A New Perspective

I attributed the sudden jolts of pain I was feeling to a flurry of semi-strenuous biking, first through the fields and woods at Elm Creek Regional Park, and a few days later down the big hill on Wirth Parkway, around the pavilion at Wirth Lake, and back. Nothing out of the ordinary, yet a few minutes after that second ride, I felt a horrible pain deep in my upper leg, hip, or gluteus maximus—I'm no expert in anatomy. It jabbed me so fiercely that I couldn't put any weight on that leg at all. When I adjusted my posture slightly, the pain vanished. But avoiding that particular flex of the joint made walking very difficult.  For the last four or five days I've been going heavy on the ibuprofen, wearing muscle-relaxing menthol patches, and walking around hunched over like an old man, grabbing onto every chair and counter-top I can find.

In fact, I haven't been walking around much at all.

I spent the morning Sunday, when the jabs were at their worst, sitting in my portable camp chair out on the deck in the cool crisp sunny air, which had been refreshed by the previous day's rains.  Seeking a position of maximum shadow, I chose a spot on the deck where I'd never sat before, on the landing heading down the steps to the yard. It's a silly place to sit; the landing is only three feet square. But I found that from that perspective the neighbor's houses are entirely blocked from view by foliage, which is nice, and I'm also much closer to the greenery in the yard. You can't see the garden from here, but that's also nice. It looks pretty ragged these days, and also somewhat chomped down by the deer and rabbits.

Yes, the ligularia are blooming now, but they're less robust than they were a few years ago. We seldom fertilize, and two years of drought have also taken their toll. Maybe that's just the way of all plants—to lose their vigor and peter out.

One further virtue of this spot was that it afforded a view of both the trees and the sky in roughly equal measure. At one point I looked up to see a tiger swallowtail fluttering amid the highest branches of the silver maple that dominates our back yard "woods," moving at remarkable speed in a seemingly random series of sudden lurches without crashing into anything.

On a little table at my side were three books: a collection of essays by the French philosopher Pierre Badiou called Infinite Thought, a very short book by the nineteenth century novelist Alphonse Daudet called In the Land of Pain, and a book by art critic Jed Perl titled Authority and Freedom. I might almost say that I chose them at random, but you know as well as I do that isn't how it works. No. You comb the shelves looking for something to read and this or that title "jumps out" at you. You "respond" to it. "Yes, this is the perfect thing," you say. "If not for ever, then at least for right now."

Only time will tell. But exploring such affinities is what keeps life moving ahead,  enriches us, and, yes, makes us happy.

On page two of the introduction to Infinite Thought I hit upon an interesting passage. According to the commentator, Badiou divides life into two realms, ethics and truth, and further subdivides experience into four spheres or categories—art, love, politics, and science. This scheme resembles that of the Italian philosopher and statesman Benedetto Croce, who divides life into thought (truth) and action (ethics). Croce's more detailed set of distinctions includes four "moments of spirit," each of which corresponds to a value—beauty, truth, utility, and goodness.

I have little doubt that Croce's handling of these concepts is more rigorous than Badiou's, but the Frenchman might turn out to be more fun to read, and his points of cultural reference will undoubtedly be more up-to-date. Glancing at the index, I noted that Badiou never mentions Croce, though he does refer to Wes Craven, a film director best known for Nightmare on Elm Street.

The trouble with such ad hoc reading programs is that I seldom get very far. The sky had gone to a gauzy gray, the neighbor's wind chimes started acting up, a robin began to cluck, and a chuckling goldfinch began to circle the neighborhood. Soon a great-crested fly-catcher arrived in the neighbor's yard. I didn't see him, but I could hear his defiant war-hoop.

Foregoing the translator's introduction, I opened one of Badiou's essays and soon came upon the following remark:

"Every truth that accepts its dependence in regard to narrative and revelation is still detailed in mystery; philosophy exists to tear the latter's veil."

For myself, I'd be content to stick with the narrative and revelation. Such devices or vessels "hold" the truth quite well, and it's much easier to drink from them.

So I turned to Jed Perl's defense of the arts, Authority and Freedom. But I couldn't help asking myself, "What is Perl defending art against?" In any case, authority and freedom make odd bed-fellows. Artists are basically free by nature—aren't we all?—and they've never been much concerned about authority. It's the critics and historians who want to assert their authority, struggling to establish or defend a canon, and so on.

It occurred to me that Perl seemed to be treading a path laid out long ago by T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Which I have never read.

Off to the bookshelves I went to fetch a book of Eliot's essays. My collection didn't have that essay, but "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" caught my eye, and thumbing through it out on the deck I came upon a few nuggets of wisdom.

"The pursuit of politics is incompatible with a strict attention to exact meanings on all occasions."

"Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake."

"One symptom of the decline of culture in Britain is indifference to the art of preparing food. Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living."

"What we believe is not merely what we formulate and subscribe to ... Behavior is also belief ... Even the most conscious and developed of us live also at the level on which belief and behavior cannot be distinguished."

Eliot's analysis is unequivocally a defense of Christianity, but he is so careful to discount anything that smacks of peremptory theology, empty piety, or mere ecclesiastical display that his argument, such as it is, begins to take on a Zen-like air, as in this elliptical remark:

"The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications ... It holds good only in the sense in which people are unconscious of both their culture and their religion."

Thus did I wile away the day, almost as if I'd been at a cabin staring out at the boundless horizon of Lake Superior. Hilary joined me often, knitting at the table at the other end of the deck, and sometimes heading down into the yard to pick up sticks or tend to some ailing plant. Late in the afternoon we went inside to cook up some Thai meatballs, though standing upright long enough to mince two or three cloves of garlic was all I could do the contribute.

We got the meatballs out of a bag in the freezer, which moved things along. The sauce consisted of a potent mix of hoisin, rice vinegar, chili-garlic sauce, oyster sauce, fresh ginger, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, and quite a bit of brown sugar. The recipe, though Asian in flavor, came from a cookbook written by a woman from Bayfield.

Here's That Rainy Day

It's a song from the postwar period, I think. It starts like this:

"Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams

Funny but here's that rainy day" 

The song is a lovelorn lament, of course. But I was looking forward to the rain, and so was everyone else. We were long overdue for a hearty soaking. Severe thunderstorms were predicted here and there, but for the most part just a gray, wet Saturday afternoon—the perfect time to hole up with a book that I might otherwise have returned to the library, unread.

But now one of my own "leftover dreams" resurfaces. It came to me as a book caught my eye that I'd purchased recently at Magers & Quinn —The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness. I haven't read it cover to cover--haven't read it much at all--but the gist of it is pithily summarized by Steven Pinker in one of the blurbs:  "A brilliant analysis of a major new phenomenon: that people care more about how stuff looks." The book came out in 2003, the pages are yellowing. (I only paid a dollar for it.) But I thought it might offer an interesting snapshot of the era when people were first seduced by the sleek lines and high density plastic of Apple products, for example.

But is this anything new?  For the last forty years at least, some segments of the population have been avidly buying and selling "vintage" artifacts from the 40s and 50s. Evidently that era has a style of its own—maybe three or four. Further examples—deco, art nouveau, Arts and Crafts—could be adduced ad infinitum.

The author, Virginia Postrel, knows this, or course. She knows quite a bit about the history of industrial design, and the efforts made by crafts people and designers to beautify things prior to our consumerist age. But she's driving at a different point:

To say that the 1920s were an age of aesthetics is true in some sense, just as it is true that the 1850s were an age of telecommunica­tions, thanks to the telegraph, and the early 1960s an era of comput­ers, thanks to the mainframe. But everyday life feels very different when such developments are still mostly the province of a knowl­edgeable or wealthy elite. Pervasiveness matters.  

But are the things on sale at Walmart today really that much more attractive than what we find in a Sears catalog from 1902? Maybe not. In any case, it's clear that Postrel is far more interested in those styles that are supported by the expanding affluence of the later twentieth century than in aesthetic values per se. We might "like" the toaster or vase we just bought at Target or Pottery Barn or Conrans, but would anyone actually call it beautiful?

Maybe what intrigued me about the book was simply the association of the two words in the title, style and substance. They usually stand opposed to each other. One is by definition something solid and even weighty, while the other is almost by definition superficial and flighty. "Oh, that is SO last week!" as the saying goes.

In the midst of this train of thought I was reminded of a drawing class I took as a freshman in college. The instructor, Tom Eggerman, required that we read an essay by the artist and illustrator Ben Shawn called "The Shape of Content." I don't remember what Shawn wrote, but I do remember that Eggerman, with his bald head, wry sense of humor, and thick, sandy mustache, gave the game away in class when he said: "The shape of content is form. Isn't that a great formula?"

The substance of style? The shape of content? Even the concept of form leaves open the question of good form versus bad form. Classical simplicity or baroque excess? We're getting a little metaphysical here, which is fine by me. But beyond the demographics of marketing strategies and style trends lies the work of art itself, beautiful and unique, elusive and inexplicable. 

How do we recognize it? We feel it. It captures, in one way or another, the spirit and truth of the life we're living, without actually giving it a name.

The afternoon storm turned out to be mildly thunderous but intermittent—patches of moderate rainfall but no thrashing trees or upturned trash cans. During the heaviest cloudburst the sun was actually shining across the street.

The plants are happy, no doubt. But I was hoping for a little more darkness and drama. (Am I longing for winter already?)

At one point I picked up a slim volume of poems by William Matthews and read one in which he describes golfing with his father, who is stung repeatedly by a swarm of wasps, but insists on completing the round. 

The last stanza goes like this:

I played to keep my father company.

"They're cells. The nest is the real animal."

I pictured their papery cone and tried

to think what the dark surge wasps pass from each

to each inside might be except the fierce

electricity of state, or family.

  

Bastille Day Meditations

There are times when things just fall into place, like the tumblers in a lock. You don't really have a key, but a rosy weekend opens to view nevertheless. 

Last Thursday night,  having consumed a hearty serving (or two) of chicken tagine with sliced lemons on couscous and a glass (or two) of côte du Rhone, while listening to a jazz trio called Tethered Moon perform a six-minute rendition of Edith Piaf's "L'accordíoniste," I was struck once again by the beauty and richness of the world we live in. Bastille Day is dedicated to such feelings, though  this year it almost escaped my attention. 

I know what you're going to say. "Beauty? Richness? Don't you follow the news?" 

To which I would answer, "Sometimes, but not always, and especially not on a weekend like this one."

Like everyone else, I'm aware that people are dying in Ukraine, while also staunchly defending their freedoms, supported by the US and the European community. I'm aware that inflation is at a forty-year high, though I also remember that moment, forty years ago, when Hilary and I bought a house with a fourteen percent reverse-mortgage interest rate. Somehow the world kept spinning and things worked out.

(I'm also aware that on Thursday the markets shrugged off the bad inflation news, and that sounds like good news to me.)

In any case, on Bastille Day, we put such things as real estate and market trends, and even the horrors of war aside. I'd rather read about the mustard shortage in France.

We sit in awe of the photos transmitted from the James Webb telescope, while also noting that they look a lot like scenes from Star Wars films. Yes, I know. These are real, in a manner of speaking, and scientists are going to learn a lot from them about how the universe we live in arose.

I think that's tremendous. But I was also deeply in awe a few nights ago, while camping at Glacial Lake State Park, to see a near-full moon low in the sky at 3 a.m. with Saturn hanging tremendously bright to the south east, just below Pegasus.

I'm waiting for the metaphysicians to tell us what the word "arose" actually means.

Scientists use such terms, while shying away from anything that sounds like a value judgement.

Are we getting better? Are we rising higher and higher? The very thought reminds me of a poem by the French poet Apollinaire, part of which reads:

It's nine o'clock the gaslight is low you leave your bed

You pray all night in the school chapel

Meanwhile an eternal adorable amethyst depth

Christ's flamboyant halo spins forever

Behold the beautiful lily of worship

Behold the red-haired torch inextinguishable

Behold the pale son and scarlet of the dolorous Mother

Behold the tree forever tufted with prayer

Behold the double gallows honor and eternity

Behold the six-pointed star

Behold the God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday

Behold the Christ who flies higher than aviators

He holds the world's record for altitude

Norton stopped over in the afternoon, just in time to see the turkeys scampering across the yard. One of them stopped to get a drink of water.

We discussed the progress of our various tomato plants, what the high winds did to his dock a week or two ago up north, and how the local dock expert came over to tie up the pontoon boat before it drifted away. "I've known him for thirty years," Norton says.  

He also dropped off some cookies baked by a client as a sign of appreciation for the work I'd done on her new book.

 As Hilary says: "Everybody likes cookies."

This morning I ventured down the parkway, with the plaintive strains of the Polish trumpeter Tomas Stanko and his quartet on the CD player, to the farmers' market behind the basilica. Friday's a good time to go. Parking is free and easy, and there aren't many people there, so you can chat with the vendors. I bought two bunches of Thai basil from a Hmong woman and a huge bag of regular basil from Mr. Dehn, the owner of Dehn's Garden.

Down the way I bought six ears of corn from a young woman from Waverly, an hour west of town. She had a very slight accent, and didn't seem to know who Hubert Humphrey was. Turns out she's actually from Ukraine! I would like to have chatted further but hers was the only corn available, and a line was forming behind me. Next time.

My final stop was at a stall where bottles of kombucha were on display. I'm not a fan of that product, but the man behind the table was amiable. I told him I didn't like the fizz.

"Mine don't have much fizz," he said. "Most manufacturers add soda to get that effect."

He recommended the hemp kombucha, which (so he told me) contained all nine enzymes, or whatever chemicals are involved.

"Will I get high?" I asked.

He sort of reminded me of an old family friend, Peter Herbert, who died a few years ago. And when he told me the brewery was located in Hopkins, I had to mention that my sweet  96-year-old mother-in-law lived there.

"My parents live there, too," he said. "Dad's 92, mom's 86. I take then out to lunch twice a month and two of my brothers live nearby, to help them out."

By this time, I knew I was going to buy some kombucha. I got a ginger and a hemp. Hilary was at her regular Friday stint as a volunteer at Second Harvest. I figured we'd sample them both when she got back.

When I got home, I spread everything out on the kitchen counter. Do you think I overdid it?

We wrapped up our Bastille Day festivities with a few trips to the movies. As luck would have it (but it's likely that luck had nothing to do with it) the film society had arranged to air a series of French films, including one set at the Place de la Bastille, no less. The Opera National de Paris now stands near the location of the old prison, and the film, called Les Indes Gallante, documents a year-long string of rehearsals that took place in preparation for a production of an opera of the same name by Jean-Phillippe Rameau that was first produced in 1735.

In recent decades baroque opera has experienced a revival of sorts but it seems to me that Handel and Gluck dominate the field. In any case, productions of Rameau's lush and languorous works are still far from common. That being the case, director Clément Cogitore could not defend his decision to re-imagine the work on grounds of undue familiarity. Yet as he explains it in one of the film's early scenes, his approach does have a certain emotional and political logic. Rameau's original version consists of four independent episodes, all of them romances, taking place in the four corners of the then-known world, namely Turkey, Persia, Peru, and North America. Cogitore's "remake" takes for its locales the four corners of modern Paris, each of them given over to a particular immigrant group. The music is still Rameau's, and the singing is the same, but the dancing draws on hip-hop, krump, break, and voguing.   

I hardly know what these styles are, and having seen the film, I don't think their bizarre, jerky, and often violent moves fit very well with the music or the tone of Rameau's narrative. But it was great fun to watch these extremely talented street dancers dish (archaic term!) with the costumers, the choreographer, and mostly one another, while participating in rehearsals where they're treated with utter respect by the director, chorus master, conductor, and choreographer, but also required to fit their styles into the overarching vision of the professionals who are shaping the work.

The film devotes rather less time to the vocalists, and there are surprisingly few scenes that reveal what the opera looks and sounds like as the pieces begin to fall into place. But it's a joyous work—a party film—cramming greater energy into far less time and space than, say, your typical Frederick Wiseman documentary.

The audience at the premier clearly loved the performance. The critical response was mixed, as one might expect. One critic wrote, "Why pay 200 EU to see some dancing, when if you saw the same thing in the street, you wouldn't throw them a cent." Those of us who saw the film don't really know how well the performance gelled, or what impact it might have had on those who attended. But the film itself is a triumph.

When we got home Hilary and I streamed a more tradition version of the opera on YouTube with eighteenth-century wigs and garb, rigid and highly stylized dancing, and cardboard props. We didn't last long. The music was nice....but the production looked ridiculous.     

How I Spent My Fourth of July

My favorite line from Robert Frost, or at least the one that comes to mind most often, is "way leads on to way." This is undoubtedly because I am often delighted by unexpected discoveries that it has been my good fortune to make due to entirely random occurrences.

A case in point: I read one or two emails a day sent to me by the New York Times, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Economist, or some other such source of information. A week or so ago I read a piece by an Algerian woman who for many years has lived in Paris, in which she recommends books to be read by anyone who plans to visit that city. I was surprised to see the novelist Annie Arnaux on the list. I have some of her books somewhere, I said to myself. But they're so OLD. 

The book that came to mind was A Woman's Life, but the one I found in the basement was A Man's World, in which Arnaux describes her father in a series of matter-of-fact but also strangely tender vignettes that underscore the sad but inevitable break that occurs when a bright young working-class girl goes to school, wins a scholarship, marries a middle class white-collar guy, and becomes both "literary" and bourgeois.

The focus of the book is not, however, on the "break." The focus is on the mundane life of the author's father, who had neither time for nor interest in culture, though he was deeply aware of his linguistic shortcomings and concerned to use language properly so as to appear respectable in the eyes of his "betters." Arnaux also describes in some detail the social classes and levels that become obvious to anyone who, like her parents, earns their living running a shop. It's a Balzacian portrait, but far more brief and dispassionate.

While I was down in the basement looking for A Woman's Life, I came upon two other volumes that I brought upstairs. One was The Dean & Deluca Cookbook and the other was a collection of essays carrying the somewhat ponderous title The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. Opening the book to the table of contents, I selected an essay called "Between Being and Emptiness: Toward an Eco-ontology of Inhabitation," and began to read. The author, one Thomas A. Alexander, a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, begins by taking his professional colleagues to task for focusing too exclusively on arid epistemological peccadilloes (he calls this habit "philepistemy") while neglecting to examine the more serious issue that philosophers are supposed to address, namely, how we should live our lives. The emphasis he places on wisdom traditions and fields of context, including those that are broadly social and ecological, is entirely apt. At one point he writes:

The ideal of wisdom we need must endeavor to comprehend and respond to the ecological aspect of nature and to facilitate communication among the diversity of the world’s cultures that must cooperate and live together now as close neighbors rather than as exotically distant lands. In this context, the conflation of the idea of “philepistemy” with philosophy becomes an extravagant luxury. Wisdom, as noted, involves a deep awareness of human life and the world in which it exists so that the way of life is a realization of human existence as an expression of nature. The present moment calls for reconstruction at the ontological level. Philosophy is concerned with the basic ways human experience and nature interexist. What sort of wisdom is called forth by the crisis of modernity? One that facilitates awareness of how human existence is interconnected. The quest for wisdom needs an eco-ontology.

It's true. Yet Alexander, like most academic philosophers, feels it important to pursue this ideal by negotiating, dissecting, and interpreting  the thought of other philosophers—especially John Dewey, in this case—rather than spelling out his own views directly. Sure, I'd like to find out more someday about Dewey's thought ...but not now. Rather, it seemed appropriate to actually EMBODY the theories Alexander was advancing by an act of "interexistence."

Hilary and I had been down at the farmer's market a few days earlier, and we still had a bag of red potatoes sitting on the shelf. Yesterday morning, following my basement explorations, as we were biking the stretch of trail from Lake Nokomis to Lake Harriet and back, pausing at some length on the wooden bridge under Lyndale Avenue to watch the creek flow by, the one thing on my mind was not eco-ontology but salade Niçoise. Potatoes, green beans, red onion, olives, eggs, anchovies (the key ingredient), several kinds of lettuce: by chance, we had it all on hand, just waiting to be cooked up and assembled into a wonderful mélange.    

Morning yoga at Lake Harriet

I hadn't made a salade Niçoise in months, if not years; lucky for me the Dean & Deluca Cookbook was now sitting right there on the kitchen counter. It's a chatty book dating to 1996. (We had never used it much, though we visited the flagship store in Soho back in its heydey.) In the entry for salade Niçoise the authors highlight three points of controversy regarding this dish: a) cooked or raw vegetables? b) greens or no greens? c) ingredients tossed together or presented separately?  They endorse cooked vegetables, greens, and mixed ingredients in the final presentation, though they suggest you can arrange a few slices of egg or tomato in a row around the rim for effect.

That's the way we've always made it. But it doesn't hurt to check.