Clearing

Happy Pride!

Happy Pride!

Living culture

I'm a little surprised that I didn't post about just how transformed the American Museum of Natural History's celebrated Northwest Coast hall was when I checked it out two years ago. In a gallery now curated by and with the indigenous nations whose works are shared, the viewer is invited into living cultural worlds, rather than observing with rueful fascination the salvage of supposedly dead and dying ones. Now we learn how this salvage contributed to the destruction of the cultures in question - often AMNH agents purchased religious objects whose use had been outlawed by Christian legislators - but that the cultures endured and thrive. 

I was struck by how the tables of "science" and "religion" were turned here, the cultural power of the AMNH, which had so long "scientifically" rendered native practices as quaint or sinister "myth" and "ritual," now used to introduce supernatural worlds and powers as true elements of reality.

We went yesterday to check out "Grounded by our Roots," the Northwest Coast Hall's latest exhibit of work by contemporary indigenous artists. One stunner is Alison Bremner Naxhshagheit (Tlingit)'s "Church and State" (2024), which calls in question the authority of United States law - represented here by the Supreme Court - "to govern indigenous matters." Table turning indeed!!

Orientalism lives!

Checked out the new west entrance to the American Museum of Natural History, a curvy wasp's nest-inspired concrete concoction which turns out to be airy enough but a little more exciting in photos than in real life. But creating an entrance at what had been the back of the museum not only adds new space but changes flows, and we found ourselves in a gallery it was hard to believe was anywhere in a museum in 2024. 

Called "Asian Peoples," if you came at it from the east, as people before presumably did, you arrived from "Asian Mammals" (!). From half-naked "primitives" you'd work toward the "higher civilizations" of China, India and the Islam world. But we, like throngs of others now, came at it from the end, invited in by what was once the exhibit's sending-off, a sort of diorama of Samarkand captioned "The Lure of Asia." Seriously?!

By weird coincidence, the eminent Indian American historian of British colonialism Priya Satia published a critique of this gallery today (!). She was in the museum with her children earlier this month and so appalled at what she saw that she wrote a thread on X, response to which was vigorous enough that ThePrint asked her to write the article.

 

The displays of human cultures have been part of AMNH from the start - and, of course, they cover every part of the world except Europe. But I was dumbstruck to learn that this Orientalist fantasy, which I assumed dated to the bad old days when it hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress just over a century ago, in fact dates only to 1980! That was just two years, Satia points out, after Edward Said published Orientalism, calling out western "orientalists" for their presumed capacity - indeed superior capacity - to understand the east. 

 

Satia wonders about what walking through these galleries has meant to generations of school children. ("Are we Southeast Asian?" I heard one teenager ask a parent.) Satia's particular focus was the representation of India as monolithic, monolithically Hindu and caste-obsessed. In her brief essay she doesn't remark on the bizarrely mandala-like representation of "The Indian Worldview" which somehow nests within each each other "Myth and Epic," "The Pattern of History," "The Pattern of Everyday Life," "The Four Ends of Man" and "Caste and Karma" (at the center!), all framed by "The Powers of the Gods" and "The Vedic Cosmos." Monolith, anyone?

We learn also how Arabic culture is founded on admiration for Greece and Rome, and why Chinese science never became truly scientific like the west's. I'd like to know what this exhibition replaced, and who was involved in putting it together: I'm sure they thought they were doing better. Satia's X-discussions suggest there have been many protests over these and other galleries in the "Human Origins and Cultural Halls" - producing little more than some unconvincing signage indicating that the exhibits may be a little dated and need rethinking.

 

But, appalling though it is, it occurred to me it might make a good field trip destination for "Theorizing Religion" this fall. (Perhaps the week we read Hume's Natural History of Religion...?!) Students will be invited to study this gallery, compare it with the completely different vibe of the Northwest Coast galleries, recently completely redone in consultation with indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. These galleries are chock full of "religion" and theories of its evolution, all somehow "natural history" - and imbibed by countless schoolchildren. (If I do this I'll need to return and have a look at the galleries of African, South and Central American and Pacific Peoples. The other galleries of indigenous North American cultures are closed.)

 

Tree diagrams

It's been a spell since I spent time in the special reading room at the New York Public Library. We were out of town for a month, then sciatica made the library's imposing scale and long hallways and staircases forbidding, then heat wave after heat wave... I'm also at a stage in my book-writing where reading a lot of new things isn't needed, or even welcome. I'm drawing together what I have, which is already a lot, trying to make a coherent argument out of it. Very rough and shaggy draft by the end of next month is the goal! Still, here I was, looking for a few specific images I want to peruse anew, like this wonder in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber' stunning Arbre des Familles (2003). What have family trees to do with my argument? You'll see!

Is geography destiny?

It's really shocking how many maps of different things (this one's from here) wind up looking the same...

The present's obscure but dynamic possibilities

The Episcopal Church has just elected a new Presiding Bishop, and everyone's sharing words from Thomas Merton he shared. I will too!

In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. 

In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. What really matters is openness, readiness, attention, courage to face risk. 

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. 

What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope. 

In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love. 

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

TPSRE ablaze

There was a brush fire today in the Torrey Pines SNR Extension! 

The area's indispensable photographer Herb Knufken posted a photo as it was just starting - taken from across the lagoon, in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve itself. After many hours, the work of 150 firefighters, many water-dumping aircraft and some evacuations, 23 acres were burned, including trails we hiked just half a year ago. 

Following the fire in real time, not from across the lagoon but from across the continent, brought back scarred memories of the Witch Fire in October 2007, a much bigger conflagration which seemed, until the fierce winds changed direction, likely to destroy the whole town in which I grew up. And more recent memories, too, like the path through a kind of tree-tunnel which we walked just last December...

Lifting voices in song

After church today, our new music director - one year in - shared his process for choosing hymns and other music for our services. It was engaging and disarmingly frank: pieces must be liturgically appropriate (match season or readings), practical (work with resources and time) and have aesthetic value (he likes them!). He's always asking others for their favorites and pet peeves, too. 

And so we've ended up with a broader range of pieces - especially hymns - than with our previous music directors, in part because his sense of what's practical and of aesthetic value is informed by the repertoire of years working at many different kinds of churches. He comes from the Lutheran tradition, for whom communal singing is crucial. Ours is his first Episcopal Church, but he's proved a quick study. 

So what was once a diet almost entirely of the 1982 Hymnal, a Metropolitan Museum of classics, is now regularly supplemented by hymns from Lift Every Voice and Sing, a hymnal created for African American churches which includes spirituals, gospel and much of the Methodist hymn tradition, too. The intergenerational community with whom we join voices in song has broadened and shifted its center of gravity from the cathedrals of the British Empire (...!) to American churches, black and white, with liturgical traditions high and low.

I wonder how else we could stretch - beyond the Anglosphere, perhaps? and into some of the hymnody which reflects the new theological landscape of a church led me women as well as men, which speaks of kindom rather than kingdom. In liturgy we already benefit from the language and insights of Enriching our worship.

Skylines

Not too long after we moved into the neighborhood, construction began on a big residential tower in what had been the northern quad of Union Theological Seminary. Completed last year, residents have now moved in - including the faculty of Union, accommodated on lower floors. They get access to a northwest-facing roofdeck on their eighth floor which allows dramatic views of Riverside Church. Friends took us to see it today. To the northeast, you could see our complex, with funny little ziggurats on the top you can't see from below. 

Gratitude for Jerry Schneewind

At a very lovely memorial gathering yesterday for the wonderful Jerry Schneewind, who died in January at ninety-three, many endearing stories were shared. (I shared some too.) But the one which seems to sum up the gift of his life, attested to by memory after memory, focused on a single syllable. It was part of a longer string of memories recounted by the daughter of his friend Richard Rorty. (The two families summered together for decades, their children growing up together.) One summer day, she saw him uncharacteristically without a book and passed her recently acquired Kindle to him, asking if he wanted to read any of the titles on it - she reckons there were about a thousand. He duly looked through them, then passed the Kindle back to her. "Nope!" he said, with a twinkle in his eye. 

I've heard that "Nope" before, as clearly had many others in the room, all of us beaming in recognition. The storyteller, now a therapist, took this as his reassurance that children need not take care of their parents, but I heard in it an echo of a line the philosopher Larry Krasnoff (he and I were the only past students of Jerry's there) had written in an online tribute, to which several people referred. After enumerating Jerry's manifold contributions to scholarship and the profession, Larry wrote: 

And he was happy, not in any sort of fake or impossibly aspirational way, but because he knew who he was and that he got to live a satisfying life, the one he wanted to live. 

Who wouldn't want to lead a life like that? (It inspired Larry to want to become a professor.) In other tributes there was a similar sense of the satisfying fullness of Jerry's life, full of professional achievements, yes, but even more of long-standing relationships familial and collegial and in friendship. As person after person mentioned his bread baking (I was the one to mention that some of it was with ancient grains, before that was even a thing) we heard of meal after meal in the world of unstinting generosity which he and his lovely wife Elizabeth (she died in in 2021) offered to all. 

How moving was it to hear from two people about their younger brother Timmy. Jerry had agreed to be his godfather when a philosopher colleague asked him ("but I don't do the god thing!" he said, to which the father said, "that's why I'm asking you"), and when the father suddenly died, the Schneewinds took Timmy in as one of theirs, for the rest of his life. He's passed since, too, we learned, but the testimonials from his surviving siblings had us all in tears. 

Another philosopher, whose career Jerry had saved, hiring her as the first woman in Johns Hopkins' philosophy department, described him as the most "quietly extraordinary" person she'd ever met. Big of heart and great of soul, not so much modest about his rich and overflowing life as content with it. That's what I heard in the "Nope"! He had plenty. Who could ask for anything more? 

Clear throughout was the centrality of the lamented Elizabeth (or Elsie) to all of this; all who loved and had been loved by him had also loved and been loved by her. In the same register as the joyful Schneewindian "Nope" were the words Jerry apparently said at the each of his daughters' weddings: he could wish them "no more than what he had: true love and happiness."

The gathering ended with chamber music, a shared love of Jerry and Elsie's. In characteristic generosity they had taken up viola and cello later in life, knowing that the world was full of frustrated violinists desperate to play quartets. The piece Jerry had suggested, if it suited, for an occasion such as this was a quintet. We cleared the center of the room and five young people, including Jerry and Elise's grandson (a cellist!), played the last two mevements of Mozart's 4th string quintet. The gathering was complete.

Precocious

Each leaf has stories to tell.

Smile

New York Botanical Garden's Alice in Wonderland-themed summer show is a little thin on the ground... but I found the Cheshire cat!

Flash!

A column by Margaret Renkl, who writes eloquent dispatches for the New York Times about cultural and natural things from Nashville, TN, managed to name lots of places I've been or almost been recently. She was, she says, at a writer's workshop in Brevard, North Carolina, and heard about one of the remarkable firefly species of the region. Called blue ghosts, they glow, close to the ground, without blinking. It rained that night, though, so no luck seeing them. Then she put her name in the lottery to see the synchronous fireflies at Great Smoky Mountains National Park - too many people are interested for all be allowed in - but her name wasn't picked. 

Her luck turned when her family arrived for a holiday in Western North Carolina and someone connected her to a nature guide who'd just seen both kinds of lightning bugs (as they're called in the South) on a scouting trip in the Pisgah National forest, some at 3000 feet and others at 3800, and agreed to take her and her family to see them too. To see the blue ghosts you need to be in true darkness, so they drove with their headlights off, then waited, in the guide's words, "to let the night settle."

The darkness that settled was like no darkness I’ve ever known. I could not tell the dark trees from the dark sky. There were no trees. There was no road. I was the trees and I was the road and I was the murmured voices of the people I love best in all the world. It was so dark that a great hand could have reached down to upend me, and but for the blood pounding in my ears I would have had no idea that I dangled upside down.

What a lovely writer! Eventually she was able to see the blue ghosts, their greenish light creating an otherworldly landscape. And then Renkl noticed stars peeking through the trees above. 

The stars in the sky were winking. The stars in the understory were glowing. It was everything I’d waited a year to see and far more than I’d even known to wish for. 

As if this wasn't enough, after an hour the guide took them to a lower elevation, "chasing spring," where they could see the synchronous lightning bugs, all of whom light up at the same time... though the thick understory (rhododendrons, surely!) made it hard to see many more than those over the road. In any case, it was a transporting experience, and another followed, a third kind of lightning bug, that lit up like the flash bulbs on an old camera.

It's a characteristically lovely essay but I mention it also because all this happened in the North Carolina we got to know - Brevard, Great Smoky, Pisgah. We know, too, how the southern Appalachians allow you to "chase spring" a different elevations are differently far along in the seasons. But there's more! What inspired their guide to set up an ecotourism company was a trip to Costa Rica.

Mr. Galton was inspired to start Snakeroot Ecotours after a visit to Costa Rica more than a decade ago. “I saw how the country has embraced ecotourism as a way to protect and honor their forests, and I couldn’t help but think: Our Southern Appalachian forests back home are just as special, and deserve the same reverence,” he said.

We weren't in North Carolina during the lightning bug season and Costa Rica's the big fish that got away, but I feel like I've been barking up the right trees!

Money in politics

Like many registered voters, I have been inundated for months in solicitations for contributions to hotly contested battles against well-funded opponents from across the land. I'm not comfortable giving money for contests in faraway places (not scruples shared by dark money, I own), but in general the exercise seems a little abstract. Funds will go for TV advertisements - and I don't have a TV. I can't imagine what it must be like to be subjected to wave after wave of mostly attack ads, first for primaries and then for general elections. Are voters likely to be swayed by the message they hear most often, or the one they heard most recently? Don't people tune them all out? 

Our local elections usually generate a few ads in the mail, but these last weeks it's out of control, and I'm starting to get a sense of what it must be like to be on the receiving end of such an onslaught. Our State Assembly member iis retiring and a half dozen people are vying to take his place (all are Democrats). The campaigns for what seem to be the two strongest candidates have been sending regular flyers in the mail, and both of the candidates have been to our housing complex; indeed, both have been at our door! Their positions seem comparable. Yet as early voting (which started the 15th) approached there were more and more flyers. A few other candidates have started sending more flyers, including one who seems to have hired a photographer for a single photo shoot with a single unnamed constituent, and another whose sole argument seems to be "elect a physician, not a politician"! Last week, a serious-seeming large format letter from state party bigwigs appeared, informing us that one of the candidates had misrepresented his opponent, apparently unprecedented in our district. A few days later, a photocopied letter from two dozen of our housing complex neighbors was pushed under our door, defending him against the accuation. Two days later, another photocopied letter, from another set of neighbors, renewing the charge, attaching the accusation. We went away for the weekend and came back to find three more flyers from the top two!! 

I've been generally bemused by the battle but I'm starting to think of the money that's behind these, more and more as I bring more and more of these glossy flyers to the recycling. I don't even more than skim them anymore, but I'm keeping a tally. Would it be perverse to vote against the one who seems to have the deepest coffers?

Shadow

What's wrong with this picture? We returned to Innisfree Garden, which we saw for the first time just about a year ago. As before we were enchanted by abundant water lilies along the shores of the lake, and the unassuming way the garden's design draws you this way and that, making one exquisite discovery after another. Coming the same time of year (it was 370 days ago to be precise) we found much familiar, and some a little more advanced. 

The pool full of fat pollywogs, for instance. It was full of the fat little critters again - though not of course the same pollywogs as last year. (Are these the next generation or even the one after that? I'm suddenly hearing the closing of Janacek's "Cunning little vixen," which closes as it opens with the call of frogs...) Today's were turning a mottled brown, had grown legs and were busily burrowing to hide in the sand. 

But back to the picture above, a tree shadow gloriously spreading along verdant lily petals. What's wrong here? It's not winter: it shouldn't be casting a shadow like that in June! Where are its own leaves? A good number of trees seemed to be struggling. I was struck last time already by the vigor of caterpillar pillage here but this seems different. I've heard about beech leaf disease, a blight wreaking havoc in the forests up here. Is that what's going on? When we were here last year, the hills in the distance were a vibrant green.

Vandalism

500 likes in 30 minutes...!

Queer trees

Among the joys of a local public library (not all local public libraries) is that displays introduce you to new books you'd never otherwise know about, like this, featured in a Pride Month display. This Kickstarter-started anthology brings together brief comics by twenty-nine "creators," sharing a little of their story and offering solidarity and encouragement to folks who may be going through similar discoveries. Three swallows do not a springtime make but I noticed that trees feature as sources of solidarity in several. 

Sam (him/her)

Nasr Bin Safwan (he/they) 

Mel Valentine Vargas (they/them)

The OUT Side: Trans & Nonbinary Comics, ed. The Kao, Min Christensen adn David Daneman (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2024), 9, 137-9, 145

Scia te

I've really been letting this blog slide these past weeks. The reason isn't very interesting. A flare-up of sciatica, which was just glimmering as we returned from North Carolina, has turned out to be much more persistent than my first attack three years ago. The sciatic nerve goes from between the vertebrae of your spine on one side through you buttock and down the opposite leg. The cause of my grief, we established in 2021, was a herniated disk (or lumbar radiculopathy, a name I found amusing until it got the last laugh) on my right side, sending flares of pain down my left leg. Cause and timing of the herniation are unknown: "I just treat the pain," said one doctor. Since the slipped disk is between vertebrae L4 and L5, I get various kind of pain, tingling and numbness along the hip, the outside of the leg and the top of the foot. You never know what might hurt, and its confounding to realize that, being a nerve issue, there's nothing actually amiss in the foot or knee or hip - and nothing you can do beyond pain killers.

It's been fine in the intervening years. Periodically I felt twinges along the sciatic nerve in my left leg, now that I knew to recognize it, but nothing serious. It's not clear what set it off this time; the long drive back from North Carolina won't have helped, apparently, though I felt nothing amiss, and it didn't get bad until a couple of days after that. But I thought that, painful as it was, it might lay me low for a week like the last time, and then let me return, if at first wincingly, to active life. That was quite a few weeks ago! Apparently you self-medicate unless it persists for more than two weeks, so I dosed myself with Ibuprofin and Tylenol PM (sleeping was uncomfortable even though I moved to a futon on the floor). Some friends took me to their chiropractor the first week, which seemed to help; I've tracked my fitful improvements by what it takes out of me to get to his office (71st Street) and back, though I'm still not sure what chiropractic is. We didn't let it prevent us from going to the opera, or on a scheduled trip to the Adirondacks, where soft forest paths proved friendlier than hard New York City sidewalks. Although I still had to stop fairly frequently to sit or crouch, I managed to walk each day - 2.5 miles once, which felt like a major achievement!

After three weeks and feeling much better if still leery of walking (and uncertain each day what the next day would bring), I went to see my GP; I told him I wasn't happy taking pain-killers several times a day. He prescribed some muscle relaxants and a steroid and recommended I make an appointment with a pain management specialist in a week, even if I was feeling better. A week of steroids and stretches later I was feeling better, and the pain management specialist confirmed there's no residual weakness in my leg joints. I should do stretches, perhaps see a physical therapist (as I did last time) and, in case anything's changed in three years, get a new MRI; even if not, it would be what was needed were these pain management strategies not working and we chose to take the next step, injections in the spine. MRI's scheduled for next week.

When it first hit, after days when I couldn't even leave the apartment, I went outside for short walks, and saw a different city. There are always people of all kinds on the streets here, and this time I sensed every step every one of them took. Many were labored, more than a few must have been painful. I remember something similar from last time, when climbing the stairs in the subway was the hardest thing and I noticed the many others for whom it was a hardship. I remember that often as I walk past people suffering the steps (most New York city stations have no elevators, a condition unlikely to change now that our embattled and long awaited congestion pricing scheme was halted in the eleventh hour). Often I slow my own steps down so as not to seem to be flaunting my relative ease of movement. This time I felt some gratitude for deepening my empathy - but also impatience to get on with it: I'd learned a lot, thank you very much. I realized I was still assuming that painful mobility was just a passing (if regretably recurring) phase for me, not a new stage of life. We'll see.

All this uncertainty and, yes, pain - there were days and nights when I couldn't stay in any position for long, or when none offered full relief - put all plans on hold. I was glad to have some books to read which involved movement (like this one and Tristan Gooley's natural navigation book How to Read a Tree) but also didn't require too much concentration: I suppose I was logie from pain meds much of the time. All planning for the next few weeks went out the window too. At some point my planned trip to the cloud forest in Costa Rica got shelved. Sort of a bummer, all in all - and fewer of the pleasant aha-moments I put aside for the blog. Hope it - and I - are up and running again soon!

[Update 6/17: I think I'm out of the woods! No meds, no pain, undisturbed sleep. It's not completely gone but I'm up and about, pretty much footloose and fancy free. Hope it lasts!]

Westward view

New York City has too much light for us to be able to see stars so I make do with the stars gleaming through the dark canopy of Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Lawrence Tree," my long-time favorite poster. A little sun faded in its first place in this apartment balcony, it's placed to complement our city sky now. I think I picked it up forty years ago, in Santa Fe, only five years ago learning that the painting can be placed any-which-way-up, and perhaps best the inverse of what's on the poster. This poster shows what you might observe standing, looking up a tree. But the inverse is the view when you're lying beneath a tree with your head touching the trunk, rising with its energy skyward.

Very excited I'll have a chance to reacquaint myself with such vertiginous glories this summer, as my high school class will be celebrating our 40th (sic!) graduation anniversary. I'm going!

Cloud castles

There's been weather happening across the river, but not much for us.

At the base of the pine / 松本

It's become clear to me that it would be good to articulate where I'm coming from as I write about religion and trees. This is something I do in my classes, where I ask students to write an "eco-spiritual" self-portrait in our first week together - and I do, too. It seems important for my book too. I'm not a botanist or an arborist, have never lived in a tree nor, come to think of it, planted and tended one. I'm not even given to hugging trees. Why should anyone be interested in what I think about religion and trees? The point isn't that there's an objective or best vantage here - trees, and treescapes, differ widely. But I grew up knowing of this diversity, and - in the coastal desert of Southern California, where, I found myself writing, "every tree was a miracle."

The most miraculous trees were our precious neighbors, the Torrey Pines, perhaps "the world's rarest pine tree," who carve out loopily sublime silhouettes on sandstone bluffs against the sea, eloquently expressing the ardors and joys of existence. I will have come to know them at the same time as their most famous chronicler, Japanese American artist Tsuyoshi "Mat" Matsumoto, whose pencil drawings have come to define them. 

Reading up a little on Matsumoto I learned that he was born in Hokkaido in 1908, going back and forth between Japan and the US many times before winding up in retirement in La Jolla charmed by the Torrey Pines. Child of a Christian mother, he studied not art but theology. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he studied theology and music at Union Theological Seminary in the 1930s, returning to Japan to work as an organist and active as a Christian pacifist. As militarism grew, American friends brought him back to the US, where, after a few years ensconced in the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, one of his Union classmates helped him find a position teaching music at an American Missionary Association-run school for African Americans in Alabama. 

When the war broke out, Matsumoto was arrested by the local police on suspicion of espionage, only released with the help of missionary connections. He taught Japanese language at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago, after the war enlisting in the US military and teaching at the famous Monterey language institute. He became a US citizen, but returned to Japan, where his wife had spent 8 years unable to secure a visa. Based at the US military base at Yokosuka (near Yokohama) for two decades, he raised a family and exhibited art (abstract and expressionist work!), returning to New York City on retirement. Drawn by the Torrey pines, he settled in La Jolla, where he opened an art gallery. He visited the pines daily from 1973 until his death in 1981, leaving behind hundreds of drawings. 

The various accounts I've cited here, which to an extent cite each other, differ in emphasis and diverge in some details, especially concerning his work as an artist. Did he run a gallery in New York before the one in California? Was he self-taught - guided by the pines themelves? Or is that, during the 1960s in Japan,  Matsumoto began intensive study of pines, the Japanese symbol of good luck and longevity—there was also a personal element in that “Matsumoto” means “root of the pine.” One way or the other, I suspect he helped other visitors to the Torrey Pines to see them as Japanese see pines, as rugged, deep-souled survivors in an often cruel and inhospitable world. I know I see trees - not just pines - that way, too.

(Images from here, whence also a random religion-and-trees factoid

those trees in the screen-like spread at top, which stood at now bark beetle-ravaged High Point in TPSNR, had been christened Matthew, Mark, Luke and - the big one - Mary. )

Stitch in time

One of our local honey locusts remembering the days when protection was needed against mastodons and other megafauna long extinct.

Operatic elders

Lucked into amazing seats for Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" at the Met last night, in a production designed in 2007 by Mark Morris with costumes by Isaac Mizrahi. It's an odd opera - a tragedy already well established in the operatic repertoire in 1762, but with a forced happy ending, as the premiere fell on the name day of the Emperor who was atttending. In this telling, Orfeo loses Euridice twice, and gets her back twice, too, his grief so eloquent it moves - twice - the hearts of the gods. The music is gorgeous, but how seriously is one to take it the story? 

Morris decided the soloists and dancers' costumes should be contemporary (for 2007), but the chorus, representing "witnesses from history," are in costumes of every period. The assembled worthies, ranging from Nefertiti to Jimi Hendrix, are fun to watch; in 2007 there was even a "Where's Waldo?" competition for identifying them. (Apparently Ralph Waldo Emerson is in there somewhere too.)

In the performance they're a bit distracting, as someone steps forward and you think Einstein? Julius Caesar? Harriet Tubman? Genghis Khan? Lady Di? Moses? Stalin? Babe Ruth? Frida Kahlo? (I identified several of these, learned of others online.) If it were still 2007, and we were all in the Gap-like clothes of Mark Morris' dancers, the effect would be postmodern magic, the chorus, in glorious historical costumes, conjuring "grand opera," and the folks in contemporary dress - us, wondering how seriously we can take our own stories. A happy end?

Pollinators welcome!

No-Mow May's lushness lingers on