Margotlog: More Than Ever, We Need "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Margotlog: More than ever, we white folks, north and south, need Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I've been listening to the disks for the past few weeks, or maybe as long as a month, as I lie on the bathroom floor before going to bed, and soak my eyes with warm cloths. I listen to a wonderful reading of Scout and Jim, and Aticus, the family in Alabama, and their wonderfully tart-talking household helper (she's brown-skinned, but an absolutely integral part of the family, and in a moment I'll remember her name!), all of whom take me back to the South Carolina of my youth.

We had no brown-skinned household helper. My mother Maxine from North Dakota couldn't imagine needing help. And my father, the sometimes warm-hearted and other times fulminating racist,  Leonard from Pittsburgh via Italy, kept up a running display of "northern" attitudes. I did not yearn for a black woman in the house, though many of the girls in my all-white school had a brown-skinned helpers. Yes, they were paid, as was Calpurnia, Scout and Jim's "mother-substitute."

I say that with all sincerity. Their mother had died before the book begins, and Cal as they call her, is more than a presence in the kitchen. She is part of the family as were the brown-skinned women who worked for the families of friends I made at the fancy all-girls' private schools where my mother insisted my sister and I attend. Sometimes when I visited these privileged girls (my mother's father, Papa Max, sent money from North Dakota to pay for our private school education) I felt uncomfortable at the way the grown-up white women talked down to these women who cooked, helped raise the children, kept the house clean, and no doubt, like Calpernia, sometimes verbally disciplined my friends.

To Kill a Mocking Bird is extraordinarily in the way Harper Lee characterizes the family and neighbors, and even the mad dog that for a long, trying afternoon stumbles around in the dust until Mr. Heck Tate, the sheriff, brings a loaded shot-gun and insists that Aticus shoot the stumbling animal. This and other hints tell us that Aticus is more than competent. He is the hero of the story, and the children are his chorus, as they struggle to grow up (their mother has died), begin to discern the layers of society, including the disgusting white father (years ago we would have called him"white trash") who brings charges against a black man for "having carnel knowledge" of his pathetic daughter. Turns out, the father, a slovening, n'er-do-well has been raping her, and now tries to pass off the horror on an honest, kind "colored man."

This trial is in many ways the culmination of the racist society, but for me, the book's heart and soul reside with Aticus and the children and Calpernia--with the day-to-day functioning of their household, and of the mysterious family next door, with its aging pathetic son. And also the white woman who's lived alone for decades, drinking herself into a fury, so we learn as the children come to hate her and Jim ruins her peony bushes in a fury at her tormenting. Yet, there is redemption: just before she dies, she with the doctor's help weans herself off the alcohol that has soothed her deformities. 

There is no stereotyping of black people versus white people. Each character is absolutely and continuously made individual and present to us. In my opinion, To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the finest pieces of literature written by an American, in company with Melville's Moby Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and hundreds of others (usually only a single work among an author's output).

We need To Kill a Mocking Bird not for the horribly sad ending, but for the daily interaction of people in the south, mostly white people, but in one memorable chapter, when Calpernia takes Scout and Jim to "her" African-American church, in a rendition of different ways of redeeming what can't be helped, and offering a welcome to all who come in good faith.

This is open-hearted book, true-to-diverse kinds of talking and living, as it offers a hand even to the most isolated. Truly, an American original that belongs with the very best of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and so on.

Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

Margotlog: Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

John Ruskin, the 19th-century British art critic and historian, is said to have complained that most American and English tourists to Venice will "dash through the  Basilica di S. Maria della Salute,"  paying no more heed to the gems by Tintoretto and Titian than they would to clothes on a line.

Determined not to be such a dolt, I spent hours a few days after arriving, getting into a slow moving vaporetto (rapid only in comparison to a row boat), and making my way with others crammed on board to the Campo della Salute. Another visitor, a well-dressed woman who spoke with a Southern accent (she was African-American) admitted as we paused in the huge campo that she had not much idea what we were supposed to see. In another minute, a friend stepped from a nearby building that announced itself as the "Peggy Gugghenheim Collection." The woman waiting suggested that I join them, but when I explained that I had promised mysef to see the Salute, she nodded and disappeared.

The church was dim and lofty. Chapels held huge paintings, some so high up that I had to crane my neck and shift about to find the right angle for discerning their subject matter. After several turns around the church, with careful study of the art and the artists' names, I became comvinced that I had seen only one Titian.(Maybe modern scholarship had changed the attribution of others?) So many paintings depicted figures in flowing robes ascending into the heavens that the message seemed to be: we all should be full of bliss or awe. But I'm afriad the paintings struck me as old, difficult to see, and repetitive.

The next day's "misty, moisty weather" kept me much closer to Hotel Boccassini. The wind off the lagoon which stretched a far distance, was brutally cold. I held tight to my hood, and to the railings as I forced my way up one steep bridge after another.

It had occurred to me that when I'd visited Venice years before, I had entered a church not far from were I was staying now. It was the Church of Santa Maria Assunta dei Gesuiti. Reaching it again, I was reminded that its imposing marble facade faced a rather narrow strip of open space--nothing like the Salute's command of an enormous espanse of the Canale de San Marco and from there onwards to the Adriate.

Carefully ascending the wet steps, I forced myself against the wind and through a heavy iron door. A few other visitors moved in the vast church, yet I felt as if the dim church belonged only to myself.

"Founded in the 12th century and reconstructed in its current configuration in the 18th century, the church of Santa Maria Assunta has the typical plan of the Jesuit order, and an imposing Baroque facade. The interior decorated with white and green marble inlays on walls and gilded stucco work is absolutely unique in Venice." So described a brochure.

Titians and Tinterettos seemed to be everywhere. The first, "The Martydom of San Lorenzo," by Tiziano Vecello (Titian's true name) pushed the martyr being burned alive over glowing coals, into the lower third of the painting. High in the darkness, like dying coals, came a hint of the divine.This, I told myself, was what Ruskin's adulation of the Salute church had promised. Here, was that sudden adulation confirmed.

Baroque art is perhaps harder to appreciate from our contemporary perspective than, say, Impressionism which has its feet on the ground, and the charm of children rolling hoops in a park. Trying my best to be elevated with the truly magnificant figures--some simple, others in long flowing gowns with cherubs and angels circling on high--soon in the semi-darkness, I began floating, the cherubs and angels almost guiding me into another realm of flying, and adoring. 

Margotlog: Horrific Degradation Looks So Appealing

Margotlog: Horrific Degredation Looks So Appealing

This past weekend, I stood in front of two large photographs in the Weinstein Hammons Gallery, 908 West 46th Street, Minneapolis. For a few moments, I thought I was seeing rather benign, large-scale but odd images of the Earth. Not the entire earth, but segments: one looked like a huge mountain with blocks cut out of it. The other was of a bulldozer, creating long connected ribons of sand. The ribs took the shape of a fan, except that in the midst of them sat a bulldozer in bright yellow, casting a tiny shadow of itself. At the edge of the sand that hadn't yet been disturbed sloshed a liquid element of vibrant green. I could see little wavelets at the right edge of this watery element.

Turning to the young assistant at the museum, I requested what information existed about these two photographs by Edward Burtnysky, an artist unknown to me before. She brought me a three-fold explanatary card, titled "Anthropocene," with information that the term signifies our current geological epoch. The previous one, the Holocene, "started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded." Now geologists believe that we as the Earth's inhabitants have left that era for the "Anthropocene," which refers to the "indellible marks left by humankind on the planet."

The photographer, Burtynsky, also writes, that he is concerned "to show how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks."

Finally I began to understand. Yes, it is a beautiful image, this fan of shadows and sun-streaked ribs, with puffs of sand at its edge. I could almost imagine Madame Karenina, deploying her fan as she flirted with Vronsky on a dance floor. But this was "near Lakeland, Florida," USA, in 2012. Note: Madame Karenina threw herself under a train. The tailings from phosphorous mining poison the water into which they slosh.

The other image hung beside the one from Lakeland, Florida, captured an enormous mountain from which blocks of marble were being excavated. Centuries ago, marble was mined by slaves. Michaelangelo carved his "David" from a single block of marble. Later slaves used metal chisels and wooden wedges "inflated by water." It took me a few moments to understand why the wood wedges needed to be inflated. Then I imagined that if the wood was water-soaked, it would be more maleable, less liable to crack and break.

Next, in the 18th century came explosives which left huge piles of waste called "raventi." Yes, probably an Italian word that means refuse, so much amazing marble sculpture originating in Italy. Now, since the 1960s, trucks and excavators cut helical slabs, eliminating the waste caused by using explosives.

The owner of the quary, at 63 years old, says what has been taken "is as if I plucked a hair from a pig." The mountain has been worked for 3000 years, but its capacity still seems limitless.

Both of these "excavations" can be seen from space. This impressed me, suggesting just how vast they are. "Life in the Anthropocene" prompts us to consider how profound and lasting have been human changes in Earth's systems.   

Egg Rolls on Sunday or I Had to Leave the House!

Egg Rolls on Sunday

I had to leave the house, and so I drove to Vina (about three miles away from home to a shopping area near Ford Parkway) where I ordered two, then another egg roll, making three, and ate them all in one fell swoop.  I had to leave the house, and not be overcome, as I'd been for some weeks by the insulin treatments for Julia, our adorable black and white (no not Julia the Terrible or Julia the Magnificent but Julia the Purr-Queen). My only other acquaintance with diabetes, if memory serves, wafted toward me as a girl when my mother took me and my sister on the train, from South Carolina to North Dakota to visit her father.

Twice a day, a nurse appeared in a starched white uniform with little crown on her head and took him into one of the two downstairs bedrooms where, my mother said, "She gave him a shot." He was old and square, with wisps of white hair across his reddish head. My mother adored him, or so it seemed, from the amount of time she spend cooking "from scratch" oatmeal he liked, frying bacon and eggs, and dousing his dessert coffee with cream and sugar.

Julia is an adorable cat, pliant, warm-hearted toward us, and now almost willing to be subjected to twice daily syringes of tiny amonts of insulin. I sit with her in "Fran's chair," a large recliner, while he gives her the shot in the loose furry skin at the back of her neck. Now that we've been doing it so long, it seems almost routine. But there's the weekly "test day" when in four-hour increments, a drop of her blood has to be extracted by a poke to her ear (which makes her flinch from surprise and pain, and poor Fran, my husband, flinch at the horror of hurting her).

I had to leave the house. I had to get away from the inexpressible desire for all this to end, even though my part in it is rather minor--my hands not sufficiently strong enough to extract a drop of blood. Oh, poor darling cat! She seems to have learned that we don't want to hurt her, that hurting her is hard for us (but of course harder for her).

When I returned, she came to the back door to greet me. She was so willing to be patted and have me fluff her fur "the wrong way" from tail to neck, that I almost broke down. She held no grudges that the day before, we'd held her down on a towel while Fran pierced the edge of her soft black ear as we whooped for a drop of blood. It was not fun, perhaps worse for us since we knew it was coming, or maybe because we are not as loving and joyful as she is, has always been. She is the best cat ever, among the dozens of cats (dozens? Well at least a dozen.) whom we have loved, and cherished, until it was time.

We dread that time. And have no idea when it will come. Maybe that's the worst of all. No, the worst of all is perhaps this: that I had to leave the house for the surcease of three egg rolls.

Margotlog: Brightness Falls from the Air

"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."

A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them.

It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.

When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.

Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.

*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:

 

Brightness falls from the air?

"Brightness falls from the air" is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: 

 

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life's lustful joys;

Death proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave;

Swords may not fight with fate,

Earth still holds open her gate.

"Come, come!" the bells do cry.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death's bitterness;

Hell's executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player's stage;

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

Margotlog: Singing in the Dark

When you've taken a dear friend to the airport with only a three-quarter moon and a few stars in the sky, when you drive home alone through night-enveloped streets, it helps to sing: "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, Charming Billy?"

Darkness is the mood of inspiration. Suddenly, you're singing with the voice of your mother or father, ages ago in Charleston, South Carolina, with clacking palmettos in those long, languid summers. "I will be true, for there are those who trust me..."

And you're back at Girl Scout camp in the "foothills" northwest of Charleston, and Meta, the Scout of all Scouts, who stands at least six-foot tall in her sneakers, and sports long rippling golden hair, Meta is singing: "In a cottage in the woods, by the window a little man stood. Saw a rabbit running by..." 

You, suddenly, have become the rabbit--ears erect, nose twitching. And you're remembering a recent holiday including the kid-clan of your husband's grand children. Decent, the hard-working parents,  more than decent, inspired perhaps, but failing in one respect: the oldest kid, a boy about 13 wanted a pet. His parents who both work hard at jobs and at the even more demanding business of parenting, have allowed a small lizard, a gecko.

Darkness returns, and I am home again in South Carolina, with our first puppy, who lived with us for maybe three months before the little black and white charmer died in the night. My sister and I were heart-broken. Kudos to my parents, especially to my finicky Italian-American father, Leonardo, who refused a cat. "It will jump up on the table and that will be the end of it!" he thundered. Yes, thunder. His voice had a range from sweet morning dew to thunder and lightning.

We sang opera, my sister and I, dressed in our mother's fancy nightgowns, which she never wore in our presence. But then, my parents had been married eight years before I, their first child, was born. It was the Depression, after all, and both of them worked.

Singing in the dark of that 6 a.m. drive from the airport home, I find myself giving voice to all the joy that substituted for "things" in our Old Citadel lives. Wearing our mother's fancy nightgowns, listening to recordings of Lily Pons singing excerpts from the finest Italian operas, we girls discovered how fortifying it can be to gave voice to our own, immediate presence in a world that would open from fantasy to reality. My sister becoming an opera singer, and I? Well, poets are writers of songs too.

Frozen Pipes and the Death of a White Squirrel

Frozen Pipes and a White Squirrel

It's been polar here in Minnesota, land of ten thousand frozen lakes. Wind-chill well below zero and temperature an eager competitor. For the first time in 20 years, the pipes to our kitchen sink froze. Yes, they are close to an outer wall, but so are the pipes directly under them in the basement. To reach those lower depths, I had to wear a down robe AND my down coat, plus thin plastic gloves with heavy gloves over them, just to reach the cat litter box at the bottom of the basement stairs. Why the cat, who is mistress of two other cat boxes on the warm second floor, insisted on doing her business in such depths of cold is a miracle of feline sagacity.

For the past two days, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen, first rinsing dishes in a little bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, then filling the tea pot and heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the frozen sink. I could have lugged the dishes upstairs to the bathtub, where warm water still gushed, but somehow the kitchen process seemed important. I told myself the warm water exiting the kitchen drain JUST MIGHT help thaw the frozen pipes.

Eventually, I asked husband Fran to drive me to the pharmacy where I purchased a heating pad. Walking home, I felt very proud of my hardiness, giving most of the credit to my North Dakota mother. Of course, I looked like a walking blimp. In her North Dakota hometown, children walked to school, their legs bound in multiple leggings, bodies stuffed into coats, cloaks, and mufflers, and their hands in double mittens. Their heads were wrapped in so many scarves, the children themselves were virtually unidentifiable. Luckily, there were only 10 children in her class, all perfectly familiar with each other, wrapped or unwrapped.

These days, we Minnesotans with well-heated homes and cars have it relatively easy, except for the people somehow bereft of decent housing who try to survive 20-below by running a car motor from time and time and hoping the numbness they start to feel isn't frostbite. This morning, as the temp rises toward 19 ABOVE, there's a sad StarTribune story of a homeless man who did just that with his pal of a dog. He himself was rescued by the police and taken to a shelter and from there to a hospital. The dog, finally found, appeared to be fine.  

Yes, at 20 below, stray dogs can survive for a time, as can most critters in my back yard. I work to help them, with a heated birdbath, which I fill every morning. On my multi-armed bird feeder pole, I hang suet and a sunflower cakes, and feeders filled with sunflower seeds. Finally I spread sunflower seeds and a mix of smaller seeds on two long pathways in the yard.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I looked out the broad picture windows in our second floor bathroom to find an enormous red-tailed hawk bending over something white. These figures were was stationed in a leafless elm tree just behond our yard. Even now, as I write this, my heart starts beating erratically. The spill of white might have been the feathers of a dying pigeon, but as I stared, a white leg and tail appeared, splayed over the limb--it was "our" white squirrel, the only white one we had among all the other grays. Perhaps an albino, perhaps with hearing or eyesight loss, yet it staked out its spot every morning for munching seeds. A familiar member of the yard, and as welcome as the red-chested nuthatches, the red-bellied woodpecker (who seems twice as large as the little nuthatch), and the hairy and downy woodpeckers, the blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, finches, juncos and even a few crazy robins who left, I assume, the minute the temperature began to drop.

I couldn't tear myself away from the window, tears in my eyes, as the huge hawk, with its rear end lifting and falling, pulled at the squirrel body. This "winter kill" was happening as I watched, and the hawk was taking one of the denizens of my yard whom I'd come, in a mild way, to love. From time to time, the hawk would pause and turn its profile. The beak and nasal area were smeared with blood. It was making a meal of the white squirrel. It was devouring a creature I had come to love.

I know it's somewhat insane, to become protective and possessive of a wild creature. But I did love the white squirrel, and I did not love the hawk, though it was impossible not to admire its huge body, puffed out in the cold and the rigor of its yanks. But the hawk was an interloper and the white squirrel had gamely visited the yard for food and water, winter, spring, summer, autumn. It was the only white one. Would I have been as sad had the hawk begun to eat one of the grays? I might have been mesmerized by watching one creature devour another. But I doubt that I would have continued to feel the loss.