You know how it is, one thing leads to another. This time it started with the birds, so many of them, different ones. The vultures dominated, though, hanging out in the trees along the Columbia river among the bald eagles and ospreys, all ready to swoop down, all eerily quiet.
Then I saw the object of their concentration, or, more likely, their desire. A beached sturgeon, still fresh, no visible wounds other than a torn fin. A spectacular specimen. Perhaps killed by the ever surging water temperatures and dropping water levels – that warming was one of the causes for the recent die-off of sturgeons in our waters, both in 2015 and 2019. Sturgeons can get to be up to 100 years old, but they only spawn every 8-12 years, so their populations are extremely vulnerable at this point, despite many efforts by states, fisheries and environmental organizations to protect them.
In any case, I had just read a book review that started with the phrase “a beached sturgeon of ungodly proportions,” a phrase I found enticing. What followed had me rush to put my name on the library wait list (54 holds on 3 copies – what are you thinking, Multnomah County library?) for The Hounding, a debut novel by XenobePurvis. Set in 18th century England, it describes the fate of five sisters who are accused to be witches or worse, having caused a “season of strangeness,” claimed to transform themselves into dogs, now hunted by their neighbors. They try to save that fish, to no avail, and a man eventually kills it by violently stomping on the sturgeon’s head.
Apparently – again, I have yet to read it – many literary examples of sisters are invoked, from Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park to Hester Prynne. The main theme, though, seems to be the traditional one: the way society treats women, assigns them magical powers for which they are subsequently prosecuted, harms them by clinging to beliefs of malevolent witchcraft. And this brings me to a book about a different group of siblings that I just finished, The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.
It is a long, complicated novel, with constant shifts in time and several narrators, one of whom, the single male and potential half-brother to Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia, increasingly reveals himself to be quite the unreliable chronicler of the tale. Set in our own time, across Sweden, Tunisia and the U.S., its plot – if there is one, really – is also driven by superstitious beliefs in the supernatural. The sisters themselves believe that their family was cursed, and this guides their lives and decision making. The novel ropes us into deeply detailed worlds, both of behaviors and emotional interiors; it also makes it very clear that self-fulfilling prophecies interact with structural characteristics of misogynistic, patriarchal societies, exponentially affecting outcomes for women.
The book was not expressly plot-driven. I was more reminded of Susan Sontag’s adage that novels are education of feelings – they help us to escape the ever narrowing versions of ourselves, tied to habits in thinking and interactions. It certainly reminded me of how sibling relationships are fundamental to our existence, but their mechanisms are much more easily discerned when you observe other sibling relationships from the outside. In this case, the author managed to makeeach oneof them increasingly more sympathetic, despite some being closer to me, the reader, in personality than the others. He also showed the futile or destructive power of competition, when they could have helped each other all along. But the novel’s real success lies in the ability to convey how potentially neutral or positive life outcomes can be thrown into disarray by the persistence of false beliefs, no matter how rational you try to be. Let that sink in.
***
I have one sister who I admire, and we love each other deeply, despite being very different from each other, but I also feel sisterly bonds to several of my friends. I thought this was described best in Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In the first poem, she alludes to a shared history (siblings are, after all the ones who know you longest and suffered the same family dynamics, even if in different roles), but does that allow you to claim true knowledge of the sibling? Is the stranger she uses as comparison really a travel acquaintance, or another version of the sister, or is it the poet herself, claiming we are unknowable even to ourselves in the end? Too complicated for my heat-addled brain.
Much more decipherable, then, and a hymn to sisterhood whether by biological bond or not, is this for me:
“Women”
My three sisters are sitting on rocks of black obsidian. For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.
My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession. She is going as the Transparent lady and all her nerves will be visible.
My second sister is also sewing, at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely, At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.
My third sister is gazing at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea. Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.
Here are three sisters sitting at the water’s edge, (no sturgeon in sight, alas,) on rocks of black obsidian. Obsidian is, of course, sharp volcanic glass formed by quickly cooling molten lava, used since the Stone age for weapons, daggers, spears and knives included, but also as ornaments. In the realm of supernatural beliefs, it is associated with healing, protecting us from negative influences. “Its reflective properties are thought to help us recognize false beliefs we may have about ourselves so they can be released.” (Ref.) Hmm.
So, here they sit, on top of those symbols of mostly violent destruction, and yet healing dominates associations. Stitching together a costume that reveals rather than masks you, vulnerabilities and all, being true to yourself, in public no less.
Stitching the scars of your broken heart, sewing as reparative action, such a familiar trope for women’s duties, but now these women mend themselves.
The third sister has gone far beyond: she can leave the torn stockings as they are, seeing the scab from her wounds drift off towards the horizon, self-generated skin a strong enough renewal. She might have fallen, but picked herself up. She might have been violated, but wounds will heal.
And given how most women I know see themselves reflected in one or the other of “our” sisters depicted here (on the mirror surface of the obsidian and in the hurt), this poem is a gift of encouragement and manifesting, with no further need for belief in talismans or other mystical powers. We might be fumbling towards repair, but we do have the power to heal ourselves.
Then again, being able to turn yourself into a dog on occasion, hunting with the pack of your sisters, might be quite the thrill, no?
I’ll report more when I’ve read The Hounding.
Music today is a phenomenal collaboration: Sisters doing it for themselves….
“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 splitsfirewood 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.
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.)
“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.
The grasses will recover.
So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.
The trees, though, are suffering.
Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!
The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.
A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.
I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.
Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times are These” from Collected Poems: 1950-2012.
So let’s talk about trees, or rather let’s look at them.
What was:
***
What is:
The fires are, of course, every where and getting worse. Not natural but man made disasters, if we consider them a consequence of climate change that we elicited. As I write this, the McKinney fire is growing rapidly in Northern California. It has grown to more than 51.000 acres in the last two days and cost lives, with thousands fleeing and losing their homes. Montana lands and people are afflicted by the Elmo fire, and Idaho residents are under evacuation orders since Saturday as the Moose Fire in the Salmon-Challis National Forest charred more than 67.5 square miles (174.8 square km) in timbered land near the town of Salmon.
Last month, the Pipeline Fire on Nuvatukaovi (Hopi) or Dookʼoʼoosłííd (Navajo) — the San Francisco Peaks — ripped through Arizona forests desiccated by the worst drought in 1,200 years. Thousands of people evacuated and major traffic ways closed for all. New Mexico has unprecedented fires as well, with two of the largest fires on record burning at the same time: The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon blaze and the Black Fire, approaching 350.000 acres.
Alaska is burning, some 55 fires across the region, active since June.
Here in Oregon, according to the official state website announcing current conditions and evacuation orders, we counted as of yesterday 19 fires.
And if you think there is some stark beauty captured in all of this devastation, I suggest you think about the toll to other living beings, and not just in terms of immediate death through burning or asphyxiation.
Short version of a long research report (with the table below laying out the framework): fires change population dynamics and environmental make-up in a way that affect immune responses and exposure to things that make animals, and eventually humans, sick. One major factor is an increasing contact with select parasites. Fire alters the exposure to parasites (habitat destruction, mortality, host movement, and community alteration)and also changes immune-mediated susceptibility (stress or injury and pollution). your immune system is simply not up to task if it has to fight on multiple fronts. If animals, including parasites, loose their habitat, they come in closer contact to human populations. Fires also shift the balance of a system of parasites, so that if some species are killed other species go unchecked, grow rampantly and are thus bringing more disease into mammalian populations.
So by all means, let’s talk about trees as well as the many, many other complex topics, from general climate to specific fire threats, so we can prepare adequate responses.
Here are the Sighing Firs, from Stanislaw Moniuszko’s HALKA.
