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February 2025

Just Playin’ Around.

· Exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU ·

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”  – Friedrich Schiller (Schiller’s Werke, Nationalausgabe, Vol.20, pg.359.)

You don’t have to buy into the absolutism of Schiller’s proclamation to acknowledge that the 18th century poet, playwright and philosopher was on to something with his theories around a human play drive. He believed that play allows an escape from the rigid structures provided by societal expectations, and in some ways melds our sensual experience with rationality, providing a path to both, appreciation of aesthetics and critical thinking. Ultimately he saw play as an expression of freedom.

During the 200 years since, we have seen repeated waves of interest in the relationship between play, or playfulness, and the aesthetic experience as well as the production of art. Freud connected childhood play to creativity in ways that influenced generations:

“Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him ? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” (Ref.)

The Surrealists embraced both his notions about what drives child play and his concept of the “uncanny,” so often associated with dolls. The Expressionist artists of The Brücke proclaimed that you had to return to seeing the world through a child’s eyes. The movement towards “Primitivism” included not just a focus on cultures untouched by technology and modern civilization, but on childhood productions of art as well. In 1948 a group of French artists formed CoBrA, which publicly claimed the drawings of children as their inspiration. A child-like aesthetic was on the rise, although its content was very much about the existential sorrows of a post-war society. More recently, you have artists like Cy Twombley, Jean Tinguely, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few, whose creativity is informed by the processes, forms of expressions or materials involved in childhood play. And now we can engage with work by Ai Weiwei, whose most recent exhibition, Child’s Play, at Vito Schnabel Gallery in NYC ends this week. Using Lego Bricks exclusively, he translates art-historical canvases, famous portraits and political news images into the medium of play.

Child’s Play. It’s your turn to play! Serious Play: Translating Form, Subverting Meaning. Prototyping Play. Push Play. Play Well. Playing Rules! (a weird translation from the literal German show title Playing means Changing.) These are all titles of exhibitions across the last years, some with formidable collections, others with brilliant ideas, most of them with an interactive component that hopes to increase cultural engagement.

***

Play we shall. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU offers the opportunity to play while exploring art (or vice versa?) with its current exhibition Just Playing around. Lucky for us, and unsurprisingly, given the caliber of the curator duo Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin, the work on view provides much more than the opportunity to take a break from the real world. There are serious issues to be thought through, new insights to be gained, novel connections established – in other words, reality and critical thinking intrude on the unstructured spontaneity so desired. The show is thus something of an articulation of Schiller’s concept of play: a synthesizing, through contradiction, of the human experience of sense and reason.

The exhibition stretches across two floors, walls painted in saturated primary colors that echo kids’ rooms of yore before the current vibe of sad beige children (a fun meme that is mocking trendy design ideas for pastel environments reflecting parental rather than kids’ tastes.) Exhibits span a range of modes – sculpture, installation, video reels, paintings, and costumes, featuring the work of Derrick Adams, Calvin Chen, Jeremy Okai Davis, Latoya Lovely, Jillian Mayer, Takashi Murakami, Jeremy Rotsztain, Heidi Schwegler, Joshua Sin, Matthew Earl Williams, and Erwin Wurm. The displays are very clearly marked for presence or absence of interaction, with the signage continuing the bubbly graphics of the hand-outs and announcement posters. Playful, perhaps, space-saving for sure – the spatial arrangements allow for introduction of and extended commentary by the artists in tight construction.

Joshua Sin Power Up (2024)

The entrance hall displays two columns made out of furry toys which artist Joshua Sin found in the bins of Good Will stores. These are the kinds of soft companions embraced in the cribs and strollers of the younger set. They are the perfect metaphor for this exhibition, if you consider them transitional objects: a link to  D.W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts. During childhood they form a bridge towards growth. The artist, however, reflects on what we loose in the transition: “innocence, imagination and unbridled joy.” Have to disagree – innocence lost, perhaps, but imagination and unbridled joy are available still, and in fact captured by quite a few items within this show, or the reaction of this viewer.

That said, I was quite taken by the other sculpture Sin created: a hundred or so of small, mass-produced Beanie Babies, tightly encased in acrylic boxes, forming columns. They reminded me of display cases in airports or department stores, where merchandise is aimed at customers, young and old; the collectible quality of these creatures lures kids into a mode of amassing toys rather than forming a relationship with a few individualized ones. Creating want, rather than protecting from a world of commerce, shaping future consumers, fixed on brand. A poignant reminder how even play can be devoured by market mechanisms.

Joshua Sin Boxed Dreams (2024)

And speaking of brand, that is how one of the, if not most, famous contemporary Austrian artists is sometimes labeled. Erwin Wurm is represented at PSU with two instantiations of his One Minute Sculptures. This is a series that integrates time into the art work, as well as interaction with the viewer, by offering basic materials, often casually collected as found objects, placed on a pedestal and provided with simple instructions: do this or that with it for a minute, or as long as you can. Photos can be taken and archived, prolonging the otherwise short-lived sculptural constellation of a toy dog hanging on your shoulders. He has been doing this for almost thirty years, restricting displays to galleries and museums for fear of it becoming a gimmick, and proudly announces that “only” 129 or so exist. Define gimmick again?

Erwin Wurm Theory of Hope (2016) (One minute sculpture)

An ongoing retrospective of his life’s work at the ALBERTINA in Vienna (which also shows other, equally identifiable series) at the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday, sees the artist expand. The One Minute Sculptures are now rid of pedestals, come without instructions and provide abstract sculptures we are supposed to interact with. It was “too clean” up until now, according to Wurm. Mostly, though, the idea is to undermine the pathos elicited by so many high-brow, serious works of art, and engage the viewer with whimsey, fostering connection by playful interaction.(Ref.) And to be perfectly honest, an installation of his, an upside down truck made into a platform inviting you to peruse the Mediterranean that I saw at an earlier Venice Biennale, was a striking commentary on the movement of goods and bodies across that body of water at a time where the refugee crisis changed political constellations in Europe. More thought, less play. For me, memorable.

***

A video screen spanning the entire back wall of the gallery displays a loop of an azure sky with little white clouds and some inverse sky-writing in child-like script, slowly fading into oblivion. Maybe you can’t access your inner child – but you surely can still be treated like one, with the reassuring message that you’ll be ok (where is the pat on the back?). The mirror-image distortion of the words questions said sentiment, of course. What can we trust in a world where up is down or left is right, truth made ephemeral? Where assurances disappear while we are still trying to decipher them? Clever and beautiful work by Jillian Mayer.

Jillian Mayer You’ll be okay (video 2013)

Speaking of inner child, it surely helps to get back into play mode if the appropriate environmental cues signal the possibility of immersion in child-oriented environments. Latoya Lovely provides an inviting installation that is dominated by color, geometric murals, familiar books and object, artificial trees that hold clothes for (encouraged) dress up, and supersized magnetic wall puzzles that multiple people tried to re-arrange during my visit. Environmental immersion is clearly en vogue, and people are willing to wait in line for hours to enter spectacular playgrounds that mix art and playfulness, like Meow Wolf in New Mexico (where I stood in said lines, dished out unspeakable sums of money, and still wonder why,) or now Hopscotch here in Portland. The small scale and appreciated calm of Lovely’s installation somehow made a much more important point than the circus-like atmospheres mentioned above, bent on sating our unquenchable yearning for spectacle: Play (just like art) consists of making, taking apart and crafting back together, transforming space, and improvising, and so on. All of these processes are enabled or fostered by appropriately child-friendly environments where the materials themselves speak of playfulness and encourage reorganization.

Latoya Lovely On a Lovely Sunday Morning (2025)

***

There is playfulness and then there is playing games, both an important aspect of experiencing the world through the lens of play. One is aimless, rule-free, independent. The other is often goal oriented, bound by rules, and certainly open to or even in need of repetitive, practiced sequences rather than spontaneous moves. (Practice those scales and those pitches! Memorize those opening gambits in chess!)

Think of board games, Mahjong or Back-Gammon, or playing a musical score, or competitive games in sport. Jeremy Okai Davis’ paintings on the lower gallery level offer depictions of sports figures who surmounted obstacles and succeeded in a racist world, intentionally questioning the rules of the (larger)game.

Jeremy Okai Davis Crown (Althea Gibson) (2023

His work is well rooted in a long line of art works that made the game, and the social structures surrounding it, itself a topic, starting with the preoccupation with card playing in the 16th/17th century. Lucas van Leyden’s The Card players, Carravagio’s The Cardsharps, LaTour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs are all examples where issues beyond play were slickly introduced: who wants to have fun, who is competitive who likes to take risks or is cautious, who is strategic, who is willing to cheat, and who is good or bad at losing the game. And who is, we can now add, included or excluded, by invisible rules reaching back to Jim Crow. Play and the fate of players as a metaphor, then, representing social conditions.

I am not a gamer, but the role that video games have come to play around the world cannot be underestimated. There are whole museums now dedicated to video game art, offering exhibitions concerned with all the questions I’ve raised so far, applied to the artificial screen. The British National Video Museum, for example, right now offers an exhibition, The Art of Play, that focuses on how artists create the mood and textures of the video scenes. Video games are the perfect template to create or enhance myths, through world building and often sly ideological influence. They can be a vehicle to allow people to tend to baser instincts without real life consequences, but they can also be the seed for incredible levels of creativity in the player who has options to design their path forward.

For me, the most intriguing and thought-provoking installation in the entire Just Playin’ Around exhibition tackles questions around the psychology of gaming. Matthew Earl Williams (Confederate Tribes of Grande Ronde) took stills of the game Red Dead Redemption 2, the successor of one of the most famous video games ever, Red Dead Redemption. Both have won critical acclaim and multiple awards, wildly successful commercially. Set in the late 1800s in the Wild West, with themes concerning cycles of violence, masculinity, redemption, and the American Dream, the role player can choose who to be and with whom to align (multi-player mode possible), making practical and moral choices that have various rewards and punishments attached. Williams created a series of tintypes, popular in the late 19th century, and got permission from various players to capture images of their avatars which they had imaginatively costumed to stay in character. He raised the question why some would wish to be Native Americans during a historical period of their extreme suffering, when most players chose to be cowboys. Alas, no answer to that, as far as I could detect.

Matthew Earl William Indians of the Uncanny Valley (2021)

But the transfer of a digital fantasy creation onto a historical medium, the tintype print, created an illusion of historicity, when it was all frictionless role play safely removed from real life massacres. Add to that the choice of framing: garish, elaborately detailed and carved gold frames, that I immediately associated with the Orientalist paintings you find in the Louvre, or other National museums. The exotic “other” is squeezed into frames representing the taste and status of an entirely different world, their brightness furthermore a visual contrast enhancement of the darkness of their subject. I have no idea if that was intended by Williams, but the association to framing of outsiders was riveting.

Alternatively, these frames could represent the high-brow art found in museum, now linked to the low-brow art of video games, which draw in millions and millions of people, something museums can only dream of. Active play, connected to aesthetic experience of the created fantasy worlds, seems to be an ingredient we should indeed have a closer look at.

***

“Art is a complete fairytale – art is an unending child’s birthday party (forever, and ever, and ever, like cookie monster.” – Jonathan Meese, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Diktatur der Kunst, Berlin, 2012, p.474. (My translation.)

The longing to live in a world of play, and the assumption that play, intent on breaking the chains of reason, will enhance creativity, often go hand in hand in the contemporary art world. There is nothing wrong to focus on escape, when life is overall hard and overwhelmingly complex. Floating 2 story-high yellow rubber duckies on European harbors, as Florentijn Hofman did, or building a pink castle inside a Danish museum, as Meese and associates were known to do, provided fun for most involved, levity that is perfectly acceptable once you relegate high-brow “art” to the background, at least for a stretch of time. Did it bring back a piece of childhood, though, as intended? Can you really reenter a child-like mode of playing, and does that have an actual effect on creativity? Is it not just appearance, a strategy, since the child-like aesthetic, and the juvenile, playful demeanor are a consciously developed style of the artist, one which they consistently extend to adulthood – or so asks art critic Larissa Kikol, who is an expert on the subject matter.

Contemporary psychologists have some answers to offer, although a core question remains unresolved. For one, try as you might, you cannot completely reenter the state of a young child that you left behind long ago. Even if I make it as easy as possible, leading you through age regression via hypnosis, for example, you will draw me a picture you think is that of a child, but which differs significantly from those drawn by actual children. We simply cannot erase all of what we have learned growing up.

In a limited way, however, play does enhance creativity. Research tells us that one of the prerequisites of creativity is to focus less on external rewards and pay offs, and to engage in activity just for the pleasure of it. A sense of play can help with this – after all you are chasing fun. Likewise, a prerequisite for creativity is a willingness to step away from patterns and customs, and explore the unknown and often ambiguous, a willingness to take risks, and free play can help here too. Note, though, that I refer to these as prerequisites. They set the table for the creative process, but there is no scientific consensus on what the process actually involves. It certainly aids creativity if you relax assumptions and ignore boundaries and let your thoughts go wherever they will. But research suggests that these steps give you more options, not necessarily better options. And the creative mind seems able to separate the jewels from the junk. It also makes someone more likely to move into the direction of the jewels. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Can play put you in the right mindset? Often yes. Is play the golden key that unlocks all doors? Likely not.

But for those of us experiencing art, rather than being called to produce it, an invitation to play is often the way to jump over barriers keeping us from enjoying something we fear we might not understand. The gallery attendants, singularly helpful, knowledgeable young people, reported that the rooms fill with students when there are larger breaks between classes. By these reports, they have not previously made much use of the gallery integrated into the PSU complex, and the nature of the exhibition clearly provides a draw. As it should, offering more than just playin’ around.

After all, we need adults in the room, now more than ever, and much of the presented work helps us to get there.

Just Playin’ Around

January 21 – April 26, 2025

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU

1855 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201

FREE ADMISSION

HOURS:

Sunday:  Closed

Monday: Closed

Tuesday:  11 AM–5 PM

Wednesday:  11 AM–5 PM

Thursday:  11 AM–7 PM 

Friday:  11 AM–5 PM 

Saturday:  11 AM–5 PM 

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The Beauty of Ruins

Many years back I was part of a group of artists invited to spend a full day at the Blue Heron Paper Company in Oregon City, a site long shut down after bankruptcy. Like for so many photographers, decaying industrial sites held a special appeal for me, with beauty found in strange places.

In 2019, the Confederate Tribes of the Grand Ronde bought the 182 acres, and in 2021 publicized plans for the development of the river and Willamette Falls-adjacent property which holds special cultural and historical significance to the Grand Ronde. Here is the vision (captured in a short video) as expressed at the time. The plan included “mixed use for office, retail, restaurants and public spaces near the falls, as well as instructional learning spaces so visitors can learn about the history of the land. The long-discussed riverwalk would also be a part of the plans.“

Rounding up Circles

Progress has been slow, with demolition of select buildings taking a lot of time, amongst permit woes and required resources. Then, 2 weeks ago, a large fire broke out on the site, still smoldering a week later, requiring closure of major thoroughfares. The billowing smoke caught over the small town, with worries about toxic air quality lasting for more than a week. The fire fighting was hampered by the intensity of the fire, and the fact that during an earlier fire in 2020, several fire fighters faced life-threatening conditions that no-one should experience again. The cause for the fire is still under investigation, but tribal authorities are confident that their demolition plans will proceed along the original time line.

Lining up Lines

I was thinking back to my earlier explorations because of an incredibly moving and thought-provoking essay that I am linking to here. I truly recommend reading it, it is not too long and I will myself shut up momentarily, so you have time. The Miners combines current political analysis with history and an ardent love for a State, Missouri, that has seen much destruction through mining extraction. The author describes the beauty of the remaining structures of the mills and the mines, as well as the travail of the aftermath, when companies leave town, and that triggered my memory. Kendzior, by the way, has a new book coming out at the beginning of April, The Last American Road Trip, a collection of essays of her travels cross country. It can be pre-ordered here.

Pipe Dreams

And here are a couple of mining songs…. Lee Dorsey, John Prine, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Jimmie Dean.

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Of Paroxysms and Purges.

Why despair over our descent into a failed democracy, when you can worry about the odds of being hit by an asteroid instead? The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global collaboration started in 2013 to monitor and track space objects that could impact Earth issued its first-ever Potential Asteroid Impact Notification for the asteroid, known as 2024 YR4. The football field-sized rock is estimated to have a larger than 2% chance to hit earth in 2023. (Ref.) Give or take a few percent, predictions seem to fluctuate….

There are several reasons why I am bringing up asteroids today.

The benign reason: I recently located my long lost photographs from a trip to Mexico and am eager to share the colors, so prevalent in the entire city scape, on a grey Monday morning. We’ll take cheer where we can find it! The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and caused the extinction of approximately 75% of all species, including non-avian dinosaurs, also hit in Mexico. The Chicxulub impactor struck Earth about 66 million years ago near the Yucatán Peninsula, or so I learn from ScienceAlert.

The re-assuring reason: that new celestial interloper is not assumed to be an extinction event, even though it could do extensive local damage if it would hit populated areas.

The enraging reason: will we have the relevant scientists engaged in monitoring and protection against natural phenomena in 8 year’s time, heck, six months from now? Will we have means of gathering information about scientific data, developments and warnings from official websites, unless we go to international sources outside of the U.S.?

Unless you live under a rock, you will have noticed that scientific websites are disappearing left and right, at the same time that scientists are fired en masse and also threatened not to communicate privately about the state of affairs or else. It might make you think of that movie “Don’t look up” that described the authoritarian mindset of a future US regime insisting that what you don’t see or count, doesn’t exist. That way you can exploit an un-aggrieved population until the last minute before the asteroid hits. We had an inkling of that with regard to the expressed desires by the 2016 iteration of this administration, to disappear Covid-19 statistics when 2020 arrived.

But now it has hit for real: entire organization websites, from weather predictors (NOAA weather and climate science websites have disappeared), to general health access, from reproductive rights information to vaccination information, all gone. As of last Friday, the CDC was ordered by HHS to take down all flu related campaign materials from its website – during the worst flu season in decades. Add to that the growing fear that mass vaccinations are going to be actively discouraged, if not entirely prohibited.

It is not just about public health information and appeals disappearing – whole data sets are purged, a kind of digital book burning. Science cannot proceed without building on established data. And medicine cannot treat without access to available diagnostic tools and treatment options – this is particularly evident in neonatal care: very occasionally newborn babies have unusual, hard to identify symptoms. Access to data bases at the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute for Health can provide quick answers what to expect and what to do. Can? Could. Data have been taken down, more than 8000 pages have been taken off-line, rare disease information included, leaving neo-natal units scrambling to come up with answers in a race against time.

Here is a table with just some of the disappeared or altered data sets. Not a complete sample, since vaccine info removal only happened last week.

Scientists, both on an individual basis and in organizational settings, are trying to rescue whatever data they can with downloading marathons. According to Wikipedia, the Internet Archive has been successful in archiving many health datasets. Internet Archive is also a contributor to the consortium effort of developing the End of Term Web Archive, which attempts to copy every government publication at the end of every presidential term.The Harvard Law School Library hosts the Data.gov Archive,  Harvard’s Chan School mirrored public health records. A coalition of data organizations launched the Data Rescue Project “as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts”.

With regard to climate science, or astronomy, to get back to our asteroid projections, the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. (Ref.) But archived data are harder to access, and eventually of no use, if they are not updated. Today’s (alarmed!) New Republic has a detailed overview of the Republican war on information (their phrasing.)

For me, the question I’d like to have answered is: why? Why deprive a nation of the public good of scientific data? I guess one could follow the money and claim that the absence of publicly available information means we have to pay for it from private providers. Disappearing the language around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion by off-lining any scientific research around vulnerable population might feed into the attempt to eradicate those concepts (and people) from public discourse altogether.

But what use has the undermining of public health by enabling the spread of contagious diseases, or by preventing the diagnoses and potential cures for rare diseases? Is it a religious, anti-science bent that requires acceptance of deadly strikes? Is it eugenic lust for eradication of all who are weak, physically or economically? Is it prediction of future scarcity due to climate effects, scarcity which would be lessened by gradual depopulation? I am not saying it is any of these, I am seriously searching for answers, because the purges of both scientists and scientific data make no economic sense whatsoever for the country as a whole, once a true public health crisis emerges. So “follow the money” simply doesn’t work here. I welcome suggestions!

Music today has the appropriate theme: Prayer Central…. a movement from Terry Riley’s ˆSun Rings” with the Kronos Quartett.

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Valentine’s Day 2025.

Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”

Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)

First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.

Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.

“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”

They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.

The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.

While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)

You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:

A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding


The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran
Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community
Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in
partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement,
are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.

This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful
conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.

Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123
Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace

Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.

A Proclamation for Peace 

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

by Kim Stafford

Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.


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Shelter

You know that feeling when you think about something and all of sudden almost everything you read or see somewhat points in that direction? It’s some sort of semantic priming, and mine has been all week around the notion of shelter. How can we find shelter against the onslaught of bad news, the overabundance of worry, the intensity of stress in our personal as well as public lives?

First thing this morning, then, was a videoclip sent from Germany. Someone declared that the current mood, across the world, is like the weather: dark, stormy, and definitely cold. He then argued we all have to be like hats, or jackets, or felt-lined boots used for exactly that weather, offering shelter against what surrounds us, providing warmth for those next to us, out in the cold. I took to that mental image – you’ll be my jacket, I’ll be your hat. Protection found in mutual caring for each other, shelter in loving kindness or chesed, as it is known as a concept in Judaism.

Next thing in my inbox was this week’s Meditation in an Emergency, focused on the need for big tents, another form of shelter. Solnit argues that during emergencies like real world catastrophes people come together to support and protect each other regardless of political or religious differences that usually keep them apart, unless they reside at the absolute extreme ends of the spectrum. The same should happen during political upheavals the likes of which we are currently experiencing. There is value in alliances, then, rather than isolation, protection through coalitions, not undermined by scorn or accusations for previous mistakes. )Although some will always barred from my tent: Republican Darren Beattie, for example, appointed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior role that represents American foreign policy to the world. Beattie has called for the mass sterilization of “low IQ trash” and feral populations. “Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.).” Nerd-Reich eugenics, anyone?)

Back to sheltering tents: Here is Solnit’s paragraph that registered most with me:

Many powerful forces–the rhetoric of mainstream politics, the framing of mainstream entertainment and news, the version of therapy that reinforces individualism as it tells us we’re here to care for ourselves, end of story–tell us we are consumers, not citizens (and here I mean citizens as members of civil society, regardless of legal citizenship status). That we are here just to meet our own needs and chase our personal desires, within the realms of private relationships and material comfort and security, and that we hardly exist beyond those small realms. It says on the one hand “go have all this stuff” while it quietly discourages us to have the other stuff that is public life, participation, and power. While pretending to point us toward abundance, it deprives us of the most expansive and idealistic versions of ourselves. And most of us really are that larger self, the version that cares about justice, human rights, democracy, equality (withering all that away is a clear part of the right’s agenda at least since Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”).

Chiharu Shiota The Network (2024) Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France. Photocredir Philippe Biolatto, Ville d’Aix-en-Provence

And then I came across a mention on ArtNet about two current exhibitions of work by an artist who is everyone’s darling these days – not mine, admittedly. Chiharu Shiota’s work has been basically repeating itself for the last 25 years, and some of her installations borrow quite a bit from other people’s ideas. But honor where honor is due: She was one of the early sculptors who integrated fiber into her work, before we saw the explosion of fiber art across the last years. And the theme of interconnectedness has been a red thread (quite literally) throughout her career. (She reserves the black threads she uses for associations to the cosmos, fate, or other intangible things that surround us.) The idea of all of us being invisibly bound together by these webs made out of thousands of threads, and the visual experience of tent-like installations hanging above our heads certainly fit into the associations that came up around the notion of “shelter.” For an introduction to her work, here is an interview with the artist, a good starting point.

Chiharu Shiota Uncertain Journey (2024) Le Grand Palais, Paris, France

Photo credit: Didier Plowy

Here are selective exhibitions still on view:

until 19.03.2025
The Soul Trembles, solo show, Le Grand Palais, Paris, France [touring exhibition]

until 20.04.2025
Between Worlds, solo show, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey

until 28.04.2025
The Unsettled Soul, solo show, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic

Chiharu Shiota The Silent Concert (2024) – Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic

Photocredit: Vojtěch Veškrna

until 27.06.2025
The Soul’s Journey, solo show, Fundacion Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico

As I said, she is surely en vogue. Lots of soul in the titles, lots of wool in the air. Clearly resonating with a large, international public. Maybe it is people’s fascination with the nature of webs, strong and fragile at once. Or the rudimentary desire for cocooning. Or respect for the tremendous amount of coordinated work going into these creations. Or humans’ insatiable desire for spectacle, the bigger the better. All not mutually exclusive.

I encountered her work for the first time at the Hammer museum in L.A., when she was the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s redesigned lobby, for the Hammer Projects 2023.

Here is an installation in a gallery in Brussels from 9 years ago, that somehow reminded me of a painting by George Tooker, the way my brain works…

Chiharu Shiota Sleeping is like Death (2016) Installation View, photo credit Gallery Daniel Templon

George Tooker Sleep II (1959)

Last year Shiota was invited to show at the Chapel of the Visitation during the Aix-en-Provence Biennial; her installation included letters from people asked to write about their experience with gratitude (does that remind you of Yoko Ono’s installations of trees and letters for peace?)

Beyond Consciousness de Chiharu Shiota - Journal Ventilo

Chiharu Shiota Beyond Consciousness (2024) Photo credit: Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff

Maybe the idea of gratitude is another way to find shelter: a focus on what we have that is positive. It might just insulate us, if only for short moments, from the fear and disquiet instilled by the news.

Gimme Shelter, indeed… the Stones knew.

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Another Thought Experiment.

When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.

I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.

Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”

So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)

From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.

Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis

Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.

Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.

What would you do?

Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?

Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…

What will we do?

I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.

***

Omnicide

And when our children ask,
Why did  you do nothing as the world
was dying?   what will we tell them?

Will we say, We didn’t know how
sick it was, or admit that We gathered
our rosebuds while we could,

Old  Time was still a-flying—?
It’s now the end of  everything,
our children will say, go crawl

into your arks and sail off  destitute into
your doom, and leave us only
your shadows. And our children

will light candles across seven continents
empty now of  lions, kangaroos, ravens,
squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—

devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants,
cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs,
vultures, lizards, and alley cats.

Our children will hide in caves with blind
cockroaches, together feeding on the algae
glowing in neon greens and blues

across dolomite and limestone walls.
They’ll leave no pictographs behind,
no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.

Such silence now, they’ll say, this  you’ve
bequeathed us, this human indifference.
And we’ll beg them, Survive.

BY MAURYA SIMON

Music today is from France, with entirely home-made and recycled instruments, a funky melange that should cheer us up. Always music.

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A World growing Cold.

We had a dusting of snow this week, lasting not even a day. Coincidentally, I was cleaning out some closets and found a number of calendars from the 1990s, beautiful, huge art reproductions on linen paper, sent to me as gifts from Germany. Most of them were intact – I had only ripped out a few of my favorite pages to put into thrift-store frames at a time when we did not have the funds to put original art on the walls. I went to look for the winter months, and there they were – impressionistic renditions of snowy scenery.

All of the calendars featured painters from an artist colony that was established in the late 19th century in the small hamlet of Worpswede. The village in the state of Lower Saxony, close to the wealthy and bourgeois Hanseatic league city of Bremen, was a haven for young, academically trained artists trying to escape urban centers and an increasingly industrialized society, longing for a return to nature and establishing a utopia of communal living. In a way, they withdrew from reality and any attempt to use art as a means of engagement with a new technology-driven society, changing at a rapid pace. Instead they expressed longing for an ideal, intact world (heile Welt), and pursued new aesthetic criteria to express their belonging to a Germanic world, their northern roots. They hoped to mutually sustain each other pragmatically and artistically, in a region that was cheap, in fact so poor that almost every single crop sharer had multiple children emigrate to the U.S. at the time, because the land could not feed large families.

Starting in 1889, the three founders, Fritz Mackensen, Hans Am Ende and Otto Modersohn first lived with farmers, then in an inn, and eventually started to build their own houses. They were soon joined by numerous other artists, all drawn to the stark landscape of the foggy country side, dominated by peat bogs, heather and moors, a river and canals that allowed small barges to transport the peat. It was close to the sea, windswept, with annually 200 days of rain, flat as a pancake, opening endless horizons, disrupted only by the occasional birch groves and conifers thriving on the sandy loam. In 1901, Rainer Maria Rilke started to visit – you can read about his impressions of the artists and the landscape here. He developed a crush on two young women, a painter, Paula Becker (these days famous in her own right), and a sculptor, Clara Westhoff, who he eventually married since Paula had chosen Otto Modersohn, then a widower and financially secure, instead. Rilke’s essay reads like a long fare-well to a shared vision, now abandoned, since the utopia had not worked out.

It took but ten years for the idyllic artist colony to break apart. Personal rivalries played a role, jealousy about sales, exhibitions and awards. The very first group show in Bremen that exhibited some 34 work of multiple painters, had been a flop. The wealthy burgers clung to their old-fashioned tastes for genre paintings and did not like, much less purchase, the new impressionist art. A fluke visit of this show by Eugen Stieler, president of the Munich Secession, led to an enthusiastic invitation to show at the Munich Glasspalace in 1895 – and they were a sensation. From then on they met with success at all the reputable art fairs and museum shows across the county.

More importantly, the dissolution of the artist group was caused by increasing conflicts around political and ideological issues. They all had read, and were influenced to varying degrees, by a book by Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, (Rembrandt as Educator) a basic, openly racist text of anti-positivist and anti-rationalist philosophy that was hugely popular at the time. It was about German art, blood and soil, rejection of science and technology (dangerously international, not “völkisch” enough!), an exhortation to any German individual to serve the German spirit and culture. (Ref.)

All should sound familiar to those who know how National Socialism coopted these positions. Several of the painters, foremost Mackensen and Am Ende, did eventually become flaming Nazis, while others withdrew, trying to stay neutral, and one courageous individual – Heinrich Vogeler – completely shifted gears, fighting the Nazi regime, changing his art from romantic Art Nouveau to political agitation prop. He paid for it with his life: he was captured and sent to a Russian penal colony when the Germans invaded Russia, to which he had fled. There he starved to death.

Heinrich Vogeler Barkenhof im Schnee (1910)

***

Heinrich Vogeler Frühling 1897

What strange paths this man trod, what encounters,
experiences, shattering upheavals it took to free him
from the rosy flower-chains of a romantic fairy-tale
world and turn him into an uncompromising fighter in
the ranks of class-conscious workers.]
— Erich Weinert, Introduction to his edition
Vogeler’s Erinnerungen (Berlin: Rütten &
Loening, 1952), p. 14.

Why am I writing about this, rather than letting us all enjoy some pretty pictures? It comes down to the psychological question of what enables people to resist propaganda, while others adopt mind sets that are flamingly immoral. The obvious parallels to our contemporary horror show make an answer to that question ever more pressing.

We are currently facing a concerted attempt to reinstall forms of segregation, assert a hierarchy of value determined by race and gender, with White males on top of the hierarchy. Forget about issues of enrichment, corruption, influence peddling, colonial longings, political persecution, science denial, or all the other things having rained down on us in the last two weeks with the advent of the new administration.There is a basic, open, systematic assault on everything the civil rights movement worked for decades, a century, to achieve. Re-segregation is the order at the federal, state, and local level, not just some purging of DEI initiatives.

Let’s call a spade a spade – you can read in detail about it in the Washington Post here and the NYT here. It is not just about “meritocracy,” the new powers are suing about the very presence of Blacks in our institutions. The US Census Bureau has taken down the statistics for age, sex and race/ethnicity, numbers needed to pursue equality. Women and POC are supposed to be driven out of the workforce – just listen to the President’s comments on the causes for aviation disaster.

Ending all Cadet Clubs and activities for POC at the United States Military Academy, while all religious ones remain, is aimed at re-segregation and elevation of Christian Nationalism.

The introduction of school vouchers that allows schools to accept/reject applicants if they are private, and hollow out the available funds for the remaining public schools, is a tool of re-segregation. Don’t forget that Trump’s judicial nominees almost always demurred when asked in their confirmation hearings whether Brown v. Board was wrongly decided. Doesn’t that make you wonder what the Supreme Court is up to next? The DOGE posse has gotten access to Department of Education data on federal student aid, including the personal information for millions who receive student loans from the government, feeding it into AI to cut funds for the majority poor and POC constituency served by that aid, eliminating thus access to education.

I could go on. We have been there before. You can learn about President Wilson’s attempts to re-segregate federal government in a fascinating book by Eric S. Yellin: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469628387/racism-in-the-nations-service/.

So how does an individual resist the flood of rising racism? For Vogeler it was, I believe, the experience of serving in WW I and realizing what the causes of war were all about, for one. He developed a strong sense of empathy with those unjustly treated in their societies. He also was extremely widely traveled, learning about the nature of hierarchies no matter what nation you looked at, in Europe or Asia, the eternal division between up and down, us vs. them, as a means to protect stratified power.

Most Americans have not served in a war, or, for that matter, left this continent. Their perception of the world is singularly driven by what they learn at home and from the selective exposure to media that knows how to manipulate mindsets. Most importantly, as I have written about in detail already five years ago, we have to look at attitudes being transmitted in a direct connection to the history of slavery. I excerpt it here. (I know, it’s getting long, but it is SO important and you have all weekend thread it….)

“Scientific studies have shown this to be true nowhere more so than in the American South. In their book Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics Avidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history.

In a nutshell: Southern Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose.

But there is another important mechanism at work, called behavioral path dependence by the authors: Generation after generation passes down and reinforces beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learn from their parents and teach their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoe the value judgments and create spaces for segregation. After slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relies increasingly on cultural mechanisms.

“…things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, extrajudicial violence, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.

And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (or what’s left of it) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.

Education is key, and education is what they are going after.

Musik, fittingly for place and time, then, by Brahms.

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Thoughts on Change.

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.

Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.

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.

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Evaporation.

Walk with me through a landscape touched by frost, a layer of glistening, crystalline beauty sheathing every blade of grass, leaf and branches. Something delicate, fragile, lasting just hours before the rising temperatures make the sublime views disappear, melting the hoar frost and then evaporating the water.

Rising temperatures, across the span of seasons, not just during a 24 hour cycle, are the main culprit globally, it turns out, for our ever increasing droughts. It is not the lack of rainfall, but evaporation of water due to heat that account for over 60% of the exceptional drought in the American West. And so we face dry wells, dwindling reservoirs, parched ground, forest fires. 

Some, of course, believe that all you have to do is turn on “a valve” and let the water run, providing needed help to farmers and fire fighters alike. The current President of the United States among them. And so he did, ordering his Army Corps of Engineers to release a maximum amount of water in California’s San Joaquin Valley, with an unheard-of one-hour notice to local authorities.

“Consistent with the direction in the Executive Order on Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Success Lake to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires.”

All hell broke loose, with local authorities, farmers, Republican State Senators all trying to persuade Trump’s minions to stop the planned volume of release, for fear of flooding the down stream communities, since the river channels could not hold the masses of water. Local water management officials called on members of Congress to intervene, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Reps. David Valadao and Vince Fong. None responded to requests for comment. Farmers needed to move equipment, migrant workers needed to flee from their riverbed camps near harvesting locations, Potterville fields needed to be protected. It was reckless endangerment of a community that had voted this President in, even after the authorities managed to curb the outflow somewhat from what had been initially intended.

It was also an act in the President’s renewed California water wars that was based on completely wrong assumptions about the potential uses of this water for firefighting in L.A., one big mountain chain to the South blocking the natural dispersion of water. Just one assumption in a series of spurious claims about the state’s water policies.

The release of billions of gallons of water will have long-term hurtful consequences in the valley region. The water, now running off into the Pacific Ocean, was stored for farmers’ irrigation needs in the dry season. Agricultural business has already been hurt on multiple fronts with water scarcity, the rounding up of undocumented agricultural workers, and now the tariffs. Depleting the reservoir of water at this time will increase the vulnerability of agricultural communities in the summer, already struggling with ground water pumping restrictions.

Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which tries to compensate for the fact that farming has for decades used twice the amount of groundwater than is replenished by nature. This has caused the land to sink, causing enormous infra- structure damage that the state is now trying to staunch. The restrictions led to plummeting values of farms, endangering many smaller agricultural operations who cannot pay their loans. “The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that about 500,000 acres – one-fifth of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland – may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize aquifers. Small and medium-scale farmers appear most vulnerable.” (Ref.)

Value evaporating.

Common sense evaporating.

Water evaporating, flowing useless at this time of year for communities falsely claimed to be helped.

Our protections from unscientific, vengeance-, ideology- or greed-driven decisions, evaporating.

As of this writing, we have a non-elected civilian with unidentified, potentially non-American minions downloading on his personal servers every single data point of every American’s existence he found while forcing access to the US Treasury. Our social security numbers: no longer protected. Data about our taxes, our income, our health status, you name it: an open book to be read by potentially hostile powers. The U.S.Treasury holds the nation’s money. Its dispersement (or withholding) is now under the control of someone who is unaccountable and was not able to receive top security clearance and is under investigation for flouting security clearance rules.

We are talking all of our tax money, the social security money we earned and paid in, the money for clean air, safe food and water, safe air travel and highway management, medical research, and so on. A system responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds now at the whims of unaccountable individuals. As our own Senator Wyden warned, this creates potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities, given Musk’s significant business ties to China. It also creates potential havoc for upcoming debt ceiling negotiations, given the assurances needed for ongoing payment flow.

A private citizen taking control of established government offices, seizing physical control of government payment systems, now able to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally chooses. Closing entire departments (USAID) and locking out thousands of government employees. An unvetted, congressionally un-appointed individual illegally usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse, shredding the constitutional protection guaranteed by the separation of powers. Some call it a constitutional crisis. Others fear that It is no less than a coup.

Democracy evaporating.

We are advised to make our voices heard, seemingly the only thing we can do right now.

Once again, here is the easiest way to find out how to contact your state representatives, your governor, your senators, whoever you wish to address with questions about what they intend to do to protect you, your entitlements and the privacy of your data. A question as simple as that.

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

For those of us in Oregon:

Senator Jeff Merkley: (202) 224-3753

Senator Ron Wyden: (202) 224-5244

Congresswoman Janelle Bynum: (202) 225-5711

OR Governor Tina Kotek : (503) 378-4582

OR State Attorney General Dan Rayfield: (503) 378-6002

Call. PLEASE. Drip is not enough. Needs to be a flood, slowing down evaporation of our rights. Blue state calls matter, too.

And now for the good news: Rebecca Solnit has started her own occasional newsletter – you can sign up for free here. Probably the most encouraging and empathetic writer out there next to Heather Cox Richardson.

Let’s end with a defiant smile: here is a body of water not likely to evaporate soon. He/she/it/they even have their own social media announcements now.

Music today about cold times, followed by something better….

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Who decides what we remember?

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht

I would not be surprised if one or another of you read the document below and thought: “History is written by the victors…”

The special observances to be eliminated by fiat of the new administration include Black history month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, Women’s History Month, and so on.

Memorial Site of Concentration Camp Buchenwald.

Once you discard the public remembering and teaching of history, you can fill in the blanks with anything you like, likely falsehoods that will stay with the next generations who have no access to the actual records, if it is done thoroughly enough. The current attacks on the contents of teaching materials, and even independent sources like Wikipedia (reported in Newsweek,) clearly speak to the issue. As journalist Adam Server from The Atlantic commented: “They want to ban the teaching of the unpleasant facts of American history because people might conclude injustices in the past that contribute to inequalities in the present should be rectified, instead of their belief, which is that some groups of people are inherently superior to others.”

The quote about victors shaping the narrative in their preferred fashion was attributed to Winston Churchill for the longest time. Falsely, as it turns out. People then pointed to words uttered by Reichsmarschall and war criminal Hermann Göring, a coward who did not even face his Nürnberg Trial sentence of death by hanging, resorting to suicide by poison the night before. “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,” “the victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”

Apparently, the sentiment had been around for a much longer time, in various European nations, France in 1842, Italy in 1852 and Great Britain in 1889. It arrived at our own shores a few years later:

“In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech: “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” (Ref.)

Well, if you have (and abuse) the power to erase history when it is at odds with your ideology, you sound more like a loser than a victor to me. Might as well go golfing on Holocaust Remembrance Day…. (yes, he did.)

The real question is, of course, what can be done when the powers that be try to eliminate our remembering of acts of horror as well as acts of heroism, acts of oppression met by acts of resistance, of an evolution of rights for those who had been denied them since times immemorial. The prohibitions of public remembrances, the choice of names for institutions, the restriction of text book contents might not be easy to stop, particularly when appeals to “forgetting” are voiced by some of the largest communication platform owners in the world. (e.g. Musk’s contribution to the neo-Nazi party AfD rally last week in Germany.)

But this can be counterbalanced by art (although admittedly much harder to distribute to large enough audiences.) Films that try to document the past as it unfolded can be useful and convey content pretty directly. Poetry can be a teacher. One of the best collections I can think of is Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting (1993). The classic anthology contains hundreds of poems centered around events that changed history. No other than Nelson Mandela introduced the book at the time:

“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.”

Primroses and bush anemones under the beeches of KZ Buchenwald (Beechwood) near Weimar.

A more recent one is Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), edited and translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght. This volumes contains work by many lesser known poets, intended, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each. It is a remarkable book.

A particularly timely read, too. I am writing this on the day of the signing of an Executive Order to prepare a 30,000 capacity migrant detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. The site of previous human right abuses (including torture) identified by the UN, Amnesty International and Red Cross. A site three times the size of Auschwitz, outside of U.S jurisdiction (leased from Cuba,) so that many of our legal protections don’t apply and access of observers and journalists can be restricted or altogether prohibited. The justification, at this point, is that it will house undocumented immigrants, to be deported. When will the first US citizen be shipped off shore as well? According to NBC news, the President himself “suggested Monday that the United States could pay a “small fee” to foreign countries to imprison Americans (bolded by me) who are repeat criminal offenders, floating a kind of modern-day penal colony. Trump billed the idea as a cost-saving measure in remarks at a conference for House Republicans in Miami.” Gitmo next?

Crematorium at Buchenwald

Photographs today from my visits to memorial sites of German concentration camps.

Music today is unfortunately just a snippet of a piece we should have access to in its entirety. Click on the blue arrow in the lower left corner to listen to the excerpt of Jüdische Chronik, organized by Paul Dessau.

KZ Ravensbrück

The Vanished

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn’t the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They’ve been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don’t make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.

Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.

The vanished are just.
That’s how we’ll fade, too.

BY HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

TRANSLATED BY RITA DOVE

Nelly Sachs, to whom the poem is dedicated, was one of the foremost Holocaust poets who escaped to Sweden. The German original can be read here. It references themes of one of her famous poems, Flight and Metamorphosis.

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