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Poetry

Generations

Hike with me. Pack the sunhat, yes, I mean it. If you are lucky we encounter another windless, cool but sunny day that brings the landscape into sharp relief and makes for long shadows.

The hike leads up to an old cherry orchard with a single remaining tree, on the Washington side of the Gorge, a longish hour’s drive straight East from PDX. I did the whole 5-mile loop some years ago, this time managed 2/3rds of that which counts as a grand achievement given the steep inclines.

The views of the Columbia river and the basalt cliffs are spectacular, once you up there after parking at river level.

The screes are impressive, walking on the unstable stones path is another matter. Not so much dangerous as simply requiring tons of concentration that you don’t loose your footing. Much time spent with eyes on the ground when they should be scanning the surround for its stark beauty.

Should you be so lucky, you’ll see a bald eagle flying in the distance just when you look up, eventually settling in one of the dry oak trees that dot the hillsides. If you quietly approach, you might find flickers as well, perfectly camouflaged against the lichen covered rocks. And always, always, ravens.

During the breaks to catch our breath, my fellow photographer and I talked about how differently serious photographers approach the views of the landscape.

What for us is still a marvel, a breathtaking exposure to beauty no matter how much affected by human habitation and intervention, is for others a grievous example of the loss of all that was pristine.

Some long for untouched nature, while I certainly am grateful for the roads and tunnels built into the mountains so I can reach meadows that are crisscrossed by paths carved by men, and orchards built into oak tree habitats.

Which is, of course, not to say that we should not be stewards of the earth. Plenty of reminders all around – the drought is visible, even this early in the year,

the river low.

Evidence from where we looked down the promontory confirms that we continue to ravage the planet – trains carrying oil or coal that traverse the Gorge endanger us all. Coal trains pollute the air, contaminate the ground and water with coal dust, and contribute to climate change. Oil trains endanger lives and environment with their potential for accidents. In 2016 a 96-car Union Pacific train carrying highly volatile Bakken crude oil derailed near this location, setting off a massive blaze. 47,000 gallons of escaped oil, 2,960 tons of oil-drenched soil, contaminated groundwater, and $9 million in cleanup costs, cause by Union Pacific’s failure to maintain the tracks. It was a miracle that the small town of Moisier was mostly spared. (Here is the link, once more, to our documentary film that tells the whole story.)

Of course it is stunning, as always, how tenaciously nature clings on, even under challenging conditions.

I was reminded of a poem by Lucille Clifton that urges us to rethink our relationship to nature and the responsibilities we have not just for our own species but for all others as well. A perfect entry into a week where I will follow up with another hike that shows the effects of climate change in a different fashion.

generations

people who are going to be 
in a few years
bottoms of trees
bear a responsibility to something 
besides people
                        if it was only
you and me
sharing the consequences 
it would be different
it would be just 
generations of men
                        but 
this business of war
these war kinds of things 
are erasing those natural 
obedient generations 
who ignored pride
                              stood on no hind legs 
                              begged no water 
                              stole no bread
did their own things

and the generations of rice 
of coal
of grasshoppers

by their invisibility 
denounce us

by Lucille Clifton

from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton.(2020)s

Music today is an incredibly beautiful tune from Mongolia’s steppes – Wandering, played at about the tempo that I was walking up those cliffs. The whole album Cycle by Hugjiltu 胡格吉乐图 can be found here.

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Rapelle-Toi!

I’ve been to Paris, the proverbial city of love, three times in my life. The first visit, driving there all the way from Germany with a new crush, was supposed to be a romantic weekend – which ended up anything but, holed up in a small hotel room with a severe case of food poisoning. Love didn’t last either.

The second time I spent a week there with my youngest, then around 12 or 13, bursting with love for this young travel companion. He surprised me with unexpected flexibility, adapting to (mis)adventures, king of the Metro once he figured out the system, getting us everywhere we wanted to be. Seeing the world through the eyes of a child new to travel was revelatory.

The third time I was there for a fortnight, all by myself, grateful for the steady love of the one who sent me off. “Do what makes you happy, you need a break. I’ll hold the fort until your return.” I’ve never walked so much in my life. Two weeks spent on foot, exploring the neighborhoods until the light waned and I could no longer photograph.

Some of the exploration happened at the various cemeteries, green oases amidst the city’s bustle, and reminders that love lasts beyond a life time. At least that’s what so many of the memorials, in their detailed marble and sand stone sculptures and engraving, seem to promise. Whether we can trust that promise is another matter.

Today’s poem is an exhortation to keep it up.

Alfred de Musset (1810 -1857) a French dramatist and poet from the post-Napoleonic era makes it very clear: you better remember me, I’ll haunt you just in case! He clings to the idea of eternal love, despite the fact that throughout his life time love was always a form of suffering. He had an on/off affair with George Sand during his formative years until he was dumped by her. The loss of her to other lovers inspired much of his creative writing, but also fed into his mental instability. He died young after a life of debauchery and alcohol abuse, an emergence of multiple personalities and eventually alcohol-induced dementia. Not sure how many remember him.

Remember Me

by Alfred de Musset

Remember me, when Morn with trembling light
Opens her enchanted palace to the Sun;
Remember me, when silver-mantled Night
In silence passes like a pensive nun.
Whene’er with ecstasy thy bosom heaves,
Or dreams beguile thee in the summer eves,
Then from the woodland lone
Hear a low-whispered tone,
Forget me not!

Remember me, when unrelenting Fate
Hath forced us two for evermore to part,
When years of exile leave me desolate,
And sorrow blights this fond despairing heart;
Think of my hapless love, my last farewell:
Absence and time true passion cannot quell,
And while the heart still beats,
Each throb for thee repeats,
Forget me not!

Remember me, when ‘neath the chilly tomb
My weary heart is wrapt in slumber deep;
Remember me, when pale blue flowerets bloom
O’er the green turf that shrouds my dreamless sleep.
I shall not see thee, but from realms above
My soul shall watch thee with a sister’s love,
And oft when none are nigh,
A voice at night shall sigh,
Forget me not!

from Poésies Nouvelles (1850)

Here is the spoken French version. I have no clue who did the translation into English, but note that the first and last line of each stanza use different phrases which dilutes the French original where the command “remember!” is repeated verbatim.

More importantly, if this poem strikes you as a narcissistic outcry, let’s give some love to more collectivist action. Yesterday France saw a major wave of strikes and protest against neo-liberal pension reform. The Interior Ministry said more than 1.1 million people protested, including 80,000 in Paris. Unions said more than 2 million people took part nationwide, and 400,000 in Paris. (Ref.) The unions have shown the most unity in decades, fighting against the plan to exploit workers. Here is a good summary article of the political agenda of Macron and allies, once again haunting the working class.

Musset is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where some of today’s images are from.

Music today is a French chanson about the two lovers and an old Woody Guthrie song about unions, for good measure.

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The Snails

The Snails

by Samatar Elmi

I mean, the analogy writes itself
like the onion in a grand conceit
though we really are like two slugs
in a derelict mausoleum.
Google “snails are…”
Dangerous. Slow.
Destroying my garden.
Our jobs and our women.

You, who cannot speak snail,
wouldn’t understand how the shell
was the gift and curse of diaspora,
how our songs and laments resound
in our half-remembered houses
that we carry to forget, to carry on.

This poem by Elmi, a young British-Somali poet, Ph.D. candidate and musician has been on my desk for a while. I wanted to pair it with photographs I shot some time ago, but it took me ages to find them. Thus is the curse of an unorganized archive. That way, though, I had occasion to read the poem repeatedly, always reacting with a mix of admiration of the poet’s craft and sadness, the way an immigrant’s life and burden so perfectly captured in his analogies. He won the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize with this work, the annual prize for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection.  

The snail analogy is of course the Black/Brown/Muslim/Latino immigrant who destroys gardens, jobs, women – ours‘ no less. Next we are redirected to the other’s perspective, in that abrupt break between stanzas, visually mirroring the distance between “us and them.” All this while analogy itself is made a subject in the first line, disorienting the reader in some fashion, trying to figure out if it really writes itself while we are grasping for understanding. It brings us right back to the fact that there is a schism between two worlds, being strangers to each other, with xenophobia so closely related to our disgust reaction to the slimy invaders known as snails.

The snail shell serves as an echo chamber, the repository of the cultural memories of a former belonging, now half remembered, and in need of forgetting to force integration. How could we understand, the loss it implies, and the demands that will never be met to Whites’ satisfaction, we who live here with our jobs, or women and our gardens?

It is all so sparse, so economical and yet so rich in meaning.

Music from his album The Winter of Discontent (he uses a different alias as a musician.)

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Seclused in Light

by Thomas Lux

It’s dusk. My sons are tall. And one of them became a father this week, starting a new cycle of life. I feel like my heart is encapsulated in light, radiating awe and joy in view of natality, the miracle of birth and new beginnings.

I can’t help but think of how I have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s writings in What is Freedom on the centrality of beginnings to human beings. In reference to Augustine’s City of God she conveys it is not just the beginning of that new life, but also the ability for each life to initiate something new.

“Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.“

In The Human Condition” she writes: “when we speak of birth, we speak not of the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” She later describes the possibility of action in this context, and the impact on community derived from plurality. But that has to wait for another day. Right now I can only marvel at birth itself and the existence of someone who has not been in this world but five days earlier. Let’s give that new human being some time to grow before she decides if she wants to participate in the lineage of activism.

I was listening to Arun Ghosh’s new album Seclused in Light when the news of the arrival of this child reached me. (Composed during lockdown, he invented the word as a mix between recluse and secluded.) So much in this music that I wish to be true for her life to come: a clear, melodious voice (his brilliant clarinet), often playful and surprising, sometimes insisting, never shrill. A steady, measured rhythm, never frenetic. An integration of traditions, both across continents and across time, making for a truly international fusion. A mix of spirituality, humor and joy, with an explicit embrace of nature and communal action, and an occasional stoic trait. And, importantly, all written in major keys, sad minor keys making but split second appearances. (Full album – hopefully – here. Two favorite tunes below.)

A life full of light.

A life filled with beauty, variability and resilience like the hellebores that bloom in my granddaughter’s month of birth (snow, cold, rain and all!)

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A Plea against Narrowing

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that did not exist before, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, expectations and impositions; and let us see to it that we learn to tackle all that without dropping too much of what it has to bestow…”

„Und nun wollen wir glauben an ein langes Jahr, das uns gegeben ist, neu, unberührt, voll nie gewesener Dinge, voll nie getaner Arbeit, voll Aufgabe, Anspruch und Zumutung; und wollen sehen, daß wirs nehmen lernen, ohne allzuviel fallen zu lassen von dem, was es zu vergeben hat […]” – Rainer Maria Rilke Letter to Clara Rilke 1907.

Walk with me. On one of the last days of the old year, as it happened, a stroll through downtown that was a deserted place on a grey Friday morning, the quiet ruptured only by loud screams of a houseless person, the wailing echoing in the canyons between the high-rises. The few pedestrians cautiously crossed the street away from the misery, avoiding eye contact with the tent that looked wet, cold, forlorn.

Photographs today are all from a downtown PDX walk between the Portland Art Museum and Pioneer Square, going north on 10th Ave and coming back South in the park blocks.

And now 2023 already here. No New Year’s resolutions for me, since I know from long experience I won’t keep them in the first place. Although IF I would claim some, they would be echoing this British advice:

Get slightly older each day – Eat more cheese – Discard old socks – Drink the same amount of tea (ok, coffee for me) – Never run out of biscuits – Say “getting there” a lot – Muddle through.

Yet I do have a wish: to have the courage to witness (and report on) what is happening in the world, no matter how deep the darkness goes.

I want to continue to fight against the gentrification of the soul, the self, that comes with aging and privilege. It is so easy to narrow your focus when you become overwhelmed by the suffering in the world, to declare that turning away from the darkness is an act of self protection, when it is an act of choosing comfort instead.

Comfort that is not available, much less granted, to the people exposed to war, oppression, subjugation, or exploitation, by mad men in power, governments, institutions or their neighbors. If the people of Ukraine have incomparable courage to live through bombardments and invasion, the people of Iran facing gallows for desiring liberation, as do their Afghan brothers and sisters, if the Kurds have no allies in the world, nor the Palestinians any protectors, if they all summon this courage daily to live, I might at least have the courage to look. To witness, fully knowing my solidarity amounts to nothing other than emotional discomfort over the experienced helplessness.

Empty squares, with the houseless crouched in corners, and a lone city worker blowing fallen pine needles that moved in small waves and eddies.

We don’t just have to look abroad. There are plenty of discomforting sights close to home. So easy to narrow your eyes and blink the “blight” away, turning to more uplifting views. Don’t get me wrong – I embrace the powerful offerings of nature and art, literature and science as happily as anyone to make me feel better or console me, perhaps even to bestow some hope for a more just world, as my regular readers know full well. But not at the expense of the minimal tribute I can pay by witnessing what else is going on in a nation filled with racism, inequality, culture wars and drifts towards authoritarianism, even or particularly when I have reached an age where active participation in a fight for change has become harder. Maybe my reporting can encourage others who still have energy to get engaged.

Age imposes a narrowing of our lives through the declining powers of our bodies or the restrictions of disease, all multiplied to the nth degree by living in a pandemic era. It is understandable that that narrows the heart as well, the capacity for compassion when preoccupied with your own making it through the day.

It need not narrow the mind though, as long as we are mindful of how and where we apply attention and if we make sure we stretch towards learning. American-Serb poet Charles Simic once said: “The attentive eye makes the world mysterious.” I never understood that, still don’t. For me the attentive eye is all about learning about the world, de-mystifying what we are told to believe. The Jewish tradition with its intense focus on learning has always struck me as something that provided more than just tools for professional advancement, or, more importantly, understanding. It is such a thrill when you realize there is an infinite potential for growth, both of knowledge and as a person, every day, even when the potential for your body is decidedly limited.

For 2023 that means my steady diet of junk novels and movies will continue to be supplemented with stuff that is hard to read and topics that require intense familiarization.

It is somehow fittingly ironic that the question about liberty and justice for all is raised at the Louis Vuitton store. The brand’s trade tag is “Truth. Live and love truth.” No clue why a manufacturer of luxury goods comes up with that, but I don’t exactly think they’d like to hear the truth about the effects of capitalism where the consumption of luxury items plays a large role, if only as marker of the class that can afford the luggage.

***

What I learned on the first day of 2023 came about because I wondered why the sound of human misery is so deeply afflicting when you walk by, half scared, half upset. My search found, instead, a splendid analysis on a related topic: Why do Rich People love Quiet. The Brooklyn-based author of Puerto Rican descent, Xochitl Gonzales, was just made a staff writer at The Atlantic. She describes how she and her cohort of students of color experienced their lives at an Ivy League Institution and then again when White young professionals’ arrivals started to gentrify the traditionally non-White boroughs of NYC.

“The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. … In those moments, I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. And in acquiescing, I accepted that.

For generations, immigrants and racial minorities were relegated to the outer boroughs and city fringes. Far, but free. No one else much cared about what happened there. When I went to college, it was clear to me that I was a visitor in a foreign land, and I did my best to respect its customs. But now the foreigners had come to my shores, with no intention of leaving. And they were demanding that the rest of us change to make them more comfortable.”

The essay then explores the regulation of noise from above, the various administrations, mayoral office and NYPD, through laws and by moving noisy venues like nightclubs out of gentrifying neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Lower East Side and into Brooklyn. That borough, now thoroughly gentrified itself, racked up the most noise complaints of 2019 to the city hotline, the majority of them grievances about lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. One culture’s preferences demanding acquiescence from another.

The Apple Store is barricaded behind steel net fences, with only one entrance ramp controlled by police. Moats next? Tiffany, on the other hand, let’s you peek into the window under the watchful eyes of no fewer than three security guards for the one storefront.

Gonzales’ recent novel Olga Dies Dreaming was named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. On my ever expanding list to read. The title is taken from a stirring poem by Pedro Pietri (1944-2004), Puerto Rican Obituary, linked here because it is too long to post. Don’t want to go overboard with the first blog of the year. Read it, though, if you have the time, it expanded my narrowing view of the world, offering glimpses into a culture so close and yet so far from my experience.

The park blocks offer a strange assortment of sculpture. The museum declared itself “indigenized” – whatever that means – during an exhibition by a Native American artist, Jeffrey Gibson, who produced timelines recording important events for indigenous and non indigenous Americans alike. How will 2023 be added? Since I still do not go inside museums and galleries I cannot report on the show.

Music today offers some classic Puerto Rican Salsa by Héctor Lavoe and, if you want to stretch yourself, the song Titi me preguntó, by Black Bunny, Billboard’s Artist of the Year. “Titi” is Time Magazine’s best song of 2022 pick, the voice of someone who acknowledges and tries to break with his toxic masculinity. The rapper’s music is ubiquitous in NYC right now.

No Black Bunny, but a bronze sculpture of an English bulldog, ridiculously dressed like the doormen of the Heathman Hotel where she resides outside, flagging the pet friendly policies of the establishment.

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A Dream within a Dream.

Last blog of 2022.

Comprehensive retrospective? Nope.

Prognoses for 2023? Nah.

Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.

If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.

A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.

Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)

More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)

Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?

Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.

Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?

What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?

Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.

Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.

Music a favorite by Fauré, after the dream.

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Bird Bazaar

We were iced in for a bit last week, although thankfully not for long or as intensely as much of the rest of the country. Photography was restricted to what was available out of the windows, ample traffic given the cold. All those birds made me think of my unhealthy preoccupation with the demise of the bird app: TWITTER.

Nuthatches galore (Kleiber)

Scold me all you want (you know who you are), my time spent on that medium was not preoccupied with “doom scrolling.” It has been a source of information about politics I care about that would have been – is – otherwise unavailable. A lot of the European news are behind paywalls, and some not published in the main media at all, as for example a lot of the discussions among young, progressive Jewish voices in Germany. A lot of Black voices opened new horizons not easily accessible otherwise.

Twitter has been indeed a platform that allowed marginalized voices to communicate and to be heard, internationally it was the choice for many movements that were able to organize this way and get the news out. With the arrival of Emperor Musk, as many call him, although I prefer Elmo, the safety of those voices is endangered. Next to the monopolized print press in large parts of the world, a platform that allowed new collectives to form has now become the plaything of yet another oligarch, his whims defining the rules.

Plaything is too harmless a word – the site is now a weaponized tool that can wield large influence, not least over the upcoming 2024 election in this country. But it can also wreak havoc abroad. Major investors in Musk’s take-over of the company are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Quatar Investment Company and Binance, the massive crypto finance company founded in China. They have been given special access to confidential company information. (Ref.) There is a huge worry that so far anonymous voices of dissidents will be outed, leading to their persecution. In Saudi-Arabia alone, 40% of all citizens are on twitter, anonymously.

As owner and CEO, Musk has removed the entire human rights team, as well as the team dedicated to disabled users, and the old content curation team which dealt with fighting disinformation. His next move was to ban the accounts of people publicly critical of him, journalists included. The re-admission of previously banned, extremist sites en masse has of course led to explosions of lies, racist and anti-Semitic tropes and disinformation, much to the satisfaction of the owner who encouraged voters to choose far right candidates during the mid-term elections. Just yesterday he tweeted, once again, a word that squarely panders to the extremist belief system that nefarious Jewish powers plan to replace the white US population with Brown people.

Flicker (Goldspecht)

Wren (Zaunkönig)

Importantly, and that is why I think I am so preoccupied with it all, there are no mechanisms that could curb the whims of an emperor. Maybe the financial chaos, with advertisers leaving as well as the important content providers, will lead to bankruptcy. But given that there is a network of unimaginably rich individual and state entities across the world that support his political ambitions, I don’t believe lack of money will be the downfall. Unfathomable riches of a few allow manipulation of public opinion and elimination of critics, quite literally.

Likely a hermit thrush, I learned, an unusual bird here at this time of year (Drossel)

Here is one of my favorite political reviews of the year that speaks to the choices the powerful have, reminding us of and analyzing a biting poem by Browning in this context, no less. Greg Olear’s column Prevail has been a recent discovery for me and a source of pleasure. So are the birds, to which I will now return, hidden behind the window frame, camera in hand.

Robins (Rotkehlchen)

My Last Duchess 

BY ROBERT BROWNING

FERRARA

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Chickadee, Towhee and Junko (Meise, Winterammer, Grundammer.)

Music, staying with the topic, is Beethoven’s Emperor Piano concerto Nr. 5, played by the incomparable Ashkenazy.

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What are the Chances?

“What are the chances…” was the beginning of a sentence that cropped up with astonishing frequency this week.

“What are the chances, seriously, that more people voted for Walker than the Rev. Warnock?” was me fretting half-way through the evening when election statistics had the former ahead of the latter for a short amount of time. Still in disbelief after all these years in this country that it could even come close. The good guy won, eventually, but the margins were too close for comfort.

***

“What are the chances that Sinema leaves the Democratic Party before Manchin?” High, it turns out. Her voting behavior cost us higher minimum wage, extended child tax credits, and voting rights protections. Seems there is little variability in her moral compass – it’s stuck on amoral.

***

“What are the chances, that I would find myself in any way connected to one of the right wing extremists arrested in Germany during a nationwide raid this week?” Low, really an outlier. 25 people (with more assumed to be associated) are accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the state with armed attacks, former members of congress and military and ex-military para-trooper members among them. Many are now in pre-trial detention, suspected of forming a terrorist organization. The defendants are closely linked with the Reichsbürger movement, who believe that the 1871 borders of the German empire are still in effect, tend to be far-right extremist, do not accept the legality of the Federal Republic of Germany, and, according to the prosecutor, “followed a conglomerate of conspiracy myths consisting of narratives of the so-called ‘Reichsbürger’ as well as QAnon ideology.”

New “head of state” was supposed to be Heinrich VIII Prince Reuss, a 71 year-old of aristocratic lineage, and one of the purported ring leaders. Here’s where six degrees of separation makes an appearance, however: as an 18-year old I was invited to visit a branch of the Reuss family for Easter. For the life of me, I can’t remember why I scored the invitation or why I accepted it (certainly no romantic involvement) from Heinrich IX Prince Reuss (must have been a cousin), they all get the same name, just numbered in succession…

We drove south in a car from Hamburg to his parents’ castle (literally) near Frankfurt. Arriving too late for dinner, we were led to our rooms. I appeared, starving, the next morning, Good Friday, in the breakfast hall. The horror! I was not dressed head-to-toe in black, mourning garb required for this Holy Day, apparently, in arch-conservative households. Back to your room, have the maid rummage for a fitting outfit! Well, it was off to a train station for me.

***

“What are the chances“, I thought, when following the complicated Supreme Court hearings about the Independent State Legislative (ISL) theory on Wednesday, “that I’ll be able to write about that in ways that get the legal details and importance of the Moore vs Harper case across?” Slim, as it turns out, even with the example of an iceberg….

In a nutshell, the case is about extreme gerrymandering, the possibilities (or not) of stopping excesses, and, more generally, the power of state courts and/or legislative bodies to shape aspects of federal elections. SCOTUS heard plaintiffs’ arguments that under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures retain exclusive power over federal redistricting and election rules, while state constitutions, state courts, governors, or voter-approved ballot measures have no power to check, balance or even review those laws. Yup. -. It is, as legal observer and author Elie Mystal pointed out, all about trying to take power away from non-partisan state actors and putting it solely into the hands of partisan state actors.

That’s as far as I can go – the rest of the arguments, delivered in detail, clarity and with focus on the implications to what remains of our democracy, can be found in VOX, the Atlantic, Mother Jones, the NYT, and the National Review. Take your pick – any one but the last helped my understanding of the matter.

And since we’ve landed on the topic of relative probabilities, we might as well end the week with my favorite poem about Statistics. Chances are, you’ll like it, on average.

A Word on Statistics

Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.

Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long: forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise: four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy: eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes): sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with: four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something: seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness: twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds: more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances: it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight: not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things: thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark: eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just: quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand: three.

Worthy of empathy: ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred — a figure that has never varied yet.

BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA  from Miracle Fair. Translated by Joanna Trzeciak.

***

Photos today from Frankfurt and environs, in honor of another weird episode in the life of Heuer, filed under Frequency Distribution.

Statistics? No Problem. (Sorry for the annoying ads interrupting today’s music, could not find an alternative.)

Chances that this photograph relates to today’s text? Nil. I just love it, the matching colors, the symmetry and patterns of vertical lines, the contrast of work boots and fur jacket, this stranger’s strutting towards the center of the gate posts in completely empty space. It happened to be shot near Frankfurt.

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Kestrel at Rest

The sonnet below was written 135 years ago, and none, none of the beauty that it describes has changed – a kestrel on a fall day, surrounded by the blues and golds of a blazing landscape.

The kestrel I photographed had his soaring and striding already behind him – I had been standing under trees dropping leaves and watching, when s/he came to rest. I don’t share Hopkin’s religious fervor – he was a Jesuit priest and actually dedicated this poem to “Christ our Lord” – but feel in complete agreement when it comes to embracing the beauty of fall.

I leave it with you for the days to come – I’ll take a break for Thanksgiving week and hope to return with more images of blue and gold-vermillion.

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple – dawn – drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, –the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1887)

And here is the sonnet set to music.

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Hoping for Grace

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind-
the other half having flown back to Bohemia-

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

by Mary Oliver

from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two

This is probably one of the poems I love most, for so many reasons. The way it shifts between description and evaluation, the former showing an outsider’s perspective, the latter a relationship to another human being as well as a yearning for some form of grace. The tenderness with which a seemingly “crazy” act is put into perspective, disambiguated as a form of loving, is striking. We so often, scared to death by the perceived reality of losing our minds, rather distance ourselves from crazy behavior, instead of finding some remaining value in it. Oliver also acknowledges that we cannot count on (or control) a particular way of aging, but might be blessed – either avoiding dementia or finding a light within. A frightful admission and her unswerving insistence on finding hope, as in so much of her work.

There is a German saying that age brings out either the cow or the goat in women. The former is supposed to be a hefty, placid, friendly, not particularly flexible form of being. The latter has more the qualities of what English speakers would call “catty” a nervous, snippy, mean and often stubborn crone. Folk wisdom like this is wrong as often as it is right, or contains at least partial kernel of truths, as all stereotypes do. Fact is, despite an explosion of research into aging across the last decades we, as scientists as well, know very few things for sure.

We do know that the brain parts that regulate inhibition of behaviors are affected early on. The subsequent disinhibition might be relevant for becoming “a goat,” bitterness and anger now more expressed.

There seems to be overall agreement, that although personality traits remain relatively stable across the life span (UNLESS dementia occurs, which can completely change your personality without your fault) some traits seem to get a bit stronger age, and others diminish. Of the “Big Five” personality traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability seem to be getting a lift with maturation. Two other traits do decline with age – a general openness to experiences, and both facets of extraversion, social vitality and social dominance. (Ref.) Personality and aging interacts – some of us have an easier go accepting the hardship of aging than others. Personality resources such as self-esteem, perceived control, self-efficacy and resilience shape the person’s response to adversity in later life, not surprisingly.

What else do we know? Some of our long-held beliefs – for example that older people display a positivity bias and are better at emotional regulation compared to younger ones – are now questioned. New insights have found that contemporary old people are cognitively much better off than their peers who were born 20 years earlier, when tested at the same age. This is not because we somehow managed to delay the onset of age-dependent decline or because we decline more slowly across the years. Rather, we have been overall, across our lifespan, cognitively strengthened with better education, technological use, wider access to information, and that overall improved performance is giving us some slack to cover up the early signs of decline with age.

Here is a short list of the questions that are currently asked in the field (NIH/National Institute of Aging.)

  • There is a whole enterprise exploring the biology of aging to help with prevention, progression and prognosis of disease and disability. It is a two way street – aging is a risk factor for developing chronic disease, but diseases also hasten aging.
  • There is a body of work dedicated to better understand the effects of personal, interpersonal, and societal factors on aging, including the mechanisms through which these factors exert their effects. Research is looking into the interaction between behavior (lifestyle)social, psychological and economic factors, as well as the timing of intervention during critical periods in a person’s life span where the course is set, and the effect of place (there are geographic aspects that impact aging.)
  • Researchers are interested in looking a population differences, to see where disparities need to be tackled, and also how we can improve our understanding of the consequences of an aging society to inform intervention development and policy decisions.

They got their work cut out for them. Whether potential answers enable us to improve our empathic responses to people living with dementia, or help us to prepare better for our own decline, I cannot tell.

May what is left be loving.

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