You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2015.
April is poetry month! I love poetry…and poets! Many of my friends and close associates are contemporary poets, scrambling to make ends meet as they rework language to capture the elusive meaning and rhythm of life. I really enjoy talking to them about literature…including poetry, but much of my favorite poetry is Victorian poetry…and it’s frustrating to watch my poor friends’ smiles curdle when I say such a thing. The rhythm and the themes of 19th century poetry are very different from modern poetic tastes, but not quite sufficiently different that it can be neatly archived away in the hallowed halls of ancient poetry. To modern poets a great deal of Victorian poetry seems fusty and overly-detailed. It has a repetitive classical-music rhythm which (to ears more used to the syncopation of rap and rock) can sound like a monotonous drone. Thematically, Victorian works are insufficiently focused on identity politics to rate approval from the academic literary establishment right now. The canonical poets of the 19th century were seemingly unconcerned with the complexities of gender, class, race which hold the so much of the attention of the literati in today’s democracies (although this stereotype is less true on careful re- reading—indeed many of the great Victorian poets were passing, or gay…or even women!).
I am making the same mistake which drove me away from literature—talking about politics, historiography, the biography of authors, and suchlike “meta” concerns, when what really matters is the actual poetry! At its zenith English poetry of the 19th century is unrivaled. The sumptuous language immerses the reader in a fulsome world where colors burn brighter than in real life and supernatural epiphany lurks around every verdant garden corner. The great English poets of the nineteenth century were too concerned with the greater meanings of humankind, life, and the universe to become unduly caught up in the grasping web of daily politics…but that doesn’t mean humankind’s scheming clannish nature and self-delusions are not addressed.
Here is one of my favorite passages of poetry, from Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., a vast elegy which Tennyson wrote for a beloved friend who died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage. The work is an attempt to make sense of loss and human fragility. It was written at a time when the simplistic certainties of religion were rapidly fading away. The scientific breakthroughs of the 18th century were driving technology and civilization forward at a breakneck pace during the 19th century but some of the other larger implications of these scientific breakthroughs were also becoming apparent. Victorians were relentlessly trained to be religious, but thinking people could see past the fraudulent stagecraft of the priests and begin to apprehend how vast, ancient, and uncaring the world really is.
Tension between the ersatz facade of religion, and the darkness of a world without any magical beings, was much at the center of Victorian thinking…and it made for dramatic and interesting poetry! Here is Tennyson’s poem (or actually the 69th canto thereof), a lament about the pain of death and loss…and about the larger nature of life…and about faith.
LXIX.
I dream’d there would be Spring no more,
That Nature’s ancient power was lost:
The streets were black with smoke and frost,
They chatter’d trifles at the door:
I wander’d from the noisy town,
I found a wood with thorny boughs:
I took the thorns to bind my brows,
I wore them like a civic crown:
I met with scoffs, I met with scorns
From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
They call’d me in the public squares
The fool that wears a crown of thorns:
They call’d me fool, they call’d me child:
I found an angel of the night;
The voice was low, the look was bright;
He look’d upon my crown and smiled:
He reach’d the glory of a hand,
That seem’d to touch it into leaf:
The voice was not the voice of grief,
The words were hard to understand.
The work is Christian in meaning and symbolism, but right away the narrator experiences problems with the dogma and the real nature of his faith. The poet picks up and puts on a wreath of thorns which is meant to represent grief for his dead friend and the larger grief of mortality itself. This thorn crown obviously also has a special religious significance: it is the same crown which Jesus Christ wore during the passion. Jesus was both human and divine. In Christian mythology he was a person who died and then transcended death. Christianity extends the same promise to its followers.
Angel of Death (Evelyn De Morgan. 1881, oil on canvas)
In his broken sadness, the narrator attempts to bridge the gap between death and eternity by wearing the same garb as Christ, but right away society condemns the narrator as pitiful and childlike. Grief is not meant to so undo a person. Additionally, the promise of eternal life—of any divine compact at all—is in doubt. Spring will not come again. The streets are black with industrial grime. His friend is dead…as we all must die, and yet religion is no so longer a sovereign remedy. The world of society is founded on religious strictures—but laughs off expressions of those beliefs. Worse the beliefs themselves have been undermined…by life’s sorrow sand by greater knowledge of the world.
When the narrator does encounter an actual angel–a numinous from beyond who represents the true meanings of existence—the angel transmutes the crown of thorns into a living wreath and says something which lies beyond the poet’s grasp. It is a tremendous combined message of hope, uncertainty and grief…yet this sacred message lies beyond the poet.
The words were not the words of grief, but neither were they comprehensible to Tennyson…We all must keep fumbling towards meaning in a world without any certainty.
Divine messages are jumbled whispers from our dreams and from angels of the night…and from poets who keep delivering beautiful and ambivalent truths which the priests and politicians certainly would never dare utter.
Artist’s conception of MESSENGER above Mercury (NASA)
On Thursday, humankind is deliberately crashing a spaceship into another planet! We could easily be the evil aliens in someone else’s space drama. Well, at least we could be, if there were any remote chance that Mercury, the intended target of our bombardment, were a possible haven for life. And bombardment is not really the right word: what is actually scheduled is the seemly & rational conclusion to NASA’s MESSENGER mission, a highly successful exploration of the solar system’s mysterious innermost world. The mission has been ongoing for more than a decade (a decade of our Earth time—or nearly 40 Mercury years).
A portrait of Mercury from MESSENGER
The 485-kilogram (1,069 pound) MESSENGER spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral in August 2004. The space probe has an awkward and contrived government acronym, which is why I keep talking about it in all caps—I’m not shouting (although planetary exploration does make me very excited). The craft took some amazing pictures of Venus (a planet which always calls to me) on its way to Mercury. Then MESSENGER flew by the small planet multiple times before entering orbit on March 18, 2011 (the first human spacecraft to do so). Since then MESSENGER has extensively scanned and mapped the surface of Mercury—a planet which is surprisingly elusive to astronomers because of its proximity to the sun. The mission revealed some surprising results which are leading to big new questions.
False Color Maps of Mercury (NASA)
Mercury has a small diameter—it is actually smaller in area than some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter—but it has substantial mass because much of it is made of heavy metals. The face of the small world is thought to be ancient: scientists speculated that its bland pitted face might date back to the formation of the solar system, but it seems that Mercury does harbor secrets.
The mission featured a big surprise. Messenger found surface water in the form of ice frozen inside the polar craters of Mercury. This was not really a shock—astronomers have suspected that ice was present due to radio-telescope readings. What was surprising was that the ice was coated with tarlike black goo. My poor roommate (who is always wandering the house pointing at films, stains, and accretions in horror) would not be surprised by a black coating on anything, however scientists were taken aback because Mercury was not thought to have any “volatile” compounds. According to the current models of planetary formation, elements like chlorine, sulfur, potassium and sodium should have boiled away during the cataclysmic high-temperature formation of Mercury…yet there they are, like the scum in my kitchen. The scientific data from MESSENGER is likely to force a rethink of planetary formation (although frankly, considering all of the weird exoplanets that are being discovered, scientists probably need to refine their theories about planetary accretion anyway). The mission also measured subtle planetary flux which should give us a better sense of Mercury’s composition and internal workings.
The yellow patches show areas where water ice is believed to exist. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
All good things must end, however, and MESSENGER has run out of fuel for maneuvering. Mission controllers have opted for an operatic exit and they are smashing the craft into the planet’s surface at 8,750 miles per hour (nearly four kilometers per second). This should create an 18 meter (50 foot) wide crater. Future scientists will have a known fresh disturbance to use as a benchmark for assessing the ancient craters of Mercury. Perhaps the plume will reveal some interesting secrets as well.
MESSENGER Crashes into Mercury (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, ink and colored pencil)
Unfortunately, it will be a while before we see the results of our destructive acts. The site of impact is hidden from Earth, and we have no other spacecraft in any proximity to Mercury. A European and Japanese collaboration called BepiColombo is scheduled to launch from Earth in 2017 and arrive at Mercury in 2024. Perhaps we will have new questions for whatever answers MESSENGER is about to divulge in its unseen but spectacular final act!
Update: Through some grotesque oversight, NASA failed to portray MESSENGER’s final moments through the magic of art. I took the liberty of providing my own interpretation above. NASA did not return my questions about whether the spacecraft will wail in a plaintive manner as it impacts the surface–so I am forced to assume that it will. Did I mention that Mercury has no atmosphere? You should probably ignore that…
The River Styx (from achristouillustration.com)
We have previously addressed the chimerical nature of magenta—a color which does not actually exist, but strongly seems to because of the way that humans perceive light. In the intervening years, you have probably been wondering if there are other colors like this: hues which are not there except for tricks of the brain. Today we bring you an amazing & impossible color from the underworld. “Stygian blue” is a supersaturated blue/violet which is also as dark as the darkest black! It would be the coolest color in the rainbow except for the fact that it isn’t real…but you can still see it. In fact, if you keep reading, I’ll show it to you right here!
Before you call in the men with big white nets (who, like the bill collectors, are always creeping nearer anyway) allow me to explain. Stygian blue appears to exist because of the opponent color theory (explained below in an utterly unhelpful and incomprehensible diagram) a theory of color pioneered by the dramatist, poet, and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe!
“Oh! THOSE opponent colors…yes, of course!”
Opponent color theory deals with how the eye (and the mind) process information received from the three types of color-receptive cones commonly found in the human retina. Setting the biological details to the side, the theory essentially posits that certain colors reciprocally evoke fundamental opposite colors: blue and orange are opposites; red and green are opposites; yellow and purple are opposites; and so forth. This blog has come near to this territory before (with a pumpkin-colored Chevy Chase?) and we will return to component colors again, since they lie at a nexus between physics, aesthetics, neural science, and the unknown. But right now we only need to recognize that the opposite of dark blue is pale orange (at least to the human eye).
Flags (Jasper Johns, ca. 1967-1968,color lithograph)
In order to see stygian blue we must utilize a trick of physiology. If you stare long enough at a strong hue: you will see an afterimage of its component opposite—the negative reflection of the image you have looked at. A famous example is hack artist Jasper John’s bizarro American flag in orange, black, and green. If you stare at it for a few minutes, and then look at a white wall, you will see old glory proudly waving in your eyes…but there is no actual flag.
Likewise if you stare long enough at an orange/yellow blob, and then look at a black field, you will perceive a glistening phantasmagoric shade of ultra-blue which is as dark as the black, but is not black—stygian blue! Here is the swath I stole from Wikipedia which allows to do this while staring at your own monitor in the comfort of whatever cubical farm/battlefield/hyper-space sarcophagus where you are reading this.
Please note you have to stare with unflagging diligence at “x” for quite a while!
As a bonus the image includes some two other chimerical colors, hyperbolic orange and self-luminous red (which I did not think were sufficiently interesting to lead this essay, but which “exist” based on the same basic principles). Of course this does not actually involve any ghosts, supernatural entities, or Lovecraft colors which drive you insane (more so than usual anyway). Stygian blue is merely a trick of the brain…but so are a lot of things we spend our lives striving for and working on. I for one find the color quite pretty and I would wear it or use it in my paintings if such a thing were at all possible.
For example it would be a great color for a screaming Gorgon chariot!
Magical Tree
by JourneyArtist (deviantart)
Today is Arbor Day, the annual international celebration of trees. Like my distant heathen ancestors, I partake in a bit of tree worship. Because of their immense size, strength, beauty and longevity, trees are an obvious metaphor for the numinous. However there are also more subtle and compelling reasons that trees are the ideal symbol of divinity.
Trees are at the center of a vast web of commensal relationships between living things. They rely on large mutualistic collections of organisms to survive. Trees cannot live without an unseen world of symbiotic organisms in the soil. The towering plants rely on nitrogen fixing bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes to take nutrients from the earth. Likewise trees communicate through fungal networks which link them together in improbable ways we are only now learning about.
Trees utilize bees, flies, monkeys, and birds for pollination…and to disseminate their seeds. They call on different parasitoid wasps for defense through elaborate biochemicals. We should really envision a tree not as a big spiky discreet thing sitting in the lawn, but as a vast flow chart/rolodex of connections with other living organisms.
Of course trees are not unique in being an interconnected node within a vast web of life—that is really the way all life is. It is a grotesque human conceit that humans stand outside and above nature. I have always thought of humanity as a problematic youngest child. We are the favorite (for the moment). We have such gifts…but we are so arrogant, unhappy, and unstable. And we are so so monstrously greedy. I sometimes like to imagine trees as a gentle stable elder brother.
Actually though, mammals are much older than flowering trees. For hundreds of millions of years our pathetic little ancestors cowered beneath the roots of conifers, cycads, ginkgoes, tree-ferns and such. Then, at the end of the Mesozoic, the ascent of mammals happened at the same time that the angiosperms took over the land. Our shrewlike ancestors evolved into arboreal primates as the angiosperms themselves were becoming the forests.
We grew up together! While the great angiosperm forests of the Eocene may not have required much from our squirrel-like grandparents, today’s forests desperately require our good graces so that they are not all converted into parking lots. Plywood, and ugly discount furniture.
Anyway, my thoughts are getting away from me. I only wanted today’s post to be a reminder of Arbor Day and how wonderful and beautiful trees are. Here is a small gallery of lurid yet evocative images of sacred trees! I especially like the pictures of trees together with outer space or the cosmos (like the big portal tree at the top). Happy Arbor Day!
Space Tree by MartijnVn on DeviantArt
A crane-type construction vehicle
In addition to writing your favorite blog (:)) I am also a toymaker with a leather apron, a droopy mustache, and the desire to build impossible wonders to delight and amaze the world. Way back in 2011, I put up pictures from my upcoming book “Things that Go: Green & Groovy” which was a guide for building amazing toy vehicles out of common household rubbish, wooden wheels, and craft paint. Some of the vehicles were really cool! I turned common garbage into nifty-looking vehicles…albeit ones which did not run on their own (I was sort of like Fiat or Kia).
A missile cruiser!
Alas! As usual, my creativity was no match for the sinister vagaries of the world economy. There were sourcing/pricing problems in China, regulatory fights, and goodness only knows what other sorts of business headaches for my poor publisher. The publisher had hoped to alloy the positive aspects of the toy business together with the uplifting aspects of book publishing (toys are sold directly to retailers, whereas books, nightmarishly, are sold by consignment). Her good intentions were thwarted at every turn and she learned directly about the anti-competitive forces the large toy companies utilize to prevent products from small companies from ever reaching market (something I learned about when I made “Zoomorphs”). All of this happened during the great crisis in the world of publishing. Gosh!
A planetary space base!
Anyway, what this means is my cool book has still not made it to the shelves. This strikes me as particularly ironic, since I was continually goaded to build faster—and I turned out all of the many, many toy vehicles at a staggering pace. I thought I would share a few more of these vehicles with you here on my blog so that at least somebody gets to enjoy them! Also to build buzz I guess?
forklift
Maybe the vehicle book will happen someday, but in the mean time I have other toy projects…and other writing projects…and other art projects. Keep watching this space to see those projects–they are going to be amazing! Also let me know if you need any directions on how to build a miniature cardboard wheelbarrow before the book launches in sometime in the unknowable world of the far future.
wheelbarrow
It’s Earth Day, the arbitrary day in April which we have chosen represent the splendor of the biosphere. More accurately the day is a PR soapbox, which environmentalists use to harangue everyone about the truly disastrous job humankind is doing in our self-appointed role as stewards of life on the planet. I agree with the environmentalists—I guess I am an environmentalist! Humankind is using up too much of the biosphere for ignominiously stupid things. We have Problems (with a capital “P”) yet we spend most of our time worrying about Justin Bieberlake and whether the consumer goods we purchase properly reflect our status. For Earth Day, instead of writing about fracking, drought, or overfishing, I am going to write about chickens and status. Status is what social animals crave more than anything. It is the crux of our life. Yet the mad quest for status causes us to make awful decisions for ourselves and for the world.
Let’s start with chickens. Chickens are social creatures. They have a very intense “pecking order” of who gets to do what–which is literally based on pecking. When I was growing up we had a flock of Rhode Island Red chickens. The rooster was on top of the pecking order and he would eat first and peck any subordinate chicken he liked. The top hens had bright red feathers and shiny eyes. They pecked subordinate hens, who in turn were cruel to their social inferiors…and so forth. At the bottom of the heap were some sad-looking hens who got pecked by everyone else. They were the dull red color of old bricks and their feathers were falling out. The very bottom hen was a festering mess of sores. She was almost always eaten by a hawk or a raccoon (if we humans didn’t put her in the pot first).
It is an exceedingly accurate model of humankind. In each society, the glistening cocks at the apex of society have unlimited access to resources and freely mistreat anyone beneath them. People at the bottom of society are in real physical danger from their low estate and could easily die from disease, exposure, or crime. However the way we attain this hierarchy is determined by social dynamics much more complicated than those on display in the poultry yard. After middle school we can’t actually hit each other without involving constables and lawsuits, so we base our status grabbing on a more complicated set of networks and social markers.
To continue with the theme of chicken, my roommate always aggressively points out that she purchases organic free-range food–unlike certain benighted philistines who just buy the cheapest factory-farm chicken (I guess this is due to my insatiable desire to harm the planet, torture living creatures, and poison myself and everyone else with “toxins”?). I have seen a “free-range” chicken farm—and it looked like a factory farm with a dinky wired-in aviary appended. Maybe it would be better to be a chicken living there, but probably not by much—certainly not to me anyway.
My roommate is an exceedingly lovely and gentle person who earnestly doesn’t want chickens to be tortured (but still wants to eat chicken, because, let’s face it, that’s what humans like to eat). Why am I picking on her? For status of course! To push my political agendas and ideologies!
Our pursuit of most things is really a pursuit of status: resources, mates, health, political power, unfettered access to knowledge…all good things come from high-status.
In my book, the people who have the highest status are people who have lavish flower gardens and lots of medieval Chinese porcelain (perhaps this mindset explains why I am a jobless lout writing an eccentric blog). Most Americans would probably dwell on other status criteria—the most injurious automobile, the lowest trousers, or praying loudest in church. Status-markers comes in so many flavors that it is sometimes difficult to recognize how central it is to who we are.
I am worried that Earth Day has become a part of our ceaseless attempts to one-up each other. It is like my roommate’s “free-range” chicken legs: a foolish status object rather than a way we can legitimately determine how to best preserve the vast fragile web of interlocking ecosystems.
Mother Nature chose to apportion chickens’ share of resources based on how they peck each other. Evidently she chose to apportion human agendas by how we choose and display our cars, our meals, our houses, and our gardens. Our ideas are related to our social position and how we portray ourselves. Hence our endless jejune jockeying over whose stuff is better, or tastier, or more moral, or greener, or more expensive. Political consensus is attained by a synthesis of endless small-scale aesthetic and moral choices which add up to large-scale policy choices.
This bothers me because I find many high-status “green” ideas to be bad ideas. If we rely on “organic” produce which requires vastly more land, water, and energy to produce, we will use up all the world’s land without being able to feed everyone. Likewise many “sustainable” energy sources like ethanol, solar panels, and dams use more energy than they create…or cause waste or environmental degradation. People who oppose nuclear power plants (in favor of fracking I guess?), and embrace resource-devouring, erosion-causing organic farming frustrate me. But their motives are often noble and praiseworthy.
“Earth Day” seems like a button or a bumper sticker (and a sanctimonious and unfun one at that). Our true problems…and opportunities…are much greater and more difficult to grasp and popularize. But a button, a bumper sticker, a sanctimonious “holiday” are a start. So is a confused and self-contradictory essay about the politics of environmentalism. Happy Earth Day! We’ll keep working on this. There are solutions to our very-real environmental problems, but they are going to require scientific research, hard work, and sacrifice of some cherished sacred cows (or chickens) by everyone.
Quokka with offspring
The quokka is a small macropod. Hmm, maybe I better explain that a bit: macropods are browsing/grazing marsupials which use their long hind legs and muscular tails to aid locomotion —the most famous exemplars are kangaroos and wallabies. The quokka (Setonix brachyurus) is a small-kangaroo-like mammal about the size of a domestic cat (2.5 to 5 kilograms (5.5 to 11.0 pounds)). They are mainly nocturnal and live on some small islands along the coast of southwestern Australia, although there is a small dwindling population on the mainland.
A leaping quokka (from “Awesome Robo!”)
Just like that one kid in grade school, Quokkas have “a stocky build, rounded ears, and a short, broad head.” Early European explorers to Australia were perplexed by the quokka and wrote of them as cats or giant rats. Quokkas can climb trees and shrubs (which they graze on) and they live in semi-arid scrubland, dry forests, and in gardens and lawns.
Quokka at the Taronga Zoo (photo by Paul Fahy)
Quokkas have dwindled greatly in their natural range due to habitat loss and invasive predators like cats, dogs, foxes, and dingoes. Somewhat sadly, quokkas have no natural fear of humans and will approach quite closely, particularly on Rottnest Island, where the highest population concentration is found. This leads to all sorts of unpleasant incidents–for humans are very dangerous indeed–so the local authorities have levied fines for touching or handling the animals (the fines are charged to the humans—the quokkas having thus far failed to master finance).
A quokka hanging out with regulars at the Rottnest Island pub
Selfie with Quokka (Kempsterk)
Although their plain brown fur and giant pupils keep them from top-tier internet fame, quokkas are pretty adorable. They look like a cross between kangaroos, squirrels, and koalas (which kind of also describes their lifestyle). Their lamentable fearlessness also leads to many great photos!
“Quokka, quokka, quokka!”
The Yellow Aconite or Winter Aconite (Eranthis hyemalis)
This lovely little yellow flower is Eranthis hyemalis, more commonly known as the winter aconite. Native to the woodlands of continental Europe, the winter aconite is a member of the sprawling & poisonous buttercup family (which includes beauties and horrors like the monkshood, the ranunculus, and the delphiniums). Eranthis hyemalis which is now blooming here in New York (in gardens which are eccentric enough to have it) is a quintessential spring ephemeral—it blossoms and grows in earliest spring before any trees are in leaf—or even in bloom. The plant flowers and puts out leaves and gathers sunlight and stores energy all before the other plants even start. Then, as the woodland canopy expands above it and as its growing spot is covered with shade, the aconite dies back to its hardy underground tuber which remains dormant until next spring. Although it lives in verdant forests it could almost be an ascetic desert flower based on its hardiness and hermit-like lifestyle. It would be a big mistake to mistake the flower for a weakling or a vegetable–like the other buttercups, all parts of it are ferociously poisonous. Do not eat it (or smoke it…or even look at it funny)!
Illustration Eranthis hyemalis
Tripod Fish (Bathypterois grallator)
I promised more weird fish this year, and here is a fish which amply delivers on this promise. This is a tripod fish (Bathypterois grallator), an eyeless wonder of the deep ocean plains. The fish spends most of its time standing completely motionless on its elongated fins which reach up to a meter (three feet) off the seafloor. It mostly copies the feeding habits of sessile invertebrates such as sea anemones and barnacles and feeds on tiny creatures which bump into its elongated (and highly sensitive) front and top fins. It walks extremely slowly along the ocean bottom on these high fins with its mouth facing into the deep currents.
Despite its sedentary preferences and circumscribed lifestyle, the tripod fish has not given up its brain or its ability to swim. If and when the fish decides to swim, its stilt like fins deflate and become flexible. Scientists have not pinpointed the exact mechanism for this transformation, but erectile tissues are not unknown in the animal world. Speaking of which…
Mating is difficult in the abyssal zone (as any Tinder user could readily aver) so the tripod fish is a true hermaphrodite possessing both male and female reproductive organs. If two tripod fish chance to meet, they mate together in all sorts of crazy troubling ways, however, if the fish never finds a partner it produces both sperm and eggs and mates with itself!
Martian Gothic (James Beoddy, 1997, mixed media)
Time sort of escaped me today, so here is a strange and intricate painting to think about. This is “Martian Gothic” by James Beoddy. It is an exciting retro-future tapestry of techno-humans piecing together a patchwork future. The networked world of the painting looks alien but also strangely familiar—as though today’s political and consumerist trends just moved a bit further down the road. The dark glittering society is not as dark as some visions of tomorrow—but it does seem to have lots of sharp edges.
detail
ferrebeekeeper 