Thoreau Smear Piece

As the political cycle swings nearer to election time, 'tis the season for "smear pieces." These are the articles in which the actions and pronouncements of a given candidate or political insider—Bernie Sanders, the Koch brothers, or  whomever—are selectively examined and relentlessly skewered, which can be great fun if the subject happens to be someone you dislike.

But I never thought I'd be reading a smear piece on an individual who died a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet this is what New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz gives us in her recent article, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia."

The article would have been better had the author stopped to actually consider the question she raises. It's right there, in italics, under the author by-line: "Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished?"

It's a fact that Thoreau's works have been cherished by generations of readers. Schulz describes it as "cabin porn," but Walden is firmly ensconced in the American canon. It's often pointed out that his writings had a profound influence on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. How could these giants of integrity and compassion have been so thoroughly duped?

Schulz never answers that question. Instead, she cherry-picks a litany of criticisms in defense of the argument that his work should never have been canonized, is not worth reading— and the sooner we open our eyes to the fact, the better.

None of her criticisms are new. Generations of readers have been informed of the fact, or discovered it for themselves, that Thoreau had a misanthropic streak. (Many writers do.) By assembling the most callous, holier-than-thou remarks by Thoreau she can find into a single screed, Shultz makes him sound smug and priggish indeed. But that isn't the effect one gets when reading Walden, Cape Cod, or Maine Woods.

Schulz has entirely missed Thoreau's sly and subtle humor. And she's insensitive to his language, which is astonishingly modern. I would argue that Thoreau is the greatest American prose stylist of the nineteenth century, and also its greatest poet. I'm not referring here to the man's verse, which is weak, but to the poetry of his prose. Time and again, when reading Thoreau, we feel that we're in the presence of a surrealist avant la lettre.  

Walden isn't a book to be read in a single weekend, or even in a single month. It's a collection of essays, in fact, and the reader can turn to the chapter on ponds, or the village, or sounds, and be immediately engaged in Thoreau's descriptions and also his musings, which compare favorably with Montaigne's. That's why you so often see people carrying Walden along to the cabin or the campground. A few sentences, absorbed at random, send one's thoughts off in exactly the right direction.

Schulz at various points describes Thoreau as narcissistic, egotistical, and arrogant, none of which adjectives can be squared with his extraordinary capacity to attend to and describe the things he sees and hears all around him, or the personal devotion he inspired in his own time and continues to inspire today. If he's unhappy with his neighbors, it's usually because he feels they've lost the capacity to attend to life's quotidian marvels. No doubt the lives of "quiet desperation" he criticized so pithily also had virtues of which he was unaware, but readers from his day to ours have been inspired by his work to reexamine their values and ideals.And that's a good thing. He can be harsh and condescending, but it's also clear that he's well aware of the histrionic and absurd elements in the persona he's cultivating. 

In his book TheThoreau You Don't Know, Robert Sullivan paints an attractive portrait of Thoreau's personality and social life, well researched, convincing, and entirely dissimilar to the badly lit Instagram Shultz has given us. The gist of her article seems to be: I don't like Thoreau, and I don't see why so many others do.

Well, that's not much of a story.

I opened my copy of Walden just now—I've never read the whole thing—and came upon the following passage on the first page of the chapter on sounds:  

"But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remem­bered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity."

Happy Aufheben Day

For many years, Columbus Day has been noted chiefly as the day when you go to the bank to make a deposit or withdraw some cash only to find that the bank isn't open. "What the...?" you say to yourself, then read the note pasted on the glass reminding you of the holiday.

But with the proliferation of ATMs, which can now accept checks you haven't endorsed, and are even too lazy to put in an envelope or total up, Columbus Day has largely faded into insignificance, and even become a magnet for protests and quasi-historical criticism.

Some municipalities, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul, have replaced Columbus Day with a new holiday, Indigenous Day. I like the idea of having such a holiday, though I'm not sure celebrating it on the day Columbus first spotted land in the New World is a good idea.

Then again, there is a certain logic to the association. Indigenous people would probably never have quit fighting one another and come to consider themselves members of a single extended family except as a response to a larger and otherwise indomitable outside force.

It's easy to understand how offensive Columbus Day seems to Native Americans, and many aspects of the explorer's character make it difficult for whites and Latinos to get much excited about him, either. But I can remember the days when we were required to memorize the red-letter days of early exploration:

Columbus - 1492 / Ponce de Leon - 1507 / Balboa - 1509? / Cortez - 1513 / Jacques Cartier - 1536

I don't recall that any of these men were being celebrated for their humanitarianism, honesty, moral fiber, or ethnographic curiosity. Back when the holiday meant something, Columbus Day was a celebration of two things: courage in the face of the unknown, and the freedom and economic opportunity opened up by immigration.

These elements of the holiday have also come in for derision, of course. Sailing west across an ocean into the abyss for eighty-one days can hardly be considered a courageous act, we're told, when Breton and Basque fisherman had been fishing off the coast of Newfoundland for centuries. And the fact that countless millions of immigrants, many of whom faced oppression, torture, or starvation in their home countries, found new lives in the Western hemisphere loses its luster when we stop to consider that the land wasn't really theirs to take.

For myself, I find such reasoning a little shallow, and look forward to the day when our understanding of historical events  and movements sheds both its gingoistic triumphalism and its petulant adversarialism, subsuming both attitudes in a more complex and all-embracing vision.

I'm not sure what a holiday based on that notion might be called, or when it would be held. Somehow, I don't think the idea of celebrating "Aufheben Day" on August 27 (Hegel's birthday) will catch on here in the States any time soon. Besides, considered in isolation from specific events, the concept loses its meaning.

This year, on Indigenous Day, I think I'll re-read Follow the Dream: the Story of Christopher Columbus, a gorgous children's book by Czech immigrant Peter Sis, and then maybe flip through the pages of They Sought a New World: The Story of European Immigration to North America, with its wonderful illustrations by William Kurelek, whose Ukrainian parents settled in Alberta.

After a light dinner of homemade acorn bread and orzo-wild rice salad, maybe we'll settle in to a double feature on the tube: Terrance Malick's brilliant The New World, and Jonathan Wack's wacky Powwow Highway. 

   

Journals without End

Lined up on a shelf in the back of a closet in the middle bedroom, which is basically the ironing-cum-meditation room, you will see my journals—at least the ones that happen to be roughly the same size. I prefer the oversized journals, 8.5 x 11; they give my left-handed scrawl some room to operate. I've also got quite a few of those smaller moleskin journals, which are easier to take on a trip. And there are also a few oddball volumes, either leather-bound or cloth-bound and covered with little white dots. I even have a green alligator-skin journal, though I have no recollection of where that came from.

Perhaps that's the point of "journaling"—to improve our recollections.  If so, then it doesn't work all that well. But I suspect most people who write in journals do so not to remember things later, but to process things now. There is something about writing things down that solidifies experience, and especially those inconsequential moments when nothing is really happening.

A few days ago I came to the end of a journal that I started in February of 2014. The final entry reads, in part:

"It's been beautiful all day and I really don't know what to do about it. I was worried about the tomatoes I bought. They seemed a little soft when I pulled them out of the bag. In fact, they're the best tomatoes I ever ate..."

Yesterday I felt the urge several times to note some such state of being, vacuous emotion, or idle thought, but could not. I didn't have anything to write in. It was an odd feeling of hopelessness, as if I were about to drift off to some netherworld where absolutely nothing ever gets done.  

Don't get me wrong. "Journaling" is not something I do. The word connotes a determined and regular practice, like jogging or butterfly collecting. I would even hesitate to say that I "keep" a journal. It just happens that I write in a journal  sometimes. They can be painful and embarrassing books to look back on. Sometimes unbearable.

Just now I took a look at a journal from 1989, hit upon some rocky and emotional passages, and was on the verge of tossing the volume in the trash. Flipping to another page, I came upon a reference to a book called The Four Continents by Osbert Sitwell, where he refers to the ancient Cambodian habit of exporting kingfisher wings, and how that industry necessitated the construction of canals for which the country became famous. Osbert comments that the Khmer themselves are long gone, though the kingfishers continue to thrive.

This morning I ran some errands out near Ridgedale, one of which was to pick up a new journal. There are perhaps a hundred types on sale at Barnes and Noble  but nothing works better for me than a black Canson Art Book sketchpad with unlined white paper.

I never go into a bookstore without feeling a pang of nostalgia for my years in the book industry. I like book people, though I don't really fit in to that world. It's driven by an idealistic sense, which I share, that books are intrinsically inspiring, noble, and illuminating—not only what's written in them, but the books themselves, in a strange, almost fetishistic way. Unfortunately, undercurrents of disappointment and frustration are seldom far from the surface of the book world, because there's little money to made in it.

Perhaps that will be the first thing I write in my new journal: "Books are cool."  Somehow, I don't think so. More likely it will be something about vegetables, or the glorious weather we're having, or the strange sensation of wandering the aisles of Penney's looking for light-weight pajamas and saying to myself: So this is what shopping is like. Some people do this all the time.  

All Scientists Should Be Militant Humanists

An article appeared recently in the New Yorker in which an eminent scientist, Lawrence Krause, argues that all scientists ought to be militant atheists. The reasoning is clear in many places, but Krause's familiarity with religion is evidently meager and his faith in science unfounded. As a result, his conclusions are unsound.

Krause is correct to assert that science is an atheistic enterprise. That's just a one-word way of saying that appeals to a supreme being or to transcendental causes have no part to play in scientific explanation. That's true.

But being a scientist is not the same thing as being a human being, and anyone whose self-definition is limited to his or her methodology in the lab is likely to be a sorry excuse for a human being.

Why? Because as an approach to experience, science is categorically incapable of answering the big questions. Specifically, science will never tell us why we're here or what we ought to do next. And the attempt to scoff at such questions is likely to expose a shallow and largely uneducated mind.

Krause's article contains a number of valid points, but the entire piece is predicated on a sort of liberal tolerance (a position that I and many other readers of the New Yorker would fully endorse, by the way) that has nothing to do with science. It's a religious attitude, or better yet, an ethical and metaphysical one. The laws that the Kentucky clerk refuses to follow are based on such attitudes, though their validity rests not on divine revelation but on the constitutional system that instituted them.

Krause's blindspot is exposed, for example, when he describes the clerk's position in the following terms: "The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage."

Krause is evidently so unfamiliar with religions that he thinks they are merely a bundle of ideas—something that people think about. On the contrary, all religions are prescriptive in one way or another. They tell people what the universe is like, but also how one ought to behave in it. Some of these prescriptions are usually ritualistic and even superstitious, but many go beyond such "religious" practices to provide day-to-day rules of conduct. These are the injunctions and precepts that give religion its normative value, but also make it difficult sometimes for devout individuals to do their jobs.

I agree with Krause that the religion of the law trumps any personal religious views an individual might have. To think otherwise would be treasonous. Those who can't do a given job due to religious beliefs ought to be terminated— though they remain free, or course, to believe whatever they want to believe.  But Krause's basic differentiation between actions (politics) and ideas (religion) is unsound and misleading, because it's rooted in a view that intellectualizes, and therefore trivializes religious belief.

Everything becomes clearer once we acknowledge that the law of the land (politics, civil society) is itself a secular religion fraught with transcendental overtones. It doesn't conform to any specific sect or cosmology, but rather, advances a respect for individual freedom that's both deep-rooted and also brilliantly vague.

In any case, there's nothing scientific about it. 

State Fair 2015: Nature, Science, Art

We go to the state fair almost every year, but not for the food, the music, or the rides.

What keeps us coming back is the art, the animals, the informative nature exhibits, the crafts, the ingenious household gadgets, the agricultural displays, and the random encounters with the people who tend the booths.

And the colors everywhere.

It's fun to negotiate a familiar landscape that nevertheless changes year by year—a landscape unlike any other in the world, with so many wildly heterogeneous options that  no two visits end up being the same. A band might start playing, a parade might go by. One line might be too long, another might be conveniently short.  The log-rolling contest or the Pheasants Unlimited booth might catch your eye.

Someone in the education building will hand you a fan with a picture of the Pope on it. Someone in the Eco-building will give you a plastic device to time how long you spend in the shower. (Try to keep it under five minutes, please.)

All seasoned fair-goers have a strategy. Some make long journeys to the fairgrounds from the suburbs by bus, others know about secret parking stalls on the nearby St. Paul campus.

We usually approach from the west on East Hennepin, coming across Northeast Minneapolis on city streets past Surdyk's, Brasa, Eli's, the Cream of Wheat building, FinnSisu ski-sauna shop, and the old Gibbs Farm. We park in the Camel Lot (making sure not to get in the lane that gets sent down to the grandstand parking) and walk into the fairgrounds from the north, where the atmosphere is mellow and  we meet up with many of the things that interest us most before our legs get too worn out.

I don't know much about tractors, but I like to see the antique models on display on the fringes of the kiddy farm. They evoke that era when anyone who wanted to work and had some land could give farming a try.

Across the way are the hot tubs and the miniature cabins for sale.

I volunteered this year to tend the Citizen Science kiosk for an hour in the Eco-building, on the strength of having monitored the water clarity in Bassett Creek, which runs near our house, for the DNR all summer. During my sixty-minute stint I met a woman from Virginia, MN, whose mother might have taken a civics class from my grandfather. Her husband happened to a microbiologist and former president of the Minnesota Academy of Science. I also met a young man whose mother monitors the water quality on the St. Croix from the Stillwater bridge once a week. One middle-aged man I talked to, after learning about how the Viceroy and the Monarch butterflies relate to one another, asked me to explain why we only have one hummingbird species in Minnesota, while in Arizona they have ten.  And a woman from Wisconsin asked me to explain why she found a gray tree frog in her Weber grill the other day.

I'm pretty good at making things up, but that one put me to the test!

Several visitors asked me where they could buy milkweed seeds to support the migration of the  monarchs.(Prairie Restorations?)  By the time my hour was up, I was thoroughly  impressed by the levels of curiosity and awareness exhibited by passers-by.

During all this time, Hilary was at the Handicraft Building, looking at quilts and mittens and rag rugs and architecturally designed furniture. This was a good thing, because that meant  I didn't have to look at them so much later.

Once my shift was over, we spent a few minutes examining the other displays in the Eco-barn, which included a stand offering samples of an organic hot mustard dip for corn chips, and displays promoting the virtues of rain barrels and LED lights. In the lawn in front of the building we scrutinized a locally manufactured Vistabule teardrop trailer similar to one that our friends Jim and Debbie bought recently. It's a cute little trailer—basically a bed on wheels with a kitchen out back—and a Prius pulling it will still get 29 miles per gallon. 

We sat on a bench in the sun eating some mid-morning snacks—a foot long hotdog and a pronto pup— and then wandered into the art building, which was a little hotter, a little more crowded ... a little less exciting than usual? Or was I just a little more tired from having stood around for the last hour talking to strangers.

The image just inside the door, commanding an entire wall, was a lithograph of a tank. Not a good choice.

But by the time we'd finished our circuit I'd identified a number of favorites.  The works by people I know where uniformly stellar—Craig Lassig's photo of a very tired Obama, Clara Euland's intaglio print of the moon rising above a highway, Fay Passow's lithograph of a forest in crepuscular light, Mike Hazard's photo of a Hmong woman harvesting carnations.

Other works that caught my eye in a special way included a painting/collage that reminded me of William de Kooning:

 A huge black-and-white photograph of a man getting a haircut while sitting amid the roadside rubble of a village in India; a print with an animistic flavor done in the Northwest Coast style:

 A painting with German Expressionist overtones probably had the most gravity of any piece in the show:

 A delicate rendering of ice fishing seemed to capture the allure and also the boredom of that winter sport:

I was intrigued by a lovely photograph of a little girl with binoculars standing on a big rock look off at something beyond the edge of the picture, while a huge body of water vanishes into the distance right in front of her; I also liked a tall, thin, stylized rendering of some teepees and horses; and a delightful musical score covered not with notes or words, but with scribbles.

We spent the rest of the morning fighting our way to the carousel area in front of the grandstand, where a panel of local chefs underscored the importance of using fresh ingredients--for the ten-thousandth time. We bought some crab cakes and gumbo at a Caribbean restaurant/bar offering live Peruvian music, and watched a video of some iron ore being blasted out of an open-pit mine in the DNR building.

BWCA Visit

It's worth asking:

Why would anyone drive for six hours, then pile into a very small and tippy watercraft, paddle into the wind for a hour in misty  50 degree weather, then stop on some rocks and string up a tarp to block the wind and drizzle—all for the purpose of reading a book?

Why? because it's fun. It's expansive. It's challenging. It's elemental.

It's also unpredictable, which adds to the drama.

In the BWCA, you never know where you're going to camp. Campsites are sometimes spaced miles apart, and if the one you're counting on is occupied, you have no choice but to move on.

Our recent trip to the BWCA was somewhat different because we spent the first night in Superior, Wisconsin. That made it easier to move up the North Shore at an unhurried pace the next morning on our way to the Gunflint Trail. We pulled in to the outfitter at Gunflint Lodge to buy a few fire-starters. (It had been raining a lot and dry firewood might be hard to come by in the woods.)  The woman behind the counter gave me a whole bag of brown, oily, bubble-gum-like slabs...for free. That's the late-season discount, I guess.

As we continued west toward trail's end, past luscious green swamps (no moose) and huge pillows of white granitic bedrock (the Saganaga Batholith), we passed a sign pointing to a "Seagull Landing" that I'd seen many times before but never had the time to follow.  I'd seen the road on maps and  knew roughly where it came out onto the lake, however, and considering the direction and force of the wind, it occurred to me it might be a better place to embark from than the channel we usually use. At least it was worth exploring.

Thus we found ourselves a few minutes later paddling across a part of Seagull Lake we'd never seen before. Once having pulled ourselves into the protection of a cluster of islands, we spotted a campsite open , and took it.

It was 1 pm. Our paddling was over. My camp notes (in part) read as follows:

"Spent about an hour rigging up our tarp amid a grove of mid-sized cedar tees—an awkward enterprise and an awkward result, but it served us well, keeping off both the wind and the intermittent mist and drizzle. Patches of blue sky appeared three or four times during the afternoon, but they were fleeting. It was mostly gray and a little bit cold. I was happy I'd bought a sweater at the thrift shop in Grand Marais on the way up.

"We sat on our chairs reading at the edge of the woods, where the wind was less severe, then scampered down the hill to the tarp when the mist started in. (Some people wouldn't think this was much fun.) I had my stocking cap on all afternoon. At one point I went off into the woods to get some firewood and came upon a spruce grouse. Bright red eyebrow. Otherwise hard to see, though he was standing on a log ten feet in front of me."

It was a pleasant afternoon, and it got better when the wind died down and bigger patches of blue sky started to appear overhead about 6 p.m. I took down the tarp; it had been flapping all afternoon and was no longer of much use. We were enjoying the evening sun in the clouds and never got around to making a fire, though we heated water on the stove for our traditional mug of powdered Swiss mocha.

It was deadly still and quiet after the sun went down. Then the loons in the channel in front of the tent started to call loudly, maybe five birds (but maybe only two or three) exchanging their hilarity in an overlapping call and response.

"The stars last night were amazing. The crescent moon had set by the time I went out to pee and the entire sky was illuminated  by stars of great intensity and size. They  looked like holes poked in the blue-black firmament with a blunt instrument, through which blazing white light was pouring. Every part of the sky was filled, but I'd just woken up and the dimmer stars didn't register. It was a thrilling sight and I should have lingered to appreciate it more fully, but I was barefoot, the ground was wet, and it was maybe 50 degrees.

"The wind has shifted. It's now milder, coming from the south. We took a two-and-a-half hour paddle through the warren of islands out to the Palisades and then south into the wind around Three Mile Island, where most of the countryside is in wretched shape due to a forest fire that passed through in 2007.

When we got back we rigged up the tarp at the other end of the campsite. Then lunch. Then more sitting. Listening to the chatter of the kingfishers. Watching a family of six mergansers fishing together along the shoreline.

Now the water in the channel shimmers with golden sunlight muted by the haze, and everything has  a blue-green caste. I've picked up a book a Zen poems I brought along. Reading or not reading, it's largely the same.

And now I hear voices in the distance, though only one canoe has passed this way in the last 24 hours, and those voices are sometimes an illusion, a trick of the wind.

When you're in camp, you spend a lot of time doing nothing. The campsite is huge, open, and grassy. You can look to the west for at least a mile, and we sometimes see parties of distant canoes heading out from the channel we were planning to embark from.

Right now I'm staring at a clump of birch trees that's maybe five years old. 

Further down the hill, I see a solitary tree that might have taken root just last year.

Leonardo and the Leicester Codex

If you happen to go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this August, you'll have the opportunity to see something most people never get a chance to see—some pages full of writing, with drawings in the margins, by Leonardo Da Vinci. A few years ago Bill Gates paid thirty million dollars for these eighteen sheets of paper, and since then he's allowed them to go on display from time to time.

The pages are encased in Plexiglas (or some such thing), mounted in free-standing kiosks scattered amid four low-lit exhibition rooms, and carefully illuminated to make it possible for you to see both sides. Most viewers won't be able to read anything Leonardo wrote because he wrote in Italian—and in the "wrong" direction, moving from right to left. But the drawings in the margins are interesting and the interpretive signs under each display explain the gist of what Leonardo is exploring on any given two-page spread.

It  would be easy to look at three or four of these pages and say, "This would be  a lot easier if I were sitting in a chair, holding a Dover reprint in my lap." It takes a bit of effort to take a step back and see the "thing"—the sheet of paper that Leonardo actually dragged his pen across five-hundred years ago. Yes, there it is, right before your eyes, albeit tucked safely behind a few thick panes of transparent protective material.

This is the "aura" that Walter Benjamin made such a big deal about with regard to original works of art as opposed to reproductions. It's a form of sympathetic magic. You see,  I never met Leonardo personally, but I have examined the very sheets of paper upon which he recorded his passing thoughts. Cool.

Leonardo crossed out some things, and he sometimes wrote additional comments above and below the lines, but the sheets are remarkable "clean," as if he usually wrote precisely what he was thinking, or was adept at modifying and qualifying his thoughts on the fly, rather than crossing them out and beginning anew.

The drawings, though invariably small, are also remarkably clean. The lines are straight, the shading delicate.

In the last room of kiosks, half-hidden by a couple of protruding walls, there are two illuminated displays with benches in front of them. They add  immeasurably to the impact of the exhibit. You can sit in front of either display and flip electronically through the pages of the codex, reading them in English with the aid of a lens that magically translates the lines into English as you drag it across the screen. This is very cool.

Is the text interesting? Not really, unless you're wondering how water eddies around obstacles or how light bounces off the moon. Leonardo was interested in a great many things, such as how spring water can issue forth from the earth high up in the mountains, and how aquatic shells reached those elevations. Is there water on the moon, and if so, why doesn't fall down to earth? It's fun to see a fertile mind at work, examining various hypotheses, rejecting this one, accepting that one, and giving us the reason why.

But we now know the answers to most of the questions Leonardo pondered. And we know that many of the answers he came up with were wrong. Sure, he got lucky every now and then, with ideas like earthshine, and plate techtonics, and helicopters. Still.

It would be pointless to deny Leonardo's remarkable industry and perhaps unparalleled curiosity. But to portray him as a "genius" of the first order seem like a publicity ploy and doesn't tell us much about him. Aristotle, to take a comparable example, wrote works on aesthetics, formal logic, ethics, and metaphysics each of which forms the bedrock of its respective discipline. I don't think anything similar could be said of Leonardo. He was basically an artist of the first rank and a speculative engineer. He observed, analyzed, and imagined things, and drew many of them with great precision, but he seldom turned any of his work along this line into genuine poetry. I, for one, find it hard to warm to him as a painter, a scientist, or a person.

What I liked best about the Leicester Codex is the note-taking effort itself. Page after page, we find ourselves in the presence of a mind in the act of uninhibited description, analysis, and speculation.  The thought is right there on the page. Leonardo tended to overwork his paintings, but when he jotted down his seemingly boundless ideas he just kept moving ahead.

A stroke of genius on the part of the exhibition curators was to cap the multi-room display of Leonardo's incomprehensible writing with a room filled with huge reproductions of coral reefs made out of colored yarn by members of the Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring. The pairing is irreverent and gutsy, yet it makes a certain amount of sense, in so far as the intricacy of the crocheting patterns gives the created forms a natural and organic look—just the sort of thing that might have fascinated Leonardo. And the garish colors provide a refreshing contrast to the dimly lit pages of the monotone codex.

The final room of the exhibit is even further removed from the spirit of Leonardo...but it also happens to be engaging. It exhibits a video, projected on an enormous screen, called "The Raft" by Bill Viola that runs perhaps fifteen minutes. For much of the time we watch a group of people who seem to be waiting for a bus. No one talks, no one moves. One by one, a few other individuals show up and muscle their way into the crowd without too much effort or resistance.m(The man reading a book barged his way in a few minutes ago; the woman in red and blue on the right is starting to weaver her way through the crowd.)  The only sound is an ominous off-stage rumbling.

Everything changes when enormous blasts of water appear from either side and continue to pour over the waiting people for several minutes, battering them brutally. Some fall to the floor almost immediately, others hold their own impassively as best they can.

Finally the deluge comes to an end and the individuals either try to help one another up, or don't. Viola claims to have been inspired by Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," and in the final panel above you can see a faint resemblance.

It's a bizarre scenario, but for some reason I found it mesmerizing.