I am knee-deep in several independent writing projects and so, this once (or once again?) I will cheat and put someone else’s review of a book (Orwell’s Roses) I recommend up here, instead of my own. You still get the photographs of last week’s wonders in the mystery garden, though. And, in case you missed it, here are my own thoughts on Orwell, gardening and the disappearance of marital labor, from some time back.
Here is the link to the review of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses by Gaby Hinsliff. I am attaching the full text below for those who do not have access to The Guardian where it was published last year. If you have read it already, you might also be interested in the 2022 winner, announced yesterday, of The Orwell Society‘s Political Writing award: Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned. Here is a review from March.
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit review – deadheading with the writer and thinker
Inspired by George Orwell’s love of gardening, Solnit’s suitably rambling book should appeal to the green-fingered and the politically committed alike
The roses are in dire need of pruning. My rambler in particular is getting very tangled; too many whipping tendrils snaking out haphazardly at all angles. But it’s so pretty it’s hard to be properly brutal with it, even though it would probably benefit from some judicious thinning. And yes, it is the experience of reading Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses that has jogged my memory.
The book simultaneously is and isn’t about George Orwell, just as it is and isn’t about roses. It belongs in a whimsical category of its own, meandering elegantly enough through lots of subjects loosely connected to one or the other; more of a wildly overgrown essay, from which side shoots constantly emerge to snag the attention, than a book. But at its root is the fact that in 1936, the writer and political thinker planted some roses in his Hertfordshire garden. And when Solnit turns up on the doorstep more than eight decades later, she finds the rose bushes (or at least what she takes to be the same rose bushes) still flowering, a living connection between past and present.
From this blooms the most enjoyable part of the book – a reflection on what gardening may have meant to Orwell, but also what it means to gardeners everywhere; beauty for today, hope for tomorrow, and a desire to create something for those who come after – all of which find an echo in the best of politics.
To make a garden is to feel, in Solnit’s words, more “agrarian, settled, to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years and the latter would bear fruit in decades to come”. By the time Orwell’s roses flowered that summer, the Spanish civil war had broken out. As they grew, Europe spiralled closer to conflict. But the buds would still swell and the petals would still fall, and in the midst of death there would be new life, a cycle that helps explain why gardens and nature more generally have been such a comfort to so many through the grief and loss of the pandemic.
But roses, in Solnit’s story, don’t merely symbolise the eternal. They also symbolise joy, frivolity and a kind of sensual pleasure not always associated with Orwell, so often presented as a rather dour and austere figure; a chronicler of hardship in his writings on the low-paid and exploited, and in his fiction a prophet of doom, warning against the evils of totalitarianism. By choosing to focus on the gardens he planted – in Hertfordshire and, later, on the farm he bought on the Scottish island of Jura – and the happiness they brought him, Solnit restores something often missing not only from Orwell but from the political tradition of which he is part.
But not all the branching diversions of this book are so successful. A chapter on coal, which ends by arguing that Orwell’s planting of a garden half a century before climate change entered the public consciousness could be interpreted as the nurturing of “a few more carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing organisms”, feels at best tortuously grafted on to the rest. I could have happily taken the secateurs to Solnit’s musings on the coincidence between being served Jaffa Cakes on her British Air [sic] flight to Britain and then reading an article about Palestinian children visiting the beach at Jaffa – an anecdote that tells the reader nothing of any significance about either.
But then into every garden a little bindweed creeps. The green-fingered and the politically committed alike will want to curl up with this book as the gardening year draws to a close and we reflect on a time during which nature has been more of a solace than usual. It’s been a good year for the roses, at least.
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” said Gertrude Stein. Well here is a musical bouquet of a rose and a rose and a rose. Fauré, Schubert in a Fritz Wunderlich performance, and Berlioz.
A perceptive friend remarked that I have been offering much contemplation on nature when not writing about the larger art projects across the last months. It is true, I have been using nature to distract myself from politics, the relentless onslaught of bad news, piling up like yesterday’s clouds, pictured below.
So it was yesterday when I hung out with a number of ospreys. Or so it was supposed to be. Alas, the politics refused to leave my head. While the birds circled, hunted, tended to their brood, I thought about how the accumulation of shootings not only numbs us, but makes the average citizen more eager for strongman or authoritarian protection. The repeated shocks drive the last ones away from our attention, to be replaced by the newest massacre.
Remember the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, mid-May? The school shooting in Uvalde, some weeks back, now Highland Park during the 4th of July parade? So far, in the U.S. this year, we have had 322 mass shootings, (defined as 4 or more dead, excluding the wounded.)
And then this:
” the shootings were “designed” to get Republicans to support gun restrictions. Here’s what I have to say. I mean. Two shootings on July 4: one in a rich white neighborhood and the other at a fireworks display. It almost sounds like it’s designed to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control. I mean, after all, we didn’t see that happen at all the pride parades in the month of June,” Greene said.
“But as soon as we hit the MAGA month,” she continued, “as soon as we hit the month that we’re all celebrating, loving our country, we have shootings on July 4. I mean, that’s … oh, you know, that would sound like a conspiracy theory, right?”
So spouts Congress woman Marjorie Taylor Greene, conveniently forgetting that just a few years back 49 people were killed at an Orlando gay bar. This month police in Idaho foiled an attack by affiliates of a white supremacist group on a Pride celebration in a park. A scooting scare at the SF Pride Parade sent the crowd running (evidence was not found.)
And then there was the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, that killed 60 people and wounded over 400. At a music festival, not during “MAGA” month….
Kathy Fish wrote her most widely anthologized piece to date in response to that murderous act.
“It was first published in Jellyfish Review. It was then chosen by Sheila Heti for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and by Aimee Bender forBest Small Fictions 2018. Variously described as a poem, flash fiction, prose poem, or flash essay/creative nonfiction, this hybrid piece has also been selected for Literature: A Portable Anthology (Macmillan), Stone Gathering: A Reader (French Press Editions), Humans in the Wild: Reactions to a Gun Loving Country (Swallow Publishing), Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, (Bloomsbury), and the newly released 15th edition of The Norton Reader (W. W. Norton).“
Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild
A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: abewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is — a band.
A resplendence of poets.
A beacon of scientists.
A raft of social workers.
A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protestors is a dream. A group of special education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace.
Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.
A target of concert-goers.
A target of movie-goers.
A target of dancers.
A group of schoolchildren is a target.
by Kathy Fish
I have no use for conspiracy theories, from any faction. The facts speak for themselves. The number of available guns needs to be reduced. Gun laws need to be reformed, waiting periods initiated, background checks performed. Large capacity magazines need to be prohibited. Politicians need to be prevented from benefiting from lobbyists’ largesse. As long as we do not acknowledge these facts, children remain targets. Or their parents. Or anyone else in the fabric of things.
Come on ospreys, do your thing. Distract me.
Here is a beautiful album that might do the trick.
I was thoroughly bummed. A friend had reached out if I could resume photographing one of his Master Classes, this time at BodyVox and on-line, offering a Dance Workshop on July 8th and a Drum Workshop on the 9th. How I would have liked to do that, but of course I can still not attend inside sessions. It’s been almost three years since I’ve documented those African drummers and I miss it (wrote about them last here.) Check it out – it’s open to all and an exhilarating experience.
My mood did not exactly improve when I tried to soothe my irritation with a walk. The extent of the damage that last summer’s drought and this spring’s cold floods did to the trees at the Oak Bottom nature preserve is now evident, and it is considerable. Worse, there are open fire pits to be found in the park, a clear and present danger to the old growth around it, never mind the trash. I so understand the houseless pitching their tents away from dangerous highways, or sidewalks where the next forced removal is around the corner. But my heart fears for the safety of the forest when fire becomes involved.
Fire ring ashes above, Cottonwood tree fluff lying around like tinder below.
In case we’d forget, someone spelled out the systemic root causes, adding cries for help.
“Capitalism ruined everything.”// Save Kids.
Read by me during a month when the Supreme Court had revoked women’s constitutional rights to bodily autonomy, decided that Miranda rights aren’t really necessary, declared that states can’t regulate firearms, assured that the EPA cannot regulate assaults on our – and the world’s – environment, but states can use new powers in “Indian Country,” not just further diluting Native American sovereignty, but also opening an avenue to criminalize and punish any non-native protesters who come to states that go ahead with drilling and pipelines. Mood further deteriorating.
As Vox Senior Correspondent Ian Millhiser remarked: “The United States has three branches of government, the Judiciary, which makes laws. The Executive, which sends a lawyer to the Supreme Court to argue in favor of laws. And the Senate, which blocks Democratic nominees to the Judiciary. Oh, and the House which asks for campaign donations.”
Still, wildflowers, chicory and sweet peas, morning glory and jewel weed among them, lined the path.
Ducks went about their business, watched over by a solitary heron (where did all the others go?)
Raccoon and I exchanged meaningful glances before we parted.
And the birds ignored it all and just trilled out their song. Or foraged for lunch. Or fed their fledgelings, closer to home. At the equal opportunity bird feeder in front of the study window.
This is about 5 meters from the road which she regularly crosses to get to my roses and hostas….whatever small fruit had managed to set on the apricot trees are gone as well.
Daily practice of hope? Turn to British writer and poet Tom Hirons. How can you not seek help from a poet who describes himself on his website as:
Essentially a cheerful fellow driven to apoplexy and grief by the madness of our times, Tom is calmed most effectively by walking on Dartmoor, by sleeping in the deep greenwood and by the sound of true words spoken.
Holding each other fast against entropy was likely the principle behind this tagger’s planting of joy, which ultimately cheered me up – a distributed garden of flowering hearts, specimens all photographed at Oaks Bottom on this one round yesterday. Grace occurs in unlikely places.
Here is a recent performance of Sekou, his mates and the young dancers at a Blazers game.
Disaster-porn: “to satisfy the pleasure that viewers take in seeing other people’s misfortunes, as by constantly repeating vision of an event, often without commentary or context”. – Australia Macquarie Dictionary
My morning readings include the news from Europe, brought to me among others by Der Spiegel, a German weekly and the country’s largest news platform on the web. All photographs but one today were seen on their site last week, and elicited decidedly mixed feelings. They lure with beauty while depicting disaster, simultaneously drawing attention to human suffering as well as away from it.
An ice vendor waiting for customers during the worst heat wave in decades. In neighboring Nawabshah (Pakistan) the highest value ever recorded: 128.7 F on May 1st.
Somehow the term disaster-porn came to mind. It is a phrase often used to define depictions of suffering in the developing world, but also applied to the increasing number of end-of-world or other catastrophe movies coming out of the film industry, and not just in Hollywood. Is it ethical to depict, create and watch all this stuff? Let me put the answer right in front: it can be, theoretically. At least this was what I concluded after reading the essay that I am summarizing today while trying to solve my dilemma.
The remnants of a container depot in Bangladesh that stood in flames and then exploded, throwing heavy objects through the air for hundreds of yards. Dozends dead, hundreds injured. Foto: picture alliance / dpa / AP
The term disaster-porn can be found as early as 1987 when a Washington Post editorial about the stock market crash. It described that those of us doting on the disasters in cinematic action dramas are lured into believing that it is either all fake, or that we personally will escape bad fate in the end, never mind the millions we watch dying in catastrophic scenarios. The term has been popularized ever since, sometimes in specific ways, like in Pat Cadigan’s 1991 Sci-Fi novel Synner which used “porn” as a suffix denoting an excessive, overly aestheticized focus on a single topic. (The award-winning novel, by the way, envisions a world where the line between machines and reality becomes porous, a possible disaster scenario now in the real-life news 30 years later…just google AI.) The phrase is thus applied not just to fictional descriptions of disasters but also to round-the-clock depictions of round-the-world catastrophes by the media.
Iraqi boys herding sheep in a sandstorm. They are not allowed to enter into the province of Najaf, to avoid spreading the Crim-Congo fever. They are stuck at the border in the middle of the storm. Foto: Quassem Al-Kaabi / AFP
What is the problem? On the one hand, in an ever more interconnected world where we might be called on or able to help with disasters even at distant locations, information about them helps our collective mind to make decisions. In other word, the depictions might elicit empathy and understanding, which can turn into human solidarity.
On the other hand, there are multiple problems. Disaster-porn can be gratuitous and exploitative – published to sell clicks, or used as justification to simplify complex geopolitical realities, and thereby encourage military operations under the guise of humanitarian action.
In addition, over-exposure to images of doom can lead to a muting of your reaction, draining our reserves of pity, desensitizing us to others’ pain. It can be experienced as damaging our own sense of well-being, thus having us turn away from the suffering in the world. Compassion fatigue elicited by a pity crisis.
Boy amidst storks sifting garbage in the Indian province of Guwahati. Dangerous because of the extreme heat – several garbage dumps have spontaneously caught fire and combusted. Foto: Biju Boro / AFP
There is some inherent psychological truth to the fact that we better protect ourselves from too much exposure to bad news. If we feel that there is absolutely no way we can interfere with the starvation, drowning, imprisoning, wounding, torture, and killing of people, seeing them exposed to these situations will create a sense of anxiety that we will try to resolve by averting our eyes. A barrage of doom scenarios leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, both associated with depression, and subsequent paralysis when we think about possible action – just no sense left, that we could make a difference. Here is just one of the studies that lays out that scenario.
Another way to cope with extreme heat across Asia.
And yet…
“Disaster porn, then, in all its iterations and for all its flaws, is a vital political terrain in which publics are at least implicitly asked to struggle with the social significance of the suffering of others. It connects public issues like war, famine, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks to the private lives of those they affect, and shows us how disruptions of social structure become disruptions in individual biographies. This is the case in even the most seemingly stereotypical news reports of suffering in the developing world, and in even the most outlandish Hollywood disaster epics as well.” (Ref.)
Literature and disaster movies contribute in an odd way: they do describe the role chance plays with some people being more endangered than others, some surviving when others don’t. Yes, there are heroes (or villains) who manage to suggest that with some amount of smarts and vision you can still control the outcome (echoing our sense of exceptionalism in U.S. culture), but there are all the others who are not so lucky, because it is often determined by the vicissitude of geographical location alone, rather than specific talents or skills. Chance confers the privilege of survival. It might make us think about our own privilege and so raise compassion, since so far chance has spared us, amidst the forest fires, or floods or infectious diseases.
The Clark Ford River flooded the houses of many of the inhabitants of Fromberg, MO. This is a lawn ornament submerged in the waters. Foto: David Goldman / AP
Leave it to me to read and watch these kinds of novels and films, if only to spare you to have to do it yourself…..
My current target is a 1973 science fiction novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, which took 9 years to write.It has been made into numerous films, a highly praised animé version among them. Some had altered endings, some were withheld during certain time periods because they were too close on the heels of real life disasters in Japan, given the exposure to earthquakes and the Fukushima catastrophe. The latest, a Netflix production, is so bad that I recommend it on a day where you need help to erupt in laughter – the acting – if you can call it that – guarantees that you will.
The book, however, is worming its way into my brain. The basic story concerns a scientist’s discovery of the likelihood that all of Japan, the entire archipelago, is going to go under due to earthquakes, ocean floor faults, and what not. One of the narrative lines concerns how the government is handling the crisis, from negligence to obstruction to panic. Don’t look up, this year’s U.S. disaster movie that I discussed here, probably took a page out of that book. Another line focusses on the distribution of millions of people around the world, with nationalist impulses against immigration vying with empathy for a drowning people. The philosophical question it raises, though, is one that we will have to think through in climate change migrations to come: what does it do to your identity, as member of a nation, or a tribe or a culture or a language group, when the place that defines you ceases to exist? Literally is no longer there to return to? Is it destructive to lose that connection to place which is a base for underlying sense of self, or is it empowering because you can shed the debt you incurred as a member of the nation (say of an imperialistic or fascistic past) and start from scratch?
Think it through – time not spent doom scrolling…
We could also focus on the message conveyed by a random stranger who was kind enough to let me photograph her t-shirt 2 days ago.
I take my victories where I can find them. Two days ago I won a staring contest with a coyote. The bunny, paralyzed with fear between us, lived, too. I stood still for what seemed half an eternity, he approached a step or two but then reconsidered. Time enough to take the photographs, and for a Painted Lady to land on the scat he left behind. No matter how often I feel blessed by nature, some encounters are unexpected, as if by magic, and make my heart race. With joy more than fear.
It had already been a morning filled with sweet encounters. The hungry scrub jay fledglings waiting for their mother,
other mothers readjusting worms in beaks.
Egrets hanging out, with a cacophony of their screaming offspring in nests in the woods behind them.
Glimpses of snowcapped Mt. St. Helens in the distance.
I had come to photograph something altogether different, though. I wanted to capture the star-like flowers of hemlock or cow parsley, you choose. (I have written about the distinction between these two, the former highly toxic, the latter good for making soup, previously here.) I needed a stand-in for stars, since they play such an important role in the poem attached below, not having images for the real thing since I rarely see them these days. Either it is too cloudy, or I am in bed already.
I don’t know why I had not come across this poem earlier – it has been around for a long time. Since 1977, to be precise, in a volume called The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. The author, Laura Gilpin, had received the Walt Whitman Poetry award the previous year. She died, not yet age 56, barely 6 months after a diagnosis of cancer, in 2007.
The Two-Headed Calf
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.
by Laura Gilpin (1950- 2007)
The poem hit me at gut level, about the precariousness of life, about “othering,” and the hope one can find when staying in the moment, if only for a moment. It also fascinated me with a level of writing skill that manages to suggest so many different scenarios in so few lines.
What do we have here? Immediately we get introduced to the derogatory term freak. Wrapped in newspaper (a calf with two heads? Large newspaper…) reminiscent of ways to discard refuse like stinking fish. It will be displayed, gawked at, the museum replacing freak shows of yore on the circus circuit.
“...a term used to describe the exhibition of exotic or deformed animals as well as humans considered to be in some way abnormal or outside broadly accepted norms. Although the collection and display of such so-called freaks have a long history, the term freak show refers to an arguably distinct American phenomenon that can be dated to the 19th century.”
Promoted by P.T.Barnum, people raved about the entertainment delivered by watching disfigured animals or humans with disabilities, weight and height differences, dwarfism included, absence or increased presence of limbs, vitiligo, and persons with ambiguous sexual characteristics including hermaphroditism. Given how indefensible and indecent amusement at the sight of human abnormalities is, it is no surprise that the world saw a “Revolt of the Freaks” in 1898, when a collection of the 40 or so most-famous performers in the world staged a labour strike while on tour in London, demanding that the management of the Barnum and Bailey circus remove the term freak from promotional materials for their shows. To no avail. It took until the middle of the 20th century for these shows to be abandoned.
What is unfortunately alive and well, though, is a (religious and ideological) movement that defines “non-normative” people as freaks, abnormalities to be eradicated from a healthy societal body, and threatens to, at best, exclude them and force them into hiding, or punish them and those who support them, or, at worst call for their extermination. From a church pulpit, no less.
In this year alone, more than 240 bills have been introduced directed against LGTBQ people, most of them trans, and the year isn’t half over. The Human Rights Campaign reports that last year, 50 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed in the U.S., 14 so far this year. That is not counting the suicides of mobbed or despairing trans teenagers. According to NPR, a third of the known trans-youth, 58.000 people, are in danger of losing gender affirming health care. Actually, newest statistics show that the U.S. has about 1.6 million people who are transgender, 43% young adults or teenagers.
Gilpin draws a scenario in the second stanza that shows the domesticated framework of a summer evening at the farm. North field, like a neighbor’s address, with mother, a loving family then, mellow conditions lit by the moon, soothing noises by soft wind, the mention of an orchard promising the sweetness of fruit. All is right here, as long as the cruel world can be kept at bay, and the fate of non-conforming to norms, or of disability, postponed for just a few hours longer. It is inevitable, but in the meantime there is beauty to behold. And here is a glint of magic: four eyes in two heads see double the beauty, a privilege not granted to the rest of us.
Yet the added shimmer is no compensation, in my mind, for the lack of a glimmer of hope that people will attempt to integrate physical or mental disability without prejudice, or accept gender non-conformity (not a disability!) as a human right. Or stop using it as a wedge issue in a war between polarized ideological factions.
Gilpin worked for decades on a second volume of poetry, finished shortly before her death and published posthumously, The Weight of a Soul. Mine was left less heavy by the thought that poetry can still help us think things through, sort out who is discriminating and who needs protection. My soul was also made lighter by the hocus-pocus of nature, creating every variability imaginable, shimmering in the light.
Here is some beautiful music from Australia Superclusters. More stars, for your ears this time.
1: a sudden spasmodic effort that accomplishes nothing
2: one that appears promising but turns out to be disappointing or worthless – Merriam Webster
William Merritt Chase Peonies 1897
This was me, last week. Sort of. Make the hair white, make the peony bouquet more modest, make it camera in hand instead of fan, and you’ve got the picture. Peonies have been a magnet for visual artists across centuries. They are lush, come in a range of colors, can be arranged in dramatic tableaux. And when the petals fall, they serve as a perfect memento mori. It doesn’t hurt that they last in the garden only for a short time. The fleetingness spurs desire to create something more lasting.
Here are some of my favorite paintings, as per usual the European fare I grew up with, Dutch, Russian and French masters.
Vincent Van Gogh Roses and Peonies (1886)
Pierre Auguste Renoir Peonies (1880) Eduard Manet White Peonies (1864)
Henri Fantin-Latour Vase of Peonies (1881) Alexander Gerasimov Still live with peonies (1950)
No massive bouquets for me, at $3 per stem, but the five I ended up with held a wonderful surprise in store. I had unwittingly bought Paeonia Coral Charm, a peony variety known for its color transformation while blooming. (Photographs are all of the same bouquet, across a week or so.)
The variety was registered in 1964 and colors switch from coral to cerise, orange and, finally, white across its lifespan, in the vase as much as on the stem in the garden. Quite a spectacle to behold.
Peonies are a flash in the pan – they come and go in the garden in the blink of an eye. That phrase, flash in the pan, has its origins debated. Some say it originated in the 17th century when Flintlock muskets held small amounts of gunpowder in a pan. When the power flared up without a bullet being fired, it was called a flash in the pan. Others claim it has to do with the experiences during the Gold Rush of the 19th century. Prospectors’ excitement when they saw something glint in the pan was dashed when it did not turn out to be gold.
In any case, for a moment I had had high hopes that one could use the phrase regarding UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – alas, he did survive the no-confidence vote on Monday, albeit facing a substantial rebellion and a weakened leadership position. I’m not going to bore you with details of my distaste for the man (and his party’s politics) but instead share something that brightens my days occasionally.
There is someone on Twitter called “Shakespeare Replies” – @TheBardAnswers.
He or she provides appropriate citations from Shakespeare’s works for current political situations and is about as much a fan of Johnson as am I…
I have collected some of the ones that made me laugh across time – hope you enjoy them as well.
And secondary commentary on Nadine Dorries’ support’
Alas, not always are the text sources referenced, but it is just fun to anticipate when the next one will come along.
Or this one:
And finally, other targets as well:
Shakespeare, of course, wrote about practically every plant there is, except for peonies – at least I could not find anything in my go-to-guide,Botanical Shakespeare, which lists and cross-references the names of plants with the plays, sonnets and everything else. Best of all: they offer planting instructions of the flora appearing in any given play. For June you could chose A Midsummernight’s Dream, for example, and learn which of the mentioned plants are good for your zones, how to plant them and a lot of biological information about them. (All contained in link above.)
Might as well go plant some peonies, given that I cannot use Sonnet 29 for a certain Prime Minister quite yet…
Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
This is for the kids who die, Black and white, For kids will die certainly. The old and rich will live on awhile, As always, Eating blood and gold, Letting kids die.
Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi Organizing sharecroppers Kids will die in the streets of Chicago Organizing workers Kids will die in the orange groves of California Telling others to get together Whites and Filipinos, Negroes and Mexicans, All kinds of kids will die Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment And a lousy peace.
Of course, the wise and the learned Who pen editorials in the papers, And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names White and black, Who make surveys and write books Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die, And the sleazy courts, And the bribe-reaching police, And the blood-loving generals, And the money-loving preachers Will all raise their hands against the kids who die, Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets To frighten the people— For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people— And the old and rich don’t want the people To taste the iron of the kids who die, Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power, To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together
Listen, kids who die— Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you Except in our hearts Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field, Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht
But the day will come— You are sure yourselves that it is coming— When the marching feet of the masses Will raise for you a living monument of love, And joy, and laughter, And black hands and white hands clasped as one, And a song that reaches the sky— The song of the life triumphant Through the kids who die.
I had said I’m taking the week off, and I am. But could not think about yesterday’s massacre in Texas without thinking of this poem, and the insistence on life triumphant in the last lines, a defiant – helpless- cry, wrapped in hope. Needed to share it.
The powers that be in this country tolerate that guns are the highest cause of death for kids in this nation. 27 school shootings in the first 5 months of this year alone. The powers that be are content to see money from weapons flow into certain coffers, their own included. I am not even listing the ones that got NRA donations in the tens of thousands, just the ones overt a million.
But the powers that (want to) be are interested in more than money, and that is important to remember. We will not see any significant change because mass death primes for authoritarianism. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains, systemic gun violence is part of a Republican political design to destabilize American society. Her recent essay in the Washington Post spells out in great detail how transforming public schools into death traps is tolerated as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.
Let Langston Hughes be right, a day will come where the song of life triumphant will rise to the sky, a monument to all the lost kids. But in whose lifetime?
“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.”
— Mariame Kaba
You are getting two for one today. I wanted to post a piece of music, Our Phoenix by Mari Esabel Valverde, because it is a heartbreakingly beautiful reaction to the white-supremacist incited and enacted violence and terrorism in this country, Buffalo, NY as the most recent instance. The words are from a poem (full text of Our Dangerous Sweetness in the link) by Amir Rabiyah, who was born in London, England, to a mixed Cherokee and white mother and a Lebanese and Syrian father and who, as a trans poet, explores living at the margin.
I thought, though, that another one of their poems is more powerfully hopeful, needed in a world and era where positive thinking is ever harder to conjure, as well as gloriously full of double-meaning. So here’s my daily dose of practicing hope. And besides, I can show you what’s currently on my kitchen windowsill, glittering in the darkness …still waiting for blossoms, though.
Cactus Flower
We flash victory signs in the darkness, so the darkness may glitter. — Mahmoud Darwish
As the sun sets—we set our plan into motion. Our sole purpose to overthrow
any assumptions, to change the course of ordinary thinking.
Our work begins by speaking to darkness and telling darkness soon :
we will demonstrate through the secrecy of stars,
earth’s magnetic embrace how we can be many things at once.
So much of the work we do is internal, goes unnoticed, uncompensated.
We get written off or not written at all, labeled freakish, prickled, rough around the edges.
We learn to thrive in the dry humor of soil; carry water in our bellies to quench our own thirst.
We survive, over again. Adapt. Even after being carried in the beaks of birds, dropped elsewhere,
far from our roots, we grow. We flourish. And when least expected, when histories
not told by us, for us, claims we are defeated,
we gather our tears as dew. We release our anguish, intoxicated by our own sexed pollen. We burst,
displaying the luscious folds of our petals.
by AmirRabiyah
And if you you are in the mood for analysis rather than poetry, read this. Or this from the Jewish perspective. Or this from an economic-systems approach.
“If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won’t see anything.” – Ruth Bernhard (1905-2006).
Ruth Bernhard’s words tugged at my brain during my most recent encounter with one of Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II artists. Bernhard was a pioneer among women photographers best known for her abstract images of female nudes. The artist created a portfolio of work across her lifespan that politicized the private long before the public feminism of the 1970s. Mentored and adored by some of our photographic greats, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, the German photographer tried to make us see what is often not visible, pushing the viewer away from the typical objectification of nude models towards an empathy that allows some tenderness to emerge, but also visions of female desire.
Being willing to see more than what is “visible” is important for both, the viewer of a particular work of art and the one who creates it. This is especially true if the art is informed by anthropological and historical considerations, as is the work of Lynn Deal who will provide a fabric sculpture for Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition this summer.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Deal, born in England, was raised in New Mexico and spent much of her adult life in Oklahoma and some years in Texas. Her interest in fabric and design dates back to her childhood and eventually brought her to the Pacific Northwest, a fertile region for fiber artists, where she joined the Columbia FiberArts Guild. Deal’s background in all things fiber is rich: she earned a BA in Design and Human Ecology from the University of Oklahoma and received her MA there as well, then worked in various roles, director, curator, exhibit and education director and site manager among them, for the Metcalfe Museum, the Tulsa Historical Society and the Texas Historical Commission among others.
Antithesis (2001) The traditional layers of quilting are reversed, the ties are purposefully elongated rather than traditionally short.
Once she realized that clothing and costume design, the typical occupations for many interested in working with fabric, were not for her, Deal focussed on researching and exhibiting domestic textiles at the intersection of private creation and society’s structural conditions. That exploration included studies of cross-fertilization between women crafters who belonged to different classes and races in the 19th and 20th century South of the U.S.
A specific area of interest was the quilting of a Louisiana plantation owner, Cammie Garrett Henry who opened Melrose Plantation to visiting writers and artists, making it an important community during the Southern Renaissance—a period of intense artistic production between World War I and the end of World War II. Henry, a White woman, incorporated motifs and techniques from indigenous Hawaiian work into her quilting. The quilts of her Black domestic servant, Clementine Hunter, on the other hand, started to display motifs that described the architecture and daily views of the White plantation world around her. Hunter, mostly admired for her folk art paintings, became one of the best known artists of Louisiana. Rather than staying away from what would today be termed “appropriation,” these women integrated various cross-cultural elements that enriched their work.
Parallel Paradigms (2016) A piece contemplating reproductive inequalities and risks.
Deal’s artistic practice is clearly informed by both the historic techniques and configurations she immersed herself in, and the way a deeper view of the world could be communicated in crafted work. Her wall hangings and sculptures do require intense visual exploration, since an immense load of detail work sometime delays the appreciation of the larger picture. So much to look at, in terms of varied materials, methods of stitching, application, patterning, and color.
She loves it all, the spinning, weaving, sewing, embroidering, dying, carding, and quilting. No technique is left behind – nor are types of materials; wool, tulle, silk, cotton, beads and buttons, silkscreens panels, odds and ends abound. What emerges are stylized portraits of a world as perceived, “wool her paint, stitching her brush, fabrics her inspiration,” as she phrased it. Seemingly innocuous titles invite the viewer to go beyond the plethora of detail and explore possible meanings. Here is a perfect example: At the Party.
At the Party (2016) Excerpts
The quilted scroll shows the appliquéd figure of a young Black girl or woman, dressed up, hair beaded, behind a wrought-iron fence, covered with Mardi-Gras beads and seemingly random cotton loops, once used to make potholders by domestic workers whose hands were not to be idle. The prominent fence, however happily colored and skillfully embroidered, excludes the figure, puts a barrier between viewer and subject, and can almost be perceived as a small cage. No amount of magnolia pinks and stereotypic New Orleans’ festive cheer with its abundance of beads can ultimately obscure the reference to slavery and racial segregation.
Looking beyond the easily visible, of course, is required.
Similar insights reveal themselves, when you contemplate some of the other, unfortunately timely topics:
Or here, a recent sculpture by the artist, Keen Waters (2019) alluding to the fragility of the river eco systems, the harm induced by dams to fish runs, pollution at the bottom.
Keen Water (2019) Excerpt.
For the Exquisite Gorge II project, a rich silken river, stitched with metallic thread reflecting light, will flow underneath a canopy of colorful gauze leading from sunrise to sunset, forming the letter M to honor Maryhill Museum. On the bottom, fabric covered container lids will remind of the plastic pollution ubiquitous to our waterways.
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I consider Lynn Deal an heir to an age-old practice of, however subtle, political expression through the crafts. Traditionally relegated to the female domain, a domestic chore or diversion, craft was always perceived to be a lesser cousin to the fine arts. True even if and when it enhanced the social status of the patriarchs displaying the incredible handiwork of their female household members, whether in French castles, American plantations, English country manors or churches, producing true works of art like the Bayeux tapestries. If you looked closely enough, however, it had a voice.
The combination of textile arts and politics is nothing new then. In the last decades, it has become a defined movement known as Craftivism,popularized byBetsy Greerand groups like the Craftivist Collective, founded by Sarah Corbett. The goal is to use craft to change or improve on what is wrong with our world, a goal clearly contained in Lynn Deal’s artistic pursuits, to create with solidarity and respect, to provoke thought and help women to express themselves in ways that might include producing in private spaces, on a small scale, rather than commercial production.
The artist and carding tool, carded wool.
Cooperative work is included – with many eyes and hands creating statements that can range from environmental concerns, to feminist issues, to anti-war unity. The medium of knitting or crocheting is entering the public space, with yarn bombing or other kinds of textile decoration. So is quilting, and in some instances embroidery. (Ref.)
Marianne Jorgensen Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank (2006) (Protest against the war in Iraq – the pink covering consists of more than a 4000 pink squares- 15 x 15 centimeters – knitted by volunteers from Denmark, the UK, USA and several other countries.)
Craft has historically been a mode of direct action. Take one of the earliest examples, the 19th century Female Society of Birmingham, whose members sewed innocuous “work bags” (traditional holding your embroidery needles and sewing) which they filled with anti-slavery literature and sold across Britain (over 2000 of them!) The materials were carefully chosen – East India silk, satin and/or cotton – materials that were thought not to be produced from slave labour. Each bag contained a card that stated the choice of materials and asked the new owner to boycott slave labour goods. With the proceeds the women supported the anti-slavery movement in the 1820-30s. (Ref.)
The late 19th century women’s suffrage movement used handcrafted banners and embroidered sashes, with the Arts and Crafts Movement interacting with the women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Europe, in the campaign for the right to vote. The same could be found among the women of America’s National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution and used symbolic colors (yellow for light, white for purity and purple for loyalty) on their hand-crafted banners.
Nashville Equal Suffrage Association 1920 ( Source Tennessee State Museum)
There are also many versions of quilts made to protest social issues, from Georgian slave Harriet Power‘s story quilts,
the work of slave descendants at the community of Gee’s Bend in Alabama, to the 1980 International Honor Quilt, instigated by Judy Chicago, that honored mythological and real women as well as women’s organizations in its 549 quilted triangular pieces.
International Honor Quilt (University of Louisville/Hite Art Institute (2013)
Lynn Deal’s studio
There is also the incredible quilting work by Gina Adams, a descendant of both Indigenous (Ojibwe) and colonial Americans. She produced a series of quilts (2015) called The Broken Treaty, cutting out the letters of entire Broken treaties–these were pacts written by the United States and Canadian Government and signed by Native American Tribes — from calico cotton, the fabric that made White Americans very wealthy. The letters are placed on weathered antique quilts that were made during the time the treaties were signed.
Embroidery takes on new forms in the hands (and from the creative brains) of contemporary craftivist artists. Australian artist Michelle Hamer, for example, provokes with image of billboards, stitched to great effect. I fear her 2013 work is taking on renewed relevance in our current Supreme Court debacle.
Michelle Hamer (2013) We’re All Gonna Die, Girls.
Craft, fiber and methods of working fiber, clearly have been transformed into a tool of communication with others outside the domestic sphere. Artists use their skills in manipulating fabric and wool to create not just something beautiful, or interesting, useful or simply endearing, but to make us think about what it takes to make our world a better place. In its public appearances, from pink hats worn at demonstrations to AIDS quilts laid out at the Mall, crafts have assumed an important role in American society.
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Upwards Endeavors (2015)
I am fond of beads. As a teenager one of my most cherished possessions was a multi-string bracelet of tiny glass beads, faded pinks and purples. It had been acquired from hippies who proudly proclaimed themselves grave robbers, stealing pieces of the ornamental flower wreaths fashioned from these beads from old French and Italian graveyards, long exposed to the weather and neglect. The frisson of such a violation added to the attraction of a 16-year old, no doubt.
Years later, while traveling through Northwest Africa in 1971, hunting at bazaars for antique Millefiori glass beads (not the fake ones for tourists) that had been part of commercial trade during colonial times, became a game.
Nowadays, jewelry made by a talented friend using Venetian glass, is a source of joy.
I have mostly associated embroidered beadwork with indigenous art, a pillar of Native American tribal design, for example. European colonial settlers brought glass beads, replacing previous beads made of copper, shells or bone. This led to adaptive, often ingenious changes in working with the materials:
“Faced with the challenge of integrating these new materials, women turned to familiar basketry techniques for ideas, adapting traditional basket-making methods to weave beads and native-made fibers into bags, caps, straps, and hair ornaments. Visual evidence for this can be seen in the motifs found on 19th-century woven bead work from the Pacific Northwest, which correlate directly to those used by women on their baskets and flat bags. This presentation will provide examples of loose-warp woven beadwork from three Native American tribes in the greater Pacific Northwest: the Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska, who focused more on embroidered beadwork than loose warp weaving; the Wasco of the Columbia River Valley, who wove beads until about 1915 at which point loose warp weaving techniques were gradually replaced by beading “on a frame;” and the Pit River Indians of Northern California, who created some of the most idiosyncratic objects, shaping their tubular bags in unusual ways.” (Ref.)
Bead embroidery can be found in Japanese history as well, and has played a significant role in African cultural history. Little did I know how much bead work was also represented in European work, even though I knew about the commercial bead manufacturing centers in Italy. Pretty mind-blowing, when you look at examples like these from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection:
Clearly Lynn Deal has a lot to work with, having found her own ways of integrating beads into her sculptures. They are elements of joy, of playful attention magnets, small messengers of harmony against backdrops of unease. Work that makes you try and find a balance, as it was intended to do.
Then again, Frankie, the pet rabbit, couldn’t care less – having free run of the studio makes for a happy life, no further improvements needed.
the process of spreading through and being present or perceived in every part of something. Oxford Languages Dictionary
I wish the sculptures I am presenting today would not trigger associations of something malevolent, if not evil, pervading the space around us, creeping in, sliding through, erupting through protective barriers and consuming the space we inhabit. It is remarkable work by a Brazilian artist, Henrique Oliveira, and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the national and international assaults on human rights, or the authoritarian creep, or the misogynistic and racist slime surrounding us, but I could not force my brain to see it any other way. Then again, that is what extraordinary art does, mirroring the world as is.
It’s not just gloom. It really is a state of fear, or worry morphing into anger, if not rage, when encountering the next bit of horrifying news. People are killed in wars, killed by heat in Asia not known in these dimensions, needlessly dying of a virus for lack of organized protection. Now we learn that the old Christian men (and woman) in power in this country have decided to take rights away that they consider not “historically rooted,” tolerating the death of countless women, never mind their loss of control over their own bodies.
per·ver·sion/pərˈvərZHən/noun
the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended. Oxford Languages Dictionary
The draft of a leaked majority Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, points to a future that perverts everything liberal democracies have fought for, to an extent that is hard to fathom. It is not just about the right to safe, legal abortions. Alito’s draft opinion explicitly criticizes Lawrence v. Texas (legalizing sodomy) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalizing same-sex marriage). He says that, like abortion, these decisions protect phony rights that are not “deeply rooted in history.” (Which is, by the way, exactly how Justice Robert Taney argued in the Dred Scott decision: “no African-American, free or enslaved, had ever enjoyed the rights of a citizen under the Constitution. For more than a century leading up to the ratification of the Constitution, blacks had been regarded as beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race … and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”)
Never mind the selective reading of “history.” It was not until the 1820s – 1840s that abortion got criminalized in this country. The right to determine the fate of women’s own body has been assigned for over 50 years now, 20 % of our 244 years as nation. Not enough history? More importantly, look at the 9th amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by people.” Evolving rights were acknowledged, because not all future developments could be known.
If you connect the assault on the right to privacy, the pointer to the historic past, and the discussion found in conservative think tanks and law schools, we have to worry about assaults on all the rights that have been granted: the right to racially-integrated schools highly among them, to inter-racial marriage, to gay marriage, to life-saving gender-affirming medical care, and the right to vote in fair and free elections.
What sounds like nostalgic longing for a past by retrogressive justices is really a toxic power tool to re-establish complete control over those who served in prior centuries: the poor, the non-white, the 3/5 of person, the female contingents of our societies that were subjected to the preferred standing of property-owning males.
I recommend to read this Atlantic article by Adam Server for the details of Alito’s SC decision draft. I urge, if you have the time, to go back to an older book, that presciently spelled out what we are embarking on, while analyzing similar movements of the past: Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Arendt wrote this book after World War II had ended, fully convinced that even darker days were ahead, with totalitarian ideals going to surge and rule. Maybe her timing was bit off, but what she feared is slowly emerging across our world. Looking just at our own country, the U.S, inequality has risen to unthinkable heights, elections are under attack in systematic ways never seen before, from simply not accepting election outcomes to manufacturing every possible obstacle to free and fair voting, or means of influencing voters via hidden funds and manipulated mass media.
We do live in a world in which it seems, as she wrote, “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.” In fact, you don’t even have to organize the masses any longer, if you have found ways to suppress them. Arendt looked back at the history of Nazi Germany in particular, but also European racism and imperialism in general, and warned: Human rights are not to be taken for granted. “To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens. The stateless, and those classified as noncitizens, or non-people, are assured of nothing. The only way they can be helped or made secure is through the existence of the state, of public order, and of the rule of law.“
Think through who qualified as non-citizens in this country before the addition of the 14th amendment to the Constitution. For that matter, refresh you memory of all the “historically rooted” rights women did not have in 1787. Here’s a good reminder. And here is what an evolving legal system that incorporates the enlightenment of our times looks like: White women couldn’t vote before 1920. Women of color couldn’t vote until 1965. Interracial marriage was illegal until 1967. Americans with disabilities act was signed in 1990. Being subjected, subjugated, controlled again seems to be the nostalgic dream of the men who are now able to make the law – or, as I see it, a mockery of it.
Alas, Hannah Arendt also reminds us of another aspect of history – then and now. She pointed to the passivity of many people in the face of authoritarian rule, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda. “In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” And talking about propaganda – the airwaves, 24 hours after the drop, are filled with uproar over the act of leaking, conveniently suppressing the core of the message, the threatened loss of constitutional rights.
I truly fear, though, that after some initial ruckus, that passivity will hold here and now again. DO prove me wrong, to my eternal delight.
All photographs above are from Oliveira’s work, referenced on his website.
Images below are a compilation, shown before, from my series Tied to the Moon, about women’s experiences and life events, for timely reasons.
