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Art on the Road: Where Tough meets Tuff

Double dipping today – this will be up at Oregon Arts Watch as well.

IT HAPPENED TO ME AGAIN. That’s twice now, in just two years. I had to revise my assessment of an artist once I got to know the history and environment that was essential to their work. The first re-evaluation took place both on an intellectual and an emotional level – where I truly disliked Frida Kahlo before, I came round. https://www.heuermontage.com/?p=5790

Gerald’s Tree I, 1937 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And now I have to admit something similar is happening for Georgia O’Keeffe. I was never a fan of the endlessly repeated desert skulls or foreshortened flower paintings, imbued with sexual metaphors or gender-specific markers – references, it turns out, mostly peddled by the men in her life in the beginning of her career and appropriated by many a feminist at some later point. O’Keeffe herself rejected these interpretations just as much as being co-opted by the feminist cause. (For a thorough analysis of her relationship to feminism read Linda M. Grasso: Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism University of New Mexico Press, 2017)

I was also not particularly taken by the way the oil paintings were rendered. Even though the landscapes use saturated colors, there is often a dullness that does not capture the intense brightness of New Mexico’s high desert. Laura Cumming, reviewing the 2016 O’Keeffe retrospective mounted at the Tate Modern, says it better than I possibly could:

But by now, what strikes is the stark disparity between the sensuous imagery and the dust-dead surface. O’Keeffe’s oil paintings turn out to be pasty, matte, evenly layered. They have no touch, no relish for paint, no interest in textural distinction. They are as graphic and flat as the millions of posters they have spawned worldwide; in fact, on the strength of this first major show outside America, they look just as good, if not better, in reproduction. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jul/10/georgia-okeefe-review-tate-modern-retrospective

From the River – Pale, 1959 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Mostly I was put off, though, by her ways of perfecting a persona, here too some semblance to Kahlo. She paid a lot of attention to how she looked (perhaps to be expected in one so often photographed) down to having a beloved piece of jewelry recreated in a different metal that better matched the color of her now white hair. She insisted on – often self styled – black and white clothing when being photographed, although she appeared usually in quite colorful clothes. The environments she lived in, particularly later in life when fame also brought fortune, were carefully arranged with designer furniture – Mies van der Rohe and Saarinen pieces among them. It is unsurprising that we now have traveling exhibits dedicated to her style, her clothes, her surroundings. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/touring/georgia_okeeffe_living_modern

Cottonwood (Detail), ca. 1952 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

And above all there was that myth making of the independent, strong, lonely recluse seeking solitude in the acrid Southwest after life got too complicated on the East Coast. I had trouble squaring my images of recluses with someone having a house keeper, a gardener, a staff, and a coterie of friends, neighbors and endless groupies while floating on ever growing fame as a true American modernist. She objected to be associated with anything commercial (allusions to the fact that some of her paintings foreshadowed pop art infuriated her) but her ascent was driven, in part, by the commercial aptitude of her husband, photographer, artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, a much older man.

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SO WHAT SHIFTED? Why have I started to see the artist and her art with new eyes and a certain appreciation? It was a combination of three factors during my recent visit to Santa Fe. I saw her early work in the lovely museum dedicated to her (https://www.okeeffemuseum.org).

Black Lines, 1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Abstraction with Curve and Circle, 1915-1916 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
 

I watched a documentary movie that the museum offers, in which the artist ruminates on her own life, and I experienced the landscape of New Mexico for the first time.

Black Place III, 1944 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The museum offered the usual biographic time line. Born in 1887 to farmers in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe teaches school in rural Texas after training at the Art Institute in Chicago. She takes up with Stieglitz, a leading promoter of modern art, and becomes part of an influential intellectual circle that catapults American art out of the dark ages, including names now extremely familiar to us, among them “Make it new!” Ezra Pound and “The Local is the Universal!” William Carlos Williams. She is close friends with another photographer and protégé of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, as well as his wife Rebecca and later Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. When her husband turns to even younger women and their marriage falls apart she moves to the Southwest, having visited every summer previously for many, many years.

All that I knew. I now learned, that this path was also riddled with disease and breakdowns (psychiatric wards included,) not as extreme as that of her friend Frida’s, but enough to stress how strong she must have been to go her independent ways. I was also drawn in when she talks about happiness in the documentary. She said something along the lines that happiness is insubstantial and short-lived for most people. What counts is being interested and that she was. She also took, she insisted, throughout life what she wanted.

In the Patio VII, 1950 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

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INTERESTED SHE WAS: it shows in her ways of learning and applying principles developed by other artists – and then giving those principles her own rendering, taking what she wanted, whether that meant sticking to abstraction, or emulating strands of Neue Sachlichkeit. Being able to see her early abstractions, not painted in oil, made that particularly clear to me. These lovely watercolors herald later form and point the way to her insistence on 2-dimensionality, even in her landscapes.

Black Mesa Landscape NM/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Interest helped her to extract what she could use from all these photographers around her: endlessly modeling for Stieglitz, Strand, Adams and later Webb did not stop her from taking from this art form what made her paintings part of the American Avant-garde: she zoomed in and out in her depictions, as if she had those different lenses, shifting from macro to wide-angle renderings, making things big that were small and vice versa. Lessons of scale drawn from photography clearly influence her during most of her career.

                                                   Ram’s Horn I, ca 1949 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

(And talking about photography – it drives me to distraction that every exhibit of her work that I have ever seen or read about, is paired with photographs of her by all these famous men in her life. It really has the viewer focus on her as a subject rather than her as the agent of her art.) But she took what she wanted: she left when it suited her, she stood by her artistic vision even when pressed to adapt to that of those around her and she experimented with relationships at a time where it took even more courage than it does today.

Interest made her a world traveler – particularly later in life when she went all over the place, always to return to her home in New Mexico where she finally settled in 1949, three years after Stieglitz’ death. And this landscape, as I now understand having seen it, provides a superb match to anyone with photographic sensibility. The thin air and the way it affects vision upends our usual ability to judge distance; in this way her paintings are quite literal depictions, only intensified by her proclivity towards abstraction. It is also a landscape in which anything incidental disappears when trying to brave the harsh elements, the dryness, wind, dust, heat or cold. That, too, is captured in O’Keeffe’s work, with its singular focus.

  A Piece of Wood, 1942 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The ground she walked and worked on in NM consists of compressed material from volcanic eruptions called Tuff. It is a soft substance, crumbly, easily destroyed – everything the artist was not, even though she had to endure one of the worst nightmares imaginable for a visual artist: macular degeneration. It appeared first in 1964, and her last unassisted oil painting was finished in 1974. She died in 1986, 98 years old. She might have been self-absorbed, vain, single-minded, but she also was vulnerable, thoughtful and above all, tough. Can’t help but like that, and allowing it to color the assessment of her art.

Church Steeple, 1930 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

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INTERESTED SHE WAS AND INTERESTING SHE REMAINS. If you are curious to learn more about O’Keeffe, here is your chance: The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust education presents Carolyn Burke on Tuesday, 4/30 at noon. The renowned author will discuss her book,  Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury. 

http://www.ojmche.org/events/2019-brown-bag-with-carolyn-burke

And if you are lucky, you will have a chance to listen to a new opera about O’Keeffe wherever it will next be produced. Today it rains with music by Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed just saw its world premiere in San Francis late March. It is staged as a train ride that O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand take to NM, where they play drunken games and talk about their lives. https://operaparallele.org/today-it-rains-2/

The only musical excerpt I could find is late in this clip, start at 25:00: And yes, it’s modern chamber opera. You know what that means.

Photographs today were taken completely independently of the paintings in NM and only later matched up. Talk about translations of a landscape….


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A Change of Weather

On my last full day in New Mexico I drove to Frijoles Canyon to explore the Bandelier National Monument. It is located within the Pajarito Plateau which was formed by two eruptions of the Jemez volcano nearby, more than a million years ago.

Each of these eruptions were about six hundred times more powerful than that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Just saying.

The rocks you are seeing in the photographs are actually volcanic ash, compacted over time into a crumbly rock called tuff.

It can be easily eroded by the weather or human tools – and indeed the Ancestral Pueblo people living here more than 10.000 years ago made their homes in the rocks, enlarging existing holes and caves and building in front of them.

Both petroglyphs and pictographs can be found here

A small, seemingly innocuous creek runs through the canyon, bearing water all year long, so important for human habitation, and even more so in this arid climate. The regular 10 cubic feet per second (cfs) occasionally converts into flash floods.

A horrid one in recent history followed the 2011 Las Conchas Wildfire, that completely destroyed the upper watershed of the stream.

The creek surged with 7.000 cfs of water; in 2013 it got even worse with a flash flood of 9.000 cfs – the piles you see in the pictures are the left overs of the uprooted trees and rocks and other debris that haven’t been cleared by the National Park Service. At the time they came down the mountain in waves reportedly three stories high. The clip shows the flood coming into the parking lot of the site.

https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/photosmultimedia/flood913.htm

These kind of weather-related events probably happened across the centuries but are now increasing in frequency. They would have cost many lives during the times people actually inhabited the canyon. In general, their life expectancy was short, 35 years on average, women regularly dying in childbirth and almost everyone suffering from bad teeth and arthritis. Men were responsible for hunting, constructing and weaving, while women did the farming, (grid gardens and scattered fields all across the mesa in hopes that localized rains would water at least some of the crop of beans, corn and squash), took care of the children, cooked, made pottery and regularly plastered the outer walls of the buildings.

I fiddled with my own life expectancy by deciding to dare climb into the restored cliff dwellings. It was worth it, but, honestly, a challenge. Some kind woman spontaneously offered to take a picture of me, so here is factual evidence in case you don’t believe me.

You had to do several of these, some longer than others, interspersed with staircases

I envied the ravens and the swallows who sail seemingly without efforts between the canyon walls.

Inside the cliff dwelling looking out into the canyon

Not much bird life to be seen, overall, although I did luck out with two owls, closer to Albuquerque, one sitting on the nest and her partner guarding them from across the path.

Her head is peeking out of the hole

Also spotted were quails, a curved beak thrasher and an occasional woodpecker. And here you thought you’d get away from bird pictures…

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A Change in Assessment

Maybe it’s just me, but one of the most glaring juxtapositions during my stay in New Mexico seemed that between the wide open sky and landscapes, and the squat, walled-off architecture surrounded by coyote fences.

Todays photographs are trying to capture the vastness of the landscape, but cannot really replicate the feeling you have when you stand under that enormous sky.

Steel Bridge over the Rio Grande near Taos


Imagery does better when it comes to depicting the Pueblo Revival architecture that is so prevalent in Santa Fe and Taos. Wikipedia tells me that “It was popularized in the 1920s and 1930s by a group of artists and architects seeking to establish a unique regional identity. In 1957, a committee led by John Gaw Meem drafted Santa Fe “H” Historical District Regulations Ordinance No. 1957-18, commonly known as the Historical Zoning Ordinance. This ordinance mandated the use of the “Old Santa Fe Style,” which encompassed “so-called Pueblo, Pueblo-Spanish or Spanish-Indian and Territorial styles,” on all new buildings in central Santa Fe. This ordinance remains in effect, meaning the Pueblo style continues to predominate.”

Pasqual’s Eatery


My lovely Air B&B neighborhood
Taos

The style draws from the historical craft of both the indigenous people and the Spanish colonialist. Buildings used sun-dried clay bricks mixed with grass for strength, mud-mortared, and covered with additional protective layers of mud. These adobe homes are characterized by flat roofs and soft, rounded contours. If they use more modern materials these days, they still mimic the appearances with paint and clay applications. Roofs are supported by a network of vigas — long beams whose ends protrude through the outer facades — and latillas, smaller stripped branches layered between the vigas.

https://www.frommers.com/destinations/new-mexico/in-depth/architecture

Clearly the form has a function: the truly harsh weather conditions – ice cold in the winters, mercilessly hot in the summer -are held at bay by the thick walls, houses ducking away from the strong winds.

The fences had utility as well, as their name implies: livestock had to be protected against coyotes, and the fences were makeshift constructions from anything found in the landscape. They reminded me of the Japanese term Wabi-Sabi (侘寂)– a traditional Japanese aesthetics embracing transience and imperfection, acknowledging a beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

Modern structures emulate at least the feel of ducking under that sky.

Even the churches are squat, offering protective walls rather than stretching proudly or haughtily into the heavens.

At the end of my stay I felt there was after all a certain harmony between disparate needs and elements, rather than what I had earlier assessed as defiance against a kind of void.

 Folklorist Juan B. Rael, who was born into the Spanish culture of NM, documented songs of religious holidays, religious plays, and secular songs as performed by members of the community in 1940. Here are some terrific examples:

https://www.loc.gov/item/raelbib000120/
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A Change of Occupiers

The first humans to come to what we now call the United States got here on foot. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia some 20.000 years ago, perhaps even 30.000 – 40.000 years ago. They made their way up and down the coast by boats, nomadic tribes often driven to new places by changes in climate. Scarcity of food led to various intertribal fighting for resources, a culture fostering warriors, but also to tribal migration to climes where they could eventually settle.

The North American Indian people who live in permanent compact settlements in New Mexico are known as Pueblos, descending from the pre-historic Ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi). The eastern Pueblo villages are in New Mexico along the Rio Grande and comprise groups who speak Tanoan and Keresan languages, comprised of Tiwa, Town and Tewa, as well as Athabaskan.

At the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1539, the Pueblos had autonomously governed villages, where decisions were made in subterranean ceremonial chambers called Kivas. Hunting and gathering was supplanted by farming of corn, squash and cotton – the only crops available. Complex irrigation ditches were constructed and lined with clay to preserve water (the latter giving archeologists a leg up in mapping the water systems.) Plant plots were sheltered with gravel to prevent evaporation. Societies were matrilineal (inheritance went down the female line) and matrilocal (boys married into the villages of the girls.)

Hunting was communal, including the hunt for rabbits – up to 60 people at a time would cut their hair and weave it into hare-nets, enormously long structures that snared the bunnies, some persevered from 11.000 BC in the museum where I learned all the rest of it: the MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE in Santa Fe.

I had gone there to explore their exhibit Beyond Standing Rock which highlights encroachments and violations of Native American sovereignty, many of which have impacted Native health and sacred lands and describes what led up to the DAPL protests. http://miaclab.org/current&eventID=4044

As luck would have it, I was invited to a practically private 2 hour tour of the museum with an incredibly knowledgeable docent, who taught about the archeological finds, but also the bloody history the Pueblo people had to endure. Although they managed, after 90 years of Spanish colonization, to unite in rebellion and reclaim their land and independence (as well as the horses, sheep and fruit trees introduced by the conquistadores,) that success didn’t last long.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/10/1680-the-pueblo-revolt/

After the reconquest in 1691, villages adapted to colonial rule by incorporating some aspects of the dominant culture necessary for survival while maintaining the basic fabric of traditional cultured in some instances converting to Christianity.

Skip forward to the appropriation of land and treatment of indigenous peoples by the US government and military, with forced relocations, death marches and concentration camps that claimed every 2nd life of those displaced in the 19th century. Less deadly but psychologically equally damning were the more recent attempts to Kill the Indian in him and save the Man, which was the motto of U.S. government forcing tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation

Judicial decisions by the Supreme Court managed to weaken protections for the sedentary Pueblos wherever they could.

The United States Supreme Court, in the 1876 United States versus Joseph, declared that the Intercourse Act of 1834 was not applicable to the Pueblos of New Mexico. The Court viewed the Pueblos as having a settled, domestic existence and therefore were not subject to laws which were passed for the protection and civilization of “wild Indians.” The ruling denied the Pueblos the protection of the federal government and placed them within the jurisdiction of the local courts and officials. The Court did not define the Pueblos as citizens, and thus they did not have the right to vote, nor did they have the right to hold public office. While the Court excluded the Pueblos from participation in political life, it opened up the way for their lands to be appropriated for private enterprise by non-Indians.

https://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1066

In a most interesting bit, my docent added to descriptions of these politics a terse report on HUD, our Housing and Development Administration. HUD is actively building and distributing housing for descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo people. These dwellings, however, are rigidly restricted to sizes accommodating only a core family. The previously common multi-generational living situations are thus disrupted; this has the consequence that transmission of ancestral language, culture and religious practice by daily interactions with the elders is no longer happening. A sly mechanism to force acculturation, in the guise of guaranteed electricity and indoor plumbing.

I was trying to digest all this during a somewhat challenging hike at Kasha-Katuwe National Monuments (Tent Rock) within the lands of the Cochiti Pueblo. The canyon trail is a one-way trek into a narrow, “slot” canyon with a steep (630-ft) climb to the mesa top. One scraped knee and a head bursting with pride of my stamina later I enjoyed the excellent views of the Sangre de Cristo, Jemez, Sandia mountains and the Rio Grande Valley.

https://music.si.edu/video/members-cochiti-pueblo-perform-eagle-dance-2000-smithsonian-folklife-festival

And here are some interesting voices from a different pueblo.

And here are some photos taken by E. Curtis in the early 1900s in New Mexico – these are postcards, I was not allowed to photograph in the museum itself.

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A Change of Color

Not only did I have a change in scenery, but also changes in color perception. I am one lucky woman, still trying to process all I saw and learned from a week in New Mexico.

I will report on it all peu à peu, but will start with a palette of colors while I get settled at home, do the laundry and appease the dog who wasn’t happy with my absence.

Here’s the thing about color at hight altitudes – Santa Fe is at 7199 ft (2194 m): Because there is less air to scatter, all colors (wavelength) are darkened. This is particularly true for the sky: It is actually black, but during the daytime it’s illuminated by mostly blue scattered sunlight. The higher the altitude, the dimmer is the blue scattered illumination, so you start to see more of the basic black of the sky. Let me tell you, the sky is insanely dark blue up there! You’ll get to see more of it when I’ll describe my hikes, but for now this should give you a taste.

In addition, the customary pairing of blue accents on orange adobe buildings of the region maximizes color intensity since these two colors are complimentary on opposing sites of the color wheel.

Enjoy the sampling, before I hit you with the history of the state….. and of course other colors ruled, too:

Music today is a contemporary folk group – a tiny bit of delay at the beginning of the clip, but then a wonderful rendition of diverse NM traditions wedded to new music.
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A Journey in Sound

If you are like me your household chores have suffered across the holidays. (Not the holidays’ fault but my indulgence in an extra dose of Netflix – I am here to report that I have progressed from November’s Chinese Soap Opera, via -terrific- Korean historic fiction, Turkish fantasy -forgettable except for the footage on Istanbul which recalled wonderful memories- to a German horror movie. Yes, keep your reaction to yourself. I already live with enough raised eyebrows around here…. )

That said, the pile of ironing is waiting, and what better than to tackle it while listening to the sounds of another country that I will never see, but want to know more about.

The BBC has this terrific series called Documentary, and in one segment Alastair Leithead, the BBC’s Africa Correspondent, takes you on an epic adventure in sound across the Democratic Republic of Congo. He basically narrates his trip (I assume only possible because they plunged mega bucks on guards and guides and audio crew, quite frankly) but also records all the sounds during his journey. It is fascinating.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06vm1jd 

Congo has, of course been in the news – if certain US government officials watched anything other than FOX they might even get ideas: another way to suppress voting by undesirable constituencies? Claim it is too dangerous for public health! Details here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-congo-election/vote-delayed-in-three-congo-opposition-districts-wont-count-toward-presidential-result-idUSKCN1OP0J9

I am not kidding, either. The second worst outbreak in history of the dreaded Ebola disease has been used as justification by outgoing President Kabila and his cronies to decree that three opposition strongholds will not be allowed to vote until March – when swearing in of the newly elected president – the elections are this Sunday – will take place in January.

If you have not yet read or long forgotten (unlikely) Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, it is your best introduction to the history of the Congo, in a novel that has some of the strongest character development in recent memory. It is a beautiful and deeply moving book that also makes you aware of struggles that have not appeared in our history books. Or at least not mine.

.http://mentalfloss.com/article/62832/13-things-you-may-not-know-about-poisonwood-bible

For music today it will be Grand Maitre Franco singing Attention Na Sida (he died of complications from Aids in the late 80s, 2 years after he recorded this). The origin of the epidemic was in 1920s Kinshasa, now Democratic Republic of Congo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=156&v=OkfYs2_r1y8

My photographs are of flamingos, my approximation of visiting the tropics…. The Democratic Republic of Congo houses 4 species of those strange birds.

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No Hanukkah in Mongolia

An astonishing piece of writing appeared some 5 years ago in the New Yorker. Ariel Levy’s autobiographical essay on having a miscarriage during a trip to Mongolia when she was 5 moths pregnant, combined the most ruthlessly honest introspection with the clarity and sensibility of a war reporter.  Read it and weep.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/18/thanksgiving-in-mongolia

The author, still a staff writer for the New Yorker, will appear for a discussion of her new book here in PDX , having a conversation with Cheryl Strayed and Danzy Senna on March 29, 2019, at the Portland Ballroom.

I had thought I might riff off her title, Thanksgiving in Mongolia, with a Hanukkah in Mongolia, but alas it turns out there are no Jews there. Well, fewer than 100;  those 600 or so who had fled from Russia in the 1920s were purged and killed by White Russians in 1921. A few families still lived outside of the capital, but most left after the breakup of the Soviet Union and emigrated to Israel.  Mongolia had known shamanism and freedom of worship, then Buddhism throughout the centuries; once it became a satellite state of the Soviet Union, all religion was forbidden, some 30.000 Buddhist monks shot and most temples destroyed. Since the 1990s a number of Christian sects are arriving to proselytize the country which has experienced a mining boom, inviting expert personell and workers.

Mongolia has the lowest population density in the world, its capital Ulaan Baatar, the coldest capital on earth, sporting half of the entire population with 1.5 million inhabitants, all breathing in the most polluted air imaginable. The country is huge, stretching from, for sake of comparison, the latitudes of Berlin in Northern Europe to Rome in Southern Europe. Endless steppes are bounded by high mountains on one end and the Gobi desert on the other. It is hot in summer and extremely cold and windy in winter. It is also subject to occasional harsh climatic conditions known as Zud, which is a natural disaster unique to Mongolia, resulting in large proportions of the country’s livestock dying from starvation or freezing temperatures or both, producing economic upheaval for the largely pastoral, nomadic population. They rely to large parts on the export of their cashmere wool, sold to exorbitant prices here as luxury goods, paying them pennies to the dollar.

 

I would give a lot to be able to travel across Mongolia and photograph the landscape in all its variations. The pictures I have seen capture a raw natural beauty of vast spaces, high skies, colors suffused with light. I do not have the stamina, though, for the conditions of travel, even with some pricey National Geographic tour offerings, that provide the guides, the rides, the yurts.  You are responsible for your own flight to Beijing and then Ulaan Baatar on top of it.  For large parts there would be no electricity to charge the camera batteries and I could not possibly scrounge up or justify $10.000 for a 2 week trip.

 

Just as well, I sit in the comfort of my room, listening to what the world out there holds, from traditional throat singing music

to the newest band combining traditional instruments with modern rock, eating fritos instead of mutton stew (I can’t stand sheepy, lamby meat) and sifting through my snowflake photos in honor of the Mongolian climate in December.

These snowflakes, by the way, stitched with a sowing machine, were found in a Montavilla Sewing store run by a lovely Ukrainian woman in Lake Oswego who invited me in to photograph when she saw me peering through the window.

 

 

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Happy Hanukkah

 

This week Hanukkah is upon us, fatty foods, hypocrisy and all. Or so I read in the NYT, which reaffirms what I thought was common knowledge all along (click on the picture for the link). From the article:

According to most modern scholars — and a few rabbis I called on to help me out — the story of Hanukkah is based on a historical conflict between the Maccabees and the Hellenized Jews, the former being religious zealots who lived in the hills of Judea and practiced an ancient form of guerrilla warfare, the latter being mostly city-dwelling assimilationists who ate pork, didn’t circumcise their male children and made the occasional sacrificial offering to pagan gods.
Some of the details are up for debate, depending on which texts you consult. But everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews. So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism. Our assimilationist answer to Christmas is really a holiday about subjugating assimilated Jews.

 

Let’s blissfully forget about the politics and focus on the presents, one per day, that I am going to give to myself this week: an imaginary trip that will allow me to meet interesting people and explore new places. I am starting with the mountains of Tajikistan and a man who is a paragon of determination, curiosity and adaptation:

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/576898/botanist/

I learned of Raimberdi, an Kyrgyz man from a nomadic tribe in the Pamir mountains, through a short documentary I chanced upon (link above.) After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan was thrown into a civil war and to this day is utterly bereft of essentials for survival (food, kerosine, gasoline etc) which were previously supplied by the Russians (who the protagonist claims are bitterly missed.)

Raimberdi engineered a hydroelectric power station out of junk he found, invented numerous things to ease the life in his poor village, including reliable means to start cooking fires, and, most importantly, leaned into botany to reclaim the ancient knowledge of the remedial properties of plants growing in this desert region. He is also a volunteer teacher inside and outside the classroom to impart his cultural knowledge on future generations.

Role model then, reminding me of the luxuries of my own life which stands in such stark contrast to what the Kyrgyz have to endure.

Photographs are in honor of botany, but also of contrast: nothing more luxuriously green and damp in this season of brown  backgrounds than ferns, in comparison to the desiccated flora of the Pamir mountains.

Green is also the color of hope – maybe one day there will be (Hanukkah) miracles that have nothing to do with war, power, survival…in a world less mad.

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Carlisle, PA

When you amble through the streets of Carlisle, a town of less than 20 000 inhabitants in Cumberland County, PA, you get an impression of a sleepy past. Well maintained and beautifully restored buildings exhibit plaques showing their age.

Quiet porches beckon.

 

 

 

 

People shout friendly Hello’s and Halloween decorations sprout wherever you look.

 

The air smells sweet of cider and pumpkin spices (little do you know that you are also inhaling a pollutant called PM2.5 – because of Carlisle’s  location at the intersection of two major trucking routes (I-81 and I-76), air pollution within the borough often falls within the range considered by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.”)

Little do you also know, or at least I did, until I read up on the history of the place, that this small place was involved in major events in US history. Founded in 1751 by American pioneer John Armstrong it soon became headquarters for army expeditions in the French and Indian Wars and Pontiac’s War in 1761. It housed the munitions depot in the American Revolutionary War (which later became the US Army War College which to this day educates officers.)

In 1787, Anti-Federalists instigated a riot in Carlisle in response to a planned march in favor of the United States Constitution. George Washington assembled his troops there during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. During the Civil war, an army of the Confederate States of America, under General Fitzhugh Lee, attacked and shelled the borough during the Battle of Carlisle on July 1, 1863 as part of the Gettysburg Campaign – Carlisle also served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

 

One of the signers of the Constitution, Benjamin Rush, founded Dickinson College, these days an excellent liberal arts college. (Oh, Wikipedia, what would I do without you….)

 

 

 

None of that is apparent when you walk through quaint alleys, colorful mews, in a town proud of its annual car shows (whose majority of attending car salesmen seemingly decided that my hotel floor was the perfect place to congregate at 3 am in the morning, drinks and all…)

You do notice the large number of old shade trees lining the streets, making it a beautiful green place to walk. Turns out Carlisle has the distinction of being a tree city, which implies having a tree board or department, an  established community ordinance for tree care, a community forestry program with an annual budget of at least $2 per capita and an Arbor Day observance and proclamation. That care for the protection of nature almost lets you forget that Cumberland County votes solidly Republican, straight down the ticket.

I was there for a lovely, lovely wedding; its happiness blotted out, thankfully, all thought of war, constitutions, American politics for a blissful weekend. Taking my breaks, where I can find them.

Here is a folk song from the Civil War era.

 

 

 

 

 

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Infamous poet, ineffectual spy.

So far this week, aside from a guy on balls, we’ve met a woman pretending to be a man, a woman acting like a man (instantiated lust and violence included) and today we’ll travel with an Englishwoman from the early 1600s who was scorned for making money as an independent writer. More tellingly, she was attacked for her open discourse on sex and relationships, depicting in no uncertain terms the double standards held for women and men and writing about (homo)sexuality like a man.

Aphra Behn’s writing, in novels, plays and poems, was considered scandalous; even posthumously, centuries later, people like Alexander Pope and contemporaries had this to say: Behn “might have been an honor to womanhood—she was its disgrace. She might have gained glory by her labors—she chose to reap infamy.”

Robert Markley, a current scholar of 17th century theatre, phrases it this way: “In their ironic treatment of female chastity and masculine constancy…her comedies present a sophisticated and sympathetic understanding of the ideological complexities of women’s existence in a misogynistic society.”

She had quite a bit of adventure under her belt before she rose to “infamy:” travel to Surinam, where she met and befriended some of the natives, leading to a searing condemnation of slavery in her most famous novel Oroonoko. An assignment as spy under the code name Astrea, hired by Charles II during the Interregnum to find and turn some guy in Holland, a job that she failed miserably. She was thrown into debtor’s prison because her meager allowance ran out and she had been borrowing money for the trip back to England, money that the British government refused to refund. Eventually she started writing enormously successful plays with psychological insights way ahead of her times.

Heralded by her peers as a successor to Sappho, her poetry was explicit about sexuality. Her most famous poem is called The Disappointment.  Here is a quote about if from the Poetry Foundation: (click on title to read the poem.)

“The Disappointment” has been traditionally interpreted to be about impotence. But it is also about rape, another kind of potency test, and presents a woman’s point of view cloaked in the customary language of male physical license and sexual access to females. The woman’s perspective in this poem provides the double vision that plays the conventional against the experiential.”

More detailed discussion of her works are here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43639/the-disappointment

And her life in general, here:

The First English Woman to Make a Living as a Writer Was Also a Spy

I was struck when I compared these three adventure-seeking women as to how much they had in common, across centuries: they were not willing to conform to the gender rules of their times, and tied sexuality in direct and explicit ways to their assessment of gender relations or their enactment of gender relations – throwing all caution to the wind. They were willing to be bad girls, in contrast to the good little women who surrounded them. Got to see the world, too, this way.

Yesterday’s NYT editorial spoke to this distinction of Madonna/Whore in clear and concise ways, and clarified the role of misogyny as “the law enforcement arm of patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing norms and expectations.” Including the function of punishing the bad girls and rewarding the good ones….  click on photo for full article.   Hey, I stayed away from contemporary politics for at least 6 paragraphs!

Photographs from Holland, where Behn did not excel at spying.

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