cuts bulldozed through a quiet village
for the tourist run to Canada,
I’ve sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field of musing heifers, a farmstead
slanting its planes calmly in the calm light,
a dead elm raising bleached arms
above a green so dense with life,
minute, momentary life – slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats, spiders, moths, hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies – a lifetime is too narrow
to understand it all, beginning with the huge
rockshelves that underlie all that life.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
– And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep us with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
– even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her What makes a virtuoso? – Competitiveness.)

The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell.

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them –

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,

and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a deeper listening, cleansed of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry to which no echo comes or can ever come.

But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered, knowing it makes the difference. Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.

Only: that it is unnatural,
the homesickness for a woman, for ourselves,
for that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms
cast on a wall, her heavy or slender
thighs on which we lay, flesh against flesh,
eyes steady of on the face of love; smell of her milk, her sweat,

terror of her disappearance, all fused in this hunger
for the element they have called most dangerous, to be
lifted breathtaken on her breast, to rock within her
– even if beaten back, stranded again, to apprehend
in a sudden brine-clear thought
trembling like the tiny, orbed, endangered
egg-sac of a new world:
This is what she was to me, and this
is how I can love myself – as only a woman can love me.

Homesick for myself, for her – as, after the heatwave breaks, the clear tones of the world

manifest: cloud, bough, wall, insect, the very soul of light: homesick as the fluted vault of desire
articulates itself: I am the lover and the loved,
home and wanderer, she who splits

firewood and she who knocks, a stranger
in the storm, two women, eye to eye
measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s
limitless desire,
 a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap

bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,

laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow –
original domestic silk, the finest findings –
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
The striving for greatness, brilliance –
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound; and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further forming underneath everything that grows.

 By Adrienne Rich – The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

(For sticklers – I got as close to the correct format as I could. There area few line breaks that are not entirely accurate. Couldnt figure it out in the word program.)

Ken Hochfeld #2 (Series Leaning) (2025)

4 Comments

Voices of Remembering

A resolution to mark May 5th, 2025 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls passed the Senate on Monday. This was good news among a torrent of bad news regarding Indigenous rights. I want to introduce two voices today, who singularly inform, on an intellectual and an emotional level, respectively, about the issues involving Native Americans.

All images today by Nicole Merton.

Let’s start with the latter, a photographer and activist of Mescalero Apache descent, Nicole Merton. She focuses her photographic work on the MMIWP Movement (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & People) with cultural photography and recordings of untold stories, doing field work across the nation. Her photography depicts women who have payed tribute to memories of their lost loved ones, and their strength to stand for others who can’t. Within these photos there is a red hand print which evokes solidarity and a moment of silence for the ones lost. The symbol that has taken off internationally to point to the growing MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing women and girls whose voices are not heard. It also stands for the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis.

“For the last few decades there has been a massive attack on indigenous women of the United States as well as Canada, and parts of Mexico. These women have been taken and forced into sex trafficking, have been sexually assaulted, and some are murdered. Many have been reported missing with little to nothing being done about it. In the record breaking year of 2016 there were 5,712 missing women  reported by tribal officials but only 116 where actually recorded in the United States Department of Justice, the number of missing and  murdered women are still rising. A small percentage of those women who have gone missing have been girls as young as the age of 10. Native American women under the age of 35 are at a higher risk of being murdered than many other groups which makes it the third most prevalent cause of death among indigenous women. 95% of these cases never make it to the media, it is my determination to make changes and bring forth awareness, and to change lives.”

The images I am posting today come from Merton’s website, which has an amazing breadth of portraiture, but also from an exhibition where I first encountered her work, 1.5 years ago. Red Earth Gaze was shown at the Angle’s Gate Art Center in San Pedro, CA. Unfortunately I did not note the titles of the photographs, too immersed at the time in their emotional impact.

***

The other person of note is Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee), a Native American activist, writer, and public speaker. I summarize below information from her site Welcome to Native America. Her book By the Fire We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and claimed as the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, an NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick, an Esquire Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.

“The author recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.”

Here is the current situation from Nagle’s reporting: Nationally, there are 4,200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Meanwhile, as part of the Trump admin’s purge of “DEI” information on government websites, it has taken down a federal report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. The task force behind the report was created by Congress.

Trump has unveiled a plan to close the EPA Office of Research and Development in Ada, Oklahoma. It is the nation’s only federal groundwater research lab. This will have disproportionate impacts for tribes, where the majority of drinking water systems utilize groundwater.

The Trump-proposed SAVE Act is heading to the Senate. If passed, it will disenfranchise millions of citizens, including Native voters. Under the Act, tribal IDs will be insufficient to prove citizenship and will require additional documentation and rural Native voters will need to travel hours to register to vote in person, or even to update their address or party affiliation. Check out Protect the Sacred, which registered hundreds of Indigenous voters in 2024 through the Ride to the Polls campaign.

***

I am always encouraged by the singular reach that people who passionately pursue a cause, can have. Once individual voices add up to a chorus, maybe the message will get loud enough so that it can no longer be ignored. The victims deserve it.

Then again, justice is not easy to come by. For Native women, murder is the third leading cause of death. Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average. 97% of the people who perpetrate these crimes are non-Native. Part of the problem is the legal gray zone of who is responsible for prosecuting these crimes, with diffuse criminal jurisdiction.

I am summarizing Nagle again: Tribes cannot prosecute non-Natives (the most frequent perpetrators) for most crimes. And there are legal limits for the prosecution of tribal members by tribes – even for murder you can only sentence to three years in prison. (Let us for a moment ignore the issue of abolition, ok?) The federal government can prosecute “major” crimes on tribal land, like murder, assault, kidnapping, child abuse, and robbery. The problem here is that historically the federal authorities don’t take up this power – over a third of all Indian Country cases are declined, and for some years the rate is as high as 67%, not pursuing sexual assault cases, for example.

It gets more complicated: as of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, all states have the authority to prosecute crimes where the perpetrator is non-Native, but the victim is Native. Yet only 15 states have prosecutorial power on Native land. And And finally, some tribes can prosecute some crimes (sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, and child abuse) committed by non-Natives on their land, but only if they meet certain criteria and seek and receive federal approval. As of 2022, 31 tribes across the U.S. had passed this hurdle – 31 out of 574. Confused yet?

And we wonder why crime rates against tribal women are excessive.

If you are interested in how contemporary poets confront the epidemic of missing indigenous women, I urge you to read this essay that will link to various poems.

Instead of music today here is a poem in audio form. I liked the way the words conjure up a powerful woman, not a victim.

She Is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars (nikâwi’s Song)

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than the men who beat her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to her bones
She is holy in the dust

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is singing louder than the men who raped her
She is waking beyond the Milky Way
She is new to her breath
She is sacred in this breathing

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is holding the light more than those who despised her
She is folding clouds in her movement
She is new to this sound 
She is unbroken flesh

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than those who shamed her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to these bones
She is holy in their dust

by Gregory Scofield, Métis

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A Light exists in Spring.

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

by Emily Dickinson (Complete Poems)

My apple tree – lucky if we get three apples after the birds and squirrels have at it.

I figured I spare those of you not interested in politics today, by putting the poem out in front, accompanied by photographs of what is currently in bloom in my garden and the local parks, a celebration of spring. Enjoy her beautiful words that capture the essence of the season: light over darkness, rebirth, an ephemeral presence of something Holy, even if you’re not attached to Sacraments.

If you’re curious why this poem came to mind and how it is connected to thoughts about what is happening around us, on the other hand, read on. I’ll try to be concise and let the various links do the talking.

Neighborhood rhododendron

The poet warns us that there are spiritual things that science cannot “overtake” or measure, but that are rather felt by humans. I have no problem with that – I am perfectly willing to consider that not all can be explained by science. Before you allow those distrusting science in general to appropriate this poet, though, let me remind you that she also wrote in Fascicle Ten: “Faith is a fine invention / For Gentlemen who see — / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency!”

Science matters. We in the scientific community, but also most everyone I talk to who is not a scientist, are horrified by the current administration’s assault on all things scientific. What affects the largest number of people, the planet, really, is, of course, anything climate related. Policies weakened, rolled back, eliminated. Data collection abandoned, particularly where they’d demonstrate negative impact of climate change or industrial pollution on vulnerable populations (air quality, lead exposure), but also weather and dangerous conditions in general. Grants for research programs canceled, thousands of scientists fired for good. Research meetings prohibited, advisory committees dissolved, scientists no longer allowed to talk to “foreigners” (e.g. the research community that collaborates or the WHO.) Fire fighting and disaster mitigation curbed or canceled. Green initiatives kneecapped. Fossil fuel extraction resumed and encouraged, even in previously protected natural areas like our National Parks, and despite their impact on increased environmental pollution. Dickinson is likely spinning in her grave.

Daisies cover our meadow

Let’s look at health next. Again, thousands of employees terminated, including high ranking scientists and advisory boards. That includes the entire Board of Scientific Advisors for the National Cancer Institute. Brain drain, with many of those now courted by universities abroad leaving for sure. Acts instituted by an institution headed by cabinet secretary RFK Jr., who claims that ADD, ADHD, Tourette’s, Narcolepsy and Autism was unfamiliar when he was a child. ADD/ADHD was named in 1980, Tourette’s Syndrome was named in 1885, Narcolepsy was named in 1880, Autism was named in 1912…. The same person who believes a new “origins of autism” research study can be completed by September of this year.

Earlier this month, the administration formally rescinded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientific integrity policy, which had been created to protect federal scientists from political interference and retaliation. (In a timely fashion, then, note the letter sent by he acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia this week to the editor of a scientific journal, implying that the journal was partisan and asking a series of questions about how the publication protects the public from misinformation, whether it included competing viewpoints and whether it was influenced by funders or advertisers. Suppression of scientific freedom, if you don’t like the results they publish? And do we now need to add crackpot studies that spew misinformation for “fair and balanced” reporting ?)

How many blueberries will there be – taking bets.

Grants terminated (and not just that, but completely, irretrievably deleted from data bases), all references to certain vaccines prohibited. And speaking of vaccines: not only are they no longer officially recommended (causing measles and other avoidable childhood diseases to soar), or are accused of causing autism (long disproven,) they are now actively undermined in their development. Instead of approving the tweaking of existing vaccines for new variants of Covid, for example, just like the CDC did every year for flu vaccines, the pharmacological industry is now asked to run full new trials. Not only would that cost millions of dollars but also would not be possible to do for the next season when shots are most urgently needed, in fall. So the administration can claim there is no “prohibition” of vaccination, but in reality vaccination delayed is health (survival!) denied….

If you neglect research into cancer, infectious and heart diseases, as well as Alzheimers (all of whom have been defunded) how much do you actually care about public health? If you ignore the numbers on Covid infections, maternal deaths, or sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, or prevent treatment of acute drug addiction (Narcan program is canceled), many wonder if they are interested in getting rid of disease, or rather getting rid of sick people.

The magnolia is an ancient tree and on its last leg….

I forgot: food safety inspections – gone. And following $1 billion in food aid cuts by Trump, anti-hunger programs across the U.S. are struggling to feed vulnerable communities, with charities forced to replace nutritious meals with crackers, dried cranberries, and thin soup. The cutting of vital food assistance threatens the health and dignity of millions of low-income Americans.

If you prohibit mask wearing despite the scientifically demonstrate protection they provide against infectious diseases, what is your justification, particularly for vulnerable populations like the elderly and immune-compromised? When is the line crossed to applied eugenics?

The bans limiting exposure to toxic chemicals touch most facets of daily life, prohibiting everything from bisphenol in children’s products to mercury in personal care products to PFAS in food packagingand clothing. The administration is moving to kill the bans on PFAS. The location of thousands of high-risk chemical plant now shielded from public view. Car safety rules? Loosened.

Medicaid? House Republicans are considering slashing the federal government’s 90% funding match for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act — a move that could strip millions of low-income Americans of their health insurance, shifting massive costs onto states, dismantling a pillar of Obamacare.

Frontyard lilac.

Here is a site where you can find most actions taken by the administration regarding our health, sorted by month since the inauguration.

And here is a nifty general tracker that is constantly updated, where you can look at what is changing in many aspects of our daily and legal universe for yourself. In case you aren’t depressed enough yet. Every single claim made above, by the way, can also be found in the news, newspapers, journals and radio and TV programs alike. There is nothing hidden about it. I just don’t have the patience to add all the links.

I do, however, recommend reading a longer piece that made quite a bit of sense to me in explaining where the anti-science attitude originated. Hint, the claim is that it was born from an anti-governmental ideology long anchored in conservative thinking. An interesting analysis from 3 years ago by a Harvard Historian of Science and a NASA historian at CalTech.

However, what we are seeing now is going beyond that. If you undermine public health, disaster response, and climate crisis mitigation, you harm the nation you are supposed to protect. The amassing of power when you dismantle independent agencies and academic scientific research, and surround yourself with sycophants rather than experts who know what they are doing, might be the goal, but it will not lead to an advancement of the common good, the health, safety and perhaps prosperity of all of us. The few who benefit might have the illusion that they can retreat to their private islands, their luxury bunkers or another planet – but reality will catch up even with them, if only after many of us have been harmed by the denial of science and the tools it offers for our survival.

Music today is meant to cheer us all, with one of the most incredible drummers of our time – Yussef Dayes. There is light in that greenhouse – and that music – the would be familiar to Dickinson…..

Rhodies in the park.

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Waiting for the Barbarians.

You have to walk without me today, since I am busy tackling the jungle of weeds that pretends to be my garden. But my very happy dog will keep you company on your sojourn along the beaches and coast of the Pacific around the Southern border of Oregon and Northern parts of California.

The coast never fails to impress with its reminders of the power of nature – the swells, the dangerous rocks,

the provision of food if you know where to find it (and who to share it with.)

Vulture and gulls working on a big fish….

Nor does it hesitate to impress with its beauty – the colorization alone of rocks and oceans, scotch broom in bloom on the surrounding hills, the shades of water at different depths.

People, as always, can’t help but leave signs of their existence.

Geese, on the other hand, are forever on the lookout for the existence of others – thus their role as guardians of the gates during the Roman empire.

One lonely goose on top….

Which brings me to today’s poem that I had linked to in an overly optimistic blog not so long ago. For today, the association between the Barbarians at the gates and the guardian geese prompted me to offer it again, in its full sarcastic splendor. How it currently applies to all of us, needs, I fear, no further elaboration.

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.


Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.


Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.


Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.


Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.


Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

by C.P. Cavafy

Here is some fitting Debussy.

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Seeking Warmth.

“It is the fundamental task of art to fight against alienation – to go to bat for authentic hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking against the stereotypes and societal patterns that are full of hostility towards being thoughtful and perceptive.” – Erich Fried in Rudolf Wolff (Hrsg.): Erich Fried. Gespräche und Kritiken, 1986. (My translation.)

***

If you look up the meaning of the word “authentic,” the Thesaurus suggests this: genuine, honest, true, real, original, unmistakable, historical. I cannot think of a better description of the art of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) a Roma artist, Holocaust survivor, and activist whose work is increasingly displayed by major venues, providing welcome contrast to so much of the inauthentic hokum out there.

Ceija Stojka The Mama (detail with gallery entrance reflected in the glass covering the painting.)

Across the last few years the artist’s paintings, drawings and journaling were on view at Gallery Christophe Gaillard in Brussels, the Museum of the City of Lodz in Poland, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, at Kassel’s Documenta 15 in Germany, among others. Opening in April, they are at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, in a group exhibition, Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Luckily, we dont have to travel that far. Some of Stojka’s work is currently shown at the Vancouver, WA gallery Art at the Cave, together with exhibits by Daniel Baker and Sam Marroquin, and short videos about the artists by Erin Aquarian, in a show titled “Seeking Warmth.”

Stojka’s father was murdered by the Nazis even before the entire family was imprisoned in concentration camps. She, her mother and all siblings but one brother survived, despite being routed through Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and ultimately Bergen-Belsen. A miracle, given that out of 12 000 Austrian Roma, between 9000 and 10 000 perished during the Holocaust. After liberation, she attended school for a few years before she had her first child at age 15. She became a successful carpet merchant, and had two more children within the decade (two of whom preceded her in death, adding more tragedy.) It was only in her mid-fifties that she started to put her traumatic experiences into diverse forms of expression, music, self-taught visual art and journaling. It is no exaggeration to say her memories poured out, with over a thousand works of art and writing composed during the decades before her death at age 79 in 2013.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon in Forest)

Before I turn to her art, a grateful acknowledgement that individual people accompanied this artist to express herself and help bring about the prominence she has achieved. One of Austria’s most distinguished documentarian film makers, Karin Berger, was the first to engage with Stojka in the late eighties. A full documentary about the artist and her trauma, Ceija Stojka: Portrait of a Roma, was published in 1999. Lorely French, who taught German language and literature, as well as film and Roma writers, retiring this May after 39 years at Pacific University, was the artist’s friend. Importantly, she translated the first English version of the memoirs of Ceija Stojka, and is a founding member and member of the board of the Ceija Stojka International Association.

The art on display in the current exhibition is a small-scale version of Stojka’s oeuvre as a whole: there are the paintings that represent a “bright cycle” – scenes referencing life as the Romani people experienced it before the descent into the hell of the Holocaust. The acrylics are expressive, colorful, reminiscent of folk-art, and often quite sophisticated in their perspective for a self-taught artist. They report what was seen, but also communicate a sense of longing for a way of life that no longer exists. Wagons, streams, summer meadows, birds and flowers everywhere, and many people forming community around chores, more often seemingly idyllic than not. Exactly a way a child would experience her childhood, without the adult knowledge of how the Roma had to fight against prejudice and persecution long before the fascists arrived on the scene. It is a remarkable feat as an artist to be able to reproduce that experience from a memory store that by all means should have been overwritten by the horrors that followed.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon with people at stream)

These very horrors are captured in Stojka’s “dark cycle,” drawings in ink and some other materials that comprise the other half of her output. These drawings are often accompanied by text. For clarity, the English translations are repeating the meaning of the words, accurately conveying what was said (a choice I would have made as well.) What gets inevitably lost – and the part that makes her texts so indelibly authentic – is the orthography of the artist. Having had but a few years of school, after liberation and before she had her first child, Stojka writes how one hears the words, phonetically, and not according to our spelling and grammar rules. It gives the texts a texture of spontaneity and intensity, of words tumbling out of a mouth rather than a pen, providing the message with an amount of urgency that can simply not be captured in translation.

Ceija Stojka Ravensbrück 1944. Liberation 15.4.1945

These two cycles, bright and dark, interact to magnify the void caused by evil, by offering us the memorial building blocs of a remembered childhood, catapulted into the abyss. The longing for the wholeness of life before is drawing us in, and then spitting us out into the agony of what came after, or the bitterness of the realization of what the artist had to endure. The yearning for the remembered ideal frames the depicted trauma caused by genocide, multiplying the horror exponentially.

Ceija Stojka They devoured us.

We find both, personal grief and political anger in Stojka’s drawings and texts. What makes her so effective as a messenger is the concreteness of her reporting. She did seek warmth by resting amongst the dead (hence the title of the exhibition), shielding her from the wind. She fought off starvation by chewing and swallowing little balls of wool her mother had unraveled from the sweaters still on the corpses, or by eating grass pried from under the floorboards of the barracks, or sap clawed from trees. She banned despair by clinging to hope, perceived by her to be what gave them strength.

Ceija Stojka Hope – that was what gave us strength 1944

***

“Was wir suchen ist schwer zu finden. Die Angst, die müssen wir nicht suchen. Die ist da.” “What we are searching for is hard to find. We don’t have to search for the fear. That is there.” (Translation by Lorely French.)

***

Stojka’s relationship to fear is more complex. On the one hand, she models for all of us an incomprehensible amount of fierceness and courage in poems like this.

On the other hand, she describes, again concretely, a typical behavior that is the result of her experience: “You can’t walk along the street without looking over your shoulder.” (This sentence was juxtaposed with a quote by the poet Erich Fried, an Austrian compatriot who fled into exile after the Nazis killed his father and who survived the war in England. “For I cannot think without remembering.”)

Fear permeates the past, her book titled: Even Death is terrified of Auschwitz. It seeps into the presence – already in the year 2000, she worries about next generations forgetting history, and the fact that a far-right party joins the government coalition.

She proclaims soon after: “Ich habe Angst, dass Europa seine Vergangenheit vergisst und das Auschwitz nur am Schlafen ist. Anti-ziganistische Bedrohnungen, Vorgänge und Taten beunruhigen mich und machen mich sehr traurig.” (“I fear that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only asleep. Anti-Romani threats, happenings and attacks worry me and make me quite sad.”) (Ref.)

The fear, however, seems to be one of the motors for her activism to educate Austrians and the world about the history and the plight of the Romani people, activism for which she received accolades and awards. To this day, Austria has not officially recognized the Holocaust or the Samudaripen/Porajmos – in Austria referred to as the Holocaust of the Roma – through any legislative act; the Holocaust of the Roma is instead recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust as such. (Ref.)The Romani people, assumed to have originated in Asia, most likely Punjab or Kashmir, and who have never identified themselves with a homeland, have been persecuted since the middle ages within the various countries where they traveled and traded. The Porajmos saw up to half a million Roma murdered. Like Jews, they were segregated into ghettos before transport to extermination camps. After the war they were forced to settle in various locations. In post-war Czechoslovakia, where they were considered a “socially degraded stratum”, Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. As recently as the 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of migrants to Central and Eastern Europe, with large percentages of the Romanians among them being Roma.

Postcard work of Ceija Stojka (which I consider some of her strongest communications.)

Fast forward to our own times, where for the first time ever since 1945, Austria saw this far-right party, the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party,) win the most seats in national elections with garnering almost 30% of the vote last September. (The centrist parties managed to form a governing coalition some many months later that excludes the extremists.) A member of the FPÖ had only a few years back distributed anti- Romani, hate-filled videos on social media, but could not be criminally indicted since he is protected by immunity as a member of congress.) Anti-Roma hate crimes are frequent occurrences across Europe, with assault and arson attacks against homes physically endangering people. Ethnic hatred and claims of “Gypsy criminality” are clearly making a comeback in tandem with rising anti-Semitic sentiments fostered by extremists movements and now parties.

Fear can be a tool. It can motivate us to (re)act and fight for justice, as the artist did. It can be both, exploited and imposed by draconian measures and persecution, as radical right ideologies have successfully discovered. Fear of others, of globalization and immigration, of status loss or “replacement,” can be turned into hatred of scapegoats, often ethnicities other than one’s own. Fear of consequences of protest or non-conformity can smooth the path of authoritarians who want to consolidate power.

Ceija Stojka knew that, expressed that, resisted that. In life and in art.

***

Daniel Baker is a Roma artist and theorist of renown who lives in the U.K. He uses metalised polyethelene rescue blankets, sometimes sculpted, sometimes crocheted, to combine conceptual issues related to survival strategies and practices with a visual aesthetic that echos Romani patterns. Part of his theoretical work concerns the (in)visibility of ethnic minorities, particularly those that are not geographically anchored. In a somewhat ironic turn, his work could have been displayed a bit more visibly in the gallery – you had to work to discover it.

Daniel Baker Emergency Artefacts.

Sam Marroquin shows her series The Madness of War in the upper parts of the gallery. An astonishingly large number of charcoal and acrylic paintings were fitted into the space without overcrowding. Kudos to whoever hung this, likely Sharon Svec, whose curation of this exhibition is splendid overall. The paintings are simplified reproductions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by those living through the hell that is contemporary Gaza. Put on paper with the artist’s non-dominant hand, they appear more like the drawing of a younger person, a lack of perfection and child-like approach that parallels what we see in the paintings of Stojka. Here, too, are concrete depictions of humans in existentially threatening situations, their bodies and spirits bombed into extinction, their grief more than a single life time can hold. Block letters introduce the artist’s suggestions of the emotions and thoughts likely experienced, all universal enough that they promise verisimilitude.

Sam Marroquin Paintings along the Gallery Wall from the series The Madness of War.

The work makes several strong points. For one, any claim that we have moved beyond atrocities imposed on any one group is moot. The indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, of rescue personnel and journalists/reporters is not a thing of the past, intentional starvation included. Secondly, the suffering depicted is universal, even if it is applied in this case to the particulars of the fate of Palestinians. We could as well be looking at Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo. And, importantly, Marroquin’s drawings reveal a humanity of the victims that will elicit empathy in all but the most hardened, allowing a sense of shared humanity across borders.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

The issue, then, is the fact that all of these images were, as “originals,” available in public sources, live-reported during this conflict. They never made their way to those fixated on selective mass media or social media sources that are ideologically inclined to show some sides of suffering but not others. The polarization experienced in a country divided about our political future, is reflected in the visual diet that we consume, basically determined by what the powers that be put into the relevant “larders.” In some way, then, art that is not explicitly associated with media that we deem trustworthy or disreputable, respectively, might inform consumers whose minds can be opened if approaching artistic depictions without easily triggered prejudice. In theory. In practice, of course, we have to mourn the fact that the likely distribution of this important body of work pales in comparison to that of even the smallest partisan social media outlet.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

Before we despair, and in honor of the remarkable resilience of Ceija Stojka and others exposed to existential threats, let me close with a poem (Ertrag is the German title) by Erich Fried, whose words introduced this review. (And yes, I’ve been a fan since my teens, when he was first published by the German publishing house Klaus Wagenbach, before anyone else took on his poetry.)

Dividend

Gathering hope
from solvable problems
from possibilities
from all that
which holds promise

Reserving
strength
for only that
which truly
requires action

Is the way to amass
quietly
a supply of
despair
never spent.

-by Erich Fried

SEEKING WARMTH

March 2025

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660, UNITED STATES360-314-6506 GALLERY@ARTATTHECAVE.COM

HOURS: TUES-THURS 11-5PM, FRI AND SAT 11-6

For specific upcoming programs related to the exhibition, go here.

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Hope and Ashes

Would you like to walk with me, or, as the case may be, drive from Oregon’s West across the mountain passes to the High Desert? We’ll see varied beauty of landscapes moving from winter to spring, with remnants of snow offset by greening pastures and budding trees.

Once we have crossed Mt. Hood, the Sisters’ and Mt. Bachelor’s snowcapped peaks form the background for grazing horses, some looking decidedly in search for a prince. Soon you start driving along the Deschutes river, not yet raging at full strength expected after the snowmelt.

If you are curious enough for a small detour, we can visit the Pelton Dam, which impounds the waters of the Deschutes to create the deep Lake Simtustus, filling a narrow canyon about 7 miles (11 km) back to the Round Butte Dam built in 1964. The water is intensely green in parts, despite blue skies, making you wonder about algae. The surrounding rock formations are majestic. See me wince when I assume the name “Simtustus” honors a Native American, and then learn that it does indeed, but one who scouted for the U.S. Army during the 1867–68 campaign against the Paiute Indians. The Snake War, as it was known, has been ignored by historians, concentrating on the contemporaneous American Civil War and its aftermath, instead. Yet the Snake War was statistically the deadliest of the Indian Wars in the West in terms of casualties. By the end, a total of 1,762 men were known to have been killed, wounded, and captured on both sides. By comparison, the Battle of the Little Bighorn produced about 847 casualties. The Paiutes fought bitterly against the encroachment of colonial settlers onto their territory.

Driving further South, we eventually land in Sunriver, a community near Bend, and a favorite vacation spot for outdoors enthusiasts and families who love being in nature with their kids, but also enjoy the amenities of pools, nature centers, tennis and golf courts, maintained bike paths and the like.

One of the most amazing natural sights, next to deep ponderosa pine forests and the river itself,

are the lava fields produced by one of the largest High Desert volcanoes, the Newberry Volcano. Three million years old, it covers more than 2,000 square miles and sent basalt flows down the canyon of the Deschutes River as far as 65 miles from the main crater (overall it just looks like a mountain chain rather than a dome.)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) considers it to be a very high threat volcano because of its recent volcanic activity (within the past 1,500 years) in an area where numerous people live. Up until now it has been regularly monitored to detect seismic activity, measuring swelling or deflation of the ground, and trying to detect distinctive volcanic earthquakes caused by molten rock (magma) movement beneath the volcano. Who knows if those services have fallen prey to Musk’s chainsaw as well. (I checked, the answer is YES.)

It is a strange feeling to walk on top of this sleeping giant, something I last did a decade ago, and now again, as if nothing had changed in-between, except for my (reduced) speed and level of fatigue after a ridiculously short hike. I was then and still am a speck in space and time, a particle, a glimmer, given the dimensions of this geological behemoth. And I am still in awe of the beauty around me, the sense of grandeur between the expanse of the High Desert landscape and the height of the surrounding mountains.

Yet I am also aware of human achievement, if lasting so many fewer years, reaching across millennia nonetheless. Thinking here of a poem related to volcanoes, by a smart, formerly East-german poet who weaves into his dry observations allusions to Greek mythology and writing – knowledge transmitted throughout the generations (although who knows if we will see it on U.S curricula after this administration is done, installing the Christian Bible as a textbook instead…)

Active

Then someone says crater and you’re tumbling down.
A word from ancient Greek, a fragment, it means
The pitcher, in which they mixed water and wine.
The volcanic abyss, Empedocles’s tomb.

No more than a word, a splinter, and you see the sandals
Perched on the crater’s rim. Peering down through
The hole in the skullcap at the grey matter.—These pallid
Pockmarks puncturing the map of the moon.

You just hear the word crater—there’s a crack,
And the ear conjures myths out of ceramic and molten rock.
Hephaestus, the smith, in scenes with figures of red.
Or Hades, dragging Persephone down to the dead.

BY DURS GRÜNBEIN
Translated by Karin Leeder from the German, below


“Aktiv”

Da sagt jemand Krater, und schon stürzt du hinab.
Ein Wort aus dem Griechischen, Bruchstück, es meint
Einen Krug, in dem mischten sie Wasser und Wein.
Den vulkanischen Abgrund, Empedokles’ Grab.

Ein Wort nur, ein Splitter, und du siehst die Sandalen
Am Trichterrand. Starrst durchs Loch in der Schädeldecke
Auf die graue Substanz. – Diese riesigen, fahlen,
Im Mondatlas abgebildeten, pockennarbigen Flecken.

Du hörst nur Krater – es knirscht, und das Ohr,
Aus Keramik und Lavaschutt, zaubert Mythen hervor.
Rotfigurige Szenen mit Hephaistos, dem Schmied.
Oder Hades, der Persephone in sein Totenreich zieht

Newberry National Monument – Lava lands

The poem is, unfortunately, rather badly translated, which is surprising given the talent and caliber of this award-winning translator.

In my own understanding of the German, the first line describes a rather more violent, instantaneous crashing than tumbling down the slopes of a crater at the mere mention of the word. This sets the tone for the juxtaposition of “active” and “reflexive” or passive, that runs through the poem. In the second verse, the word crater is no longer a fragment but compared to a shard (not a splinter, fitting way better into the theme of the ceramic pitcher). At the end of the verse the poet refers to actually printed maps of the moon on which huge pallid flecks look like pock marks and which hung in children’s bedrooms during the poet’s youth . In the last verse, the translator uses “crack” instead of “crunch”, which is far more applicable to the crumbling lava and ceramic mix that conjures myths. But maybe I’m nit-picking. Let’s look at the references that really make this a memorable poem.

Both meanings of the word crater, volcano and ceramic pitcher, weave through the poem. Both are provided with references to Ancient Greek mythology, from writing, or found in the imagery painted onto the vessels.

The reaction to the mention of “crater” is linked to Empedocles, a philosopher who, as far as we know, was the first to offer a theory about the connection between light and vision, something picked up and developed later by Euclid. He was a strict vegetarian, had some significant ideas about human psychology and was said to have jumped into an active volcano to prove that he was immortal and live on as a God, leaving his sandals at the rim to “prove” that he had departed. There are numerous version about his demise, some claiming he faked it, others attributing it to an erupting Vesuvius which blasted his sandals up to the rim.

Empedocles’ example of a voluntary jump into the abyss provides a clear contrast to the narrator’s sense that he is inescapably falling into the depth. His imagination is active, but the experience is reflexively forced on him.

The next allusions pick up the theme of catastrophic endings by active means or passive experience. Remember who Hephaestus was, so often depicted as a red silhouette on a black vase? He was the God of fire, volcanoes, metalworking, artisans, metallurgy, carpenters, forges, sculpting, and blacksmiths, creating all the tools needed for unleashing war. And if that was not enough, he also brought a first gift to man: Pandora and her miserable box. All of it drowning the world in evil by active design. Contrast this with Persephone, who was abducted into the Underworld, tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds so that she had to stay there for most of the year, no active resistance possible.

Then again, not all is black and white, or red on black, as the case may be. Persephone still helped to bring spring and harvest about together with her mother, upon her temporary jaunts back into the world, and was Queen rather than pure victim in the underworld.

And Pandora, sent to us by a God who also provided us with habitat and tools as well as the weapons of war? She used to be a life-bringing goddess in early renderings of the Greek cosmos (in fact her name means “all-giving”), before she was eclipsed by the death-bringing human Pandora. And in contrast to the misery she unleashed, one thing stayed permanently in the box, not irretrievably dispersed across the corners of the earth: HOPE, still available.

Maybe we feel like being sucked into craters, drowned by evil that has existed amongst humans since people started to record their histories, left with a torched and jagged, infertile landscape. But we have choices: the choice to think of something as providing sustenance rather than demise (pitcher vs crater), the choice to focus on hope rather than conditioned fears that drag us down the slopes of the volcano. And we have all this because the ancients laid out the maps, and our schools taught us the history. The grey matter might be pockmarked, but it can still be put to use. Let it be active and lead to the right moves.

Chem trails in just the right position….


Music today is a life version of Genesis’ Dance on the Volcano. Here is another song from that album that remains one of my favorite of years gone by, Trick of the Tail.



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WHAT WAR IS

WHAT WAR IS

Maybe someday they’ll decide to write a textbook
only we won’t be invited to contribute

because others always know better what war is

because others always know better

okay

but just one chapter

give us one chapter

you won’t find any supplemental material anyway

this will be a chapter on silence

whoever hasn’t been in war doesn’t know what silence is

but to the contrary, they know

that we don’t know

the way fish don’t know about the water that sustains them and the oil that kills them

the way a field mouse doesn’t know about the dark that hides it from the hawk but

it hides the hawk too

let us write this chapter

i know you’re afraid of blood so we’ll write it with water

the water the wounded man asked for when he could no longer swallow and just

looked at it

water that seeps through a shelled-out roof

water that can replace tears

yes – we’ll come to you with water

we’ll leave no permanent marks

on your slogans and values that we’ve so flagrantly misused

that you can’t even show them to your children anymore

these will be our few pages

and only a few will know they aren’t empty

by  Ostap Slyvynsky

Timothy Snyder introduced us to this poet and poem on Monday, the three year-anniversary of the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The words speak for themselves. Will we heed them?

The poem is contained in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA). It is available at bookshop.org, or your local bookstore. (As a reminder: this Friday, February 28th, has been dedicated to buying or paying NOTHING, a nation-wide economic boycott to protest the new administration and the businesses raising prices because they can. Put gas in the car and get your groceries on Thursday…)

***

Two recommended long reads that you might want to pick up:

Aisha Ahmad, Political Science Professor at the University of Toronto, writes about the consequences of a potential war with Canada.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and writes about a way to think about the current President and his posse’s approach to governing, relating back to a term originally coined by Max Weber: Patrimonialism.

“Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.”

Today minimalist music. The Book of Sounds was composed by Hans Otte between 1979 and 1982. Played here by Carlos Cipa, himself a contemporary classical composer and pianist.

2023 photo montage series about war and nuclear proliferation.

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Moloch

Some persistent bug had me under the weather last week. Consequently I watched even more movies than usual, with shows divided between those I stream while knitting and those I devour intently. Given the quality of what’s currently out there, the “knitting” category covered about 90% of my movie diet, with the remaining 10% providing a sigh of relief.

I photographed at the waterfront in San Francisco in September 2020, around noon. The smoke from the fires blocked out the sun. These colors are not manipulated.

In the latter category, one series stood out in particular. It’s a French/Belgian production from 2020, now playing on the Sundance Channel, called Moloch. Not for the faint of heart – the series contains not just very violent images, it also creates pervasive fear in any viewer sensitive to horror and asks disturbing psychological questions that we have to answer ourselves. It offers magic realism as a plot device, but it is also as smart a documentation as they come of what ails our societies, and delivers superb psychodrama. Next to the terrific acting, the cinematography is brilliant, mirroring the suffering of its protagonists in the desolate land- and cityscapes that are as beautiful as paintings. If you plan on viewing it and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!

The plot revolves around people spontaneously combusting into columns of fire in a Northern French coastal town. An unlikely duo of a young journalist and an older psychiatrist team up to solve the mystery, both burdened with tragedies of their own. A number of the psychiatrist’s patients are peripherally involved, as potential victims or perpetrators of the deeds, no one knows. As the story unfolds, the crimes are attributed by the increasingly riled population to Moloch, the ancient God of Fire to whom children were regularly sacrificed. (Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel, by the way, is found in the legal, as well as in the historical and prophetic literature of the Bible, in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the Books of Kings and Numbers. The Moloch cult was an established institution with a fixed location (the Topheth), at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia. Archaeological discoveries at Carthage attest some 20,000 burials of infant bones along with animal bones in what are evidently was institutional sacrifice. )(Ref.)

The film’s victims of these seeming self-immolations are all revealed to have been violent, cruel and abusive in their own right, and the steady background noise of radio and news reports points to larger syndicates as well, recklessly polluting the sea with toxic run-offs, setting a general tone of late-stage capitalism dysphoria.

Some part of the population, however, thrives on the sense that justice is done in an unjust world, a world that sees repeat areas of violation: child abuse, sexting among teenagers bent on shaming young girls, crimes related to drug dealing, bankers driving people into ruin, and so on. The treatment of immigration – refugees as witnesses or potential perpetrators – slowly emerges, with a compassionate lens on the fate of African migrants whose suffering makes them buy into religious frenzy of an avenging God.

The core issue, though, turns out to be anger, depicted in various degrees and various manifestations, ultimately so intense in those who have no means to escape it, that it becomes fiery enough to immolate hated targets. And what, at first, was meant to be a crusade for a better world, with victims given a chance to change their behavior lest being punished, becomes in the end a reckless tour of revenge, blind with fury. The allegory of a society devouring its young who then strike back by sacrificing representatives of said system, ultimately ends in self-sacrifice of the perpetrator. And the viewer’s own moral compass is by then upside down, feeling only compassion for a life un-lived, turned to evil. All this is narrated in long, calm, pensive scenes, only occasionally disrupted by action shots.

Who needs such bleakness, you ask? My answer: any work of art that teaches us something about our state of affairs might help us, in turn, to promote some change, if only we are courageous enough to look. Regarding the particular theme of Moloch, the best artists of their times picked it up – just re-watch Metropolis from 1927 or re-read Allen Ginsberg. (More below.)

I think the question why so many young men (and increasingly some young women) are turning to dreams or actualization of violence, to revenge fantasies concerning a world that is seen as depriving them, trapping and suffocating them, needs to be investigated. How can we convey that it is not feminism, or DEI, or some other convenient subgroup thwarting them, dangled as culprits before their eyes by some politicians eager for foot soldiers? Flooding them with ideology that keeps them in suspension, unable to think of and realize a productive future for themselves?

What can be done to unravel myth from reality about the causes of inequality, injustice and purposeless lives for entire generations experiencing a steady drop in life quality and life expectancy, leading to ubiquitous anger? If a film makes you think about those issues along parallel lines, brings them up with metaphors that grab you emotionally as well as philosophically, more power to it, even if it uses the tropes of thriller-cum-horror movie as a vehicle.

Here is poetry published in 1956 (!) alerting us to the point: an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl.

II.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! 

(The entire written poem can be found here. A reading by Ginsberg himself here.)

Here is new music for an old (1927) silent movie: the Moloch Scene in Metropolis, rescored by Matt Mason.

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Valentine’s Day 2025.

Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”

Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)

First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.

Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.

“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”

They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.

The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.

While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)

You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:

A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding


The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran
Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community
Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in
partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement,
are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.

This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful
conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.

Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123
Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace

Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.

A Proclamation for Peace 

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

by Kim Stafford

Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.


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Another Thought Experiment.

When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.

I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.

Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”

So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)

From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.

Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis

Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.

Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.

What would you do?

Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?

Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…

What will we do?

I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.

***

Omnicide

And when our children ask,
Why did  you do nothing as the world
was dying?   what will we tell them?

Will we say, We didn’t know how
sick it was, or admit that We gathered
our rosebuds while we could,

Old  Time was still a-flying—?
It’s now the end of  everything,
our children will say, go crawl

into your arks and sail off  destitute into
your doom, and leave us only
your shadows. And our children

will light candles across seven continents
empty now of  lions, kangaroos, ravens,
squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—

devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants,
cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs,
vultures, lizards, and alley cats.

Our children will hide in caves with blind
cockroaches, together feeding on the algae
glowing in neon greens and blues

across dolomite and limestone walls.
They’ll leave no pictographs behind,
no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.

Such silence now, they’ll say, this  you’ve
bequeathed us, this human indifference.
And we’ll beg them, Survive.

BY MAURYA SIMON

Music today is from France, with entirely home-made and recycled instruments, a funky melange that should cheer us up. Always music.

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