Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

The Mountain Docent

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Spring                                                                Mountain Spring Moon

Two years ago this January I did my last work at the Minneapolis Art Institute, a Terra Cotta Warrior tour. Right after that tour I wanted a rest, so I signed out until June of 2103. By April, two years ago exactly, the thought of making multiple drives into the city a week had become less and less interesting, even with the art reward at the other end. By June I’d decided to step back and concentrate on Missing, the novel I finished about a year ago.

It was the right move for me and one I followed by also resigning my position as chair of the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter’s Legislative Committee. In April of 2014 it was time for another Ira Progoff Journal Workshop, this time in Tucson. The impetus to fall back toward home got another push. Kate and I were still in the process of learning about retirement, hers and mine.

Since this post comes from Shadow Mountain in the Rockies, it’s clear–in retrospect–that the homecoming urge had deeper roots. Family. We changed the entire location of our life to reflect that impulse.

But. Sometime in the summer of 2013 I created a file, Art after the Minneapolis Art Institute. Visit galleries. Go to exhibitions. Read art theory. Do research on individual artists. It’s taken until April of 2015 to find a path. The Mountain Docent is a path of discovery.

 

Even an encyclopedic museum like the MIA has limitations in its collection. Art is not only long, it is also big. An encyclopedic museum strives to have art from each era and each culture. Of course, few but the very biggest, like the Met, the Louvre, the Prado even come close to depth across all the eras and locations of art making and they still fall very short in certain areas. Often modern and contemporary art are weak due to the encyclopedic museum’s emphasis on completeness in telling the art historical story.

The Google Cultural Institute and its Art Project delivers a different work at regular intervals on blank web pages.  That made me see the direction my work with art could take. Here was an opportunity to transcend the limitations of even the most encyclopedic museums since the Art Project draws on work held in museums across the world. It also has the distinct advantage of introducing me to art, artists and artistic movements with which I’m unfamiliar. (Which is, I admit, a lot.)

Once the Art Project began exposing me to new work, options for gaining access to new work in other ways seemed to multiply. The Met’s Artist’s Project, mentioned below, has contemporary artists reflecting on works held in the Met’s collection. A viewer gains exposure to the artist who’s commenting and the art which they discuss.

Other venues will surface as time goes on. The unpredictable nature appeals to me. It allows me to investigate new artists and new works by old artists and share that learning. That was what I always enjoyed most about being a docent, learning and sharing. So the Mountain Docent will travel the world in search of art and artists that will interest and engage you. All without leaving Shadow Mountain.

 

 

Art and Culture, Colorado, Family, Music

Dazzled

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Spring                                                       Mountain Spring Moon

Dazzlejazz is a the kind of jazz joint I’ve always wanted to discover: an intimate space, good food and great music. We heard music by Claude Bolling, four pieces, a couple of folks we didn’t recognize and one composer, a Ukranian, new to us, named Nikolai Kapustin.

The listening room, where we ate, insists on turned-off cell phones and no conversation during the performances out of respect for the musicians. It appeals to me, but it does take away some of the joint nature of the place. But not much.

The first set featured a saxophone quartet. The manner of the composition echoed throughout most of the pieces. The music began in a classical vein, a slow exposition setting up a more complex rearrangement of the initial lines in movements to come. But. Rather than segue into a gavotte or an adagio or a largo the playing took off in a jazzy, sometimes discordant direction. It became plaintive and solos broke out into innovative twists. This was by a composer named Frederickson.

The next set was the Toot Suite by Bolling,  trumpet backed up by a jazz trio. The pianist, in particular, was very good as was the trumpeter. Again, a slow exposition, then, a sudden crash of the drums and the piece was off. The trumpeter reminded Kate of Bradford Marsalis. All the Bolling pieces were wonderful, suites for trumpet, flute, cello and violin.

There were two surprises. The Kapustin piece had a violin and piano, both played by

young women from local universities, both Russian and charismatic. His work is worth getting to know.

The second surprise was the finale, a flamenco played on the harp by a woman introduced as expert in special methods of playing the harp. She glissandoed and strummed, then, near the end, began whacking the harp’s base as the imitated the clacking of castanets. She finished with a flourish, left hand in the air. Ole!

The food was good. The company better and the music just right.

 

Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

Born To Be Wild

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Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.

Art and Culture, Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Spring, 2015

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Spring                                   Mountain Spring Moon

The sun hits the celestial equator today at 4:45 pm. It also rises due East and sets due West. This is the day the serpent crawls up Chichen Itza. Though meteorological spring, the three months between the coldest and warmest months, began on March 1st, today is the old holiday, one celebrated in cultures across many lands.

Here, for example, is an interesting paragraph about spring from the perspective of wu xing: “In Chinese thought, spring is associated with the color green, the sound of shouting, the wood element, the climate of wind, things sprouting, your eyes, your liver, your anger, patience and altruism– and a green dragon. Not surprisingly, spring is also associated with the direction east, the sunrise direction as Earth spins us toward the beginning of each new day.”  earth and sky

Spring sees the early evidence of winter’s end, celebrated at Imbolc, when the lambs are in the belly, brought forward. The lambs are born. The grass is plentiful so the ewes can give milk and nourish their babies. The gradual loosening of winter’s cold and snow and ice continues, accelerates until the days have warmth as their usual state.

The warmth and the sun climbing toward the north signal plants and animals both. Hibernation ends so the visible population of critters increases rapidly, coming out for the food the new season promises. Spring ephemerals burst out of the snow: snowdrops, crocus, aconites. Later, the daffodils will come, too. The strategy of the spring ephemerals is an interesting one. They emerge, bloom and die back before whatever is in the surrounding vicinity can leaf out, thus capturing all the available sunlight before shade covers their spot.

If Michaelmas is the springtime of the soul, then the vernal equinox is the springtime of the body, of the material and animate world. No surprise then that it serves as the proximate marker for the Christian easter, focused as it is on the resurrection, the new life of the body. Both Christmas and the Easter, the two key Christian holidays, one marking the incarnation and the other the death and regained life of Jesus, focus on the body and its possibilities. In the first instance the body is seen as a vessel for the divine and in the second the body is seen as no longer bound by the strict laws of the animal world. Death is no longer the end.

The Great Wheel suggests a similar, but profoundly different way of viewing these two most profound mysteries: birth and death. The Great Wheel focuses on the rhythms of the natural world and on their sequence, their repetitiveness. Taken most literally it adds nothing to these rhythms, nor does it subtract from them. Birth and death occur as the great wheel turns, as the earth revolves around the sun, source of the vital energy that maintains life between these antipodes.

This intricate interdependence between animals and plants in their life cycles, the sun and the earth’s orbit around it, is common, literally mundane. Profane, too, I suppose. Yet the miraculous is here, too and we need no sacred text to see it. Out of the stuff born in the birth of the stars themselves, stuff borne later on the solar wind and in the cataclysmic explosions at the deaths of these same stars, came the material that created our sun and our home, this planet, this earth.

Then, consider what happens next. That same stuff, now reordered and shaped into this planet, somehow reconfigured itself so that it could move, so that develop intention and instinct, so that it could replicate itself rather than having to wait for the violent processes more usual for the distribution of matter. And that that stuff, the same from the heart of the stars, so reconfigured, grew in complexity and capability until human babies began to born. Babies that could, probably for the first time here on earth, perhaps for the first time in the whole of the universe, see that which gave them the potential for life, the universe in its particularity here on earth and its dizzying universality in the cosmos.

The birth of the universe’s own eyes and ears and poets and composers and painters and dancers came and as miracles. And still do. In the same way the death of these same poets and artists does not end the births. No, the births keep coming and the deaths do not end them. In my mind this is the true resurrection, the actual reincarnation, the exact moment of rebirth. Death does not end us. We continue. And Spring is just the season to bless and hold this true miracle close to our hearts.

Art and Culture, Translating Metamorphoses

The Run Continues

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Imbolc    Black Mountain Moon

The Latin continues to come, if not easily, then with much less struggle. I no longer write down the words or possible translations, I simply type the translation I have completed. So, this is all mental work now. I do ten verses in less time than it took me to get through five. Not sure why this happened, but it’s clearly a culmination of some sort.

I can not yet read without Perseus or a dictionary because my vocabulary has distinct limits and I still stumble over case, declensions, verb conjugations. But, with the aid of Perseus I can read somewhat quickly now.

Still shaking my head. Huh. This is really happening.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Great Work, Shadow Mountain

The Week

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Imbolc                                    Black Mountain Moon

Neighbor to the east, Jude, has transferred to days after four years of working nights. This means that he now lets his two border collies out around 6. They bark, for some reason, without stopping until he leaves for work around 7. It makes the quiet of the early morning here less desirable, means I’ll have to adapt. Today I sorted and read e-mails.

Not sure what I’ll do over time.

A quiet week, but a busy weekend. On Friday I’ll attend the member preview of We (heart) the Rocky Mountain National Park exhibit at the Colorado History Museum. On Saturday Kate attends a mineralogy day sponsored by the Friends of the Colorado Geology Museum. It features lectures on gem coloration. Then on Sunday we go to the Curious Theater for a play that is the second of a trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays, written by a student of August Wilson’s, Tarell Alvin McCraney. This one is In the Red and Brown Water. The first in the trilogy will play this summer and the third in the fall.

Buddy Bill Schmidt has fiddled with the fonts on Ancientrails. Thanks, Bill, I like the change. Anybody else have an opinion?

 

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

A Childhood Fascination

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

First Latin session since November 14. Greg and I used Skype and, as a result, for the first time in over 4 plus years, actually saw each other. I’ve moved back into Ovid, Caesar just didn’t keep my interest.

Right now I’m in book VII, translating the story of Medea and Aeson. Aeson is the father of Jason, he of the Golden Fleece, and Medea’s husband.  Jason asks Medea to make his father younger, “Subtract years from me and add them to the years of my father.”

The Metamorphoses is  like a prism for Greek mythology. Greek myths and epic poetry shined out of the classical and heroic eras into the mind of Ovid. He collected their light, gave it his own cynical twist, then shined the light on to developing Western culture, especially during and after the Renaissance. To read the great poem in his own language and to grapple with making his Latin meaningful in contemporary English plants each one of these stories deeply into my own memory.

Where does it take me? I don’t really know, but I do know that the world of Augustan Rome and the world of Greek mythology has fascinated me since I was little and has not ceased to fascinate me even as I push well into my third phase.

 

Art and Culture, Mountains

Aurora

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Imbolc                                                          Black Mountain Moon

At 6:00 a.m. now the sky has gone from black to a whitish blue, a few stars still visible. When I go to bed, usually around 9:00-9:30 p.m. these days, night has fallen sometime ago, but on the nights around the full moon, the land in our back is a wonder. The moon shine comes in from the south-south east and lights up the snow with its silver glow. It also creates dark, soft shadows around the lodgepole pines. If I follow the pines to the sky toward which they point, I see stars: Cassiopeia and others in her vicinity.

Now, in the morning, Black Mountain slowly emerges from indistinct mass to large, pine-covered height, 10,000+. Sometimes, like today, it has a streak of cloud behind it. Not often, but sometimes, too, it has a lenticular cloud giving it an atmospheric halo.

Shadow Mountain, where we live, only reaches 9,600 feet and we’re about 800 feet below that, so we look up to our taller neighbors. Beyond Black Mountain, but not too far, is Mt. Evans, a fourteener.

Mt. Bierstadt is another fourteener. Those of you interested in art may recognize it since it was named after the Hudson River School painter, Albert Bierstadt. He painted this of another Colorado fourteener, Long’s Peak.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.