Christmas with Terry Eagleton

To call Terry Eagleton a critic, or even a Theorist (note the capital T) is really to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him I'm reminded of social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. 

Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counterpuncher who feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others.  

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by his grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers are today, that we all live in the midst of numerous categories of being--the practical, the ethical, the aesthetic--and often partake of several simultaneously.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of any­thing important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Cre­ation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumb­ing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But where’s the danger?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romanti­cs (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolu­tionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter.

A friend of mine remarked recently that life's two great mysteries are God and death. I would suggest that these mysteries are corollaries of a still greater mystery out of which they flow--presence. Being here, now. You and me and everyone we know and don't know. This is what seems to vanish at the end of life, and also what drives our most rewarding theological musings.

Christmas has a moral dimension, to be sure--our savior, charitable living, and all of that--but it also has a magical dimension: darkness and twinkling lights and warmth and togetherness. Colorful packages. Extravagant Food. Familiar music, most of it vocal. This year, it will be quieter for most of us. More open space, perhaps, to pursue--among other things--that elusive zone of existential frisson, both personal and cosmic, that defies description.

At Play in the Fields

 A landscape is like a poem, and walking it is like reading it. You don't have to understand it—the geology, the human history—to appreciate the lay of the land: the balance and perhaps the depth. Variety of vegetation and terrain, openness, density, expanse. The rise and fall, the arrangement of woods, fields, marshes, potholes, lakes. A shapely island of sumac here, a copse of silvery aspens in the distance over there.

Hilary and I have been walking quite a few landscapes these last few months. We have our favorites, but we don't want to wear them out through familiarity. We try to visit new places, too, and also attack the old ones from new perspectives. The back route into William O'Brien S.P. from the gravel parking lot on County 4 stands near the top of our list, though it's no longer new. We recently began a hike at O'Brien from the standard trailhead but headed south across the fields immediately, turning up into the lozenge-shaped hills from a new angle. And just the other day, we felt our way along back roads to a new point of entry into Afton S.P. off 50th Street, which made it easy to reach the beautiful fields in the park's northwest corner without first walking a mile and a half from the main parking lot down to the St. Croix River and then up through a ravine (yes, a beautiful ravine) and on through the backpacking campground.

Afton State Park

But it might have seemed that we were getting desperate when we ventured, a week or two ago, up to Crow-Hassan Regional Park.  Although it's arguably the wildest—or at any rate the least developed—of the parks in the Three Rivers system, we have never found it much fun to explore. We would invariably arrive at the gravel parking lot after a dull drive up Interstate 94 followed by a seemingly endless meander through the farm county west of Rogers, our only real hope being to spot a rough-legged hawk on one of the stunted trees alongside the last stretch of two-lane road leading to the park.

A mink fishing on the Crow River

Upon arrival, we would head off to the west over a few hills and then through a stretch of maple woods, eager to make contact with the Crow River, which forms the park's western boundary. 

After wandering alongside the river, which is substantial, for a few hundred yards, the trail would bring us up a hill through oak woods and past a stand of handsome Scots pines planted  by some long-forgotten farmer, or perhaps a park ranger, decades ago. Here the vast expanse of rolling, grass-covered fields that covers the north half of the park presents itself. To the northeast, maybe half a mile away, you can see another grove of stately pines in the midst of a deciduous woods. 

A glance at the map—I hope you print out a PDF of the park map before you leave; signage in the park is terrible—will suggest that the river valley curls to the east just beyond those trees. It would be nice to explore up that way ... but it's windy and cold out there in the open, we've already walked a mile or two, and we're ready to head back to the parking lot, following a trail that hugs a bank of woods and then veers out into some low hills briefly before rising to the north side of the lot.

A few days after that hike, so similar to previous hikes—decent enough, but hardly exhilarating—it occurred to me that we were going the WRONG WAY. Why start off so precipitously to the west every time, heading for the river? Why not head north towards the fields immediately? Or better yet, wander amid the woods and ponds on the east side of the park on our way north to the fields and wooded patches that have always remained just beyond our reach?

With only a hint of reluctance—after all, we'd just been there—Hilary agreed to return to Crow-Hassan with me to try out the new route. And we agree, it gives the park an entirely new and more agreeable flavor. It happened to be a cold, blustery day, and our meander east and north through the woods took some time. As a result, we once again decided to turn back before reaching the enchanted woods at the northern edge of the park. But we did see a lot of new and attractive terrain, and we also explored one or two trails that don't appear on any map. The trail heading south along the west side of South Twin Lake was especially nice. We passed fields of bluestem dotted with blazing star and bee-balm—all dead, but lovely just the same in their variegated shapes and textures. Bird-life consisted of two low-flying trumpeter swans that appeared out of nowhere and one low-soaring bald eagle.

At the first of several unmarked junctures we turned right, not wanting to head back to the trail we'll come north on. At the next fork we went left; didn't want to curl around in a circle—it's easy enough to do. It was a thick, gray day and the sun was no help at all.

I knew roughly where we were, but when we finally arrived an intersection with a park sign and a map, I discovered I was wrong. We weren't anywhere near where I thought we were. I had become discombobulated by a good ninety degrees as we jogged this way and that amid the rolling hills and ice-covered ponds. "Number 11?" I said in disbelief. "That can't be right."

"I seem to remember that last week we came up through those woods," Hilary reminded me. "We went down this hill and turned left." She was right. That's what we'd done, arriving at the same point from the opposite direction. But it didn't jibe at all with the directional scheme I'd build up in my head.

So, Crow-Hassan is back on the map. Lots of new trails to explore in the months ahead. We'll make it to the north end of the park one of these days, it isn't that far. Maybe on skis!     

December Lockdown

Let's just call it a quiet holiday: wandering the house like a good citizen, going for walks in the woods daily, working desultorily on projects on the computer (as usual), making pre-dawn runs to the supermarket, figuring out new things to do with the left-over turkey, chatting with friends and family on the phone, streaming the occasional TV show, and taking advantage of the ample arts and entertainment events being offered online by local organizations in dire need of support.

We're used to hosting three or four generations for Thanksgiving, but this year it was just the two of us. We roasted a twelve-pound turkey nevertheless, along with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie topped with masses of fresh-whipped cream. Hilary put together a hearty assortment of leftovers for her mother, but we still had quite a bit of turkey to consume.

That first plate of leftovers is almost better than the original meal. The second one isn't too bad, either. A few days later I was eating turkey salad sandwiches heavily laced with tarragon. The next night turkey quesadillas were on the menu.  And just last night we finished things off with some delectable turkey pot pies.

The musical offerings have also been top-flight. We listened to several performances from the Schubert Club's Courtroom Concert series, which are traditionally staged at noon at the Landmark Center in St. Paul. One of them featured a local ensemble of musicians performing music from India, and another was a rebroadcast of a sterling performance of Debussy's String Quartet which lacked a video component. 

It might seem strange to be sitting in front a computer screen looking at a static image of four musicians, but it nevertheless gives one the feeling of attending a musical event. And the music itself was gorgeous.

On December 3 the Schubert Club will be streaming an outstanding vocal quartet, "To Joy," by local composer David Evan Thomas. We heard the original performance and were stunned by its exuberant accessibility and sensual appeal. The entire text was extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary's entries for the word "joy." And joyous it is.

The most unusual of the events we took in recently was a two-part performance by the Boston Early Music Society of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo and —two days later—Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfers. Oblivious to Eastern Standard Time, we tuned in to the first one an hour later, just when Orpheus is crossing the Styx, and we left the second one early ... because we'd heard the story before. But in both performances the singing was measured, stately, and haunting.     

After the second show I pulled my copy of Robert Graves' classic The Greek Myths off the shelf, and also Ann Wroe's Orpheus: the life and myth of humanity's eternal muse. There are quite a few variations to the tale, and no one seems to know exactly what any of them mean.

On another occasion we listened in on a poetry reading sponsored by Subtext Books during which Norita Dittberner-Jax and Mary Moore Easter read from recent works. In case you missed it, these two poets will be joined by Margaret Hasse and Emilio DeGrazia at Next Chapter Books on December 10 for a repeat performance. It should be a stunner. Tune in here.

The highlight of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Society's fall season has been the new documentary by Frederick Wiseman, City Hall. It follows a number of events taking place in the city of Boston, from firefighting to Veteran's Day gatherings to garbage collection to community zoning meetings. Sound dull? It's not. During the first hour we hear a little too much of mayor Marty Walsh's oratory, perhaps, but the film soon finds its pace and begins to direct its attention not only to people merely talking about doing things but also to people doing them. We watched it in installments over the course of three days,  and by the start of the fourth hour, we were hooked.

Just joking. But the film is four and a half hours long, so be prepared.

The best of the Netflix shows we've been streaming is a five-part series on dance called MOVE. Dance is not a medium of expression we explore often, but these shows are dazzling, high-energy pieces focusing on Jookin' (Florida and LA), Gaga (Israel), flamenco (Spain), Dancehall (Jamaica), and Kathak dance (England/Bangladesh).

Home-grown entertainment can also be top-flight. One Saturday evening our friends Tim and Carol put together a pub-quiz that kept us up well past our bedtime: politics, geography, and even a music round that required the identification of brief clips by Eric Satie, Neil Sedaka, and Sugar Ray (who?). Which, do you think, is the largest of these three countries: Chad, Sudan, Algeria?

The closure of bars and restaurants has been rough on proprietors and waitstaff, no doubt, but we've made it a point to explore a few new takeout options. We stopped in at the Mill Valley Market at the Trailhead in Wirth Park several times with my sister after hiking the circuit along "tornado alley" and under Highway 55 to the Wirth Lake Pavilion and back. The food there is much better than you might expect.

And the Japanese street food from PinKU, right across the steet from Surdyk's Liquor Store, is mighty fine. And just the other day Hilary discovered that a taqueria that had burned down in NE Minneapolis has relocated nearby.

Thus the days remain interesting. But it sure would be nice to see a few friends face to face, the way we used to do, sitting around a firepit, or even inside! The lockdown expires on December 18. Just in time for a solstice party?

 

Foot in the Door - At Last!

 I've been negotiating with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for quite some time, trying to get them to add some of my work to their collection. My curriculum vitae is fairly impressive, if I do say so myself, and I'm not sure why they've been dragging their feet.

- When I was five I grew a picture of a clown with a conical hat and sent it in to Highlights Magazine. Month after month, when the new issue arrived, I would turn immediately to the page with the crossword puzzle, the cryptogram, and the drawings, hoping to see my work in print at last. After a few months of such anticipation, invariably followed by ill-concealed disappointment, my mom, a talented painter in oils herself, felt it best to interject a bit of friendly criticism: "Well, it wasn't one of your better drawings."

- In third grade, a drawing of mine—a full-color rendering Crayola of a flying egret—was included in a exhibition held in the basement of a deconsecrated church in White Bear Lake, several miles from the town where I grew up. One dark night after supper my dad drove me around the lake to see it. Meh. For some reason I felt rather more embarrassed than proud to see my "work" exhibited in the midst of so many more vivid and arresting pieces.

- Yet I did somehow develop a reputation as an artist, at least to the extent that I was recruited, along with a friend of mine, to make the plaster statues for a high school production of Antigone. You can see the results here. (It's clear that at this stage in my career, I hadn't shaken Rodin's influence entirely.) 

- After performing dismally on a pre-entry math test at the University of Minnesota—our small-town high school didn't offer anything remotely resembling calculus—I dropped that subject and became a studio arts major. I must confess that I wasn't seriously considering art as a career, but you never know, and the designation made it much easier to enroll in art classes. Which I did. Tom Egerman was the most memorable of the professors I "studied" with. His work was fresh, loose, and often funny, and so was he.

After years spent in aesthetic oblivion, my career got a reboot at the art shows we used to hold after hours at the Bookmen, a warehouse where I worked for quite a few years. I organized one or two of the shows myself. There were lots of talented individuals on the staff, keeping body and soul together while they waited for their big break. We had everything on display from Gothic chainmail to farm aprons to installation art. At one of the shows I entered a couple of hand-made album covers.

When the warehouse operation folded, I applied for all sorts of jobs, in the classic bohemian style, but before long I became involved in editing and designing books. As I honed my "style" in a serious way, I began to contemplate the next big step: the state fair art show. Trouble was, this thought would occur to me only when I was AT the state fair art show. Always too late.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when I got an email from the MIA soliciting my work for its "Foot in the Door" show. I hope you realize I wasn't the ONLY one to receive such an invitation; anyone who sends in a piece will be accepted, as long as the artwork is one foot square. And you might complain that I didn't give my entry as much thought as I should have, considering how long I'd been waiting: I sent in the screen-saver from my computer monitor.  But what's done is done, and I've learned over the years that the first impulse is often the best one.

The MIA holds a foot-in-the-door event every five years, and I've been to most of them as an appreciative art-lover on the lookout for people I know, both in the crowd and up on the wall. The new digital event doesn't have the same buzz, but it does have its advantages. For one thing, you can see the art better, because each piece is right in front of you rather than ten feet above your head. Also, presuming you have a nice 30-inch screen like mine, the pieces have that wonderful digital luminescence that enhances many, if not all, works of art. On the other hand, the webpage loads only twenty or thirty pieces at a time, and when you ask it to load more, it just slips a few more rows onto the bottom of the array. And once you click on a work to examine it more closely, it seems to disappear from the array entirely.

All the same, if you want to add a little color and whimsy to your life, these vivid and arresting works are sure to please. 

Why not take a look?  Link  

 

Fall Birding

 

Fall birding is a different kettle of fish.

You don't expect to see much, because there won't be much there

and you've already seen a lot anyway.

A few flashy warblers? Let's face it: none.

I would like to have seen a golden eagle or a goshawk at Hawk Ridge.

It could happen. But no such luck.

We did see a pipit on the sidewalk in front of the Java Moose in

Grand Marias.  Equally good. Haven't seen one in ages.

Birding is an act of unexpected sensuous immediacy, but lurking in the underbrush

is the desire to see something new—for this year, at least.

The fox sparrows have been moving through the yard. They scrape vigorously

amid the leaves, and I know what they're thinking:

"This would be a lot easier if I had arms."

The distinctive call of the white-throated sparrow

is now a feeble, half-hearted whistle. But give him credit:

he's the only one still trying.

We drove down to the river this morning—the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge.

Lots of geese and coots, with trumpeter swans in the distance.

A young birder standing nearby helped us locate a few pintails

on the fringe of the cattails a hundred yards upriver.

Elegant birds.  It's been years since I saw one.

"There are some pied-billed grebes nearby," I said.

"How can you tell?" he said. "They all look like coots."

"Longer neck, lower in the water, squarish head, comically proud. Often alone.

And maybe you can see a little crook in the beak."

"Oh yeah. I see him."

We thanked each other for the tips.

The visit concluded with a smattering of sparrows

flitting here and there through the underbrush, and

a cluster of green-winged teal amid the mallards

in a backwater near the trail.

Then a stop at Patrick's Bakery for croissants and coffee

in a backwater east of Southdale.

Apartment buildings everywhere.

Geese flying overhead.   

North Shore Getaway

The North Shore is always an inviting prospect, though during the summer months it's often thick with tourists (like us). But Hilary's brother told us about a house in the woods above Caribou Lake, a few miles east of Lutsen, that he and his wife, Mary, had booked for five days in late July. We took a look at the website. Though it was a few notches above our normal price range, it looked very nice. The first available dates, however, were in mid-October. Not a bad thing, either. We booked it, telling ourselves we needed a few things to look forward to once the cold weather set in. 

The drive up was windy but uneventful. The lunch line at the Northern Waters Smokehaus on Lake Avenue in Duluth was too long, and we were content to eat some take-out ribs from Famous Dave's, right across the street, while watching the choppy water in the inner harbor from the comfort of a parking lot out on Park Point. 

Ten pine siskins feeding in a tree

The raptor traffic up on Hawk Ridge was negligible due to the high winds. No matter. We went for a walk along the waterfront in Two Harbors and came upon a huge flock of pine siskins, feeding furiously amid the cones high up in a clump of spruce trees. 

We pulled in to our "cabin" (actually a house) a few minutes after the 4 p.m. check-in time, and I almost immediately spotted two grouse feeding on berries or buds twenty feet up in a tree, off in the woods but directly in front of the window. We set up two plastic Adirondack chairs on the shore of the lake and watched the fading sunlight streak across the clouds on the far side of the bay. 

The stars that night were intense, riveting. We felt lucky to be seeing them, knowing that gray weather was likely to be moving in overnight. 

Morning light was gray. We got out into the day early, driving a few miles up the shore to Cascade State Park. One car in the parking lot. Hiking up along the west side of the river, we come upon the first falls almost immediately. Each North Shore river has its own distinctive character—Gooseberry, Temperance, Baptism, Little Marais—and for me the Cascade River possesses the most Asian feel, perhaps because the wooden bridges seem ancient and the overhanging cedars evoke the mood of Chinese scroll paintings. 

Cold air in the lungs, pine scent in the nostrils, we moved up the trail above the fast-moving water. We passed no one during our hike other than a single grouse who was in no hurry to remove himself from the path. 

We spent the rest of the day inside, playing cribbage, listening to the gentle rain on the metal eaves of the house, and reading. I found myself reviewing a paperback introduction to Greek thought, focusing my attention, for no reason that I can think of now, of Aristotle's concept of God as the unmoved mover. The author, Guthrie, does his best to make the idea sound attractive. 

The conception of God as unmoved—or unchanging— and pure form, unsatisfactory as it remains, for several reasons, to the religious mind, is not quite so cold and static as it appears at first sight. As pure actuality he is, though exempt from kinesis, eternally active with an activity which brings no fatigue but is forever enjoyable. His essential quality is life.

It follows that God's activity is to think his own universal perfection. Guthrie continues: 

Wrapped in eternal self-contemplation, he calls forth by his mere presence the latent powers of nature, which strive in their various ways to achieve form and carry out their proper activities, thus imitating in their own particular spheres the one pure form and eternally active being. God does not go out to the world, but the world cannot help going out to him. That is their relationship, summed up in another pregnant phrase: ‘He moves as the object of desire.’ 

Something to ponder as the fresh fish we bought in Duluth are frying in the pan. 

I was less taken with the views expressed by translator David Hinton in his new book, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. I own quite a few of Hinton's translations. They're good. Here he tries to take us deeper, reproducing the Chinese characters to illustrate how unlike Western sentence construction the Chinese original often is. This is interesting up to a point, but the result is that time and again Hinton suggests that the clear and vivid images we often find (and love) in Tang poetry actually refer to a deeper Taoist truth, which he describes in the introduction as follows:

The concepts of Absence and Presence are simply an approach to the fundamental nature of things. In the end, of course, they are the same: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is therefore always a manifestation of it. Or to state it more precisely, Absence and Presence are simply different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms. 

But consider these lines: 

Amid spring mountain, alone, I set out to find you. 

Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery deepens. 

Hinton devotes almost a page of analysis to the phrase "quiet mystery deepens." He tells us that the Chinese character actually means “quiet solitude.” and admits that such a reading would be "sufficient as a description of the empty-mind opened by the perceptual clarity of his walk." But Hinton wants to dig deeper.

Appearing often in recluse poetry,[the idiogram] infuses the surface meaning “quiet solitude” with rich philosophical depths, beginning with the sense of “dark /  secret / hidden / mystery”; and that leads finally to the term's deepest level, which animates the whole cosmological process of tzu-jan. Here it means forms, the ten thousand things, barely on the not-yet-emergent side of the origin-moment: just as they are about to emerge from the formless ground of Absence, or just after they vanish back into that ground." 

He continues on in this vein for thirteen lines, using phrases such as "all-encompassing generative present" and "occurrence burgeoning steadily forth." All of this totally obscures, for me at any rate, the experience being described—the sound of wood being chopped, which, when it ceases, leaves us hearing the silence, wondering if the chopping will recommence and then becoming aware of ourselves, out in the woods as time passes, focused on a sound we do not hear, on nothing. Or everything? Or the nothing of everything? 

The phrase "quiet mystery" is entirely adequate to the occasion; anything more ruins the effect. 

At one point in the afternoon we walked down to the lake for a breath of fresh air. It had started to snow, tiny white crystals, well-spaced, dry, and harmless, almost like laundry detergent shaken from a box. 

------- 

Hilary woke me up at 3 the next morning. "John. The stars are out!" We went out onto the deck in pajamas and slippers, crunching across a fine layer of snow. The big dipper was there above the bare branches of a clump of aspens. The Pleiades was now overhead and Cygnus was riding the Milky Way. Within half a minute I saw a fine shooting star streak down toward the horizon, leaving a glowing tail.

And then I chose a star, any star, and tried to convince myself that was real, a burning orb at an unfathomable distance; that the space that separated us was real. In my mind's eye, I even attempted to step to the side to "get some perspective" on that distance, as if I were looking across a landscape at a distant rise and trying to imagine how long it would take to walk there. And suddenly the universe takes on dimension, if only for a few seconds. The vast spaces in between. The perspective is far from accurate but it's awesome just the same. Vertiginous. That's the effect I was looking for, beyond the canopy of pinholes, beyond the badly shaped mythological figures, fatalistic and frightening, yet also invigorating: the depths of space, summoning a primitive, cleansing frisson. 

A few hours later we were up again and plotting the day's activities. The cabin lies only a few hundred yards from the Superior Hiking Trail, and we'd always presumed we'd head west along that trail to Agnes Lake and beyond during out visit. But we've done that hike before. It's basically a walk through deep woods, which would be shaded and perhaps muddy. So we decided to focus on two hikes near Grand Marais that were new to us, and more likely to include stretches of open country. 

On a frigid Thursday morning in October, the town of Grand Marias is quiet. Yet the line in front of the World's Most Famous Donut Shop was still too long for our liking. We parked nearby and walked back to the Java Moose for coffee, but it was closed. We watched an American pipit hop around on the sidewalk in front of the café for a few minutes. That was a treat! 

And the coffee at the local co-op was just fine. Whenever we shop there—or at any co-op—I feel I'm part of a sacred guild. Not one of the inner circle, perhaps. But we do have a number at the Wedge. The New Age magazines on sale next to the cash register look ridiculous. I wouldn't want to buy one. But I sort of believe in it. Love, peace, happiness.

Our first hike took us to the top of Sweetheart Bluff. The trailhead is located in the municipal campground, which I had always considered the antithesis of genuine North Woods experience. (But as we drove through the grounds I noticed they have a number of pretty nice tent sites near the lake.) The hike was easy and the views of Grand Marais Harbor from the broad slab of open rock at the top were fine. The vegetation was moist, the sun was coming in low, and the colors were rich.

Along the way we ran into a woman who was visiting her brother in the local hospital. "My kids say I'm hippying it," she said. "I'm sleeping in my van."

 

"It was sort of a cold night," I said vaguely. 

"Don't I know it. I was freezing," she said. "I'm going to buy another sleeping bag today." 

"Try the Ben Franklin," I said. "They have everything." 

But that hike was merely a prelude to our next venture—a two-mile hike through the woods to Pincushion Mountain. The trail starts at the cross-country skiing lot at the top of the rise behind Grand Marias. It's basically flat, and the numerous stretches of boardwalk along the route look to be almost brand-new. After an hour of easy walking you come to an enormous whale-like lump of rock erupting from the forest—many times larger than Carleton Peak, for example. After scrambling thirty feet up the face of the rock, you find yourself on a sunny, windy expanse dotted here and there with individual trees. The seaward view is magnificent, but the inland view is staggering.

On our drive home the next morning we made an impromptu stop at Caribou Creek, which may be the niftiest half-mile hike on the North Shore. The parking lot used to be treacherous, especially in winter. The driveway dropped precipitously from the highway, and when it was packed with snow there was no telling where you'd end up on the way down. Meanwhile, there was no place to alight on the way up before careering out onto the highway.

Someone has fixed all that, and the entry is now handsomely landscaped and perfectly level. The hike up to the gorge is easy, and the gorge itself is impressive. But what moved me most on this occasion was the grouse Hilary spotted on the way up--our seventh of the trip. It stood stock still as we watched it through binoculars. Photographs can hardly do justice to the richness of its varied markings. The back of the neck has an Escher-like checkerboard complexity that becomes more subtle and featherly lower down, while the flanks are marked with bold black stripes. As I looked at its array of features in the soft early-morning light, I said to myself, "That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

   

The Club

 At a time when it's become more difficult for us to make use of that "third space" in social life between work and home—the gym, the bar, the restaurant, the church—readers may find it worthwhile to spend some time at one of the most eminent gathering places of the eighteenth century. I'm referring to that social group known to its members as simply The Club. Unlike most gentleman's clubs in eighteenth-century London, the Club had neither a fancy name nor membership dues nor a building to call its own. It met every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern, and it's members had no other thought in mind than to dine, drink, and converse until midnight and beyond.

What makes it worthy of our attention is its roster, which included eminent men from several walks of life. Alongside the two men who founded the club—painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and man of letters Samuel Johnson—it included such luminaries as economist Adam Smith, playwright Richard Sheridan, historian Edward Gibbon, actor David Garrick, and statesman Edmund Burke. James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson has long since become a classic, was also a member, and he also figures prominently in the narrative.

The book is vastly informative and also a pleasure to read, though readers ought to be forewarned about what kind of a history lies in store. The Club is not an intellectual history of the type that evaluates the contributions made by the individuals involved to the advancement of their respective disciplines, on the order of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Nor is it a social history, describing the changing tastes, norms, and mores of the era as exemplified by these collegial but disparate men. And strange to say, very little of the book is taken up with reproducing or imaginatively reconstructing conversations that might have taken place at the Turk's Head.

What Damrisch gives us is a series of "brief lives," highlighting the moments when those lives intersect but also delving amply into the meat of each individual story, while making no claim to originality with respect to determining the significance of any of them. Yes, The Rivals and She Stoops to Conquer are funny plays. Yes, The Wealth of Nations is a landmark work of economic theory. Yes, The Decline and Fall had a profound effect on how people of the time thought about Christianity. But Damrosch seems more interested in the love lives, the dining room bon mots, and the rising (and falling) fortunes of his protagonists than in the abiding relevance of their masterworks.

The "star" around which the narrative unfolds is Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson

But that star is a binary star, because much of what we know about Johnson's private life and career comes to us by way of the exhaustive journals of his young and sycophantic friend  James Boswell. Nowadays no one but an academic is likely to be reading Johnson's picaresque moral tale Rasselas, or his Lives of the Poets, or even his once-famous dictionary. His fame depends largely on the portrait drawn of him by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. By all accounts Johnson was an argumentative but tender-hearted curmudgeon who lived in poverty, suffered from depression, was unhappily married to an opium addict, and spent as much time as he could away from home. He is well-known for such one-liners as "Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Or "Wine gives a man nothing ... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost." Or "Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel." Or "Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them very little."

Women do play a significant role in the narrative, prominent among them Hester Thrale, the wife of an enormously wealthy brewer. She invited Johnson and his friends to many lavish dinners and even seems to have acted as a sometime counselor to his nightmares and warden to his most deviant impulses. Also present at these dinners were bluestocking Lady Montague and novelist Fanny Burney, the daughter of pioneering musicologist Charles Burney. Drawing on the private journals of these and other members of the Thrale's social set, Damrosch paints a vivid portrait of a heady social environment in which wealth and social status went hand in hand, as did patronage and artistic reputation. Sir Joshua Reynolds made a fortune painting portraits of the rich; Boswell inherited a fortune; Burke borrowed heavily to maintain the lifestyle of a distinguished MP, and so on.    

Dr. Johnson was never well off himself.  Hence his famous remark: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Then again, he also remarked: "Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments."

With the passing years more individuals were elected to join the Club, few of them well-known today, and Johnson attended less often, but very little of the book actually focuses on the meetings themselves, and it hardly matters. Damrosch has fashioned a series of lively portraits, and he's included such outliers as the rabble-rouser John Wilkes, philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli, in the mix. The result is a free-flowing and affectionate essay full of witty remarks, telling anecdotes, and shrewd observations. Damrosch doesn't aim to be comprehensive or deep, but he knows how to weave a complicated tale artfully, and every page of this book is interesting.     

Biking Lanesboro - Again

We see our friends Don and Sherry maybe three or four times a year. Once in December for a whirlwind holiday evening of conversation, once in May for a bike trip ostensibly in celebration of our birthdays, all of which happen to fall within a stretch from late March to mid-May, some sort of summer event, and a grand occasion in the fall when we indulge in a two-day biking extravaganza, usually around World Series time.

It doesn't sound like much, but we've been doing it for 35 years. There is no way, at this late date, to pin down exactly how many years it's been, but it seems to me we've never missed a year, and as I think back on the places we've stayed overnight during those fall weekends, it begins to sound impressive. Our Wisconsin bivoucs have included Trempealeau, Alma, Fountain City, Wilton, Eau Claire, Menomonie, River Falls,  Chippewa Falls, New Post, Dresser, Bayfield, and Bailey's Harbor. Our Minnesota adventures have included overnights in Duluth, Little Falls, Nisswa, Sauk Center, Dundas, and Lanesboro.

Many of these settings are associated in my mind with a particular scene or event, which is perhaps the only reason I remember we were there.

In Trempealeau,  the wedding at sundown out on the lawn with young women in strapless gowns and near-freezing conditions, with the floodlights of the barges coming through the lock just beyond the "hotel"; the creaky springs on the narrow bed and the bathroom down the hall that made you feel like you were in an outtake from the TV show Maverick.

In Alma, the room where the window screens were ripped, and you could hear the claws of the hunting dogs scraping against the wooden floor out in the hall as the duck hunters retired after a long night at the bar just below.

At a budget motel in Wilton, the mid-point of the Sparta-Elroy Trail, where we were given the wrong  key and accidentally made the acquaintance of a young couple who were definitely done biking for the day.

On a subsequent visit to the same trail we stayed at a farm quite a ways out in the country and were charmed by the host couple, whose sweet daughter, that very evening, had been crowned the "cranberry queen" of the region.

 In Eau Claire, we agreed to meet up "downtown," having no idea how convoluted the layout of that town really is due to the meanders of the Chippewa River.

In River Falls, we stayed in the suburban home of a Christian couple who, when they heard I worked with books, showed me a rare volume from the eighteenth century that they'd inherited. I might have said, "I'll give you $100 for it, no questions asked." But instead, I said, "I think you should contact the James Ford Bell Library at the U of M. They specialize in that kind of thing."

It might seem that Wisconsin locations are over-represented here, until you factor in all the times we established our bourgeois base camp in that quaint and appealing Root River town of Lanesboro. 

 Why Lanesboro? Two branches of the Root River flow through it, it has two theaters, restaurants in every zone from a counter-service pizza place to a one-seating establishment where they serve crostini topped with flying fish roe, a small but top-flight local art gallery,  60 miles of bike trails, Amish farmers selling quilts and pies in the city park with their horses tethered nearby, a genuine livestock market every Friday, a first-rate wild bird store up in the hills just west of town, and a wide variety of affordable accommodations.

If memory serves, over the years we have spent a night at the Scanlon House B&B, two years at the Hilltop B&B, at least three years at the Cottage House Inn, and one year at the Stone Mill Inn.

Whatever the lodgings happen to be, the fall weekends in Lanesboro tend to take the same shape, year after year. We arrive at the Ladig residence at 9:30 sharp, just as Don is loading the bikes into their van. Fifteen minutes later we're entering the Dunn Brothers on Snelling and Grand to pick up some coffee and pastries. From there it's roughly a three hour drive down Highway 52 through Cannon Falls, Rochester, Chatfield, and Fountain, to our destination.

We usually ride upstream that afternoon and downstream the next morning. The trail follows the Root River much of the way, with a few narrow canyons and quite a few bridges. I often make a suggestion before we head out: why not eat our picnic here in town; then we won't have to pack everything onto our bikes. This notion is invariably dismissed out of hand, and wisely so. It's not such a big deal to pack up our fixings, and it's always a pleasure to stop at a picnic table forty-five minutes up the trail, unfurl the India-print tapestry  tablecloth from Depth of Field that we're been using since our very first trip on the Luce Line more than three decades ago, and set out all the goodies. We used to make an effort to coordinate the menu, but now we just bring stuff—cheeses, salami, crackers, horseradish, cookies—confident that we'll cover most of the bases and no one will starve.

For our recent excursion Sherry booked two rooms at Mrs.B's, Lanesboro's oldest hotel, established in 1875. The layout of the building—its narrow hall, steep staircase, and smallish rooms—give you the impression that it's always been a hotel or a boarding house. Hilary and I ate there once many years ago, and since that time I've associated the place with ornate wallpaper, potpourris in every room, baskets full of yarn in every corner, and vintage needlework on the wall.

The building has changed hands at least three times since then, and the current owner, Trish, a middle-aged woman with seemingly boundless energy, has modernized it thoroughly while retaining just the right amount of "vintage" charm—very comfortable but not over-stuffed. In response to the pandemic, Trish has lowered her rates and no longer serves breakfast, which is also a plus in my opinion.

Two Audubon prints, expertly framed, hung from the wall of our second-story room. The single window, deep-set in the thick limestone walls, looked south down Main Street across the bike trail toward a canoe-rental outfit, the local historical museum, and in the distance, the city park. Though small, it had a built-in corner fireplace that you could "ignite" with a remote.

To my mind, the great challenge of the weekend would lie in finding something to do after dinner. On a normal trip we might sit around playing cards, drinking booze of various types, and (occasionally) trying to annoy one another with our falsetto Neil Young imitations. Then again, we might have gotten tickets to Commonwealth Theater, where we've seen quite a few plays together over the years, including the British comedy/romance, Enchanted April, Henrik Ibsen's last play, When We the Dead Awaken, and most memorably Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The Covid virus rendered those indoor options unattractive or unavailable, but we devised perhaps an equally good one: sitting around a table on the patio behind the hotel thirty feet above the Root River with a half-full bottle of Grand Marnier that Sherry had brought along. 

During the evening we continued to unwind the strands of conversations about family, music, food, and books that we'd initiated out on the trail, and started a few new ones, while wandering only occasionally into the world of politics, where we're all in perfect agreement about the deficiencies and dangers of the current administration. 

There was no need to revive old standards like "Sugar Mountain" and "Cinnamon Girl": it was open-mike night  in the parking lot behind the High Court Pub midway down the alley, with a live back-up band! The only song I recognized was "Johnny B Goode," but the gathering was far enough away that it lent a pleasant background to our own conversation.

I remember a single starling squawking from a wire far about our heads in fading light, and, as darkness descended, a quarter-moon hung high in the sky to the south, with Jupiter and Saturn trailing behind it to the east. Just as we were getting up to go inside—yes, by that time the bottle was empty—a couple emerged from the darkness of the alley. It was Trish and her boyfriend, Greg, who had been playing in the band. We extended our compliments and they invited us to the house party taking place the next evening, giving us detailed instructions about how to get there. In the midst of their enthusiasm, I didn't have the heart to interrupt them with the news that we would be leaving town the next morning.

The next morning was sunny, cool, and crisp, and Hilary and I sat on two Adirondack chairs on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, watching the world go by. Several livestock trucks passed by, and also a delivery truck with an enormous advertisement painted on the side for Kinky Blue and Pink liqueurs. Ugh. The driver made an impressive U-turn in the middle of the block—not much traffic at that time of day—and disappeared from sight into the loading dock of the liquor store.

A few minutes later a fit-looking retiree with a carefully groomed stubble took the chair next to mine. We talked about campgrounds—he owns a vintage Scamp—and about the hotels in Duluth. He told us that at one time he was part-owner of a sailing vessel docked at Indian Point, a mile or two up the St. Louis River from the harbor. "We would take it once a year up to Isle Royale, Thunder Bay, and beyond," he said.

"I take it you're not referring to just a thirty-foot craft," I said.

"Oh, no," he replied. "It was 150 feet long." And he went on to describe the sails and the rigging in some detail, using terminology most of which I was not familiar with.

"On its final voyage, some of the owners decided to sail it to England," he said. "They sailed too close to Greenland, got trapped in pack ice, and had to be rescued by a Danish shrimp boat. Our boat sank."       

A few minutes later Don and Sherry appeared, well scrubbed and smiling, and we made our way on foot to the Home Sweet Home café at the other end of Main Street—that is to say, two blocks away. We ate an excellent breakfast al fresco and were soon on the trail again, chatting and pedaling. The morning was perfect for cycling, though the bike traffic was heavier than the previous afternoon. 

The leaves were just beginning to turn, showing quite a bit of yellow but few reds beyond the low-lying tangles of sumac and Virginia creeper. We passed a gravel pit with some impressive piles of sand, spotted a family sunbathing on the far side of the river, and also noticed an abandoned railroad bridge beyond a cornfield that looked worthy of further investigation on some future occasion.

Two hours and twenty miles later, we were back in town, saying our goodbyes and hoisting our bikes onto our vehicles. An ice cream cone before departure? No. The line was too long.     

 

Fall Equinox Birdbath

It was one of those almost somnambulant fall days. A few days before the equinox, in fact.

Friends were coming over for an afternoon visit on the deck. Sad to say, such events will soon be less frequent, shorter, harder to arrange. One couple we know  has purchased outdoor propane heaters to keep their social alive through the coming season. We've done a little research along those lines ourselves.

I had made an early morning run to Trader Joe's, taking advantage of their Sunday morning "old folks" hour. I was impressed to discover that they had the Musak tuned to the "old folks" station, too. I was greeted at the door by a song from the seminal Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album Deja Vu. "Carry On," I think. Then it was "Green Eyed Lady" by Sugarloaf.

I was home by 8:30 with two bags full of produce: peppers for the salsa, fruit that would be easy to serve without touching, blue corn chips full of mystical desert power. The cashier was—by Trader Joe's standards—unusually reserved. He got out two brown bags immediately, making it clear he wanted to bag the items himself, and stayed hunched behind the plexiglass shield the whole time. I don't blame him.  While I waited for him to finish the job I studied the huge map of Lake Minnetonka on the far wall, trying to memorize the municipalities and bays—Lower Lake, Chubbs Bay, Tonka Bay, Minnetrista, Deephaven, Shorewood—while I grooved to "Who'll Stop the Rain."

By noon Hilary had cleaned the bathroom, swept the deck, and chopped the various ingredients for the salsa.  I had watered the compost pile and turned the leaves with a pitchfork; we're going to need more room in there soon. I also got out a ladder from the garage and repaired two holes in the gutter—created by me with an ice pick years ago—using duct tape and silicon sealer. I've done it several times before. Nothing seems to work for long.

While I was out in the garden I stopped to admire the white turtleheads that, modest though they may be, are currently its chief glory. They look feeble all summer, crowded out by the expansive bleeding hearts. Now the bleeding-hearts are mostly dead, and they shine above the violets and hostas that have been eaten down dramatically by the rabbits.

Most gardeners would not be impressed.

I was relaxing with a game or two of free cell on the computer when I heard a call from the other room: "John, there's a redstart in the birdbath!" A few warblers pass through the woods behind our house every fall, but they rarely come anywhere near the deck.

It was a female, less dramatic but more attractive than the male. She had an unusual way of dealing with the water in the bath. She would fly over it, moving from one lip of the basin to the other, dipping in very slightly or not at all. It was hard to tell.

Eventually she took a plunge directly into the pool. She didn't splash much, but she lingered at various points around the birdbath for at least five minutes.

This has been one of the great discoveries of this very odd summer: how much more popular a bird bath is when located on the deck rather than out in the yard. I suppose the protection provided by the nearby shrubs far outweighs the longer sightlines available out in the yard, where a cooper's hawk can swoop in out of nowhere.

We made this discovery entirely by accident when we brought the birdbath up from the basement last spring. I don't remember why we set it on the deck. Maybe we hadn't uncovered the garden yet. In any case, we put some water in it and the birds seemed to like it. Four or five cardinals sometimes jostle for position, and when a blue jay or a robin hops in to rustle his or her wings, it's quite a show.