Middle Season #21

 

Reflecting on experience.

 We don’t learn from experience. . . We learn from reflecting on experience. 

John Dewey

Cultivating blind independence

 Radical training for the blind, from Andrew Leland:

In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind, and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people. The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. [retinitis pigmentosa] support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear” — ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.” That fall, I signed up.

Also:  The N.F.B. developed a method that came to be known as ‘structured discovery’: students learn to pay attention to their surroundings and use the information to orient themselves. Instructors were constantly asking Socratic questions, such as ‘What direction do you hear the traffic coming from?’ and ‘Can you feel the sun warming one side of your face?’ 

“[One participant] told me, of what he learned by spending a year at a center, ‘Confidence isn’t a deep enough word. It’s a faith in your ability to figure it out.’ He added, ‘Until you get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle

Story telling is about making relatives

 

The Rush Gatherer, from the series A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, by Katsushika Hokusai, 1834-1835

Joy Harjo, about Leslie Marmon Silko, from Acknowledgements of her book Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years.

Silko taught that storytelling is about making relatives and acknowledging the relationship between earth and sky, between two-legged humans and the rest of human creatures, and between the many kinds of time.  Poetry is about singing it.

I love the idea that story-telling is about "making relatives."  The story-telling is the verb is that creates the relatives.

Also, I love the notion of "acknowledging" the relationship BETWEEN three various things, including different kinds of time.

Choose to see something good

 

From the Action for Happiness website.

As I Walked Home from the Hospital by Edward Hirsch

 As I Walked Home from the Hospital

by Edward Hirsch

It was a blistering hot

Sunday morning in mid-July;

Middle Season #20

 

Bellflower in Bemis

Anemone in neighborhood garden 

Tint tuff stuff hydrangea in front yard

Oak leaf hydrangea in front yard

Middle Season 23

 

The Clearing Folk School

 

I visited Jens Jensen's "The Clearing" Folk School in Ellison Bay, Door County last week.  From the website:

Who We Are

The Clearing is a folk school founded in 1935 by landscape architect Jens Jensen (1860-1951). This “school of the soil” is nestled within 128 acres of Door County forests and meadows and overlooks the dramatic Green Bay shoreline. It was built as a place where ordinary people could, as the name implies, “clear one’s mind” by reconnecting with nature and with one another.

Our Mission

The Mission of The Clearing is to provide diverse educational experiences in the folk school tradition, in a setting of quiet forests, meadows and water. The Clearing is a place where adults who share an interest in nature, arts or humanities can learn, reflect and wonder.

---

The Clearing was founded in 1935 by Jens Jensen, a Danish-born landscape architect. Many consider him to be the most important American landscape architect and The Clearing his “great work.”

Before founding The Clearing, Jensen achieved international recognition for designing many of Chicago’s parks, along with the private estates of Armour, Florsheim, Henry and Edsel Ford and many other important Midwestern industrialists. He was a driving force in establishing the Illinois State Parks system and the system of Cook County Forest Preserves. He founded the Friends of Our Native Landscape, an organization that raised awareness about land conservation and advocated for the preservation of many important natural areas in the Midwest.

Jensen began acquiring the property that would become The Clearing in 1919 for use as a summer vacation home. Then, in 1935, at age 75, after retiring from his Chicago business, he achieved his longtime dream of establishing The Clearing. Foreseeing the effects of the automobile and the vast development of cities, Jensen founded The Clearing as a place where city people could renew their contact with the “soil” as a basis for life values. Today, many people come to The Clearing for this same sense of renewal and to be able to better manage the stresses and strains of everyday life in a complex and fast-paced world.

Jensen believed that environments have a profound effect on people and that an understanding of one’s own regional ecology and culture is fundamental to all “clear” thinking. These precepts continue to guide the programs at The Clearing. Classes involve direct experience with nature, creative expression, thoughtful study and contemplation.

... 

Today, The Clearing offers classes in natural sciences, fine arts, skilled crafts and humanities. These programs fulfill Jens Jensen’s dream of a year-round folk school in a natural setting.

Perception is a Pleasant Sensation

Sunset by Kasamatsu Shiro, 1919

from  my journal 7/24/13

about the "tea experience"... I have another thought...

I recalled that sometimes running/biking causes changes to my perception -- though maybe small changes.  I have a handful of memories of looking at trees differently -- how they come out of the ground, how rich mulch looks; today I began noticing how the baseball field, with yellow pipe snaking atop the chainlink, defines, carves out space... how geometric it is... and how trashy looking, bulging, split in places, how the posts need paint badly.  I never noticed this before.  It's like what I'd notice if I were in a new park for the fist time and I was trying to get a sense for it... ACTIVE observation, but I am not directing my attention at all.  It's taking it in, moving, noticing, noting.... And my comment now is that changed perception is a pleasant sensation... I don't know if the "pleasant" is simply novelty from the boredom of normalness or is a sensation that comes along with the altered perceptiveness.

Impatience Doesn't Come

 from journal 7/23/13

Made tea - spearmint from garden and Yerba mate. A few minutes later I'm really interested, curious about the shape of the oak leaf hydrangeas and how dark the shadows are -- and how strongly edged/cut like some art that seems hyper-realistic-- and the designs of the leaf -- how some are turning rusty, how some are spring green, some are yellow except by the stems and veins, like the great plains from above...f rom an airplane... or how I imagine that to be -- green at the streams -- in the canyons.

I begin to wait to be impatient for KBL to come back - expectant of the physical feeling of impatience -- because i'm waiting to continue on the million step process of re-painting the deck, because she's supposed to be working from 9-4. And the impatience doesn't come. I begin thinking that often I want to get after that task that I feel will be onerous -- all day drive, painting the swing set in the 95 degree heat. And we pre-emptively wan to get the irritating activity out of the way -- but very often the irritating activity isn't that bad... in fact, we'll likely find something interesting or diverting in it. And I'm not feeling like I'm NOT going to do the cleaning later, just that the relay switch that anticipates and want to "get it over with" isn't flipped.

Looking into the future -- I'm imagining that the emotional content will be (diagram of small wavy line above) rather than (another diagram with high peaks) which I usually imagine. I've gotten pretty pessimistic I guess about the near future... that the near future will be just a bunch of joyless things that sorta suck. But I'm maybe realizing that it probably won't be. It'll be okay and maybe diverting. ..... (later) I did go out and paint the stair railings in over 90 minutes and it was fine listening to the bio, completing the interior of the railings, so it looks good

Complaining is a conversation starter

 

From July 28, 2013. 

Just thought of being at work and complaining to Erin Timmons about the new computer. I realize it’s a conversation starter: quibbling, criticizing. But after my run this morning, I’m drinking coffee out my desk and watching the sprinkler, make it slow imperial waves, and I’m tired of that personality. Aesthetically I don’t like it. I would cut off the conversation with that person if I spoke to them on the phone. But I realize that's an easy conversation starter. 

$7 Violin

 Science Friday's "The Sweet Sound of the $7 Violin"

Replace Sorry with Thank You

 

Sound Forest Lab

SoundForest Lab - link

I learned about these massive recordings by Zuzana Burivalova from David George Haskell.

From: here

When one thinks of nature, the vision of forests, mountains, or isolated beaches is inevitably accompanied by the sounds of the environment, frogs ribbiting, squirrels chattering, and seabirds calling. Not only do these sounds bring peace to a busy mind, but they also can say much about what is going on in the surrounding ecosystem.

Zuzana Burivalova is a bioacoustics researcher studying soundscapes to help understand the effects of conservation.  

---

A part of The Nature Conservancy NatureNet Science Fellows Program, Burivalova continued her post-doctoral research with Princeton University solving one of environmental conservation’s most vexing problems. How does one know it’s working?

The challenge of monitoring a tropical forest for recovery success is that protected and preserved areas are designed to be remote and limited to human access. There’s also the extensive range to cover and the sheer volume of species, from mammals to birds to amphibians.

In 2019, Burivalova and her team strapped small recorders to trees to take in the sounds of the Indonesian forest. The devices are sensitive enough to detect animal songs and vocalizations several hundred meters in all directions.

To D.B. by Edward Hirsch

 TO D.B

by Edward Hirsch

I miss your apartment on West Eleventh Street

where I slept off the front hall in a bedroom

that would have been a closet in another city.

The plants breathed easily in their heavy pots,

but the radiators knocked all night, like ghosts

trying to reach us from the other side.

The traffic on Sixth Avenue was a slow buzz.

Someone rattled a dog chain in the moonlight

that bathed the schoolyard across the street.

Light seeped in through the barred windows.

I could hear Faith rustling around downstairs,

getting ready for work, unwilling to die.

If there is a West Village in the other world,

we will someday meet there.  I’ll reach over

and hug you, which will make you uneasy.

Let’s go for a bottle of wine at the tavern

near the branch library and then stroll over

to Citarella for prosciutto and melon.

You can buy a pack of cigarettes at the corner

and explain the architecture to me.  Maybe

I can stay at your place until I get settled.

Middle Season #19

A process of discovery, a way to bear witness

 From Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell

Science is not only a process of study and discovery, it is also a way to bear witness, albeit via human ears listening to a tiny portion of the forest community's many inhabitants.

***

I dodge the nastiest tangles in the understory, but mostly I try to walk a straight line. A pedometer on my hip counts paces: 260, equal to 200 meters from the last survey point.  I swing my backpack to the ground and retrieve a clipboard. ... I jab teh stopwatch and pour my attention into my ears, keeping eyes on the forest canopy.  Husky voice, phrases of four up and down notes. Scarlet tanager, twenty meters away.  Chippy-chup, a flutter of high sound. Two American goldfinches, twenty-five meters away.Slurred, bright phrases, alternating inflections up and down, a question and an answer. He sings, Where are you? There you are. Red-eyed vireo, close, only five meters away, above me on a maple branch.  Two crows fly over, ca caw-CAW.  In the distance, fifty meters away, a rapdily modulated whistle, building to an emphatic end, we-a-we-a-WEE-TEE-EE.  Hooded warbler. 

Click. Five minutes are up. Scrawl on the datasheet: "Transect V, point 2. Time: 0610. Wind: Beaufort 2. Temperature: 25 C. Vegetation: white oak and red maple canopy; sourwood, blueberry, and sassafras understory.

From mid-May to mid-June, over two years, I threaded survey lines across the forests, tree plantations, and rural settlements of the southern Cumberland Plateau in Tennnessee.

On Scarcity & Plenty

 

Haruna Niiya - a modern print selling at Room and Board

Recently read a section in "Poverty, by America" where Desmond talks about the false sense of scarcity that marks political conversation in America. 

Here he is in a NPR interview:

It's true that universal programs, like some universal basic income ideas, are incredibly expensive, and that should concern us. But it's also true that a nation as rich as ours needs to reject this scarcity mindset and just move toward broader tint targeting, as I say in the book. So the Child Tax Credit that we saw in COVID was a pretty good example of this. It had this massive intervention into the lives of low-income families, right? Just historically drove down their poverty, especially child poverty. But it also reached the lives of working-class and some middle-class families, too. And so I think that those kind of bigger-tent targeting can make a big difference in how we design policies. So I think that our goals should be ambitious, and they should reject this, like, in a world of scarce resources talking point.

There is only being held up

 There is only being held up

Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to us in the mire. This is the ‘neighbor’ the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire of our self, we can each pull out our neighbor, or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under our feet; each of us is only held up by the neighborly hands grasping us by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next one, and often, indeed most of the time hold each other up mutually. All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding human hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some non-existent ‘solid ground under one’s feet’ that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.

                    – the theologian Franz Rosenzweig, in a letter to his future sister-in-law, 1920

(from Oliver Burkeman's newsletter)

Learn how to be in the world that you have

Swallow and Camellia, by Ito Jakuchu, 18th century

 

From 2013 July Journal

In the past year, I've come to this thought repeatedly: you have enough. The mode of "collecting things" can be done. Now it's time to listen to the music you've collected and to curate. Tend to the garden. Find the best songs. Listen to them. Learn how to be in the world that you have. 

Not a peace within, but a peace you access

 

Van Gogh. Self-Portrait, 1889 

From my journal in July 2013, which I've been rereading.  The family had just come back from trip to Yellowstone National Park.  

Monday. Up at 6. 75° low. I hear the whistle of the local woodpecker a sound. I've missed also the resident crow. What does that peace mean? Interesting that it's not a peace within, but a peace you access. 

***


The "local" woodpecker and "resident" crow remind me of "How to Do Nothing" and bioregionalism. These are the sounds of the place... that I'm sitting in, listening to.

I've been thinking about "it's not a peace within, but a peace you access."  That seemed insightful to me, especially in the post-run setting on a bench in Field Park.  The idea seems to be that we have access to the natural peacefulness in the outside world... peace also might mean "the rightness" or "the natural timeline" or "the rolling on of the world" that is distinct from our buzzing brains and our desires to control things.  The idea is against the notion that the peace is sitting there inside our buzzing brains.  

After yesterday's run, I was sitting on a bench in Field Park recognizing the peaceful trees, the space between the trees.  I noted (in my Notes on my phone) sounds: "cicadas, train diesel, steam brake, bell of train, light rustle of leaves in park, air handling unit, distant birds, tennis ball into chain link fence. Another approaching trian. Speeding. No bells. Rapid rattle of wheel trucks on tracks"

Getting the knack of hopelessness

 

Araichō, Enshū, by Kawase Hasui, 1931

From The Pocket Pema Chodron

Getting the knack of hopelessness (p. 32)

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.

In Tibetan there's an interesting word , ye tang che. The ye part means "totally, completely," and the rest of it means "exhausted." Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out . We might say "totally fed up. " It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point.  This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope -- that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be -- we will never relax with where we are or who we are. 

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone "out there" is to blame for our pain -- one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there's anywhere to hide.

A break from everything having to be special

 

Morning Glory by Shibata Zeshin, 1807-1868

From Jon Kabat-Zinn #27 provides some instructions in the first 15 minutes:

Without looking for something to happen or some special feeling, giving yourself a break from everything having to be special and falling into the actuality of how everything already is (mind blowingly so)... appreciate it... [this] embodied wakefulness".

Being at home in your own experience... letting is all simply arise, come to your moment by moment, embracing it in your attending.

Creative Misunderstanding

 

Katsushika Hokusai, “Fine Wind, Clear Weather,” also known as Red Fuji, from the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” about 1830–31. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper.Credit...Nellie Parney Carter Collection; via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A couple things interesting in my notes below.  First, the complex interplay between European artists' "creative misunderstanding" of Japanese art (how the article deals with Edward Said).  Second, how Japanese art caused a new vocabulary and grammar for art -- different things become important (like in The Structure of Scientific Revolution), different things are "worth recording."  

In this NYT review of Boston MFA exhibit on Hokusai's "origins and influences," Jason Farago (who did this fabulous NYT interactive piece on one of Hokusai's prints) writes:

Europeans had, by Hokusai’s day, been drawing from Chinese, Persian and Indian examples in the creation of the decorative arts. But when Japanese prints finally began to circulate in Western Europe after his death — especially in 1870s Paris, defeated in war and transforming at full tilt into a metropolis — they appeared as both aesthetic gems and spiritual life rafts. In Hokusai and his rivals, young Parisians losing their roots found a liberation from worn visual vocabularies, and Japonisme, as the fashion was called, stretched from the painting salon to the dinner table. Fuji-themed inkstands. Velvet curtains bedecked with lotus blossoms. Transferware with fish and fowl copied from manga. “Japonisme was in the process of revolutionizing the vision of the European peoples,” wrote the diarist Edmond de Goncourt. The pottery, the lacquerware, and above all the woodblocks “brought to Europe a new sense of color, a new decorative system, and, if you prefer, a poetic imagination.”

That these artists, composers and designers did not take a scientific interest in Japanese culture hardly needs spelling out, any more than Japanese printmakers did when they depicted the “exotic” West. But the French fashion for things Japanese offers one of the richest examples ever of the productive capacity of misunderstanding foreign things — above all for the artists who would become the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose soft colors, flat expanses and neglect of shading would never have emerged without their Japanese forerunners. It wasn’t just the pictorial grammar; it was also Hokusai’s bourgeois sensibility, his attention to theater and fashion and women of the night. That taste for city life convinced Monet, Degas and their peers that their fleeting impressions of modern French life could be the stuff of high art. And even as they indulged stereotypes of Japanese delicacy or purity — when they fell into the “battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” that Edward Said called Orientalism — these Europeans were changed all the same by Japan, and irrevocably.

Another NYT article (in Style section)on Japonisme in Europe:

***

It also morphed into two aesthetic movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Art Nouveau and Art Deco, often erroneously thought to have been entirely creations of the West but in reality impossible without previous exposure to Japanese art and design. “They have taught us,” the jeweler Lucien Falize once said of the Japanese, “the poetry of this world.”

***

The French obsession with Japanese culture and art, which resulted in one of the most fecund creative periods Europe has ever known, was a dense brew of appropriation, commerce and respect.  

***

Subtly but swiftly, European art’s Christian subtext was replaced by Shintoism’s reverence for the natural world — a philosophy in which everything from mountains to humans possessed spiritual energy — as well as the circles of Zen Buddhist calligraphy that represented enlightenment or imperfection. 

*** 

For the French, who still determined Western aesthetics, Japan’s opening was fortuitous: They were ready for a new way of seeing. The neo-Classical perfectionism epitomized in the 19th century by the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a style perpetuated by rigid training at academies such as the École des Beaux-Arts, was becoming passé. Portraits of aristocrats and heroic battle scenes, however spectacularly rendered, began to seem retrograde as the empire of Napoleon III gave way to the Third Republic, and the middle class expanded. The ukiyo-e, which used simple techniques to depict everyday people at leisure — sitting at the sea’s edge or strolling through a field — seemed modern in comparison. And Japanese decorative arts, which captured fleeting moments (a leaping carp, a blossom carried on the wind) in ceramic or enamel inspired a new sort of freedom. “Everything changed after France was exposed to Japan and ran it through the French sensibility,” says Béatrice Quette, the curator of Asian collections at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an institution founded in 1882, at the height of Japonisme. “French design — France, really — was never quite the same.” 

***

THE IMPRESSIONISTS LIKED to claim that it was they alone who “discovered” the Japanese masters, they who realized the importance of their use of bright colors, odd perspective, flat planes and off-kilter composition, which ultimately liberated them from the strictures of hyperrealism — and that is mostly how art history has recorded it. But while the painters and collectors may have asserted dominion over Japanese art as it entered Europe, it was, in fact, the decorative artisans who initially made something new of it.

The French painter and printmaker Félix Bracquemond reportedly first encountered the ukiyo-e master Hokusai’s prints in 1856, at the shop of his printer, Auguste Delâtre, who showed Bracquemond a legendary manga series the artist had completed four decades earlier. Perhaps used as packing material to protect a shipment of Japanese porcelain, the block prints in black, gray and pale pink in the style known as kacho-ga, depicted birds in flight, tissue-soft flowers and lacy dragonflies.

For Bracquemond, the Japanese prints represented a fresh visual language for a changing world. He soon sought out other ukiyo-e, including Hiroshige’s 20-print “Grand Series of Fishes” (1830s and ’40s) and the 1848-49 flower-and-bird prints by Katsushika Taito II, using them as source material for what would become one of the earliest expressions of Japonisme.  

More Than Halfway by Edward Hirsch

 

“More Than Halfway” 

Edward Hirsch

I’ve turned on lights all over the house,
but nothing can save me from this darkness.

I’ve stepped onto the front porch to see
the stars perforating the milky black clouds

and the moon staring coldly through the trees,
but this negative I’m carrying inside me.

Where is the boy who memorized constellations?
What is the textbook that so consoled him?

I’m now more than halfway to the grave,
but I’m not half the man I meant to become.

To what fractured deity can I pray?
I’m willing to pay the night with interest,

though the night wants nothing but itself.
What did I mean to say to darkness?

Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest.
God is an absence whispering in the leaves.