A friend sent me an essay from the New Yorker this week – I somehow managed to avoid subscribing to the magazine for all of my decades on American shores. Lessons for the End of the World is a moving, lyrical piece by poet and MacArthur fellow Hanif Abdurraqib. It braids together strands of reactions to loss, material and immaterial. I read it as a flock of robins descended on the Hawthorne tree in front of my window, in search for the last remaining berries.
I agreed with the author’s acknowledgement that the loss of personally meaningful, irreplaceable objects requires psychological adjustment, regardless of the ways things get lost, accidentally dropped at an airport, or violently destroyed by all-consuming fires. The essay embeds his reactions within a tapestry of reminders about women’s writings on trauma and loss, Nikki Giovanni and Octavia E. Butler among them. Butler’s Parabel of the Sower is currently making a come-back in public discourse, its seemingly prescient descriptions of a society destroyed by fiery climate catastrophe and held in the thralls of authoritarian violence a detailed narrative, all too fittingly depicting this moment.
As I wrote 2 years ago (see below,) many of her novels manage to make the grief attached to loss, particularly traumatic loss, astoundingly explicit. We mourn what is taken from us, often irreplaceably so, whether destroyed heirlooms, or body parts, no longer being physically whole. Simultaneously, though, if more implicitly, she points us to the psychological opportunities attached to new beginnings. Loss raises awareness of our ability to make choices, how to deal with the loss itself, how to move forward both as individuals and with regard to the structures that surround and constrain us. Living through existentially hard times can produce new ways of thinking, acting and re-acting, a shift in values that could lead to favor mutual aid and empathy.
Abdurraqib’s essay focuses on that as well, Butler’s prescription for looking at change as the ultimate power, “the innovation and adaptation required to survive the unsurvivable.” He quotes Butler:
“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
In this regard, she is a beacon of hope, believing in our potential to grow new life out of the ashes, a radically changed life enabling us to survive the ways this planet, our nations and all of us contained within it, will continue to be harmed.
The graveyard with so much old growth burnt as well a month ago, but her grave is unharmed. The bookstore Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena has become a hub for mutual aid after the Eaton fire, just as she would have envisioned.
***
I wonder. There might be one aspect of losing irreplaceable things that helps, in some paradoxical ways, to move from grief to renewal: centering, retroactively, human connectedness.
As a personal example, I lost a number of things in the Eaton fire that originated in my own history, things I had given the kids as tokens of their belonging to a loving network of generations of people they never had a chance to meet. (Let me hasten to add, they are inconsequential compared to what others have lost, more closely connected to their current lives.)
For one, there was a garment my mother had knitted, a beautiful cape for a baby in blue and purple hues. Honestly, it had been waiting in a closet for decades, out of awareness, and once delivered to the young family, I never thought of it again. Until now, when I try to remember the pattern and constantly think of my mother knitting, a craft we have in common (I might go as far as calling it a shared form of therapy). Not only was the cape something she physically touched, but its loss is now a reminder, very much at the forefront of my daily consciousness, of how she taught me, with much patience, something beneficial and creative, knitting – a lasting connection, despite her early death in 1983.
A previous version of this hat for an owl-loving toddler burnt as well – but I was able to knit it again. Somehow the ability to replace things is wonderful but also highlights the inability to retrieve others.
Secondly, I had, quite literally a week or so before the fire, sent an old photograph of my grandfather to the kids. It had languished in a box, not even an album, for decades, must have come down to me when my father died in 2002 and I took a few of the things he had saved back to the U.S. It was taken in the battlefield trenches in France during WW I, on his (and coincidentally my mother’s) birthday on February 8th, with my Opa holding a guitar, at the center of a group of painfully young, thin and empty-eyed soldier. I have so many questions. Would you bring your instrument, as a musician, to the front? Was it provided as some sort of means to distract the company? Was music what allowed him to survive two world wars unscathed, as a peaceful, curious, nature-loving, gentle human being? These questions did not preoccupy me until the burning of the photograph.
The losses force us to remember the people attached to the items, and, in turn, our attachment to them. Maybe that focus on relationships, on belonging even after death, signals the way to adapt and move on. Just as Octavia Butler spelled out, the secret to survival lies in communal embeddedness and reciprocity. The love we received and that we can now pay forwards will never be contained in objects only, it exists independently, inviolable by flood and fire. That solace might help staunch the grief.
In honor of my Opa’s real love, the double bass, here is a beautiful rendition of a Bottesino concerto.
In 1998, author and activist Mike Davis published a book, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.(I had reviewed one of his preceding brilliant analyses of the geography, ecology and politics of LA, City of Quartz, last spring here, which I mention because it gives you a short overview of the issues he was concerned with and how he approached them.) The new book included profound analyses of the danger, handling and, yes, politics of wildfires with an emphasis on Malibu.
20 years later, a Malibu fire started on November 8 and burned nearly 97,000 acres, destroying over 1,600 structures and resulting in three fatalities. More than 295,000 residents were evacuated and an estimated $6 billion in damages incurred. The folks at Longreads.com used the occasion to publish an excerpt of Davis’ book describing the history of fires at the Malibu coast, by consensus deemed the wildfire capital of North America, and a postscript he added in 2018.
Sunrise colors accentuated by smog from wildfires.
I was sent a link to the excerpt given that this week saw another Malibu fire erupt, the Franklin Fire, which seems to be less likely to develop into a monster fire like last month’s Mountain fire in Ventura County, or the earlier, massive Thomas and Woolsey fires, which exploded with disastrous winds that pushed flames for miles and grounded firefighting aircraft. Saved by luck only – the direction and strength of winds for once in favor of the fire fighters.
My own brush with fire on a California hillside this year still sits in my bones and occasionally keeps me up at night. Reading Davis’ chapter on the politics of California wildfires – the reasons why they occur more strongly and frequently, why they harm populations in inequitable ways, and why no-one considers stopping the rebuilding of houses and mansions on fire-prone hills – and even expanding further onto the wilderness – helped to focus my head on the issues, rather than give in to my soul that shudders at the memories. What he wrote in 1998 is more relevant than ever, a quarter century later.
One of the core issues lies with our approach to fire. Fire prevention tactics like nurturing large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, have actually created conditions for stronger fires, once they ignite. Horticultural fire-breaks near towns, like citrus groves and agricultural land have disappeared due to water issues or the need for more land for construction. And we insist that we have to focus on fire handling: ever new regulations specify flame retardant building materials and brush clearing, in essence “fire proofing” human habitat. More than half of new California housing has been built in fire hazard zones since 1993, with more than 11 million Californians, roughly a quarter of the state’s population, living in high-risk wildfire areas known as the wildland-urban interface.
Karen Chapple, an urban planning professor and director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation suggests that rather than focussing on specific [wildfire] mitigation measures such as hardening homes, prescribed burns, fuel breaks, we should revise land-use planning, creating more sustainable settlement patterns around the state. (Ref.) This is particularly urgent in light of all the insurance companies now refusing to insure for damage or loss due to fire, given how costs have skyrocketed with more frequent fires. You could lose everything if you (re)build in fire-prone regions.
I very much encourage you to read the 15 minute excerpt of Davis’ book, it is grippingly written as well as informative, and might provide insights for all of us who are exposed to future potential catastrophes, given that climate change has upped the ante for fires now spreading into previously less likely areas, followed by landslides and flooding. Dare I add that the historian’s prescience, evidenced in historical unfolding of his predictions, likely extends to what now lies in wait? Here is a summary of another of his books:
“Davis’s 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, argues that a combination of poor government planning and a consolidation of resources in the hands of profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies has left the world—and especially its poorest populations—dangerously vulnerable to pandemics. (The book was widely praised for its foresight during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it was expanded and republished that year as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism.)”
What can we do, in an era when this morning’s news included the announcement that R.F.Kennedy’s advisor had earlier asked the F.D.A. to revoke approval of the Polio and Hepatitis B vaccines? Never mind the development of pandemic vaccines…. If RFK gets approved to be the new health secretary, he can intervene in the F.D.A. petition as well as approval processes. I refuse to say “we are doomed.” But we should seriously think about what can be done, because we very well might be – particularly our grandchildren – if this insanity rules the day.
In the meantime, here are some photographs from Southern California with glimpses of the ecology that burns like tinder.
Last week was so hot that I had little energy to move. Luckily, I had two books at hand that kept me sufficiently engaged, so that I could forgot about the outside world. One was Catalina (2024), by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and the other was Katalin Street (1969), by Magda Szabó (Katharinenstrasse, in the German translation.)
Small volumes, as different as can be, and yet they hone in on a similar question: how are individual choices, our values, our ability to connect, affected by historical and political circumstances that create existential trauma, by a past that afflicts the present and the future in ways beyond our control?
Cornejo Villavicencio is a young writer whose nonfiction debut, The Undocumented Americans, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. The collection of essays combined personal narrative with reported profiles of some of the most vulnerable immigrant workers in the United States. Her new book is a novel with strong autobiographical content, a coming of age of an undocumented immigrant from Equador who ends up at Harvard, and whose fate is determined by the absence of a green card, once she finishes school. It garnered raving reviews, but I found it at times difficult to read. (The author, as it turns out, received permanent residency in 2020 and was as of that date a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale.)
The first person singular perspective oscillates between smart analysis, insight into self and others with biting humor, slyly introducing us to the issues of stereotyping from multiple perspectives. It puts a glaring spotlight on structural obstacles to acquiring citizenship, to belonging in other ways defined by elite institutions, and onto the repeat experiences and subsequent fear of abandonment. It elucidates how the fears about an uncertain future can poison the present, stunt you in all your helplessness to make the right one come about, victim to pandering political decisions of a nation.
But the stream of consciousness, the gushing language and relentless pace made it feel like a wave that tried to rip you into its emotional undertow, pushing you forwards without catching a breath, and eventually cresting, abruptly ending without a sense that the story was fully told – leaving everything and everyone sort of floating in the water. Maybe we are supposed to feel that way, the closest we can come to vicariously experiencing being battered by external forces, but it was exhausting.
——
Nobel Prize laureate Herman Hesse, after reading a forbidden translation of one of Szabó’s novels, called his publisher in haste to tell him he had “caught a golden fish”. I could not agree more. Her more recent novel Katalin Street is everything I want from a remarkable piece of literature: precise language, a challenging structure of alternating between narrators and eras, a focus on female characters who escape conformity, and a philosophical deepening of questions around history’s effects on our lives.
The story is told from the perspectives of various members of three families thrown together as neighbors in the titular street in Budapest, Hungary, starting with the early years before German occupation and ending during the communist regime of the 1960s. Complex relationships – three girls all vie for one boy, three parent generations are driven by different values – are torn apart by the deportation of one Jewish couple, and the death of their daughter at the hands of a Nazi soldier, but accidentally caused by one of her former playmates.
The survivors end up together in a post-war apartment, longingly gazing at the houses that were taken from them during the social rehousing program of the communist regime, as punishment for a bourgeois existence. They are unable to communicate to overcome their sorrow, or grieve together for a past that is irredeemable. Love yields to guilt, and one of them is exiled, harming the family even more. They live in a constant state of fear of prosecution, and appear in their nostalgia, isolation and endless fatigue as if they were ghosts, unable to speak to each other or the one real ghost, their murdered childhood friend, who regularly visits to add her own observations.
I think as someone who grew up in 1950’s Germany among a population of perpetrators the issue of silence is particularly pertinent. Trauma instills silence, regardless of concerning perpetrators or victims. Values disintegrate, memory fades, all fostered by silence driven by fear to re-live the trauma, or inclination to veil it forever to absolve oneself. The titular Katalin, by the way, was St. Katherine of the Wheel, a major Catholic Saint and martyr, who is, surely no coincidence, a patron for philosophers, invoked for diseases of the tongue (the inability to speak) and protection against a sudden death (obviously not working for Jewish neighbors.)
She was not a historically established figure. In fact some scholars speculate that the story of her life and persecution was the inversion of something that actually happened: a famous female Greek philosopher and mathematician from Alexandria, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. The role reversal of persecuted and persecutor would surely fit into the intellectual framework of Szabó’s narrative. (So would the generally clever choices of names for the main protagonists, explorations of which could fill an entire session of a book group…)
What made the book special to me, though, had to do with explorations of aging – no surprise here. Here is an example of the clarity of vision found in all of her writing:
“The process of growing old bears little resemblance to the way it is presented, either in novels or in works of medical science.
No work of literature, and no doctor, had prepared the former residents of Katalin Street for the fierce light that old age would bring to bear on the shadowy, barely sensed corridor down which they had walked in the earlier decades of their lives, or the way it would rearrange their memories and their fears, overturning their earlier moral judgments and system of values.
They knew they should expect certain biological changes: that the body would set about its work of demolition with the same meticulous attention to detail that from the moment of conception it had applied to the task of preparing itself for the journey ahead. They had accepted that there would be alterations in their appearance and a weakening of the senses, along with changes in their tastes, their habits, and their needs; that they might fall prey to gluttony or lose all interest in food, become fear-ridden or hypersensitive and fractious. They had resigned themselves to the prospect of increasing difficulties with digestion and sleeping, things they had taken for granted when young, like life itself.
But no one had told them that the most frightening thing of all about the loss of youth is not what is taken away but what is granted in exchange. Not wisdom. Not serenity. Not sound judgment or tranquility. Only the awareness of universal disintegration.”
The only antidote is the ability to continue to love, something enabled by life’s choices, or obstructed by them, depending where the chips fell. No, not where they fell, but where we put them. After all, as Szabo spells out :
“In everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.”
The author died in 2007. I wonder what her last words were. But I delighted in her vision of the after life, as described in the novel, a place where people revert to child-like beings, happily embraced and treated as such during reunions with their deceased parents. Maybe you CAN go home again, albeit in a fantasy world….
The focus, though, is on the emptiness created by a longing for a past that prevents the existence of a meaningful present. The desire to turn back the clock, make choices that reinstate the nostalgic past before we acted in harmful ways, adds up to the ultimate emotional destruction of the survivors of those consequential actions. That is true for all, regardless of where the desire is coming from, narcissism, disconsolate longing, or guilt. In an ingenious move, the author lets us look at the disastrous effects of the idea that time can be folded into itself, past resurrected in the present, even for those who have left time behind – the central ghost of the story.
If all this sounds pretty bleak, yes it is. Let me assure you, the book is worth it. There are so many discoveries to be made, so many nuggets to be found in the universes she creates, a whole school of golden fish. Including many reminders that passive acceptance of “rules of law” during totalitarian regimes, silence rather than opposition, lead inevitably to disaster.
Photographs today are from Austria and Slovenia, parts of the Habsburg Empire, as was Hungary. I have never been to Budapest, alas, but the architecture is said to be the same.
Music today is Bartok’s Sixth String Quartet. Someone said this about its last movement: “The final movement is both a release and a wonder. It is the Mesto theme presented in a language of deep sensitivity, perhaps resignation, perhaps numbed grief.”
When I was little, my bedroom was situated right above the room where my mother played the grand piano some evenings. The minute I heard Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 by Edvard Grieg, I waited for the piece I really adored, Anitra’s Dance, trying to stay awake through the intervening The Death of Åse. I had no clue how popular this music had become and knew even less about its origins, a dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen that he made Grieg set to music. I was just taken by the melodies and chords.
Fast forward to 1965, now in boarding school as a 13-year old, at war with an elitist all girls’ world I despise and yet try to find a place in. My piano teacher, she of the permanent bad breath but sensitive understanding of lost souls, complains about my perfunctory performance of the suite – all I can do to stave off my homesickness is hammering the keys mechanically. She hands me a dogeared paperback with Ibsen’s poem translated into German, so I get an idea of what we’re working on. I devour it, like any other book given to me in those years, and don’t have the faintest idea what it really is about – other than having a strong reaction about why a woman would wait and waste all her life to take a narcissistic fraud and con-artist back into her lap after he ditched her. Got my priorities right, early on!
(I also stupidly abandoned my piano teacher to take up the cello – for the sole reason that it allowed me a weekly escape from school into the city where the conservatory was offering lessons. That did not last long, a story for another day.)
The short version of the Peer Gynt poem, now seen through the eyes of an adult, is this: boy tries to be someone, not sure who, and confabulates, lies, tricks and swindles his way through the world, from Norway to Northern Africa and back, with abduction of other people’s brides, intermittent stops in the halls of mythological troll kings, royal interludes in insane asylums and pursuit by the devil. Two women love him, yet see through him and call him on it, his mother, Åse, who dies, and Solveig, who takes him back when he returns broken, unrecognized, still without identity, her love the key to his redemption.
Essential here is Gynt’s search for identity (or the rejection thereof), a trying on of roles, and a desperate avoidance to be cast in fixed form while the searching is so much more exciting. Why be an ordinary person if you can be an adventurer, a rich merchant, a wise man, a king? With the arrival of modernity, predestined class or social organization no longer determines who you are – replaced by a compulsive search for self -determination. Sooooo many options to choose from, why settle on one? And so Peer steals stories from others, trying on their selves, forever non-authentic, as called out by his mother from the very beginning. He runs away from negative feelings with fantasies of omnipotence or flat-out denial, and does not care who gets hurt in the process. No wonder he feels deadened by the end, but then gets miraculously saved by Solveig’s unconditional love.
Young – and – old Heuer: Spare me the romanticism! Give me poetic justice!
In reality, I was probably enraged that in my teenage existence any deviation from “good girl” stereotypes, any trying out of alternative identities would surely be punished – WAS punished – no redemption in sight. Reserved for the boys, as per usual.
The montage is capturing the original childhood joy at hearing the sounds of Morning Mood waft up to my room, the lightness and serenity of the atmosphere mirrored by the sunlit pine sapling. The image also includes two figures in a wishful representation of Peer and Solveig sharing a life as equals rather than foils for each other.
I selected the super-imposed painting, Couple on the Heath, because the woman looks a little bit like my young mother. She often escaped her grief through music and I want to dedicate the image to her, in gratitude of opening the world of art to me from an early age.
The painter, Lotte Laserstein, spearheading the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, was a prominent artist in Weimar era Berlin, where my mother was born and raised. Of Jewish origins, Laserstein fled Germany for Sweden in 1935, anticipating that a particular identity could be a death sentence under the new regime. In an ironic, if horrid, twist, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was adapted by the Nazis and made into a nationalistic heroic tale with Gynt’s Nordic identity absurdly fixed into the fascist cult, with the trolls representing Jews.
Maybe next time when you roll your eyes that Classic FM is playing the old war horse again, you can think about all this complicated stuff associated with the music. As much as Grieg was set on showcasing the folk tunes of his country, or the sensuality of desert princesses, or the grief associated with losing a parent, all musical transcriptions of concrete events in the tale, he nonetheless reminds us that there was a larger narrative behind it all. Worth a re-read, in a time where identity politics, the need for belonging and othering, respectively, continue to play such a poisonous role across a divided world.
Here is Grieg’s Morning Mood as an orchestral version by the Berlin Philharmonic and as a PIANO VERSION.
This month I came across a book that was exceedingly clever, merging parallel storylines in seemingly effortless ways and making me think hard about a lot of things. Gorgeously, sensitively written, it was also truly funny and often pleasurably steamy. I wanted to throw it across the room once I was finished, in pure envy.
TheMinistry of Time by Kaliane Bradley alternates the tales of a 19th century arctic explorer with that of the daughter of Cambodian refugees who escaped the slaughter in their native country and try to make a life in an England of the near future. She is employed at the Ministry of Time, an administrative government branch that has somehow acquired a key to time travel. Concerned that they might change the history of the world, they pluck a motley crew of people from various centuries who were all about to be dead in their respective environments (trapped in the ice, wounded in the Great War, etc.) and thus unlikely to create a butterfly wing effect. The expats are put under scientific observation to see if adjustment to a different century is possible without lethal cost, and distributed to handlers who will be their bridges to a new life and spend the first year living with them. Cue the experiences and woes of an immigrant across cultures and time, the adventures of human beings treated like lab rats, a love story among the most opposite of characters, and a lot of historical facts sprinkled in that bring the past to life while you read about the near future.
It gets darker, though, imperceptibly first, then at a fast clip, when the narrative explores why time travel has appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at Britain’s doorstep. Without giving too much away I will just allude to the consequences of ignoring climate change and desperation to retroactively change an unbearable future. The philosophical questions are hinted at, the psychological issues treated in more depth and deftly. For the present at hand: Whether immigration happens across time, or across continents, will the issues of the past, for first and second generations, get resolved? Is trauma so ingrained that you cannot escape it, even if all circumstances are miraculously changed? When do you realize that colonial exploits were nothing to be proud of? Where do you cross a line when experimenting with humans, and how does love challenge ethics (or vice versa?) Importantly, how do you place yourself in a hierarchy of power, finding yourself trapped in conformity and complicity, when power was the only antidote to your people’s history as victims of genocide?
The novel is thoughtful, elegant, and never ever polemical. You have to work your brain a bit to get to the real questions, although you can also read it simply at the level of a historical fiction/romance romp, if that is all you have the energy for – such is the clever construction of all the intertwining strands of narrative.
I was envious because I have been struggling for some time with creating something that reaches across different realms as well, and giving the cross-over some meaning. The core idea was to link pieces of music that I care for and that come from diverse historical eras, with visual capture of something that echoes the sentiment of the music, but is firmly located in the here and now – all landscapes I photographed across the last decades. I wanted to create a bit of mysteriousness when two genres, music and image, as well as past and present, align. I was open to adding the occasional protagonist, if they carry weight in the music, picking those, too, from different centuries, but planting them in the 21st century. Playfulness was acceptable, but only if the musical mood and style was respected in the overall visualization. So how do you mirror Wagner, Beethoven, Ravel, Schubert, Weill, Janacek, Glass or Satie? It’s been an intellectual rollercoaster: Beyond the Tree Line – Musical Tableaux.
I will post some samples across the next weeks so you can see the progress. We’ll start with a suite for violin and piano from 1914 by Erik Satie, Choses vues à droite et à gauche, (sans lunettes), (Things Seen to the Right-and-Left, without Glasses.) The trees were likely around when it was composed, they are carefully tended plane trees in Paris’ Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement. The sculptural elements below them pick up the interlinking characteristics of the fugue.
Last week saw me huffing and puffing on a perfectly flat path along the river, bones aching when I returned from a 3.5 miles hike (today’s photographs). My usual inclination would be to be demoralized. Particularly since I had been collecting stories of women my age and older, all of whom pulled off things physically a million times more challenging.
I was thinking of Ernestine Shepard who is a competitive body builder, trainer and model in her 80s.
I was wondering about Ginette Bedard who ran marathons at age 86 four years ago still. She did not start until she was 68 and has run 10 marathons since – good G-d.
I envied Jane Dotchin, a British woman now in her early eighties, who treks 600 miles with her dog and pony every year from Hexham, Northumberland to the Scottish Highlands.
Screenshot
Everything she needs, tent and food included, is in the saddlebacks, and she covers about 20 miles a day. Do yourself a favor and watch the short clip linked in her name above – it brings endless cheer.
Luckily, I had help fighting off demoralized thinking from two recently encountered sources. One is a a book by a contemporary social scientist at Yale University, Becca Levy. Her research, described at length in Breaking the Age Code, tackles how we internalize personal and cultural stereotypes about aging and how these adopted beliefs then have insidious consequences. The book lays out clearly how many structural factors contribute to ageism, but also how we can employ some simple mechanism so that we won’t fall for these beliefs and have them crimp our life expectancy. Here is an excerpt that succinctly tells what her focus is all about.
Her data suggest that activating positive age stereotypes for just 10 minutes or so improves people’s memory performance, gait, balance, speed, and even the will to live. I cannot judge if those are short term effects demonstrated in the lab, or actually extend to real life situations for the long run. I can confirm, though, that my other source of encouragement has captured what I have seen in my own context of aging and being surrounded by aging friends.
Here are the words of Simone de Beauvoir (from The Coming of Age, the obscuring American translation of her original title La Vieillesse, Old Age):
“Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” (Ref.)
Looks like we’re best served by marching some miles together with friends, passionately demonstrating for a cause close to our hearts. Connections and causes. Nature can wait!
Alternatively, it could be the cause. Some extraordinary lives were linked to nature – devoted to ecological research and saving the forests. Here is the spellbinding portrait of a woman academic who spent her adult life in a hunting lodge without electricity and running water in the Polish woods, sharing her housing with a 400 pound boar called Froggy, a lynx named Agatka and a kleptomaniac crow. Read the story here – it is guaranteed to make your day, another day towards old(er)age with a positive role model no less!
Simone Kossack with Froggy. What about all those clocks?
Music today is by another favorite activist who is still performing in her older years. Chaka Khan, Queen of Funk, and erstwhile member of the Black Panthers, will perform at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. on July 26,2024!
Tell me something good!
(Song written by Stevie Wonder and originally performed with her band Rufus, heard a million years ago when I still attended live concerts…)
Kairos: a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action : the opportune and decisive moment. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary
A video has been making the rounds in Germany for the last few days, depicting a group of wealthy young people at one of the country’s most exclusive bars engaged in laughing, singing and shouting racist, nationalistic and even fascist paroles, one of the revelers seemingly giving the Nazi Salute, filming themselves with glee and later posting the recordings. (I refuse to share, giving them more exposure…)
Most commentators remark on this as something that is not novel for the sentiment depicted. What is new is the pride accompanying a brazen openness about one’s ideology that was previously subterraneous in a country blanketed with shame over past sins. There is also a shift regarding who comes forward with explicit racism – once a province of beerhalls and most often associated with lower-education populations mainly in the East, it now seems to be fashionable among the elite. Think a five star drinking hole in the Hamptons, visited by Nepo-babies and their entourage. For Germans who were happy to assign Nazism to poor yokels, this is an unwelcome occasion to have to admit extremist sentiments in all sectors of society across the nation.
Of course, we see an inclination towards unapologetic flaunting of ideologies previously kept close to the chest and only revealed in like-minded company here in the U.S. as well. Just think of Justice Alito’s various flag demonstrations. Or that of evangelical House Speaker Johnson, who displays the Christian nationalist flag in front of his office, signaling his theocratic agenda. The Appeal to Heavenflag is part of the symbolism of the far-right New Apostolic Reformation, a movement fighting for a hegemonically Christian America.
Apparently it is a crucial moment in time, propitious for the public flaunting of racist and nationalistic agendas we thought banned for good. Or at least hoped. It signals a qualitative shift, in my opinion, fostered by increasing desire for and acceptance of authoritarianism colored by religious fervor, whether Christianity or Hinduism as just two example, internationally.
Crucial moment in time is also the title – Kairos – of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, translated by Michael Hofmann, that won this year’s international Booker Prize. You can read ubiquitous reviews here, here and here. Be warned, though. It is an incredibly sad, cruel, and bitter tale that is unfolding, both in descriptions of a May/December love affair, and a reckoning with German history set at the time of approaching reunification of East and West in the 1980s.
I was grateful to read the original language, having always thought the author has an incredible skill with words to both lure you and distance you at the same time to and from her preoccupation with time. Much of her work is concerned with how time takes things -as well as bodies – apart. Now she shifts to the concept of time as that moment that changes everything, and it dawns on you, slowly, eventually, that we willingly overlook the signs that point to that moment of change, until, basically, it will be too late. True for relationships as much as politics of nations.
By all reports, the English translation is formidable. I, on the other hand, have been struggling to find the right word for an adjective I associate with the author, who was by the way, trained as a director of opera: unerbittlich. In English it is translated as unrelenting, but the German word has more of sense of “without mercy” attached. Not just not giving in to pleas, but exhibiting a punitive streak. She mercilessly holds the mirror to German society preoccupied with “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” a reckoning with the past, showing how often we still look away, or keep things at a surface, too fearful to look deeper. Exactly the situation that the reactions to the video alluded to above seem to reflect. The same pattern emerges for acknowledging signs of domestic violence and abuse. We ignore the creeping signals around us as long as we can, since it can’t be true what we don’t want to be true.
This might not be the moment in time to focus on entropy, Erpenbeck’s continual concern. Do we really want to burden ourselves with yet another downer, a hair-raising, deeply sad tale, when we are so emotionally vulnerable from all the trauma around us?
But if not now, when? Disentangling the lessons of history from wishful thinking will always be hard. Her writing is as brilliant a guide as any. Maybe this novel rises to prominence with the Booker Prize at exactly a propitious moment, before it is too late.
Last night I had a horrid dream, likely tied to the day’s reading and writing about Caspar David Friedrich. Emotionally depleted from curating a show of Holocaust photography at a German Jewish museum, I took the wrong train, ending up traveling through Poland. Once we reached the Baltic Sea shore, the train stopped. Throngs of people, me among them, scrambled down the dunes and cliffs to the beach to see Orcas (! they live in all oceans except the Black and the Baltic Sea…) swimming in what looked like jet-black, glassy waves that were suspended in slow motion. Friedrich’s Sea of Ice had melted, but the water was not behaving naturally. I could not really see much given the wall of people, all with their back turned to me and then realized I had left my backpack, wallet and iPhone as well as my heavy coat in the train – what if it left? You can anticipate the rest – trying to scramble up the cliffs, heart pounding, stone crumbling under your feet…
My former hometown museum, Hamburger Kunsthalle, currently offers a blockbuster retrospective of works by Caspar David Friedrich. By all reports it is a curatorial masterpiece, guiding you through the evolution of the work by this preeminent romanticist painter, while the drawings and paintings are simultaneously grouped by thematic content, making for a more comprehensive visual experience. A whale of a show where you can see nothing on opening night because of the masses of visitors celebrating the occasion.
The cherry on top can be found on the second floor of the museum – a selection of contemporary artists whose work references, or is derived from, or parodies Friedrich.
I’d give an arm and a leg to see it, but my days of travel to Europe are over. Luckily we can get some glimpses on-line. Here is a general tour of the exhibition. And here is an audio tour for selected works – the second entry from top in the link is the english version. One below that is one for children, which I find an extremely cool idea.
Alas, nothing visually available in my cursory search on the modern artists who relate to Friedrich. But here is a recent review that goes into more depth.
Concurrent with the exhibition, a darling of Germany’s current literary scene, author and art historian Florian Illies, published a book about Caspar David Friedrich (CDF), Der Zauber der Stille – Caspar David Friedrichs Reise durch die Zeiten (The Enchantment of Silence, CDF’s travels through time – not yet translated.) I am halfway through it and must say it provokes a lot of different reactions.
For one, I have certainly lost my ability to concentrate across the years of the pandemic. Maybe it is just aging, maybe it is the lack of conversational interaction, or the stress levels that impede sustained reading. If the structure of a book is complicated I often get lost and/or frustrated. Well, this book does have a complex structure, but it held my attention by the sheer force of curiosity it instilled: where is the author going next? What seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge will be imparted in unexpected juxtapositions?
Like one of his successful previous books, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39, which described the fates of numerous famous couples during the ascent of fascism in Europe, drawing relevant parallels to our own times, the new book is an accumulation of vignettes which constantly shift between times and perspectives. The book is divided in chapters referencing fire, water, earth and air as elements relevant to both life and work of CDF. A very helpful time table is in the appendix, as are recommendations for further writings by specialists on the topic. It is a book that helps you learn, without sacrificing amusement.
Reconstructed Frauenkirche that was destroyed in the allied fire bombing
If you ignore the somewhat self-congratulatory tone of an author who knows how clever he is, and his insistent descriptions of what and how Caspar David Friedrich thought and felt – a bit too presumptuous for my taste – you are in for a ride that elates. You learn so much about the artist, his times, the trauma that defined his development, the strange interactions with women (he decided he needed to be married in his mid-forties when the neighbor who kept his wood stove going while the artist went on his daily hikes, went on vacation. He asked for the hand of a 20+ year younger woman, who he had encountered in the store where he bought his art materials, and could not even remember her first name during the 2 year-long engagement…)
The kind of house CDF likely rented an apartment in.
Florian Illies is a quintessential story teller, and weaves tales that help us understand an artist whose rebirth into public consciousness, after long eras of almost complete obsoleteness, is no coincidence. Then and now a longing for something that juxtaposes or lifts the despair du jour was pretty central to people’s existence, and his work captured that longing (and its potential remedies) in ways not seen before.
But the author also makes us think about historical interconnections, often occurring by chance. For example, Walt Disney, during trips to Europe, collected art books galore and shipped them back to the US. When he was told by Thomas Mann, while both received an honorary doctorate at Harvard or some such, that Felix Salten’s tale Bambi would be a great script for a movie, Disney promptly acted on the suggestion and told his artists to use the CD Friedrich landscapes from the art books as the background for the movie. Hitler, a Disney fan, adored the movie. Never mind, that Felix Salten’s book, written by this Jewish author and perceived to be a cloaked substitute for Jewish persecution, was one of the first to be publicly burned.
The Nazis later appropriated Friedrich’s oeuvre into their canon of true Germanic art, to the point where every young soldier sent to his death at the rapidly deteriorating Russian front received a booklet called Caspar David Friedrich and his Homeland, containing black and white prints of his paintings of oaks and the sea. The introduction contained the assertion that the artist carried a life-long, unmovable, holy belief in Germany.
View of Dresden from the surrounding hills
Anecdote after anecdote, one art-history related morsel after another. The extreme colors of the sky, reminiscent of those of his contemporary Turner? Why, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island, now Indonesia, erupted in 1815, and ash particles that traveled across the world had an impact on how colors in the atmosphere were perceived. The theme of fire and ash replicates itself through out Friedrich’s life. So many of his works lost to fire, so many of the places he was connected to, burned.
The landscapes all constructed, rather than true life depictions, painted in a darkened basement room, fixed with the famous backside views of wanderers and women because the artist felt he could not draw people correctly, the back view being a welcome simplification. On and on it goes, deflating myths, augmenting admiration for a man who struggled with life-long depression, pathological shyness and poverty.
The river Elbe that crosses the city, where he walked during dawn and dusk, every day.
Until you have a chance to read it in English, here is some compensation for the wait: here is a link to a website that has accumulated titles of books that have a truly interesting or innovative structure. I can highly recommend Life after Life and The Warmth of other Suns.
Photographs today are from Dresden, where the artist lived his adult life.
Music today by Carl Maria von Weber, musical champion of the ideals of Romaticism. He overlapped with CDF in Dresden, where he became the director of the German Opera in 1817 and where he wrote the Freischütz. I selected an earlier composition, a beautiful piece for clarinet, though.
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.”
In a recent interview Rebecca Solnit talked about hope amid the climate chaos. She defined the term: “Hope, for me, is just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.” She added the observation, “many people are very good at imagining everything falling apart, everything getting worse; they’re good at dystopia, they’re bad at utopia.” Sometimes, I thought, a word of consolation would help, rather than the exhortation for all of us to try even harder during times when despair sets in. The thought was probably triggered by my current reading – I came across the interview while starting a recent book by Michael Ignatieff, The Art of Consolation. How to find solace in dark times. (The link gives you an excerpt of the preface.)
I had liked Ignatieff’s brilliant biography of Isaiah Berlin, but am currently irritated, two chapters into these meditations, about his devotion to religious attempts at consolation with the imperative to just accept the unknowable. No takers for “all has a hidden meaning – only a higher power knows” on this end here. The chapters are organized around a summary and analysis, ordered along a historical time line, of famous people’s dealing with catastrophe and defining forms of consolation, a veritable gallery of the broken and bereaved, as a clever review in The Guardian phrased it. More skeptical review in the NYT here.
Maybe I am just currently irritated in general. Who knows.
In any case, I thought it would be interesting to find some examples of visual representations of consolation. How do you visually translate the moment when we attempt to help someone reverse or shift despair into something more resembling a somewhat normal life, if not hope? The moment when someone or something opens a perspective towards this shift, providing a sense that it is possible, or probable, or even guaranteed that life will be easier to bear at some point?
The search resulted in a mix. It arches from representations of the texts that governed the belief systems of different eras to impressionistic paintings that captured the human interaction associated with comforting, from mannerist paintings to some modern photography. What is art and what is Kitsch I leave to the eye of the beholder.
I’ll start with miniatures from TheGetty relating to Boethius’ Consolation de Philosophie, around1460-70. The Roman philosopher’s book was the most read in Europe after the bible. It contains “a dialogue between its author and the personification of Philosophy, in prison while awaiting trial for treason. Discussing the problem of evil and the conflict between free will and divine providence, Philosophy explains the changeable nature of Fortune and consoles Boethius in his adversity.”
There is Munch, there is always Edvard Munch, who we can count on.
Edvard Munch Consolation (1894)
Compare:
PDX photographer, now based in Brooklyn, Olivia BeeConsolation (2020.)
Any thoughts? And what to make of the image (“Consolation”) of a fetus…. at the center of the exhibition Colpo di Folmine (Struck by Lightning) by Dutch photographer Arno Massee?
I, personally, find solace in the somewhat sarcastic poetry of Heinrich Heine, who, in 1832, reminds a woman staring at the sea with setting sun, that the sun will rise again….translated by no other than Emma Lazarus!
Here is one of Kaspar David Friedrich’s back views, alternatingly titled: Woman in front of the setting sun, Sunset, Sunrise, Morning Sun, Woman in the morning sun. No sea in sight, but the solace of a world still turning. That’s my kind of consolation. Then again, that painting might also be a premonition of a burning planet due to unending fossil fuel consumption – wouldn’t you know it, despair is here to stay.
Today’s musings will be all over the map, geographically, emotionally and with regards to content that has preoccupied my brain for a while. It all leads back to Octavia E. Butler, a writer who I admire for her exquisite, creative world building, her focus on in/justice, and her ability to transcend genres. I am even more grateful for all of her modeling of what it means to have courage and persistence, to stick to goals defying racist, patriarchal, professionally closed systems, while skirting existential poverty and loneliness during formative years.
Mural at the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School in Altadena, CA.
All over the map: Let’s start with Trieste, Italy. Why Trieste? I was somewhat condescendingly amused during my 2018 visit there to see flocks of fans follow the footsteps of their hero, James Joyce, who lived and wrote major works in Trieste for years. Selfies with his statue, tour lines in front of his lodgings, photographs of the multiple plaques conveniently placed by the Bureau of Tourism: Joyce walked over this bridge here! More than once!
Well, I was wrong, I’ve joined the multitudes and never should have sneered. Not pursuing Joyce, nor taking selfies, but I am now trying to walk along the paths of someone I wish I’d understand, taking in the neighborhoods and buildings that were part of her daily life, reading about her struggle, and visiting places that keep her memory alive.
Pasadena, CA, then, is next. No plaques here, but a helpful map laying out routes frequently taken by Butler, prepared by people at the Huntington Library which holds the author’s archives. An even more helpful book by journalist Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky – the World of Octavia E. Butler, which introduces the canvas on which Butler drew both herself and the worlds she constructed from the insights captured by her daily struggles, the physical environment in which she labored, and the mental landscapes that she traveled while growing into the writer some of us now devour. George describes the author with exceptional sensitivity and intuition, during the years before Butler would go on to become a MacArthur (Genius) Fellow and win a Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Hugo and Nebula Awards for her trailblazing work in science fiction—the first Black woman to win both awards.
Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA, to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who was a shoe shiner and died when she was very young. She was dyslexic, isolated in school and not particularly supported by the majority of her teachers. Later she turned to menial jobs, often physical labor, that did not require much thought so she was free to do her own thinking, and could use the rest of her time to walk or visit libraries, some involving hours on the bus.
Historic center Pasadena, including the post office where checks, manuscripts acceptance or rejection letters might have arrived in her P.O.Box.
Lynell George’s account of these early years is, among other things, based on archival items that Butler saved over the years: lists. And lists. And lists. On scrap paper, or any other expandable surface she could write on, perhaps compulsively constructed to organize and likely ward off a flood of fears that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Lists to evaluate what could be pawned to head off starvation. Lists of goals. Lists of dreams. Lists of exhortations or promises to Self, or incantations about how the world should be and how to make it so.
An eternally slow start to find her way into publishing, with 2 small manuscripts sold in 5 years, interminable stretches of professional drought, and yet this author went on to write and publish over a dozen books, with artists, play-writes, musicians and film makers increasingly inspired by the work since her death from injuries sustained in a fall at the age of 58 in 2006. Her novels are taught at colleges and universities around the country (well, where there are not yet banned, I should hasten to add…) and you can now watch adaptions of her books on TV. (Coincidentally, this weekend’s NYT listed an introduction to some of the essential works, so you can see for yourself how much ground was covered or where to start.)
***
Many of Butler’s books can be found in a small book store on North Hill Avenue in Pasadena, Octavia’s Bookshelf. It opened about a month ago and offers a range of works by BIPOC writers, and a welcome space to sit down and explore.
Here I meet Nikki High, owner of the store, who is helpful in recommending books when I approach her to pick her brain and perfectly happy to spend some of her valuable time chatting with this stranger. Which brings us to the Republic of Ghana, the west-African country where sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois resided during the last years of his life and is buried. He died on the eve of the civil-rights march in Washington,D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream”speech and where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP announced Du Bois’s death from the podium. I mention to Nikki that I am currently reading a thought provoking, beautiful novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Lovesongs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and she tells me about her recent travels to Ghana to visit Du Bois’ grave and the house he lived in, visibly moved by the reliving of that memory.
Jeffer’s novel revolves around the concept of Double Consciousnessthat Du Bois introduced in his seminal book The Souls of Black Folk (1903.) So does Kindred, (2003) Butler’s historical fiction/fantasy novel introducing a heroine who time travels between the 19th and 20th century, between the slave plantation where her ancestors suffered and her interracial marriage in 1976 L.A.. The novel has become a cornerstone of Black American literature.
Du Bois argued that living as an African American within a system of White racism leads to a kind of fragmented identity. The double consciousness refers to “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
“It is a socio-cultural construct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributed specifically to people of African descent in America. The “two-ness” of which it is a consciousness thus is not inherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here as both imposed and fraught with psychic danger.” (Ref.)
The socio-cultural existence is defined by a racial hierarchy that includes hostility and suspicion, subtle or outright exclusion, a life lived in uncertainty and guardedness. The individual’s identity, both novels argue, is also affected by the historical fact that harm extended beyond the individual to whole family structures and networks of kin. Only when you understand the legacy of historical trauma and merge it into your own sense of self will it cease to afflict you. Past and present need to be integrated to mend a disjointed self.
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As luck would have it, the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School‘s library celebrates an OEB science fiction festival the next day. Previously Washington Middle School, the institution’s new name (since Fall 2022) honors its famous alumna. Since I have to avoid crowded indoor settings during the pandemic (it is NOT over, folks!), I cannot join the activities, but manage to get a few photos in a ventilated hallway. New generations are introduced to a role model that leaves you in awe for the obstacles overcome.
On to Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, CA, where Butler is buried. It is a peaceful place with beautiful old tree growth, als long as you ignore the coyotes that they warn you about, patrolling in packs, by some reports.
Butler’s grave marker is unobtrusive, not easy to find. The inscription is one of her most frequently cited insights, from the book The Parabel of the Sower (1993), where she turned her attention to climate catastrophe and the subsequent militarization of state and rapidly shrinking chances of survival. Set in 2024, it seems utterly prescient in retrospect, its descriptions outlining the contours of our lived or soon to be lived reality.
Allow me one short digression, and some speculation, you’ll see why in a minute. Butler’s last resting place sports numerous strange grave stones, if you can call it that, artificial tree stumps carved with the emblems of a maul, wedge, axe and dove, as well as markers inscribed with repeat phrases, the Latin motto “Dum Tacet Clamet” which translates to “though silent, he speaks.” A bit of research brought me to Omaha, Nebraska, where one Joseph Cullen Root founded The Woodmen of the World (WOW) in the early 1890s. It was essentially a mutual aid society, a beneficiary order that provided death benefits and grave stones to its members by essentially passing around a hat.
That turned out not to work exactly, and so shifted thirty years later to become a regular life insurance company. By 1901 it was the largest fraternal organization in Oregon with 140 camps and a membership of 15,000. Membership conditions: you had to prove yourself in various ways, be older than 16 and – White. A subdivision, Women of Woodcraft, is captured in this photograph.
Women of Woodcraft (likely a drill team), ca. 1910. Object ID: 2011.033.001; Copyright Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center
Would Butler be turning in her grave, surrounded by valkyries like these? Likely not. She would point to the importance of the idea of mutual aid, and to change: if you look at the website of the WoodmenLife Insurance Company that grew out of WOW, you find images of Black, Asian, Brown and other faces among the White beneficiaries, carefully assembled to stress diversity. It might only be on the surface, who can tell, but change nonetheless. And in any case – she might stay silent, but her work speaks to millions, in contrast to the wood people of the world….
***
This brings me to the reason why I, an old White European woman who can take privilege seemingly for granted, am so preoccupied with a Black writer who envisioned change and imbued her heroines with strength and refusal to give up, forever pursuing humanistic goals. She instills hope.
I feel like living in an era where, here as well as internationally, change is pursued or co-opted to move us backwards. The powers that be (or wannabe) want to affirm or re-install structures – and I mean STRUCTURES – that go beyond individual racist impulses or acts, to dominate on top of a hierarchy and use that dominance to extract riches and suffering. These forces are insisting that “differences”exists, be they racial, religious, gender, sexuality or simply cultural. Don’t ever believe in equality! Put a value label to these differing categories, with some “better,” others “worse,” with the dominant category, of course, being the superior one. This valuation is extended to an entire group, depreciating not just single humans, but a whole category. “Negative valuation imposed upon that group becomes the legitimization and justification for hostility and aggression. The inner purpose of this process is social benefit, self-valorization, and the creation of a sense of identity for the one through the denigration of the other. And as is evident, the generation and expression of hierarchy run through it from beginning to end.” (Ref.)
Whether you look at the Nazi play book, present-day Hungary, Russia, India or other authoritarian movements, these principles are at work every single time, with the content attached to the “difference” changing according to local need du jour and historical hierarchies, including colonialism. In addition, progressive movements so often weaken themselves by intra-group strife instead of collaborative fighting against a common enemy. I can think of no better explanation of those principles than in Arundhati Roy’s speech last week at the Swedish Academy.
It is so easy to lose hope, to withdraw by feeling overwhelmed, helpless, powerless to achieve true equality. And yet there was a person who faced obstacles beyond description, who believed in hope and the power of community.
Here is someone who put it in words better than I ever could, Jesmyn Ward, a formidable writer in her own right:
“This is how Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, and browbeats: she writes her way to hope. This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair. This is the real gift of her work… in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.”
Against the backdrop of a legacy of trauma she provided us with a legacy of optimism, that the lessons of successful collective action and resistance in the past will guide us to the right kind of change in the future, with the help of courageous and resourceful Black women.
