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.

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter!)

Margotlog: Bird Bath Episodes (Winter and Summer)

Ok, I've tried everything aside from moving back to South Carolina where I grew up, and where, LET ME REMIND YOU WARM-HEARTED RESIDENTS, there was SNOW during one of my holiday visits to my parents, years ago. YES SNOW! With all the city's bridges, glazed to ice, getting to the airport was strictly for seasoned S.C. drivers. I bit my tongue and clenched my fists as the taxi-driver, with nonchalance, kept looking over his shoulder to deliver yet another bon mot.

Now over the last few frigid Saint Paul weeks, the heated coil that has worked to keep bird bath water liquid for two years now has given up. No frilly waves as a strong wind soars over the back yard. No beaks dipping for a drink.

I do love to watch the birds--winter, summer, spring, fall. They are my soul mates, whether they know it or not. Every day I praise them silently, these brief and joyful reminders that some can fly, and not only in giant jets. I don't want to be Icarus and have my human-made wings melt as they approach the sun, but I love to watch birds congregate--over seed, grass, flowers, and yes, all year long over liquid water.

But in our frigid winters, this inevitably becomes a challenge, and not a cheap one either. The heaters I use cost nearly $70 each. This is more than I spent for any Christmas present except my husband's neon green "Warm Things" robe. Am I throwing around brand names? Can't help myself: this is the best robe either of us has ever worn. His neon green, mine forest green. His a woman's Extra Large because the guy robes weren's nearly as warm, and neon green because when I got my money ready to order a woman's extra large, all the somber colors were used up.

Lately also, due to construction noise in the neighborhood, my bird visitors have declined. Only in the twilight do the deep red male cardinals come to the feeders, and the tan-red females forage on the ground. Occasionally a sassy blue jay barges in, no fear except for a fast exit. And the rosy finches that bear up under the cold also come to the feeders only the twilight, when from my kitchen window they look like sparrows.

Off and on, I've considered in my frustration stomping around the neighborhood, yelling at front and back doors, "Your noise is bothering the birds." But this is Saint Paul. We don't dare get too "fresh" with our neighbors, though this past summer, I chastized my near neighbors for "adopting" a mostly outdoor cat who loved leaping into my yard and startling the far greater number and variety I so loved to feed. My neighbors are dandy people, cat people, like me, but not bird people.

I became truly rancorous and even bellicose because eventually they stopped feeding this feline wanderer, and the critter appeared less and less. I was grateful, very grateful, but would not want to go through that angry trauma again. So now, I try to keep my mouth shut and let Robert Frots's motto: "good fences make good neighbors" suffice.

Finally and totally out of my control, I spied a hawk way way up in the bare brances of a wide-flung elm.It kept leaning over and tearing at something it held in its claws. Even with my binoculars, I couldn't see what the victim was, but the bird itself was unmistakeably a Peregrine Falcon. Looking it up in the bird book, I read: "feeds entirely on other birds." Yes, our Audubon friends have helped restore the Peregrine Falcon. I will just have to curb my selfish desire to be in charge of every single winged beauty. Bird depredations on each other are completely out of my control

Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"

Margotlog: Trish Hampl's "Pilgrim Soul"

It's as if I've been waiting to use Yeats' astonishing phrase until my dear friend and honored writer Patricia Hampl was about to retire from the University of Minnesota. Little did I know, years ago, that she'd been hovering in the fields where I would eventually spy my husband-to-be, sitting across from me at her townhouse. This was long after they'd worked together on the Minnesota Daily, long before I knew either of them. But when W. B. Yeats wrote "When You Are Old," he traversed the life of a woman he loved and discovered within her a love that belonged "amid a crowd of stars."
     Trish lost her dear husband Terry Williams, one of the most self-effacing and meticulous people I've ever known. I lost my first husband via divorce, but kept the daughter. Perhaps being a pilgrim  means walking along rough paths as well as catching glimpses of perfection.
     For me, some of the finest prose written by anyone in our era has come from Patricia Hampl. My favorite of her memoirs remains A Romantic Education, published after she'd established a name as a poet. Reading about her romantic education felt a lot like reading about my own, except it was so exquisitely expressed. I had to read some paragraphs over and over, perhaps because reading it as I did, before I knew her better, felt like entering a romance so enticing that I had to be a part of it.
     This evening, Trish will be honored as a distinguished professor at the University of Minnesota. She is retiring. I and many others will be there to applaud dear Trish, who has traced her path among the stars, even as she has held hands with us, given voice to her marvelous gifts, and continues to make so many of us happy. May she be the same.