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.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
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.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Margotlog: Slaughter of the Innocents
Margotlog: Slaughter of the Innocents
What explains a passion for an animal and a faraway place? I certainly did not grow up with live elephants. When I was a kid in South Carolina, there were no elephants in sight. Not even at the zoo, a rather pathetic affair with open-air cages--it was warm 9 months of the year--where creatures stared or paced and made me rather uneasy.
But within the pages of the Babar books - stories of an elephant family with grey pliable bodies, and large, picture-hat ears, and trunks like arms on their faces--I met an elephant family to adore. The girl wore a tutu and in her pink toe-dance slippers, she was even more awkward than I in my orthopedic shoes. Her father was Babar, King of the animals, and the mother his Queen. The boy (all had perky, intriguing French names--after all, their author was French), the boy, as I recollect, was rather docile. Now and then he did something naughty, but never destructive. He had no toy gun. He never played cowboys and Indians, the way boys in our Old Citadel complex did, shooting at each other around the edges of our elephant grey buildings. The Babars were far from a violent family, rather musical and arty, a bit like my own. From their stories, I grew a companionable love for them which has never abated.
Time passed. I moved to New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, finally Minneapolis/St. Paul. By this time I was 25, I'd seen real elephants, probably at a circus or two. But my youthful zest for them, my sense that they deserved honor and respect, similar to what I would give my parents, friends, teachers--that had quieted. Then, in the early 1990s, remarried, my daughter grown into an accomplished teen, I was standing in my Saint Paul kitchen staring into the brightness of a summer backyard. Seeing not the tall elm lifting its fountaining shade or the birds feeding on the feeders. But African elephants slaughtered for their tusks and left to rot.
It was a horrific hallucination--their tusks hacked off, their bodies--the grey children huddled beside the huge parents--brought low by powerful rifles. That this was happening half the world collapsed. I felt as if it was taking place just beyond my own backyard. The shots broke a pact I'd made unconsciously as a child. A pact of love and honor, which extended far beyond my own skin to include elephants as a tribe. And becasuse I was one of the kind who had killed them, I was responsible.
Now bear with me a moment. Let's imagine that the 3,000 Americans who have been shot between the slaughter of the 22 innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary in late October and the present moment are elephants. Let's imagine that these huge, gentle giants are protective parents, whose family groups extend to aunts and uncles, oldsters and youngsters. When a small elephant is trapped in a sink hole, somewhere in Africa, the child's aunts and mother gather around, drop to their knees and lift the baby elephant out by their trunks. It is a touching sight to behold: the largest land animals extending to their child the care and concern we extend to our own children, just as did the teachers at Sandy Hook--those who died and those who survived--did that horrible day. Extending themselves to help the small ones of their kind. Not parents or other direct relations, but caring people whose immediate, instinctual response was to protect the innocent.
Now, another slaughter is taking place. Over the last two months, I have received word from the African Wildlife Foundation and other wildlife welfare efforts that large groups of elephants--thirty or forty at a time, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, children--are being gunned down by high-powered rifles. All shot within seconds by automatic weapons with huge magazines of bullets.
There is an economic motive for shooting the elephants: selling the adults' tusks to China and other Asian countries where ivory is deemed an aphrodisiac. International agreements exist against trade in ivory, but there are obviously not observed. I imagine (bolstered with information gathered over the years) that poor Africans (in the Cameroons currently) do the killing (like Herod's henchmen in the Bible when another slaughter of the innocents took place). What they make by this slaughter is little compared to what middlemen capture in the sale.
The motive that spurred the young man who killed at Sandy Hook may never be entirely known, though someday I hope the remainder of his family comes forth and speaks about him. Knowledge will help focus our attempts to outlaw automatic weapons and large magazines of bullets, and create a system of background checks to retard the sale of guns to the mentally ill.
But not until we as a people fall deeply in love with human life, not until we come to accept that we are harboring a culture of death by our unwillingness to protect the innocence in ourselves, not until we see that we are selling our own for a pittance, and allowing groups far from the violence to suck on the rewards, only then will we cry out, "Let us be brave. Let us truly stand by the tenets of our country's faith. Let us truly link LIBERTY and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS to the bedrock of being, to LIFE. .
.
I could not see straight.
What explains a passion for an animal and a faraway place? I certainly did not grow up with live elephants. When I was a kid in South Carolina, there were no elephants in sight. Not even at the zoo, a rather pathetic affair with open-air cages--it was warm 9 months of the year--where creatures stared or paced and made me rather uneasy.
But within the pages of the Babar books - stories of an elephant family with grey pliable bodies, and large, picture-hat ears, and trunks like arms on their faces--I met an elephant family to adore. The girl wore a tutu and in her pink toe-dance slippers, she was even more awkward than I in my orthopedic shoes. Her father was Babar, King of the animals, and the mother his Queen. The boy (all had perky, intriguing French names--after all, their author was French), the boy, as I recollect, was rather docile. Now and then he did something naughty, but never destructive. He had no toy gun. He never played cowboys and Indians, the way boys in our Old Citadel complex did, shooting at each other around the edges of our elephant grey buildings. The Babars were far from a violent family, rather musical and arty, a bit like my own. From their stories, I grew a companionable love for them which has never abated.
Time passed. I moved to New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, finally Minneapolis/St. Paul. By this time I was 25, I'd seen real elephants, probably at a circus or two. But my youthful zest for them, my sense that they deserved honor and respect, similar to what I would give my parents, friends, teachers--that had quieted. Then, in the early 1990s, remarried, my daughter grown into an accomplished teen, I was standing in my Saint Paul kitchen staring into the brightness of a summer backyard. Seeing not the tall elm lifting its fountaining shade or the birds feeding on the feeders. But African elephants slaughtered for their tusks and left to rot.
It was a horrific hallucination--their tusks hacked off, their bodies--the grey children huddled beside the huge parents--brought low by powerful rifles. That this was happening half the world collapsed. I felt as if it was taking place just beyond my own backyard. The shots broke a pact I'd made unconsciously as a child. A pact of love and honor, which extended far beyond my own skin to include elephants as a tribe. And becasuse I was one of the kind who had killed them, I was responsible.
Now bear with me a moment. Let's imagine that the 3,000 Americans who have been shot between the slaughter of the 22 innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary in late October and the present moment are elephants. Let's imagine that these huge, gentle giants are protective parents, whose family groups extend to aunts and uncles, oldsters and youngsters. When a small elephant is trapped in a sink hole, somewhere in Africa, the child's aunts and mother gather around, drop to their knees and lift the baby elephant out by their trunks. It is a touching sight to behold: the largest land animals extending to their child the care and concern we extend to our own children, just as did the teachers at Sandy Hook--those who died and those who survived--did that horrible day. Extending themselves to help the small ones of their kind. Not parents or other direct relations, but caring people whose immediate, instinctual response was to protect the innocent.
Now, another slaughter is taking place. Over the last two months, I have received word from the African Wildlife Foundation and other wildlife welfare efforts that large groups of elephants--thirty or forty at a time, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, children--are being gunned down by high-powered rifles. All shot within seconds by automatic weapons with huge magazines of bullets.
There is an economic motive for shooting the elephants: selling the adults' tusks to China and other Asian countries where ivory is deemed an aphrodisiac. International agreements exist against trade in ivory, but there are obviously not observed. I imagine (bolstered with information gathered over the years) that poor Africans (in the Cameroons currently) do the killing (like Herod's henchmen in the Bible when another slaughter of the innocents took place). What they make by this slaughter is little compared to what middlemen capture in the sale.
The motive that spurred the young man who killed at Sandy Hook may never be entirely known, though someday I hope the remainder of his family comes forth and speaks about him. Knowledge will help focus our attempts to outlaw automatic weapons and large magazines of bullets, and create a system of background checks to retard the sale of guns to the mentally ill.
But not until we as a people fall deeply in love with human life, not until we come to accept that we are harboring a culture of death by our unwillingness to protect the innocence in ourselves, not until we see that we are selling our own for a pittance, and allowing groups far from the violence to suck on the rewards, only then will we cry out, "Let us be brave. Let us truly stand by the tenets of our country's faith. Let us truly link LIBERTY and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS to the bedrock of being, to LIFE. .
.
I could not see straight.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Margotlog: You Are My Sunshine
Margotlog: You Are My Sunshine
My only sunshine. You do make me happy. Dreaming of catching you in sun flower disks, and little peaked roofs, in giant mirrored faces that track across the sky. My sunshine, our sunshine, with as much potential as Houston, as New Jersey. Never thought of that, didja, Minnesota?
At home, we had our 1912 peaks and valleys assessed. Not so fine, with many "facets" high along a crowded urban street. Not so fine for applying shining solar panels. Better would be a roof with a long sun-south facing slope like friends we know closer to the Big River. Perfect for gathering rays and transmiting them to the electrical grid. Not only to beam heat and light inside, but sell the extra bucks back to Xcel! How bout them bananas?
Yet I persist, calling to help the Sierra Club entice outstate Minnesotans to spent Earth Day, April 22, at the State Capitol in Saint Paul. To whisper in the ears of legislators from Austin and Winona, Duluth and Grand Marais, Rochester and Hibbing, Moorhead and Mankato: we want renewable, we want a standard even better than 25% renewable by 2025. Let's aim for 40% renewable by 2030. Think of the jobs!
Think about creating better roads to Minnesota farms who've opted to have an immense wind turbine installed. There goes the dirt track. In comes a modern cement ribbon strong enough for a behemoth to pass over.
Think of significant pollution decrease--no more coal-fired mess. Less mercury in waters, thus in fish, thus in people, especially children more prone to suffer neurological damage. Far less asthma. Think of that, you parents whose childen wheeze, who don't dare run fast, play sports, play hard. Fear fear fear waking at night and not being able to catch that disappearing breath.
Yes, it's true: If we covered the Sahara desert with solar panels we could power the entire planet virtually until the end of time. But nobody's factored in the weight of those panels. Enough to dent the Earth, wouldn'tja bet? Me, I wouldn't. But I would drop my socks if the Earth got it together sufficiently to create such a life-saving measure. Better luck starting close to home where we can lobby, and suggest, plead and connive.
Me, I want a solar disk or two shared by our block, proceeds to cleaner air, slower global warming, to our own pockets.
Me, I want a solar sculpture part along the river in Saint Paul. It's a million dollar idea. But instead of proposing it to the give-away by that name, I opted to ask for funds to help our threatened SPCO orchestra. The solar sculpture park idea is there for the taking. What a novelty! What a kick? Huge robots powered by the sun. Kids agaga! Parents trying to recall the lay of their roofs. Everyone romping around in and out of the sun, even in wnter. In our coldest, clearest, sunniest days. Solar cooking hotdogs outdoors. Dogs trying not to get cooked outdoors. Shades on the sun who's smiling down on us.
.
My only sunshine. You do make me happy. Dreaming of catching you in sun flower disks, and little peaked roofs, in giant mirrored faces that track across the sky. My sunshine, our sunshine, with as much potential as Houston, as New Jersey. Never thought of that, didja, Minnesota?
At home, we had our 1912 peaks and valleys assessed. Not so fine, with many "facets" high along a crowded urban street. Not so fine for applying shining solar panels. Better would be a roof with a long sun-south facing slope like friends we know closer to the Big River. Perfect for gathering rays and transmiting them to the electrical grid. Not only to beam heat and light inside, but sell the extra bucks back to Xcel! How bout them bananas?
Yet I persist, calling to help the Sierra Club entice outstate Minnesotans to spent Earth Day, April 22, at the State Capitol in Saint Paul. To whisper in the ears of legislators from Austin and Winona, Duluth and Grand Marais, Rochester and Hibbing, Moorhead and Mankato: we want renewable, we want a standard even better than 25% renewable by 2025. Let's aim for 40% renewable by 2030. Think of the jobs!
Think about creating better roads to Minnesota farms who've opted to have an immense wind turbine installed. There goes the dirt track. In comes a modern cement ribbon strong enough for a behemoth to pass over.
Think of significant pollution decrease--no more coal-fired mess. Less mercury in waters, thus in fish, thus in people, especially children more prone to suffer neurological damage. Far less asthma. Think of that, you parents whose childen wheeze, who don't dare run fast, play sports, play hard. Fear fear fear waking at night and not being able to catch that disappearing breath.
Yes, it's true: If we covered the Sahara desert with solar panels we could power the entire planet virtually until the end of time. But nobody's factored in the weight of those panels. Enough to dent the Earth, wouldn'tja bet? Me, I wouldn't. But I would drop my socks if the Earth got it together sufficiently to create such a life-saving measure. Better luck starting close to home where we can lobby, and suggest, plead and connive.
Me, I want a solar disk or two shared by our block, proceeds to cleaner air, slower global warming, to our own pockets.
Me, I want a solar sculpture part along the river in Saint Paul. It's a million dollar idea. But instead of proposing it to the give-away by that name, I opted to ask for funds to help our threatened SPCO orchestra. The solar sculpture park idea is there for the taking. What a novelty! What a kick? Huge robots powered by the sun. Kids agaga! Parents trying to recall the lay of their roofs. Everyone romping around in and out of the sun, even in wnter. In our coldest, clearest, sunniest days. Solar cooking hotdogs outdoors. Dogs trying not to get cooked outdoors. Shades on the sun who's smiling down on us.
.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Margotlog: Two Cousins Take their Landscape with Them
Margotlog: Two Cousins Take Their Landscape with Them
Sadie and Eleonora, younger and older, first to die at 86, second to die at 95, I've known since my earliest memories. My father's first cousins who grew up down a hilly Pittsburgh street from him, whose adorable little mother was tiny as his, Josephine and Rosalie, another Italian sister pair, the older dead first--the grandmother I hardly knew. The younger, Sadie and Eleonora's Josephine, who lived well into her 90s and was my grandmother substitute.
Sadie and Eleonora, who lived together and took care of tiny adorable Josephine, and teased their cousin, Leonard my father, for his terrible driving, confirming my terror since childhood. Sadie and Eleonora, whom I visited when they lived in Washington, D.C., and I went to college in Baltimore. Then when they moved first to Arlington, then Silver Spring, Maryland, I introduced them to my daughter and first husband.
Sadie and Eleonora, whom I visited most often in their last location, a senior-living complex in Dover, Delaware. Finally freer to come more often, and almost always alone, I drove south from Philly down Hghwy 95, then sequed to Hghwy 1 and over a soaring bridge of golden fluted wings, until I was almost there.
Sadie's dying in 2008 enriched her rather tart, emphatic personality with slow languor, with acceptance one would not have predicted. Her last few weeks were threaded with agony as her lungs needed to be drained, and she could no longer eat or swallow much. But earlier she gave in to death. She became simply more quiet, more langorous, sitting with us, nibbling saltines, sipping water, looking at us intently. I mourned losing her humor and insightful political mind. But she left me Eleonora, her older sister, who then blossomed even beyond her previous vibrant strength.
Her death was protracted, crazy, stubborn with pain. I saw her between bouts of wrestling with dementia, cancer pain, incontinence, depression. When I last saw her alive, she'd survived a face-out with death where, had there not been her good friend Jo beside her, the nurses would have had to tie her down.
At the end she moaned solid for nine days and finally was gone.
. Now I've discovered that the landscape and social ties which I treasured and enjoyed so much when they were alive--the walks around the Electric Company grounds, with its buffer of feathery white pines, the friends of theirs who sat with us for lunch and dinner, whose stories intrigued me, who gave other faces to age, and the kind, attentive nurses and aides, the activity director Linda and her little dog Molly--whom Eleonora smothered with hugs--I have lost them now.
My last visit for Eleonora's memorial service I tried to believe that if I visited again, I could enter that envelope of love in which these two sisters surrounded me. But I am reminded of Charleston, South Carolina, where my parents lived on after I moved away, of how this most charming of Southern cities also lost its power to comfort and delight me in a deep and life-giving way. How slowly the magic that touched every leaf and rooftop, every tree and singing bird when they still lived to set it ablaze, how that gradually diminished, because they were no longer there. Now though I occasionally return and recognize the beauty and kindness of the city, yet they no longer ease the ache of care and affection. They no longer belong to me or I to them as I once did.
This is because the center of affection is gone and no other has taken its place. Because I came to where they lived until they died, but never put down my roots myself. They watered the place for me, even though I thought I walked to escape from our intense togetherness. How odd, now, to find I simply spun the thread of their love out into streets and by-ways, how it wove me into the arms of every crossroad until they, dying, cut it.
Sadie and Eleonora, younger and older, first to die at 86, second to die at 95, I've known since my earliest memories. My father's first cousins who grew up down a hilly Pittsburgh street from him, whose adorable little mother was tiny as his, Josephine and Rosalie, another Italian sister pair, the older dead first--the grandmother I hardly knew. The younger, Sadie and Eleonora's Josephine, who lived well into her 90s and was my grandmother substitute.
Sadie and Eleonora, who lived together and took care of tiny adorable Josephine, and teased their cousin, Leonard my father, for his terrible driving, confirming my terror since childhood. Sadie and Eleonora, whom I visited when they lived in Washington, D.C., and I went to college in Baltimore. Then when they moved first to Arlington, then Silver Spring, Maryland, I introduced them to my daughter and first husband.
Sadie and Eleonora, whom I visited most often in their last location, a senior-living complex in Dover, Delaware. Finally freer to come more often, and almost always alone, I drove south from Philly down Hghwy 95, then sequed to Hghwy 1 and over a soaring bridge of golden fluted wings, until I was almost there.
Sadie's dying in 2008 enriched her rather tart, emphatic personality with slow languor, with acceptance one would not have predicted. Her last few weeks were threaded with agony as her lungs needed to be drained, and she could no longer eat or swallow much. But earlier she gave in to death. She became simply more quiet, more langorous, sitting with us, nibbling saltines, sipping water, looking at us intently. I mourned losing her humor and insightful political mind. But she left me Eleonora, her older sister, who then blossomed even beyond her previous vibrant strength.
Her death was protracted, crazy, stubborn with pain. I saw her between bouts of wrestling with dementia, cancer pain, incontinence, depression. When I last saw her alive, she'd survived a face-out with death where, had there not been her good friend Jo beside her, the nurses would have had to tie her down.
At the end she moaned solid for nine days and finally was gone.
. Now I've discovered that the landscape and social ties which I treasured and enjoyed so much when they were alive--the walks around the Electric Company grounds, with its buffer of feathery white pines, the friends of theirs who sat with us for lunch and dinner, whose stories intrigued me, who gave other faces to age, and the kind, attentive nurses and aides, the activity director Linda and her little dog Molly--whom Eleonora smothered with hugs--I have lost them now.
My last visit for Eleonora's memorial service I tried to believe that if I visited again, I could enter that envelope of love in which these two sisters surrounded me. But I am reminded of Charleston, South Carolina, where my parents lived on after I moved away, of how this most charming of Southern cities also lost its power to comfort and delight me in a deep and life-giving way. How slowly the magic that touched every leaf and rooftop, every tree and singing bird when they still lived to set it ablaze, how that gradually diminished, because they were no longer there. Now though I occasionally return and recognize the beauty and kindness of the city, yet they no longer ease the ache of care and affection. They no longer belong to me or I to them as I once did.
This is because the center of affection is gone and no other has taken its place. Because I came to where they lived until they died, but never put down my roots myself. They watered the place for me, even though I thought I walked to escape from our intense togetherness. How odd, now, to find I simply spun the thread of their love out into streets and by-ways, how it wove me into the arms of every crossroad until they, dying, cut it.
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