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Poetry

Rebels Welcome

The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)

I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.

The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)

What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.

What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?

The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“

Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)

Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.

Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)

Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.

Let’s read up on our history!

Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.

Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.

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Got Milkweed?

· Lepidoptera Patterns ·

On those days where my body is off and my brain stuck in first gear, I have to practically force myself to go out for a walk. I’m so glad I did this last Saturday, one of those days, and chanced on a garden planted for butterflies while walking along the tree-shaded streets of the Irvington neighborhood.

As luck would have it, the owner of the property, attired in a butterfly sweatshirt that distracted from her porcelain features and clear blue eyes, was out there weeding and perfectly happy to show this stranger around.

Ida Galash has been interested in butterflies all of her life, a passion that led to the decision to plant a serious butterfly garden about 2 years ago. It hosts zinnias, dahlias, Japanese anemones, fuchsias, coneflowers, lantanas, fig tree, roses, crepe myrtle bushes and so many more, arranged with an artistic eye.

The crucial ingredient is, of course, milkweed. This plant is the singular food source for Monarch caterpillars, and it comes in a variety of shapes and forms. Poisonous to the core, it took one of those evolutionary miracles that the monarchs adapted to this plant by only three simple genetic mutations, storing its toxin in their body as a defense against birds.

My luck in finding this garden pales compared to the owner’s when a monarch actually deposited eggs in her garden some weeks ago.

Or maybe it was not luck but nature’s grateful reciprocity towards someone who has become a guardian of dwindling resources in a world where monarch butterfly habitat disappears by the minute. Between climate change, forest fires and ever-more built-up environments, the butterflies are under enormous stress in their migrations.

Ida carefully collected the eggs, sharing them with another monarch enthusiast and protected them against predators and suddenly cool nights in various forms of shelter. They did hatch after a few days and the larva (caterpillars) happily munched on freshly provided milkweed leaves.

Two weeks later they attached themselves to a leaf or stem via little threads of silk that they spin and then the metamorphosis into a gold-flecked chrysalis began. Eventually a fully formed butterfly will emerge, about 10-15 days later.

Here is the chrysalis.

During the course of a summer there will be 4 generations of monarchs going through this cycle, with all but the last one having an average life span of about 6 weeks. The 4th generation, emerging from eggs usually laid in September or October, will live many months, enough to migrate to California or Mexico to survive the winters in warmer weather, before it returns to the NorthWest in early summer.

If it returns. Monarchs, although weighing less than a paperclip, make their way South and back along three butterfly “highways,” but the numbers are steadily falling. It is not just the loss of their habitats, which have been subsumed by intensive monoculture, orchards, vineyards and farms, but also the decline of species of the milkweed plant, the only one that can sustain their breeding. Pesticide use has decimated them. Warming ocean waters intensify hurricanes that kill the monarchs on their flight. Trees used for roosting are sickened by unusual heat and diseases that flourish with climate change, or logged for insatiable commercial interest.

If you want to read a spirited book about their quirks and voyages, borrow a copy of Wendy William’s The Language of Butterflies – How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect.

If you want to read an intensely moving essay about conservationists and their fight for the survival of monarchs, check out the attachment below. It is long, but worth it, and includes for us Oregonians a depiction of a local miracle: a female monarch defied the “disperse your eggs widely” rule and laid some 600 eggs in one garden in Brookings, OR. Over the next months they counted 2700 in that yard, and more than 5000 across the small town.

Long May They Reign

Individual actions matter, whether planting a garden with the appropriate habitat, or helping others to do so. I found various suggestions on this informative website. In general you can think about distributing seed packages to Halloween trick or treaters, to schools, to restaurants or any community organization. You can also spread the seeds in public areas in hopes some will take, rewilding, in some ways, what was once the natural habitat. You can get kits and together with your children grow butterflies at home and release them after they emerge. You can fill goodie bags for wedding guests with seed packages instead of chachkas. More tips can be found on the Portland Monarchs FB site, where I also discovered this visual time line:

And all this can be done in the relative safety of these Northwest parts. Actually, I should not treat the topic of safety lightly. As it turns out numerous key figures in the preservation movement for monarch butterflies have been either threatened severely or killed outright last year.

“Mariana Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has endured months of escalating rape and death threats in response to her butterfly conservation work along the Rio Grande. The center is an ecological mecca and home to 240 species of butterflies, a third of the total found within the United States…she has found herself in the crosshairs of white nationalists hellbent on erecting a border wall…By the time of a restraining order, though, Build the Wall’s three-and-a-half-mile “border” wall in Mission was well under way, and the National Butterfly Center estimates that for every mile of barrier, twenty acres of habitat are obliterated. The sanctuary’s ecological value exceeds the life within its boundaries, for it serves as a vital natural corridor, not least for monarchs on the move. The towering wall and razed habitat threaten far more than human and butterfly migrants. If the Rio Grande floods—as it did in 2018 when the river rose sixteen feet overnight—fleeing wildlife such as bobcat, coatimundis, and peccaries will literally hit a wall and drown en masse.” (Ref.)

Some 700 miles south, two butterfly preservationists were actually killed. Homero Gómez González, who managed Mexico’s El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Preserve, got in the way of illegal logging – the desirable oyamel firs down south anchor the butterflies’ life cycle and are already stressed by climate disruption – as well as clandestine avocado growing, making enemies of those who saw potential earnings dwindle.

Raúl Hernández Romero, who worked as an ecotourist guide in a section of the vast Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that UNESCO declared a world heritage site in 2008 and who vocally denounced logging as well, was stabbed to death in the same week. Both murders occurred in the Mexican state of Michoacán, directly west of Mexico City. Michoacán is home to the world’s largest monarch roosts, but it is also a hotspot for violence stemming from organized crime.

They are not the only ones. The annual report of Defending Tomorrow chronicles the persecution and assassination of environmental defenders worldwide. The international organization focusses on abusive actors, misuse of power and financial flows, but also now on the climate crisis. In 2019 Mexico ranked as one of the most dangerous societies in which to take a stand for environmental and human rights.

The threat to butterflies really comes from all angles. Let’s give them a hand. Or a plant, as the case may be. Got milkweed?

And this from a poet born in 1830:

Milkweed

Helen Hunt Jackson

O patient creature with a peasant face, 
Burnt by the summer sun, begrimed with stains, 
And standing humbly in the dingy lanes! 
There seems a mystery in thy work and place, 
Which crowns thee with significance and grace; 
Whose is the milk that fills thy faithful veins? 
What royal nursling comes at night and drains 
Unscorned the food of the plebeian race? 
By day I mark no living thing which rests 
On thee, save butterflies of gold and brown, 
Who turn from flowers that are more fair, more sweet, 
And, crowding eagerly, sink fluttering down, 
And hang, like jewels flashing in the heat, 
Upon thy splendid rounded purple breasts.

Photograph from poison control website.

What I saw in real life across the last weeks were a California Sister, an Admiral and a Western Swallowtail if I read the guide books correctly.

Here sings Schubert’s butterfly. And here are hands made by Chopin to flutter like a butterfly.

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Thistles and Neuronal Networks

I intend to keep my promise to write this week about nothing but uplifting, constructive or beautiful things that I find right under my nose. Here is the second installment, triggered by the beauty of thistles that are in full thistle-down stage in the meadows around me. The fluff formations always remind me of neuronal networks and so it was no coincidence that I ended up looking at neuroscience art. What I settled on, though, were not images, but a truly fun experience with language that you all can have as well.

Among the contestants of the 2021 Art of Neuroscience Contest was an entry by Simon Demeule and Pauline Palma from the University of Montreal/McGill University, an interactive program called

What Lies Ahead.

If you click the link it will bring up a few words of explanation and then the invitation to start writing – just type in your first line (no need to click anywhere) and you will see what unfolds. The program is an interactive poetic experience that explores themes of artificial intelligence, language, psychology, and intent. Here is their explanation:

Through a simple text-based interface, this piece creates a game of exquisite corpse between the participant and a text-generating AI, an altered version of GPT-2 trained on the vast Gutenberg English literature corpus. As the synthetic responses unfold, words cascade through all configurations considered by the algorithm, partly unveiling the black box process within. The human tendencies captured by the algorithm resurface, produced by a machine that fundamentally lacks intent. 

As the participant is presented with ambiguity and absurdity, their cognitive ability to bridge gaps and construct meaning becomes the guiding force that steers the evolution of the piece. In turn, participant’s input feeds the algorithm, thereby prompting interpretation again. Through this cyclical, almost conversational process, a unique poem emerges. 

This project was created through the Convergence Initiative, an organisation dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary work between the arts and sciences.

I tried it out immediately and realized it would not give me the whole poem at the end. I then took screenshots of the evolution of the next “poem”. Here is what AI and I came up with, our combined brilliance now preserved for all posterity …(Their text on white background):

It is really a fun process if a little disjointed, so I tried once again. Note it is an AI program that was trained on literary Greats, randomly sampling and weighing and spitting out these words.

And here is a poem when a gifted, emotional, no-holds barred wordsmith attacks the thistle theme:

Thistles

by Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

Can we all agree we should leave poetry to actual human beings on their own???

If you still have time and inclination, go back to the art of neuroscience site and look at the other entries – there is so much ingenuity to explore, photography and sculpture included. 175 contestants from over 20 countries submitted nearly 300 submissions, of which one winner and several honorable mentions and staff picks were published.

Album today is Robert Burn’s poetry set to music. The thistle is Scotland’s national flower.

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Walking

These days I am often forced to compromise. I can, for example, walk with my heavy camera for a few kilometers in beloved places if I am willing to pop some pain meds afterwards to calm down angry surgery incisions, and make the following day a rest day. I can also just walk a short round or two in the neighborhood woods without camera and be fine.

On a glorious morning like Wednesday, before the heat descended, I drove out to the wetlands early, willing to pay the price in pharmaceuticals down the road. And was I rewarded! The place was filled with birds doing their morning toilette, visible to all on large snags, fishing for their breakfast in the water. Kingfishers, herons, egrets, hawks and even a Virginia rail (my first ever) – my bet paid off that this would be worth a try.

Kingfisher
Hawk
Blue Heron

A favorite stanza (in bold below) of Traherne’s praise of walking sang in my head – to mind the good we see, to taste the sweet, observing all the things we meet, how choice and rich they be….

Was true in the late 1600s when he lived, is true today. The way he expressed his love for nature anticipated romanticism by some 200 years; those words and sentiments about mindfulness seem perfectly at home in 2021 as well.

Egret got the fish!

We had our share of dismaying musings this week, from the expressions of power in naming to the futility of getting people to leave cults (here is another provocative piece that should have been added to the latter topic.) So I thought we’d end the week on this note of rejoicing, to mind the good we see….

Walking

BY THOMAS TRAHERNE

To walk abroad is, not with eyes, 
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; 
Else may the silent feet, 
Like logs of wood, 
Move up and down, and see no good 
Nor joy nor glory meet. 

Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, 
But cannot see, though very strange 
The glory that is by; 
Dead puppets may 
Move in the bright and glorious day, 
Yet not behold the sky. 

And are not men than they more blind, 
Who having eyes yet never find 
The bliss in which they move; 
Like statues dead 
They up and down are carried 
Yet never see nor love. 

To walk is by a thought to go; 
To move in spirit to and fro; 
To mind the good we see; 
To taste the sweet; 
Observing all the things we meet 
How choice and rich they be. 

To note the beauty of the day, 
And golden fields of corn survey; 
Admire each pretty flow’r 
With its sweet smell; 
To praise their Maker, and to tell 
The marks of his great pow’r. 

To fly abroad like active bees, 
Among the hedges and the trees, 
To cull the dew that lies 
On ev’ry blade, 
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade 
Our minds, as they their thighs. 

Observe those rich and glorious things, 
The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs, 
The fructifying sun; 
To note from far 
The rising of each twinkling star 
For us his race to run. 

A little child these well perceives, 
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves, 
May rich as kings be thought, 
But there’s a sight 
Which perfect manhood may delight, 
To which we shall be brought. 

While in those pleasant paths we talk, 
’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk; 
For we may by degrees 
Wisely proceed 
Pleasures of love and praise to heed, 
From viewing herbs and trees.

Pity he forgot to mention birds…..

Music by a contemporary of Traherne’s, Johann Jacob Walther, titled Wohlgepflanzter Violinischer Lustgarten – beautifully planted pleasure garden for the violin.

And here is a Virginia Rail doing morning stretches….

Observe those rich and glorious things…..

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Here. Not Here.

In the two previous blogs I wondered about ways to predict the future and ways to remember the past. So it seems fitting then to round up this week with a way to see the present.

I had connected the former to science, would like to introduce the latter with poetry, along the maxim lodged in my head by the unforgotten, unforgettable Ursula LeGuin (1929-2018):

“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates.”

These lines come from an essay, Deep in Admiration, that precedes the poems in LeGuin’s penultimate book of poetry, Late in the Day. (2015.) (So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018 was published posthumously). In typical fashion the small volume inspires and lifts up, even though it centers around finiteness, both personal and ecological. The poems urge us towards awareness. My mindfulness will never reach the height of observational precision and depth of forming connections among all in the natural world, as did her’s. Nor will I ever succeed in emulating the driest of dry humor that pervades so many of her writings. But it is good to be reminded to try and focus on the here and now. Since as we know it might not exist much longer. The here as much as the now.

Hymn to Time

Ursula K. Le Guin – 1929-2018

Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

And here is to doing all that with elegance and gusto during advanced age…

Artemisia Tridentata

Some ruthlessness befits old age. 
Tender young herbs are generous and pliant, 
but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage 
stands unforthcoming and defiant.

by Ursula LeGuin

Photographs include sage and Eastern Oregon landscapes; music, from a collaboration between LeGuin and Todd Barton, is mind boggling.

“Music and Poetry of the Kesh is the documentation of an invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time, and the soundtrack of famed science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. In the novel, the story of Stone Telling, a young woman of the Kesh, is woven within a larger anthropological folklore and fantasy. 

The ways of the Kesh were originally presented in 1985 as a five hundred plus page book accompanied with illustrations of instruments and tools, maps, a glossary of terms, recipes, poems, an alphabet (Le Guin’s conlang, so she could write non-English lyrics), and with early editions, a cassette of “field recordings” and indigenous song. Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined; she embarked on an elaborate process with her friend Todd Barton to invoke their spirit and tradition.”

In other words, the music and language were invented at the same time the book was written. Listening to it while reading Always coming home was the idea. Details here.

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Cross Fertilization

In truth, what I was looking for was simply some justification to post pictures of the crows that have joined the squirrels, doves and sparrows on the rainy balcony. Poe came to mind, his famous poem about the Raven. Before you know it, I was sucked into essay after interesting essay of Poe’s influence on French artists, in particular Ravel. The composer claimed many times over that Poe’s Philosophy of Composition (which describes the process of creating the Raven in meticulous, almost mathematical ways, and can be read in full in the link) was a key influence on his own principles of composing.

Just as the Anglo world despised Poe (Henry James wrote that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection,” Paul Elmer More thought Poe “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men,” Yeats thought “The Raven” to be “insincere and vulgar,” and Aldous Huxley thought it “shoddy and slipshod,”) the French thinkers and artists embraced him, Ravel, Debussy and Baudelaire among the biggest fans.(Ref.)

Apparently there is debate how seriously Ravel meant it when he said that his own work in composing was built on Poe’s methods, with some convinced of it, and others claiming that he was the eternal trickster, pulling off pranks and maybe luring people in wrong directions. Unclear if their shared interest in being Dandies forged a bond. I wouldn’t know. Nor do I care.

I do care for the music and everyone agrees that some of Ravel’s compositions are in direct reference to some of Poe’s writings. “A Descent into the Maelstrom” was among them, an inspiration to La Valse in 1920, for example.

What is also established, and that is interesting to me, is that Ravel refused to be roped into the rising French nationalism and its focus on ancient and regional French music. He was open to trans-nationalist influences, and looked outwards for inspiration, borrowings, and appropriations from international sources. A good role model in times, then and now, when tribalism, insularity and traditionalism try to constrict art and education on all fronts.

In 1928, Ravel’s extended, successful concert tour of the U.S. introduced him to Gershwin who took him to hear jazz in Harlem. He also visited New Orleans. The harvest of those encounters can be found in his later compositions, the Piano Concerto in G among them. It includes some jazz elements that are profoundly beautiful. Well, the whole piece is. Played by one of my heroines. (Alas, video has ads in-between movements. My favorite is the third movement, if you have only so much time.)

For a detailed biography of Ravel’s life, sexuality, artistic output and philosophy one can turn to Benjamin Ivry’s biography Maurice Ravel – A Life, reviewed here, or Roger Nichols’ Ravel, the most recent one.

Or one can simply listen to his music, with its many layers just like the crows feathers.

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Small Scale

The neighborhood where I have now lived for 35 years is utterly familiar, yet also undergoing constant change. On a larger scale, there are endless trees cut for sub-divisions or single housing, people leaving, people moving in. Families with young children are a welcome addition, and you now hear other languages than plain English on your walks. On a smaller scale, my garden surprises me every year with unpredictable change. This year there’s nary a blueberry on the bush that bent over with them last year, tons of foxgloves have self-seeded, brought in by the wind or the deer, attracting a plethora of bees. The daisies have finally outnumbered the buttercups in the lawn, which took only about 5 years, and the fuchsias have decided to become trees, in full bloom already. It all provides a sense of place.

Italy

It is much harder to get a true sense of place if you only visit, and that for short amounts of time. What will define it when you travel? Your visual impressions? Your interaction with the locals? The landscape that defines the surrounds or the climate? The history that you read up on, maybe? Are you a better able to “get” a place, if you have widely traveled and so can make comparisons? If you go in utterly naive or geared by expectations based on external introductions? Will coincidences play a role, an aversive experience at the hotel, or an unanticipated encounter with the nicest people? These latter events might shape, perhaps, whether you like a place or not, which is different from having a sense of place.

Belgium
Holland

Here is the cause for these musings: Anastasia Savinova, a Ukrainian artist based in Sweden, has generated some creative photo collages, trying to extract a sense of place – Genius Loci – from a large scale entity, a city or rural area, and then injecting it into a small scale object, a building. Guided by architectural cues, visual details, a good sense for local prevalence of certain colors, she constructed these buildings into formations that capture the shapes or ornamentation or idiosyncrasies of places like Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, and cities in Italy and Holland. I had immediate recognition, before reading the labels for most cities, from my own travels which are guided by visual exploration more than anything else, which meant she really captured something that is specific to each place. Pretty nifty.

Paris
Berlin

The most successful montages, less compressed and calmer, are, in my opinion, the ones that depict places in her geographic vicinity, the Scandinavian countries she lives in or has often visited. Perhaps longstanding exposure. living in a place, leads to true familiarity. This in turn allows you to distill an essence after all, not just a jumbling of multitudinous elements that caught your attention on the road, no matter how much they are part of the reality of those cities. Whatever one thinks of the printed works – they might speak more to those who have the lovely jolt of recognition – the idea itself is creative.

Will I ever travel again? Will the experience change after this eternal time of confinement? Why can my desire to roam not be stilled, even when I have the perfect model right in front of me, a wonderfully snippy ode to small scale familiarity by Billy Collins?

                                            
                 A Sense of Place


If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place–

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York’s Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing a chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape–
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird–
little courier with someplace to go–

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

by       Billy Collins

Photographs were chosen to add life to the depicted places – people I photographed in the cities captured in the collages.

Music will stretch our brain a bit, a beautiful performance by the Kronos Quartett. I figured a focus on the planet is needed to balance out a focus on an armchair….

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Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

I am generally not a fan of Charles Bukowski’s writings. A thought-provoking essay on the man, his life and his work, some years back in the New Yorker, pretty much summed it up for me: “Bukowski’s poetry,… is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive.”  The underground poet was born in 1920 in Germany and moved as a three-year old to Los Angeles where he died of leukemia in 1994. He has one of the largest following of readers in contemporary American poetry although he was never accepted into the official canon. He lived a rags-to-riches life, fueled by drugs, alcohol, and general defiance of societal restrictions, prison stints included. “The secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.“

However, the poem I would like to introduce today is one I rather like: The Man with the Beautiful Eyes is from the poem collection, The Last Night on Earth. It raises questions that are important, and points to facts that are rarely openly discussed.

The poem is read in the short film clip below, the latter itself a work of art by Jonathan Hodgson and Johnny Hannah. They adopted the style of revered socialist-realist painter Ben Shahn, creating the film with paint, ink and collage rather than digital means and providing visual details that reinforce the ideas – both the direct expressions and the subtle implications – of the poem.

View it here – and then I’ll share my observations.

The poem introduces a group of young boys, told by their parents to stay away from a house with shuttered windows and a gold fish pond hidden behind a bamboo hedge. The film starts out with a view of a poster of a missing child – clearly there is danger in the world and kids do better to listen to their parents. Kids, of course, are drawn to the opposite of what they’re told to do: and so these boys regularly play in the forbidden territory, imbuing it with exotic ambience, Tarzan around the corner. No, they are Tarzan! Unrestrained rulers of the jungle!

One day, and only once, a man appears from the house, with foul mouthed, misogynistic swearing, a bottle of whiskey in hand, a cigar in his mouth, looking completely disheveled. Not only is he friendly, he addresses them in respectful, if mocking (?) terms “little gentlemen,” and hopes they enjoy playing in his run-down realm. They are in awe. They think him, his wildness, enticing. They adore everything they are forbidden to see much less to emulate. In their eyes, he is beautiful.

One day they find the house burnt to the ground, the fish dead in an empty pond, the bamboo scorched. They decide it must have been their parents who killed the man and all that was his. They fear that the future will replicate this assault on beauty, that they will never be allowed to hold it in whatever form.

The film accompanies the narration with images of a suburban father killing every weed threatening his lawn with poison. It ends depicting a storefront with a sign Chinaski‘s – the name for Bukowski’s alter ego in his writings – and a homeless man either dead or sleeping in a dark alley next to the store, people indifferently rushing by.

Do we believe the parents capable of such a crime? They surely didn’t kill a man and left but smoldering foundations? Or did they? Do parents have a right to be afraid for their kids in a dangerous world? Of course they do. Do kids intuit, even if it doesn’t reach the level of an actual crime, that parents want to kill off the other, even if the threat is not directed at their kids, but at the parents’ own well-being? To extinguish all forms of wildness that threatens to throw your own tightly held, and dearly paid-for conformity out of balance?

One of the ways that the beauty of something unruly, unruled, will indeed be taken from you is by making sure that you never trust your own perceptions. Kids intuit what is going on, but are told they are mistaken. Kids, of course, can misinterpret what is in front of their eyes, but their gut interpretation often points to a deeper truth. They, too, must conform and obey the rules (“It is for your own good!”) in preparation for their social acceptance, and if that means to discard subjective assessment of what could be beautiful, so be it.

Deviance, it is taught, is bad, might get you ultimately killed. If you violate established cultural, contextual or social norms, never mind legal ones, there will be consequences. There is not a single culture that does not have negative connotations regarding deviance (although what counts as deviance is malleable, across cultures, or across time within a single culture.) Social control ropes deviants in, maintaining social order with a system of rewards and punishments, some formal, many informal. Children don’t want to be forced into the straight jacket of societal norms, they still crave freedom, but it is a losing battle. Those, like the man with the beautiful eyes, who have not given up on a similar desire, must be wildly strong, but they will also pay a price (if only an accidental house fire caused in a drunken stupor, or the revenge of an abused and mistreated lover, that costs him a roof over his head.)

Rarely mentioned is the fact that deviance can also be positive. It has been a motor for social change through the ages, from behaviors questioning gender hierarchies (think Suffragettes, women’s liberation) to racial injustice (think norm refusals during the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks) to the fight for LGTBQ rights or the protests around fossil fuel extraction. In fact there is a whole area of study in health psychology these days, centered on Positive Deviance, on how to employ it to produce positive change.

Bukowski might have pleaded for acceptance of a self-destructive life style, not exactly an example of constructive change to society’s norms. But the larger truth, that deviance can contain beauty and is a threat to imperative conformity, was clearly understood by the kids in the poem, and feared by their parents. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Music has had its own encounters with the label “deviance.”  Norm promotion has led to labeling certain composers or styles of music as negatively deviant, not worthy of being considered the future of music, a threat to culture, to religion, politically unacceptable, or evil. This has, of course been particularly true if the music was associated with other categories that threatened the status quo, race being among the strongest. The Blues comes to mind. Here are some favorites.

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Beauty as a form of care

Today is all about music, a new album that I find singularly graceful, or, more precisely, full of grace.

The real thing, in all of the word’s connotations: smooth, elegant movement, thoughtfulness, and the favor extended from up high. Not that I know much about Sufism’s relationship to Allah, beyond the definition that “it is a mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”

Vulture Prince was released a month ago by singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab and has been finding its way into my soul. Labeled as neo-sufism, it creates modern versions of age-old Pakistani music – classical or semi classical ghazal, thumri and qawwali music – none of which I am familiar with. Of course I do not understand the language either, some of which uses words from 18th century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib and 11th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī. It speaks to the universal power of music, and the gift of this particular artist, that it is nonetheless impossible not to get what is expressed: longing, seeking, devotion, grief and love.

Aftab has Pakistani roots and came to the US to study music and engineering at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. She now lives in New York City, having published her first album in 2015, and since also recorded together with brilliant jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily in a jazz trio called Love in Exile. Here is how Iyer describes their working relationship:

“Music can be a way of holding and being held by other people, and that’s how it feels like when we play together,” he says. “She has this deep reservoir of emotion that’s coming from a haunted place. She makes something beautiful, but it’s not just beauty for its own sake. It’s actually beauty as a form of care.”

I wish I had thought of that sentiment, that formulation, it is perfection.

In her mid-30s Aftab has already experienced the recent death of her younger brother and a close friend. That grief permeates some of the music, but the best analogy for the experience of listening to her that I can come up with can be found in the translation of the artist’s name: Rising Sun. Shrouded in lingering darkness, feeling swallowed by these hard, dark times, we nonetheless are gifted light, inevitably, every morning, the first rays bringing a semblance of hope. Color unfolding. Restoring a waning belief in grace.

I have tried to find a collection of samples of the variety of her music, and the growth curve from her Bird under Water album all the way to Vulture Prince. I can even tolerate the use of harp, an instrument I do not particularly like.I hope this unfamiliar beauty eases your way into the new week.

Lullaby

Photographs of vultures from Sauvie Island some years back. And here is a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the great poets of the Mughal empire. His ghazals, many set to music and sung by the most popular South Asian vocalists, were part of Aftab’s childhood – and used on her new album as well. This was one of the few I could find in English translation.

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Early Visions

When I did my reading last week for Earth Day it struck me how the topic of environmental harm can be traced back across centuries. Poets as diverse as William Blake, Wordsworth, Larkin, to name just a few Brits, wrote about the dangers of industrialization and the destruction of the English countryside – man-made dangers, just as climate change is a result of man-made fossil uses on a larger scale.

Going back in time even further, Ovid told the tale of Phaeton, retold below by one of our own outstanding poets, Eliza Griswold.

The power of this poem, for me, lies in the fact that it manages to outline the psychological mechanisms that can lead to destructiveness, a destructiveness that ultimately affects so many more than the individuals involved, changing the course of the world.

The original myth had Phaeton, mobbed for being fatherless, seek out his father Apollo, the sun god. His father feels guilty for having abandoned him and wants to prove his love by granting him a wish, any wish. Kid asks for the most powerful thing to make up for his feeling of being an outsider (or maybe the potentially most destructive one to exert his revenge?), to drive his father’s chariot of the sun. Catastrophe ensues when Phaeton, as was predicted, cannot control the powerful horses, freezing the earth when he veers from the path, then scorching it when he comes too close, making peoples’ blood boil through their skin which turns them Black, a race created. Zeus intervenes, seeing the havoc reeked, and kills Phaeton by throwing him off the chariot. Apollo’s mourning throws the world into darkness for days on end.

Ovid on Climate Change

BY ELIZA GRISWOLD

Bastard, the other boys teased him,
till Phaethon unleashed the steeds 
of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold 
their reins. Driving the sun too close 
to earth, the boy withered rivers, 
torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills 
burst into flame, and the people’s blood 
boiled through the skin. Ethiopia,
land of   burnt faces. In a boy’s rage 
for a name, the myth of race begins.

A boy’s rage for a name? Or an ancient example of what maligning implies – the polarization of in-group to out-group that leads to both, hate and power grabs. The poem perfectly closes the circle by starting with one divisiveness (social ostracism) and ending with another (racial disparity.) Contained within: catastrophe.

It is a reminder that crises, be they global warming, pandemics, homelessness, wars are not some outside events that happen and have to be dealt with. They are created in the ways we manage our desires, our hurts, our greed, our guilt (Apollo knew of the impending doom but could not renege on a guilt-driven promise.) That is true for both, individuals and societies at large.

Our inability to see the urgency of needed action or hesitancy to commit to it, given the frightening implications, are perhaps the result of paralyzing anxiety, as discussed a few days ago. But they might also be partially driven by our reliance on all the myths forever told – there will be a Zeus who last minute comes to the rescue, or science or any other God resigned to saving humanity, the planet. Wishful thinking, if you ask me…..

Here are some Greek dances that will liven up this Monday morning …..

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