Margotlog: A Cathedral in the Pines
My North Dakota cousins had one of the most beautiful churches I have ever entered--an outdoor cathedral in the pines. Air and sunlight fell down upon us. Breezes blew. Music and text, belief and sustenance rose into an immensity tempered by the tree tops.
Now, the closest thing I can find to that piney chapel is the Saint Paul Cathedral. Unlike many churches, the cathedral is almost always open. It commands the city like a huge tree commands the lesser brush down below. I enter a high, hushed atmosphere. Light.streams down from two rose windows, rich with deep blues. Through a dome spreads the light of the sky. We rest from the traffic, and in the quiet, say what is in our hearts.
There was nothing objectionable about the Presbyterian churches of my childhood, the first in Charleston, the second in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The churches introduced me to notions of prayer and praise, but they did not enfold and elevate me. Perhaps I was too young. The ministers were a little frightening in the sweeping black robes. What they said made almost no sense to me. Yet I liked to the hymns and singing them.
.
Taking the collection made a little drama as adults slipped tiny envelopes into large silver-edged platters and I put in my dimes. The buildings--both plain and white, with narrow sanctuaries and green velvet draperies--did not offend. I stared out wide windows in a kind of trance. Outside sun filtered down, leaves fluttered, an occasional bird flew by. Gravestones made a pleasant change and I entertained random notions about who lay beneath them. As a teen, dressing for church with white gloves and hat occupied me far more than anything that actually happened inside the church. As a child, drawing on the program passed the time.
Had this been all, I doubt that I would enter the cathedral today. It was life that taught me the need for offering up my insignificance into a quiet whose enormity I could never plumb. Where I could rest from fear, and hope to be sustained. Where I was humbled enough to kneel, and where the statues and images carried the familiar gentle Christ and his parents of my childhood.
We live in a deeply secular world. Also a deeply divided In the United States, the "religious right" has become a political force. I am not so naive as the pretend that the "religious left" doesn't also have a secular agenda. When a religious leader like the newly elected Pope Francis comes on the scene with a message of love and compassion for the poor in spirit and in purse, I almost weep with relief that goodness and mercy can still make waves in this world. But it's my deep concern and love for the natural world, that compels me most emphatically toward that old-time religious action. Not because it fits with any dogma or creed, but because it rises from what the cathedral teaches me about our place in the world.
We are not alone. Nor are we omnipotent. When I enter the cathedral and sink into the immensity, I eventually feel the truth of both these statements. I emerge freshened by insignificance and buoyed by weakness. But also freed to think and feel toward what is good and right, and emboldened to take action where I can. The cathedral puts what is busy and selfish about my own pursuits within a circle of connection. It is that piercing revelation--I must answer for what I commit--which helps me find my place within our world's enormous generosity of creatures and oceans, water and air, seasons and darkness. I belong to them, and owe them as much attention and action as I can possibly contribute. If I and many others are to sustain the bees, there must be wildflowers on my altar. And water for our Eucharist cleaned through rejuvenated soil. And bread for our communion ground from seeds with enough sustenance in them to keep us alive and alert. .
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Margotlog: Wanna Know How I Beat the Heat and Saved $100 a Month?
Margotlog: Wanna Know How We Beat the Heat and Saved $100 a Month?
Numero Uno: Gave up air-conditioning. Hated it anyway. Dried up the nostrils, made ears ring. Instead: we
* Put in tight-fitting new windows with UV glass in the 1912 house.This meant winter and summer, the cold and hot stay out, the bearable temps stayed in.
* In summer we track the sun around the house. (Yes, we are the center of the universe. Just in case you didn't know!) Hot morning sun on the south side we slap in the face with closed windows and lowered shades.
Hot afternoon sun on west-facing kitchen windows, ditto with window closings and shades. Remember those dainty Victorian females who pasted cologne-wettened handkies to their fevered brows? They collapsed in darkened rooms. Dark in summer equals cooler.
When the sun moves away and the windows are in shade, we open them and position floor fans to draw cool air inside.
Numero Due We planted trees like there's no tomorrow. Over twenty-five years, our no-tree lot has become a green jungle. Eight species of shade now cool us north and south. We can't control east and west. These belong to the driveways, but our neighbors are close. They shade us. We shade them. Note: we planted mostly northland natives--better survivors. Silver Maples our favorite.
Numero Tre Cotton, cotton and more cotton. Abhor synthetics--they paste the sweat to your body. Cotton breathes. Cotton like linen and wool is a natural fiber. Light, loose clothing for summer--easy skirts, tank tops, shorts. Bulky layered clothing for winter. Many many layers like a critter adding fur. Simple, but humans don't have smarts born in. We have to teach every generation over and over and over. (Watching TV from a young age doesn't help.)
Numero Quatro We stopped plugging in what we weren't using. Mostly. It was a fight, but I won. The husband went blah-blah-blah, this won't work on a power strip, this is too much trouble on a power-strip. I bought the strips, I power-stripped TVs, computers, fans, DVD players, shredders. I also began pulling out of the sockets the dangling plug-ins for stupid phones. What kind of smarts keeps a power cord plugged in when it's not attached to what it's supposed to be juicing--eh? That's when the electric bill really bottomed out. We power-strip TVs, computers, fans, DVD players, shredders.I'm still working on the coffee pot.
Numero Cinco We changed all the light blubs to compact flourescents and LEDs. Our Christmas tree now has bright blue LED lights. (Maybe Rudolph needs a blue LED nose?) ALL the lights are flourescent or LED--in the ceiling fixtures, in the lamps, under the cabinets, above the stairs, in the basement, in the attic. ALL the lights. When we leave a room, we turn out the lights. I get a little zing when I turn off his lights!
Now he's frowning and turning off my lights.
Postscript: Energy conservation, and staying cool and cheap was all my schtick. But he's caught on. In winter, we conserve by turning up the thermostat to 68 and down to 62. Every night. I cheat with an electric blanket. My argument: I'm a southern girl. My blood will never be thick enough for 30-below. My first winter in Minnesota I had frostbitten fingers and toes. I was wearing thin leather gloves and boots. Fine for New York. Stupid for Minnesota.But I didn't know!
Postscript: Some African women wet their long, scarf-like clothing to cool off by evaporation. I keep an inch of water in the tub, and on 90+ days, step in, douse myself all over, pat dry. The fan feels heavenly on wet skin.
Finale: Our monthly electric bill has shed $100. This began about 9 months ago. No reason to think it will go back up. We got energy credit with the replacement windows.
.
Numero Uno: Gave up air-conditioning. Hated it anyway. Dried up the nostrils, made ears ring. Instead: we
* Put in tight-fitting new windows with UV glass in the 1912 house.This meant winter and summer, the cold and hot stay out, the bearable temps stayed in.
* In summer we track the sun around the house. (Yes, we are the center of the universe. Just in case you didn't know!) Hot morning sun on the south side we slap in the face with closed windows and lowered shades.
Hot afternoon sun on west-facing kitchen windows, ditto with window closings and shades. Remember those dainty Victorian females who pasted cologne-wettened handkies to their fevered brows? They collapsed in darkened rooms. Dark in summer equals cooler.
When the sun moves away and the windows are in shade, we open them and position floor fans to draw cool air inside.
Numero Due We planted trees like there's no tomorrow. Over twenty-five years, our no-tree lot has become a green jungle. Eight species of shade now cool us north and south. We can't control east and west. These belong to the driveways, but our neighbors are close. They shade us. We shade them. Note: we planted mostly northland natives--better survivors. Silver Maples our favorite.
Numero Tre Cotton, cotton and more cotton. Abhor synthetics--they paste the sweat to your body. Cotton breathes. Cotton like linen and wool is a natural fiber. Light, loose clothing for summer--easy skirts, tank tops, shorts. Bulky layered clothing for winter. Many many layers like a critter adding fur. Simple, but humans don't have smarts born in. We have to teach every generation over and over and over. (Watching TV from a young age doesn't help.)
Numero Quatro We stopped plugging in what we weren't using. Mostly. It was a fight, but I won. The husband went blah-blah-blah, this won't work on a power strip, this is too much trouble on a power-strip. I bought the strips, I power-stripped TVs, computers, fans, DVD players, shredders. I also began pulling out of the sockets the dangling plug-ins for stupid phones. What kind of smarts keeps a power cord plugged in when it's not attached to what it's supposed to be juicing--eh? That's when the electric bill really bottomed out. We power-strip TVs, computers, fans, DVD players, shredders.I'm still working on the coffee pot.
Numero Cinco We changed all the light blubs to compact flourescents and LEDs. Our Christmas tree now has bright blue LED lights. (Maybe Rudolph needs a blue LED nose?) ALL the lights are flourescent or LED--in the ceiling fixtures, in the lamps, under the cabinets, above the stairs, in the basement, in the attic. ALL the lights. When we leave a room, we turn out the lights. I get a little zing when I turn off his lights!
Now he's frowning and turning off my lights.
Postscript: Energy conservation, and staying cool and cheap was all my schtick. But he's caught on. In winter, we conserve by turning up the thermostat to 68 and down to 62. Every night. I cheat with an electric blanket. My argument: I'm a southern girl. My blood will never be thick enough for 30-below. My first winter in Minnesota I had frostbitten fingers and toes. I was wearing thin leather gloves and boots. Fine for New York. Stupid for Minnesota.But I didn't know!
Postscript: Some African women wet their long, scarf-like clothing to cool off by evaporation. I keep an inch of water in the tub, and on 90+ days, step in, douse myself all over, pat dry. The fan feels heavenly on wet skin.
Finale: Our monthly electric bill has shed $100. This began about 9 months ago. No reason to think it will go back up. We got energy credit with the replacement windows.
.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Margotlog: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Margotlog: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
So wrote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Those words give me a shiver--they promise so much! But on this eve of July 4th, our Independence Day, let's start with "Life." The opposite of Death. We are very moved by death, personal, national, global. The recent deaths of 17 firefighters in Colorado. The deaths of thousands in New York and Pennsylvania during 9/11. The starvation of some 200,000 Somali children during a prolonged famine in the 1990s.
If we pause long enough, as I did recently at my parents' beautiful (but buggy) gravesite near Charleston, South Carolina, Death means personal loss. It means memory and appreciation and forgiveness. These emotions for essentially good people, my parents, who nurtured me physically and artistically and socially. They made huge mistakes, but often their mistakes were so different that they balanced each other out: excessive rage at black people, versus excessive silence and noninvolvement. Excessive order versus excessive randomness.
Life comes first, to us personally and as an aggregate.
Recently, a masters student in education concluded her final project surveying violence prevention and protection in three Minnesota schools. As we talked, one of her committee, a white woman who works in a northern Minnesota Native American school, commented that during her friend's survey of the school, a horrendous murder occurred among Native American youths--one was hacked to death with an ax. Yet the school said nothing about it. Of course the students knew. They went home to the community where it happened. Yet the school, peopled largely by whites, kept silent. This is neither preventive nor protective. It's about fear and a huge sense of distance. A refusal to act in concert, as if the basic right to Life did not mean the same to all of us.
There are many instances of violence that snuffs out life among people marginalized by poverty, disease, race. The violence is also marginalized. It does not receive the scrutiny or larger mourning it deserves.
Now we come to Liberty. Liberty initially meant freedom from England, freedom from the oppression of what had become an alien power, across the seas. Freedom to set our own national standards and mores, to pursue our own goals. This was not the kind of liberty that gave license to violence. This kind of Liberty supported Life.
Yet, as we discussed during our review of this student's project, any recent attempt to enact national gun-control legislation has been met by excessive ramping up of gun-purchasing and toting. The loud shout of NO legal body of the United States, CAN INFRINGE ON THIS BASIC RIGHT. How basic is this right to snuff out another's life? Hmm? How basic is it to carry an automatic weapon with hundreds of fast-shooting rounds of ammo along a crowded street, into a school? Is this Liberty or unbridled license?
Finally we come to the Pursuit of Happiness. I love pursing happiness. Basic sybarite at heart, happiness is for me is leisure, happiness is chosing a mate and having the right and liberty for full protection under the law for your union. Happiness can demand vigor. Think of those runners at the Boston Marathon whose pursuit was bombed. Think of the happiness of young families whose children were shot. Happiness is NOT shooting or bombing. But sometimes it requires fighting, as in the First Minnesota Regiment who volunteered to fight for the lives, liberty and yes pursuit of happiness for African Americans. .
Happy 4th, Happy celebration of all our Lives in the Liberty of safe and secure protection, in our individual and collective happiness.
So wrote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Those words give me a shiver--they promise so much! But on this eve of July 4th, our Independence Day, let's start with "Life." The opposite of Death. We are very moved by death, personal, national, global. The recent deaths of 17 firefighters in Colorado. The deaths of thousands in New York and Pennsylvania during 9/11. The starvation of some 200,000 Somali children during a prolonged famine in the 1990s.
If we pause long enough, as I did recently at my parents' beautiful (but buggy) gravesite near Charleston, South Carolina, Death means personal loss. It means memory and appreciation and forgiveness. These emotions for essentially good people, my parents, who nurtured me physically and artistically and socially. They made huge mistakes, but often their mistakes were so different that they balanced each other out: excessive rage at black people, versus excessive silence and noninvolvement. Excessive order versus excessive randomness.
Life comes first, to us personally and as an aggregate.
Recently, a masters student in education concluded her final project surveying violence prevention and protection in three Minnesota schools. As we talked, one of her committee, a white woman who works in a northern Minnesota Native American school, commented that during her friend's survey of the school, a horrendous murder occurred among Native American youths--one was hacked to death with an ax. Yet the school said nothing about it. Of course the students knew. They went home to the community where it happened. Yet the school, peopled largely by whites, kept silent. This is neither preventive nor protective. It's about fear and a huge sense of distance. A refusal to act in concert, as if the basic right to Life did not mean the same to all of us.
There are many instances of violence that snuffs out life among people marginalized by poverty, disease, race. The violence is also marginalized. It does not receive the scrutiny or larger mourning it deserves.
Now we come to Liberty. Liberty initially meant freedom from England, freedom from the oppression of what had become an alien power, across the seas. Freedom to set our own national standards and mores, to pursue our own goals. This was not the kind of liberty that gave license to violence. This kind of Liberty supported Life.
Yet, as we discussed during our review of this student's project, any recent attempt to enact national gun-control legislation has been met by excessive ramping up of gun-purchasing and toting. The loud shout of NO legal body of the United States, CAN INFRINGE ON THIS BASIC RIGHT. How basic is this right to snuff out another's life? Hmm? How basic is it to carry an automatic weapon with hundreds of fast-shooting rounds of ammo along a crowded street, into a school? Is this Liberty or unbridled license?
Finally we come to the Pursuit of Happiness. I love pursing happiness. Basic sybarite at heart, happiness is for me is leisure, happiness is chosing a mate and having the right and liberty for full protection under the law for your union. Happiness can demand vigor. Think of those runners at the Boston Marathon whose pursuit was bombed. Think of the happiness of young families whose children were shot. Happiness is NOT shooting or bombing. But sometimes it requires fighting, as in the First Minnesota Regiment who volunteered to fight for the lives, liberty and yes pursuit of happiness for African Americans. .
Happy 4th, Happy celebration of all our Lives in the Liberty of safe and secure protection, in our individual and collective happiness.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Margotlog: Water...a Film about India and Widowhood
Margotlog: Water...a Film about India and Widowhood
But it's filmed in Shri Lanka. Beautifully filmed with close-ups of a dreamy eyed girl (around 8) in the back of an oxen-pulled wagon. Her dark eyes, framed by long heavy dark hair, stare into watery distance. Inside the wagon is a corpse of a man who looks old enough to be her grandfather. We unquestionably assume he is her grandfather. We from the west do not marry children. Girls with dreamy eyes never consider they might be married to men old enough to be their grandfathers. We assume that marriage is not really marriage until it's consummated.
The watery world is so beautiful. Then we see a pyre, burning beside the river. We assume the river is the Ganges. Then the girl's hair is being cut off, next her head is shaved, next she is dressed in white, brought to a heavy door, let in and the door closes behind these people whom we assumed were her family.
Furious, terrified, she is cowed by a huge woman also in white. All the people in this compound are older women, all are dressed in white. Only one younger one is grinding something yellow. Soon this yellow powder is mixed with water into a paste. It is spread on the girl's head. Tumeric, to cool the skin after the head is shaved. All the women have shaved heads. They are all windows. Some may have lived almost their entire lives here, we finally realize.
For a long time it is not at all clear how they survive, though there is one exceptionally beautiful and long-haired woman among these dessicated widows. She lives upstairs with a puppy. The puppy helps the newly arrived child to calm her terror, to begin to examine where and what she is consigned to. This beautiful, long-haried woman becomes her friend. We notice an elegantly dressed heavy-set woman standing outside the bars of the huge widow who must be the head of this enclosure. Soon, we are shocked to discover that the beautiful long-haired young woman is rowed across the river to assignations. She is a whore.
Though there is a script, the spare language and our ignorance make the experience of watching this film like a watery dream. The fact that there is a plot. There is a young educated man who encounters both the new widow girl and the beautiful widow whore. He befriends them and falls in love. In one brief image we watch the castrated pimp in "her.his" expensive colorful clothes waiting outside the balcony of a wealthy colonial home. We know by then that inside is the beautiful young widow with one of her customers.
It seems to take us forever to discover the horrors that lie in wait for the people in this film--for the beautiful whore, the young stalwart man who believes in freedom and justice and who loves her, his mother who wants him to marry the right kind of girl, and his father--his father who preys on young widows.
It is the late 1930s, the time of Ghandi's rise to power. He has just been released from prison by the British. Toward the end of the film, after the beautiful widow and young man have fallen in love and met under an extraordinary tree, whose huge arms ripple out like a dark flowing river, we attend a rally to honor Ghandi. By now we are not so ignorant. We realize how desperately poor and repressed, how ground under the heel of colonialism (both British and Indian) are most of the Indian people. We believe for a brief moment that Ghandi will make a difference for these forsaken, outcast widows.
But the young girl will be the only one to escape. I will not reveal the shattering fate of the beautiful young widow-whore, nor of the many old women who have lived out their lives as the trashed, hidden away. Finally we begin to grasp how deceitful and cunning, how debased and needy, their lives are. The holy water of the river cannot wash away what has been done to them.
My empowered, elegant, learned, witty, beautiful women friends in the west do not really understand the degredation of these women. Yet we have just read in Poetry Magazine some Afghani landays, brief poems created by women, whispered on the phone, sung privately to each other The landays in the June 2013 issue of Poetry remind me of this movie "Water." I recommend them both. They show how often women are repressed, thrown like fodder to the anger, desperation, desire of men. But also of women's wily creativity, their desire and determination to be heard if only in whispers among themselves.
Two landays, gathered in danger to the writers:
I'll make a tattoo from my lover's blood
And shame every rose in the green garden.
and
The old goat seized a kiss from my pout
like tearing a piece of fat from a starving dog's snout.
But it's filmed in Shri Lanka. Beautifully filmed with close-ups of a dreamy eyed girl (around 8) in the back of an oxen-pulled wagon. Her dark eyes, framed by long heavy dark hair, stare into watery distance. Inside the wagon is a corpse of a man who looks old enough to be her grandfather. We unquestionably assume he is her grandfather. We from the west do not marry children. Girls with dreamy eyes never consider they might be married to men old enough to be their grandfathers. We assume that marriage is not really marriage until it's consummated.
The watery world is so beautiful. Then we see a pyre, burning beside the river. We assume the river is the Ganges. Then the girl's hair is being cut off, next her head is shaved, next she is dressed in white, brought to a heavy door, let in and the door closes behind these people whom we assumed were her family.
Furious, terrified, she is cowed by a huge woman also in white. All the people in this compound are older women, all are dressed in white. Only one younger one is grinding something yellow. Soon this yellow powder is mixed with water into a paste. It is spread on the girl's head. Tumeric, to cool the skin after the head is shaved. All the women have shaved heads. They are all windows. Some may have lived almost their entire lives here, we finally realize.
For a long time it is not at all clear how they survive, though there is one exceptionally beautiful and long-haired woman among these dessicated widows. She lives upstairs with a puppy. The puppy helps the newly arrived child to calm her terror, to begin to examine where and what she is consigned to. This beautiful, long-haried woman becomes her friend. We notice an elegantly dressed heavy-set woman standing outside the bars of the huge widow who must be the head of this enclosure. Soon, we are shocked to discover that the beautiful long-haired young woman is rowed across the river to assignations. She is a whore.
Though there is a script, the spare language and our ignorance make the experience of watching this film like a watery dream. The fact that there is a plot. There is a young educated man who encounters both the new widow girl and the beautiful widow whore. He befriends them and falls in love. In one brief image we watch the castrated pimp in "her.his" expensive colorful clothes waiting outside the balcony of a wealthy colonial home. We know by then that inside is the beautiful young widow with one of her customers.
It seems to take us forever to discover the horrors that lie in wait for the people in this film--for the beautiful whore, the young stalwart man who believes in freedom and justice and who loves her, his mother who wants him to marry the right kind of girl, and his father--his father who preys on young widows.
It is the late 1930s, the time of Ghandi's rise to power. He has just been released from prison by the British. Toward the end of the film, after the beautiful widow and young man have fallen in love and met under an extraordinary tree, whose huge arms ripple out like a dark flowing river, we attend a rally to honor Ghandi. By now we are not so ignorant. We realize how desperately poor and repressed, how ground under the heel of colonialism (both British and Indian) are most of the Indian people. We believe for a brief moment that Ghandi will make a difference for these forsaken, outcast widows.
But the young girl will be the only one to escape. I will not reveal the shattering fate of the beautiful young widow-whore, nor of the many old women who have lived out their lives as the trashed, hidden away. Finally we begin to grasp how deceitful and cunning, how debased and needy, their lives are. The holy water of the river cannot wash away what has been done to them.
My empowered, elegant, learned, witty, beautiful women friends in the west do not really understand the degredation of these women. Yet we have just read in Poetry Magazine some Afghani landays, brief poems created by women, whispered on the phone, sung privately to each other The landays in the June 2013 issue of Poetry remind me of this movie "Water." I recommend them both. They show how often women are repressed, thrown like fodder to the anger, desperation, desire of men. But also of women's wily creativity, their desire and determination to be heard if only in whispers among themselves.
Two landays, gathered in danger to the writers:
I'll make a tattoo from my lover's blood
And shame every rose in the green garden.
and
The old goat seized a kiss from my pout
like tearing a piece of fat from a starving dog's snout.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Margotlog: Teatro Goldoni and The Rape of Lucretia
Margotlog: Teatro Goldoni and The Rape of Lucretia
We in Minneapolis/Saint Paul enjoy one of the world's great images of the Roman matron Lucretia, Rembrandt's deeply moving portrayal just after she's stabbed herself. I've stood before this achingly beautiful young woman, her chemise stained with blood, a tear on her cheek, as she holds onto a bell rope, ringing for her maid even as she is about to collapse. The painting is entirely about innocent suffering, the rape a wager made among her husband's officers, and cruelly executed in his absence. She has been dragged from bed.
And stands before us in bruised and shattered innocence. Preparing to watch Benjamin Britten's opera of the same name at the Teatro Goldoni, a few weeks ago in Florence, I held this image before me.
"Everything in Italy is always the first time," quipped a gentleman behind me as I asked if this line was for reservations. He gave me a quintessential Italian shrug as we inched forward to the ticket window. The Teatro Goldoni was closed for renovations, my friend and companion Grazia told me. I assumed we were thus viewing the opening production.
Like many Italian theaters I've seen before, the Teatro Goldoni is a jewel-box of a place, narrow and tall with a high stage, and the boxes like bird cages ranked together to the sky. Our box with four,velvet-cushioned chairs was almost in the middle, but high up, next to il pigioneaio (or some such, a slang term for the top-most crowded quarters, like a tenement flocked with birds).
A tall, shy youngish man had already entered when I took the other front seat. We gave each other a simple greeting and he hunched over a book or libretto? Grazia entered after smoking a cigarette outside (she still smokes as so many Italians. I wish to heaven she'd stop!)
The opera is told from a great remove, with two commentators setting forth the conflict between Romans and Etruscans. They sing against flashes of imagery from ancient sculpture, modern warfare, notably World War II. When we enter the drama, brave, hardy men quarrel and plot, with murder and conquest in mind. Still nothing about Lucretia, quietly at home.
Then we meet her. She is gorgeous, but we are to understand, chaste. Still her power and glamor interest the composer/librettist more than her modesty. Her power is linked to her beauty and status as the wife of a commanding general.
When the rape begins to take root, the story and music focus on the soldier who vows to test her fidelity. There's a lot of commentary about fickle women, about how the body takes over when touched in certain ways--a bit like a hidden safe unlocked by a secret spring. The commentators bemoan the man's rough determination. We see Lucretia laughing and playing, guilelessly worried about her husband's health and safety.
The rape gets far more play than her resistance. The rape of a people--viewed in video and still images, ancient and modern--becomes conflated with her suffering. Yes it is brutal, the commentators tell us and we see it, but we do not see her, solitary and alone, friendless and abandoned, taking the ultimate courageous act of suicide. Her husband, warned of the depredation done to his wife, arrives and finds her in the act of stabbing herself.
But by this time, the commentators have lifted above the human realm to the divine. They are singing about how God looks out for all. This is a Christian addition, not at all what the ancient story signifies. Think about it: pre-Christian, the ancient story is all about moral courage and fidelity. Not about how belief in God's forgiveness smooths away ugliness. Britten, whatever his motivations, has done the ancient story an injustice, not to mention his contemporary audience who is all too aware that Christ was not conceived when this ancient act took place.
Give me Rembrandt any day, yet I'm glad to have sat with my friend, and the quiet young man who rushed away the minute the curtain falls, saying "arriverderci," the formal Italian good-bye. I wonder if perhaps he, like us, feels diminished by the composer's effort to "sanctify" for Christendom what is, after all, an ancient and painful conundrum! A dilemma that is still with us, the double standard that holds a woman's chastity hostage to male lust for dominance. We disparage Britten, but bow in homage before Rembrandt's portrayal of this young woman, who destroys herself for a honor we cannot help but loathe, yet in her face, see what achingly painful struggle she has endured and in a painful, ultimate way surmounted.
We in Minneapolis/Saint Paul enjoy one of the world's great images of the Roman matron Lucretia, Rembrandt's deeply moving portrayal just after she's stabbed herself. I've stood before this achingly beautiful young woman, her chemise stained with blood, a tear on her cheek, as she holds onto a bell rope, ringing for her maid even as she is about to collapse. The painting is entirely about innocent suffering, the rape a wager made among her husband's officers, and cruelly executed in his absence. She has been dragged from bed.
And stands before us in bruised and shattered innocence. Preparing to watch Benjamin Britten's opera of the same name at the Teatro Goldoni, a few weeks ago in Florence, I held this image before me.
"Everything in Italy is always the first time," quipped a gentleman behind me as I asked if this line was for reservations. He gave me a quintessential Italian shrug as we inched forward to the ticket window. The Teatro Goldoni was closed for renovations, my friend and companion Grazia told me. I assumed we were thus viewing the opening production.
Like many Italian theaters I've seen before, the Teatro Goldoni is a jewel-box of a place, narrow and tall with a high stage, and the boxes like bird cages ranked together to the sky. Our box with four,velvet-cushioned chairs was almost in the middle, but high up, next to il pigioneaio (or some such, a slang term for the top-most crowded quarters, like a tenement flocked with birds).
A tall, shy youngish man had already entered when I took the other front seat. We gave each other a simple greeting and he hunched over a book or libretto? Grazia entered after smoking a cigarette outside (she still smokes as so many Italians. I wish to heaven she'd stop!)
The opera is told from a great remove, with two commentators setting forth the conflict between Romans and Etruscans. They sing against flashes of imagery from ancient sculpture, modern warfare, notably World War II. When we enter the drama, brave, hardy men quarrel and plot, with murder and conquest in mind. Still nothing about Lucretia, quietly at home.
Then we meet her. She is gorgeous, but we are to understand, chaste. Still her power and glamor interest the composer/librettist more than her modesty. Her power is linked to her beauty and status as the wife of a commanding general.
When the rape begins to take root, the story and music focus on the soldier who vows to test her fidelity. There's a lot of commentary about fickle women, about how the body takes over when touched in certain ways--a bit like a hidden safe unlocked by a secret spring. The commentators bemoan the man's rough determination. We see Lucretia laughing and playing, guilelessly worried about her husband's health and safety.
The rape gets far more play than her resistance. The rape of a people--viewed in video and still images, ancient and modern--becomes conflated with her suffering. Yes it is brutal, the commentators tell us and we see it, but we do not see her, solitary and alone, friendless and abandoned, taking the ultimate courageous act of suicide. Her husband, warned of the depredation done to his wife, arrives and finds her in the act of stabbing herself.
But by this time, the commentators have lifted above the human realm to the divine. They are singing about how God looks out for all. This is a Christian addition, not at all what the ancient story signifies. Think about it: pre-Christian, the ancient story is all about moral courage and fidelity. Not about how belief in God's forgiveness smooths away ugliness. Britten, whatever his motivations, has done the ancient story an injustice, not to mention his contemporary audience who is all too aware that Christ was not conceived when this ancient act took place.
Give me Rembrandt any day, yet I'm glad to have sat with my friend, and the quiet young man who rushed away the minute the curtain falls, saying "arriverderci," the formal Italian good-bye. I wonder if perhaps he, like us, feels diminished by the composer's effort to "sanctify" for Christendom what is, after all, an ancient and painful conundrum! A dilemma that is still with us, the double standard that holds a woman's chastity hostage to male lust for dominance. We disparage Britten, but bow in homage before Rembrandt's portrayal of this young woman, who destroys herself for a honor we cannot help but loathe, yet in her face, see what achingly painful struggle she has endured and in a painful, ultimate way surmounted.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Margotlog: Clean Dirt: What You Learn Crossing an Ocean
Margotlog: Clean Dirt: What You Learn Crossing an Ocean
He was young and full-faced, pleasant, with that mid-western regularity of speech--a young man on his way from the western edge of Iowa to Johannesburg, South Africa. I wasn't going nearly so far, only to Florence, Italy. It never occurred to me to visit South Africa, but he had a product to sell--a machine developed by his farmer-tinkerer father that did something neater than usual with fertilizer.
The urge to question as I travel sometimes leads to learning the unexpected. It seems possible to pick a stranger's brain miles high in the atmosphere in ways I'd never do on the ground. Something about proximity amid relative safety--after all, we are surrounded by others and there are the flight attendants if something goes awry.
We were talking about dirt, as in mid-western farm soil, and what has been dumped in it for decades, with mounting consequences. As in the herbicide Round-Up and its persistence in the soil and plants far longer than the package suggests. As in evidence that Round-Up causes cancer. As in Round-Up's ability to bind calcium and thus give test results that say plants contain calcium, yet that calcium is not available to the human body..As in the decimation of North American bees caused in part by the die-off of flowing plants in fields (and lawns) necessary for honey-gathering insects. (Not to mention the danger to humans from pesticides used in farming that leach into the water we drink.)
As in the fact (he tells me) that most bees in the U.S. are no longer native but imported from Italy. As in the fact that to keep "pests" from damaging corn (the largest crop grown in the U.S.), more and more pesticide must be used every year. As in the only way to avoid this is a very simple and ancient practice of crop rotation and allowing fields to go fallow (i.e. run to weeds) every so often.
We land in Amsterdam and he heads off to visit the city before his much later flight, and I go to my gate for Florence. Our conversation becomes a lens through which I view all the Italian rural scenes from train and bus windows for the next two weeks. Here is what I ponder:
* Poppies are the Italian dandelion. If a field is left to itself, it will sprout poppies with abandon. Beautiful red, vibrant cups on stems studded hither and yon across relatively small fields.
* There is almost an equal ratio of planted to nonplanted (i.e. fallow) fields. The Italians are thus following this old measure for reducing the insect pests of their crops. (And by plowing in the weeds, adding nutrients to the soil.) Thus they need to use far less, or perhaps no herbicides or pesticides at all, since in a field deprived of corn, the corn borer dies from lack of fodder. And when corn is then planted a year or two after the field is fallow, the corn borer has melted away.
* I heard just before I left that the European Union outlawed the use of pesticides called neonicotinoids, the pesticides most damaging to bees. I hail this as I assume that now Italian bees are less vulnerable than before, I wonder what it will take for the U.S. to show this kind of sensible self-interest as I remember my father's outrage when a single roach dared show itself in our South Carolina kitchen. We were instantly at war.
* I try to imagine a cartoon character that's an insect and shows itself a friend of humans. Kafka's short story "Metamorphosis" is the only thing that pops up--a gigantic coackroach with human faculties. I want someone to help me love all insects the way I'm learning to love all birds, even the hawks and harriers that capture in spectacular swoops the pigeons and sparrows (and an occasional cardinal) I feed in my backyard.
* I delight in the wonderful simplicity and flavor of Italian food, Yes it costs more than food does in the U.S., but Italian tomatoes are like tart ambrosia not the cardboard simulacrum we have here. Italian ice cream (gelato, thank you very much) is almost always light and delicious, flavored with just the right amount of pistachio or chocolate or cherry. Vegetables on the grill--zucchini, eggplant, for instance--sprinkled with balsamic vinegar--well there's no better way to enjoy summer veggies. And the pasta, almost always made from scratch, is melt-in-your-mouth. These people care deeply about the flavor, texture, the rightness of food. Yes, they drink our junk--the colas. But other than that, they eat what makes eating a pleasure, and now they have helped make growing human food part of a natural cycle that does not destroy or cause illness. THAT'S A HUGE ACCOMPLISHMENT, given what happens not so far away from my front door in Minneapolis/Saint Paul.
He was young and full-faced, pleasant, with that mid-western regularity of speech--a young man on his way from the western edge of Iowa to Johannesburg, South Africa. I wasn't going nearly so far, only to Florence, Italy. It never occurred to me to visit South Africa, but he had a product to sell--a machine developed by his farmer-tinkerer father that did something neater than usual with fertilizer.
The urge to question as I travel sometimes leads to learning the unexpected. It seems possible to pick a stranger's brain miles high in the atmosphere in ways I'd never do on the ground. Something about proximity amid relative safety--after all, we are surrounded by others and there are the flight attendants if something goes awry.
We were talking about dirt, as in mid-western farm soil, and what has been dumped in it for decades, with mounting consequences. As in the herbicide Round-Up and its persistence in the soil and plants far longer than the package suggests. As in evidence that Round-Up causes cancer. As in Round-Up's ability to bind calcium and thus give test results that say plants contain calcium, yet that calcium is not available to the human body..As in the decimation of North American bees caused in part by the die-off of flowing plants in fields (and lawns) necessary for honey-gathering insects. (Not to mention the danger to humans from pesticides used in farming that leach into the water we drink.)
As in the fact (he tells me) that most bees in the U.S. are no longer native but imported from Italy. As in the fact that to keep "pests" from damaging corn (the largest crop grown in the U.S.), more and more pesticide must be used every year. As in the only way to avoid this is a very simple and ancient practice of crop rotation and allowing fields to go fallow (i.e. run to weeds) every so often.
We land in Amsterdam and he heads off to visit the city before his much later flight, and I go to my gate for Florence. Our conversation becomes a lens through which I view all the Italian rural scenes from train and bus windows for the next two weeks. Here is what I ponder:
* Poppies are the Italian dandelion. If a field is left to itself, it will sprout poppies with abandon. Beautiful red, vibrant cups on stems studded hither and yon across relatively small fields.
* There is almost an equal ratio of planted to nonplanted (i.e. fallow) fields. The Italians are thus following this old measure for reducing the insect pests of their crops. (And by plowing in the weeds, adding nutrients to the soil.) Thus they need to use far less, or perhaps no herbicides or pesticides at all, since in a field deprived of corn, the corn borer dies from lack of fodder. And when corn is then planted a year or two after the field is fallow, the corn borer has melted away.
* I heard just before I left that the European Union outlawed the use of pesticides called neonicotinoids, the pesticides most damaging to bees. I hail this as I assume that now Italian bees are less vulnerable than before, I wonder what it will take for the U.S. to show this kind of sensible self-interest as I remember my father's outrage when a single roach dared show itself in our South Carolina kitchen. We were instantly at war.
* I try to imagine a cartoon character that's an insect and shows itself a friend of humans. Kafka's short story "Metamorphosis" is the only thing that pops up--a gigantic coackroach with human faculties. I want someone to help me love all insects the way I'm learning to love all birds, even the hawks and harriers that capture in spectacular swoops the pigeons and sparrows (and an occasional cardinal) I feed in my backyard.
* I delight in the wonderful simplicity and flavor of Italian food, Yes it costs more than food does in the U.S., but Italian tomatoes are like tart ambrosia not the cardboard simulacrum we have here. Italian ice cream (gelato, thank you very much) is almost always light and delicious, flavored with just the right amount of pistachio or chocolate or cherry. Vegetables on the grill--zucchini, eggplant, for instance--sprinkled with balsamic vinegar--well there's no better way to enjoy summer veggies. And the pasta, almost always made from scratch, is melt-in-your-mouth. These people care deeply about the flavor, texture, the rightness of food. Yes, they drink our junk--the colas. But other than that, they eat what makes eating a pleasure, and now they have helped make growing human food part of a natural cycle that does not destroy or cause illness. THAT'S A HUGE ACCOMPLISHMENT, given what happens not so far away from my front door in Minneapolis/Saint Paul.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Margotlog: Insects Among Us
Margotlog: Insects Among Us
About eight summers ago, driving home to the Twin Cities from vacationing on the North Shore, I routinely encountered many Monarch butterflies taking their lazy flight south. Then suddenly a year or two later, there were almost none. Around the same time, I began reading (Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker) about "colony collapse" among our nation's bees. As the excellent article by StarTribune Josephine Marcotty (5/3/2013) reports, this die-off of bee colonies is accelerating. Culprits identified by Marcotty and earlier science writers include loss of flowering habitat, and even more clearly, the increased use of pesticides on farm fields (and orchards too), notably insecticides in the class of neonicotinoids. Genetically modified corn which is resistant to the effects of insecticides and herbicides allows farmers to spray their fields with greater and greater doses of these toxic chemicals. Just as Rachel Carson warned in Silent Spring of bird and insect deaths due to DDT, so now we as a people are facing the loss of beautiful and very necessary insects Small-scale beekeepers I know within 60 miles of the Twin Cities report no trouble raising and maintaining their hives, but they neither live in heavily farmed neighborhoods (as perhaps does Steve Ellis, Barrett, Minnesota, beekeeper quoted in Marcotty's article), nor do they truck their colonies to California to pollinate almond orchards. Such disruption is also potentially harmful to bees (Kolbert). The European Union has just banned the use of neonicotinoids, and Marcotty remarks that University of Minnesota bee scientist Maria Spivak "said Europe is more willing to ban pesticides based on perceived risk." Marcotty then quotes Spivak directly: "The U.S. has a much stricter policy and approves pesticides until [it's] proven that they are a problem." I'm an English teacher, and as such encourage my students to look for illogical and prejudicial use of language. Try this on for size: A "stricter" policy approves pesticides until they are proven a problem. This seems not stricter at all, but rather a "looser" policy, favoring chemical companies who produce not only genetically modified corn but also the pesticides and herbicides spewed on fields where such corn is grown. Note my prejudicial use of "spewed." Not a nice word, suggesting "indiscriminate, reckless," and yes "harmful." It becomes clearer and clearer that unless the U.S. bans these damaging pesticides and probably the genetically modified corn they're used on, we will soon have no flying insect friends to pollinate our apples, strawberries, almonds, blueberries, and many other trees and plants which still abide by natural "unmodified" procedures. Given the evidence that the enormous U.S. corn crop goes largely to bulk-up feed lot cattle, producing beef far higher in fat than grass-fed cattle who come to "market weight" walking the range and eating grass (which their stomachs are naturally formed to digest)...evidence that the hugely damaging use of corn syrup to sweeten colas has created a U.S. epidemic in childhood and adult diabetes and obesity...evidence that using corn to create ethynol is neither environmentally nor economically viable... (see the documentary movie "King Corn")... Well, the choice from this side of the supermarket aisle seems all in favor of veggies, fruits, and nuts. And bees and butterflies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)