R.I.P.
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
Ray Bradbury
Beltane Garlic Moon
Opening the doors of perception. Thomas Huxley, I believe, on mescaline. Now, I’ve done my share of mescaline, but there are other ways to fling open the doors. I did one this morning.
The MIA does tours for the blind called touch tours. Training was this morning and I attended. That means I put on those vaguely bluish/purplish nitrile gloves (safer for the art than the old cotton gloves, I’m told.) and got to run my hands all over Theseus and the Centaur by Barye. What a rush.
Whenever kids come to the museum, the first thing we tell them is: “The one foot rule. Look with your eyes, not with your hands.” For one inclined to transgress to begin with, this license to touch was wonderful.
I felt Theseus muscled legs, the Centaurs upper body curved back and his head held down by Theseus’ hand on his throat. I felt the hooves of the Centaur digging in, stabilizing him during this fight. The weapon that Theseus holds, ready to split the Centaur’s skull has a tension in it as it expresses an arc toward the Centaur’s head.
It was a sensual delight to touch this bronze statue and I loved it.
We also used tactile boards, basically simplifications of paintings using raised marks on a white board that depict the essential elements of the work. The contact between the blind person and the art then becomes an exchange between the raised elements–in this case, the sun, the mountains, the olive trees and their shadows–in Vincent Van Gogh’s, Olive Grove and the docent’s description of the painting as a supplement.
Then, last, we began to learn the art of verbal description. In this case there is no prop, no statue, rather a work that the docent describes in as much detail as possible. This requires a vocabulary of rich imagery and particular clarity.
The doors of perception opened for me when I put on those gloves and touched, with my eyes closed, Barye’s statue and as I listened, eyes closed to the interaction between the tactile board and the painting itself.
I got something, something unique and special, but it was very different from the experience I have visually. Difficult to describe, but very different. More a mental mapping of volume, space, a mind’s jigsaw puzzle to fit the information from statute or tactile board with the descriptions and help of the docent. A new way of interacting with the art.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Why all the attention to the transit of Venus? People lined up in the Tate Astronomy Lab to view through 4 scopes and the line Kate and I were in took at least ten minutes to inch us forward for our few seconds of viewing time.
This was an event. A celebration of the heavens, rather than a celebration aimed at getting into heaven. Heaven knows we were already there. Hubble looked on these proceedings, too.
This had a definite secular feel to me, a coming together around the scientist, their domain, but in so doing reclaiming science as our mutual endeavor, not the province of cloistered brainiacs, but a common work joyfully embraced by all.
We are, as someone put it, the universe seeing itself. That was what this felt like.
It also revealed to me a public hunger, the science literate want to lay hands on the tools and observations that make science what it is. We want to see the transit of Venus just as, I’m sure, we want to see DNA sequenced, hydrology experiments, atom smashing and whatever can make the wonder, the deep miracle of our universe visible.
In my mind this might be the first of many such encounters between the thoughtful, systematic observer/hypothesizers and the just folks who also want to see, feel, touch.
Another epigram from Tomis (Constanta, Romania) Marea Negra (Black Sea)
Beltane Garlic Moon
Started back up on the exercise. Gently. I always need to ease myself back into the routine after, this time, almost two weeks off.
My mind and body have both returned to Minnesota, the fuzziness now a memory.
The truism is that we cannot remember pain and I find that true of solely physical pain. I remember, for example, that my leg hurt like a son of a bitch after my achilles tendon repair, but I don’t recall the pain itself. Only the event.
A different sort of pain, however, sticks with me. That is, the hassle and discomfort of days like last Friday. The accumulation of those, that flight back from Istanbul that also vectored through Schipol, the smaller insults that begin with booking and paying the add-on fees, that escalate with the TSA check, then the crowded planes and the uncertain take off and landing times.
You may say, this is not real pain. And maybe it’s not. Let’s call it aversive conditioning. What ever it is, it makes long plane rides, even shorts ones, something I will go through a great deal to avoid. Give me a car. A train. A ship. If I can make any of those work for a particular trip, I’ll take them.
Big air may have financial problems, I can’t tell the obscurantism from the truth with them, but I do know that they have consistently up priced their product while down sizing their service. This reality of airline travel then has nested inside the airport reality of security checks and in the case of international flights, passport and custom controls. The sum of these is an experience, at least for us coach class customers, that has little difference from self-induced and expensive torture.
What would it take to fix it? World peace. Wider seats. An attention to customer needs as opposed to airline needs.
Whatever the ultimate solution, air travel, once something I cherished, has become a sinkhole of time wasting and money covered over with active irritations.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Another day, another sandwich bag. Back to bagging apples. Glad I exist to do it.
Look here for Roman funerary epigrams from Tomis, now Constanta, Romania. They had it going on. An example below.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Night has slipped upon us again.
While traveling across the Atlantic, I enjoyed the seat back screen because it allowed me to watch the flight tracker whenever I wanted. One screen of the flight tracker that intrigued me showed the plane’s path on a map with the terminator curves where daylight and night meet. This same screen also had a small sun which marked the location of dawn.
This world has many wonders and an advancing shadow line separating night from day is one of them.
Beltane Garlic Moon
The garlic moon is full and we still have no scapes on our garlic. Will they be late this year? I’m not sure. One thing I’ve finally learned is that no growing season is typical and the garlic, planted in September, grows ten months or so. That means it went through this unusually mild winter. Could it have affected its growth? I suppose, though I don’t know how.
The potatoes took off while I was gone. They are vegetable interlopers in a bed dug out between large clumps of hemerocallis. We also have vegetable interlopers in a bed out front, three tomato plants and two peppers.
As trees mature in and around our vegetable garden in the back, shade is beginning to limit the beds that receive enough sun to grow vegetables. I know we could cut them down, but at this point I’m more inclined to plant shade lovers and give up the space. Part of shifting the garden gradually toward less and less maintenance.
Kate has a summer focus. Weeds. She’s determined and when she’s determined, things get done. The beds look so much better sans weeds.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Out bagging apples. This is, according to what I’ve read, the only organic way to grow apples. It’s fussy and difficult to some extent since a lot of the work is over the head and requires fine motor skills to seal the ziplocks. Still, better than spraying and it’s one and done, unlike spraying.
Ran out of bags so off to Festival to get some more.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Up and semi-alert. Almost home.
The garden grew, though the carrot germination has not been good, nor the collard greens or pac choy. Could be the nights have been too cool. Everything else sucked up the May water and pushed themselves.
Kate planted lots of marigolds, petunias, alyssum and coleus. The siberian iris are in bloom and the hosta and dicentra have grown large with the extra water.
Of course, rain is good for the weeds, too, and Kate has done a lot of weeding. This week we’ll focus on the orchard. I have to get out with the bees and probably will have to put bags on the apples again. Our apple crop this year looks bountiful.
Gonna work outside some to get the body clock reset even more. Maybe tomorrow, my powers will have returned in full.