Milan Kundera - In Memoriam

Milan Kundera, who charmed readers for decades with a mix of humor, brilliant story-telling, and historical insight, died recently at the age of 94. He made his mark in the 1970s with two masterworks, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and his reputation was further enhanced when the latter book was made into a popular film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Stripped of Czech citizenship by the then-Communist government, he moved to France, which became his second home. His later efforts—Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance—written in French, are shorter than the masterworks of his middle age but hardly less engaging. 

I can still remember how delighted I was during my warehouse years to find a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, sans dust jacket, in the bottom of a shroud of hardcover remainders we'd received from Random House. The title was intriguing, though I had no idea what the book was about. Nor was I familiar with Kundera's polyphonic approach to narrative construction. It was thrilling to read a novel that was brisk, witty, and full of moral challenge, and with nary a hint of humdrum social criticism or ill-disguised allegory.   

That was a long time ago. But one passage in particular from that early novel has stuck with me, and just now I looked it up. The narrator, Karel, and his wife, after much soul-searching, have invited his widowed mother to stay with them. She had always been difficult, but when she arrives they notice a change, a softening in her.

Once when they were out walking, she gazed into the dis­tance and asked, “What’s the name of that pretty white village?" There was no village, just stone road markers. Karel felt an upsurge of pity when he realized how much his mother’s sight had deteri­orated.

Karel soon notices something more fundamental: what seems large for them is often small for her.

One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighboring country came and occu­pied their country. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else.

 It happened to be was August, and the pears in Karel's garden were nearly ripe. His mother had invited a neighbor to come and pick them, but he never came, never even apologized. Karel's mother never forgave him, though it was likely he had more important things on his mind at the time.

And here Kundera adds a final twist.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother's perspective—a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.

When the Soviet Union collapsed Kundera's “Eastern European” offerings lost some of their cache. (Decades later, Kundera himself was denounced as an informer--falsely, as it turns out.) But he kept finding new things to occupy his attention. Ignorance, (2000) for example, deals with Goethe's problematic infatuation with a young admirer, and also with The Great Return, by which Kundera means, among other things, the émigré’s return from exile. And in his seven-part essay The Curtain (2005), Kundera himself returns to re-examine, from a more mature perspective, some of the material he first dealt with in The Art of the Novel (1986).

One section of The Curtain originally appeared a free-standing essay in the 

New Yorker. I found it so brilliant that I cut it out and stuck it in my copy of The Art of the Novel. In that piece Kundera defends the practice of reading literature in translation, even going so far as to assert that it is only through translation that literature from small countries will ever escape the tyranny of nationalistic enthusiasm to make its mark on the wider world.

The broader theme of The Curtain is the history of the novel itself, and very early on Kundera makes a stab at underscoring why that art form is so important.

“…human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That—that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel.”

Kundera’s approach to the subject is freewheeling; he refers again and again to a fairly small selection of authors, jumping back and forth in time to suit his purpose: Cervantes and Rabelais, Sterne and Fielding, Balzac and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Musil and Broch, Kafka and Gombrowitz. At one point he contrasts his approach to the more strictly chronological one we often find in conventional histories.

“ ‘History as such,’ the history of mankind, is the history of things that no longer exist and do not join directly in our lives. The history of art, because it is the history of values, thus of things we need, is always present, always with us; we listen to Monteverdi and Stravinsky at the same concert.”

This analysis is not entirely sound. History of every sort concerns itself with things that remain valuable and conjoined to us. But in the history of art those connections become blatant. They're far more immediate.

Kundera analyses the density of Dostoyevsky’s plot-constructions, Flaubert’s attempt to de-theatricize fiction, and Tolstoy’s success an exposing the largely random musings that pass through a character’s mind, even during moments of extreme crisis. He explores the significance of the fact that until recently, the French language had no word for “kitsch,” and jostles Hegel’s theory of lyricism just to see what will fall out.

Music and poetry, Hegel says, have an advantage over painting: lyricism. And in lyricism, music can go still further than poetry, for it is capable of grasping the most secret movements of the inner world, which are inaccessible to words. Thus there does exist an art in this case, music that is more lyrical than lyric poetry itself. From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyrical poetry) but, rather it designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.

We may be reminded here of  Croce’s simple maxim: Art is lyricism. Yet just a few pages further on, Kundera underscores the anti-lyric conversion a novelist must undergo to establish distance between himself and the characters he’s creating. He credits Cervantes for tearing through the curtain of self-identification. “..his destructive act echoes and extends to every novel worthy of the name: it is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.”

At this, as at other points in Kundera’s argument, we might be tempted to offer counterexamples. In particular, Kundera’s theories are better fitted for comic literature than to some other kinds. Indeed, at one point he observes: “Humor is not a spark that leaps up for a brief moment … to set us laughing. Its unobtrusive light glows over the whole vast landscape of life.”

But the problematic character of some of Kundera’s assertions doesn't diminish the originality of his perspective, the dazzle of his wit, the ironic music of his prose, or the estimable brevity and courage with which he took up such issues as soul, tragedy, history, humor and the meaning of meaning itself.

History & Human Flourishing

 A recent review in the New York Review of Books drew my attention to an anthology of essays carrying the title  History & Human Flourishing. I found the presence of the word "flourishing" interesting in itself, and the review underscored the fact that the essays it contained focused their attention in various ways on how our lives can be nourished by the study of history, beyond the often useful but always limited range of prosecutorial investigations of the past. It's not the kind of book that's likely to show up any time soon in a remainder catalog or on a sidewalk bookstall, however, so I took a chance and forked over the $29 to buy a new copy—the last of the birthday money I'd received recently from Hilary's mother.

The first essay I read made it all worthwhile. The author, a Princeton professor named D. Graham Burnett, takes us through his own agonized development as a scholar in an effort to explain why so  much of what goes on in academia today, and perhaps especially in the humanistic fields, is either polemical or remote, dry, and lifeless. If I were to reiterate his position in a single sentence, I would say that in Burnett's view, the vitality and interest of the humanistic disciplines lies in their ability to evaluate events, artifacts, and cultural movements. The best work relies, in other words, on personal judgment. For the most part the university experience is driven by the need to avoid or obscure such judgments in an attempt to provide a veneer of detachment and universality to its pronouncements.

Early on in the piece Burnett describes how much he enjoyed reading the volumes in the I Believe series edited by Clifton Fadiman during his undergraduate years. Why? Because, as he described it, they brought him "relief" from the unwillingness of most scholars to actually reveal what they thought about the subjects they were investigating.

He hastens to add:

"There were, of course, in those years, bold voices exactly making brave statements of commitment—on race, gender, sexual identity, and preference; on the need for new forms of academic prac­tice. And a few years later, the tragedy of 9-11 would produce a pained spasm of “seriousness” among historians and humanist intellectuals more broadly ... But all I can say is, in the course of my own graduate formation in History, I had been led to focus on the mastery of a large, intricate, and contentious secondary literature, and I had been assiduously tutored in the tournament of anxiety that is life as a neophyte scholar. I had gotten essentially zero sense that actually deciding what one thought about things—and stating that clearly—was part of the project."

Burnett wasn't unduly perturbed by the situation because the scholars he admired were professionals who saw little purpose in blatantly advancing their personal views blatantly. Still, something was rubbing him the wrong way.

"I harbored a (sublated) sense that to be a historian was to be an 'intellectual' and that to be an 'intellectual' was to have some substan­tive conception of life that was integral to one’s account of one’s work."

The question arises as to where the foundation for such personal judgments lies. By way of answering that question, Burnett introduces us to the work of the mid-nineteenth century thinker Auguste Comte, who figures in intellectual history as the father of sociology and a lifelong proponent of positivism, a movement dedicated to bending the study of human life to fit the methods of the hard sciences. Burnett goes into some detail describing Comte's career, most of which he finds misguided and often silly, but he highlights one of Comte's ideas as worth considering: that the discoveries of modern scholars perform the same social function as that of the religions they have largely replaced. 

"If it is legitimate to speak of 'wisdom traditions,' [he writes] I would define this notion as pre­cisely that set of practices and beliefs, stories and rites, habits and concepts that equip human beings to confront pain—to take it in, to feel and experience it ... and to do something other than pass it along to others ... For me, for better or worse, the humanistic scholarly enterprises only really make sense as thinly (and, I believe, imperfectly) “secularized" efforts to do work once done in explicitly religious settings."

Burnett is arguing, quite rightly I think, that the purpose of historical thought, and of the humanities more generally, is to expand and deepen our values and our sense of the richness, sacredness, and interconnectedness of life. Historians often do this by means of the narratives they shape. Only the most eminent  among them step out from behind their material to explain in personal terms why they believe their "take" on the past is important.

One reason may be humility. Another might be simply that such a rhetorical strategy would be too crude and "unprofessional." But Burnett draws our attention to an important essay, "Science as a Vocation," that Max Weber published in 1918. He lauds it as "an exceedingly rich and historically specific text" but notes that Weber limits the scholarly vocation to one of knowledge-production, leaving no room for problems of "meaning" or "life."

"The problems may be real, but university professors have no special claim on them, and Weber is caustically dismissive of any residual conception of the university that trades on the promise that academic study will address such matters—which, in his view, it absolutely cannot (and must not). It is exactly a reconstruction of the humanistic domain on Weberian “scientistic" grounds that has, in my view, substantially deprived that domain of its pri­mary reason for being and rendered it increasingly impossible to defend in contemporary life."

I was pleased to see that Burnett sees only limited value in causation and the search for origins, preferring to place an emphasis on "recovering human experiences." He notes, astutely, that

"As a practicing historian, I tend to be basically wary of causal/explanatory history—not because I think it is impossible or invidious, exactly, but because I think there is plenty of work to be done in a different key ... I feel that there is basically an infinite amount of history to be done that works to recover human experi­ences (i.e., to resurrect and translate their immediacy), and that, on balance, this work does more good in the world (is more needed) than more history that tries to assign blame for various things—which is basically what causal/ explanatory history always finds itself doing, in the end.

 As the essay draws to a close, Burnett begins to draw in his wings, however. He shies away from the major issues his train of thought has raised and retreats into a safer realm, where the main purpose of historical inquiry is merely to "see a time from elsewhere." Gone is the religious foundation, gone is the emphasis on value and judgment.

Well, I don't blame him. Such issues are complex and difficult to untangle in the course of a few pages. This might also explain why philosophy, both analytic and continental, has descended so often to trivialities and technicalities in our times. Yet the bulk of Burnett's essay was devoted to history and the humanities as inspirational disciplines. The history of art, for example, exposes us to many varieties of beauty, and helps us to see their value. Economic history underscores the difference between enterprises that "work out" and those that "fall flat" and therefore disappear from view, though their merits may be worth re-examining. Underlying all of this is a concept that once went by the name of progress. In the introduction to this volume, the editor gives a convincing account, I think, of why the word "flourishing" better conveys what an understanding of history often contributes to.

A generation or two before Comte appeared on the scene, Hegel made use of the word "spirit." Dialectic was the concept, spirit provided the energy, the result was development.

A generation or two after Comte, the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce refined and improved Hegel's notions, retaining the dialectic while dispensing with Hegel's meta-historical scaffolding, his teleological speculations, and his interest in the Absolute. The overhaul was so thorough that it would make more sense to call Hegel a pre-Crocean than to call Croce a post-Hegeliam.

Few read Croce these days, as far as I can tell, though the University of Toronto came out with a slim volume titled A Croce Reader a few years ago. Croce wrote sixty or seventy  books, so such an anthology can take us only so far. Serious students might prefer to look back to the anthology published by Oxford in 1966 that runs to more than a thousand pages. Even in his own day, when he stood as a beacon of liberal opinion in the midst of his country's Fascist regime, Croce's philosophy was largely misunderstood even within Italy. 

At the center of Croce's world lies is the concept of spirit. In common speech that's a simple word, and we all know what it means. If I read that a football team made a spirited defense of its title, the meaning is clear.  If I describe someone as being dis-spirited, no one will mistake the meaning. If my piano teach tells me to put more spirit into my rendition I'll know what she means.

Spirit differs from Heidegger's Being, to take a more popular post-modern concept, in that it is indwelling, animate, questing, and almost invariably incomplete. A moment of expressive power or a shrewd conceptual leap toward coherence may be deeply moving, and the artistic expression or historical or logical insight it produces will endure as a cultural artifact. But new urges and issues will invariably develop in the wake of such creations. To paraphrase Hegel himself: "The act never [quite] produces the desired result." Hence the restless urge to "go beyond" that fuels the historic process we call "living."

Spirit is what the young Burnett and his fellow grad students were studying, and seeking to cultivate, and hoping to transmit to a new generation, before they were ground down by the academic system. Philosophers of an analytic bent almost invariably criticize the concept as vague, wishy-washy, or "metaphysical." But such judgments are merely the result of lazy thinking. Consider the example I mentioned a few minutes ago of Comte. Burnett spends several pages outlining the man's career and his influence on his contemporaries. It's not hard to discern what Comte was reaching for: a more precise understanding of things. His advocacy of the scientific method, which was working so well in other fields, is easy to understand, though such methods proved inappropriate to the subject. (As Paul Valery once quipped, "History is the science of what only happens once." A century earlier Novalis had further limited the reach of the sciences when he remarked: "Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.")

But in Burnett's judgment, Comte did have one good idea—that for many, the humanities now play a role once played by religious institutions. Burnett could easily have advanced this as his own insight and saved the reader some time, but the historical precedent is significant. It fleshes out the insight. Burnett paints the scene, establishes the context, and highlights the spirit—the living part—of Comte's work. The historical echoes and reverberation are enriching. But there is nothing vague or wishy-washy about the spirit involved. The historian must answer the question, at least implicitly, why we ought to take an interest in this, rather than that. He or she must identify where the value lies.

The concept of spirit only becomes vague when it's posited as being opposed to matter. To the historian, spirit animates events and in so doing, it transforms matter, lives, institutions. Hegel's term for these things is "objective spirit." The study of history and the humanities is, or ought to be, inspiring. Referring to the students who continue to pursue a career in these fields, many of whom he has taught, met with, and advised, Burnett writes:

"They must feel this, since it would be inconceivable that they would decide to pursue a PhD in the humanities in the hopes of getting a 'good job'—of, somehow, making their way in a promising 'profession.' Given the career-placement statistics for humanists with doc­toral degrees, that would be completely crazy."

The academic environment Burnett describes isn't much different from the one I experienced in the mid-1970s, during my years in grad school at the U of MN. My advisor expressed the hope more than once that I was having a good time, because he thought it very unlikely I'd ever land a job as a historian. During my last year of study twelve students in the history department were in line to receive PhDs. Only one of them had a job waiting in academia.

 I was having a good time. College didn't cost much in those days. I enjoyed my work as a T.A., and I also worked part-time as a parking lot attendant, which helped to finance my education and gave me lots of time to read.

I was reading the wrong things, however. I enrolled in a seminar on Victorian England but found myself reading Burckhardt's history of the Italian Renaissance. I took a class in the French Revolution but got distracted by Robert Kuttner's Economists at Bay. Too many scattered interests. Meanwhile, it was becoming evident to me that grad school was, as the saying goes, a process of learning more and more about less and less.

When I'd exhausted my tenure as a T.A., I dropped out. (I was offered a job full-time by the university parking service. I declined.)

I suppose if everyone dropped out, we wouldn't have brilliant books like History and Human Flourishing to read. That would be too bad. But a glance at any issue of the New York Review of Books—not only the reviews, but more especially the university press ads touting their latest publications—make it clear that plenty of fascinating material is still coming down the pipe from academia.

 Laymen like me would probably find much of it unreadable. It would take a lot of work to extract and ponder and share the spirit within. And all for what?

Well, how about enlightenment?

 

Cassandra, Meet Pollyanna

Three hundred-odd years ago Jean-Jacque Rousseau wrote "Almighty God, thou who holds all spirits in thy hands, deliver us from the Enlightenment and fatal arts of our fathers and give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the sole goods that might create our happiness and which are precious in thy sight." You'll find similar sentiments in Plato.  They've been echoing down the ages since the Fall, I guess. The contradiction they harbor is most succinctly conveyed, perhaps, by the old Italian saying: "We were better off when things were worse."

In an article that appeared recently in the New York Times, free lance psychologist Adam Mastroianni makes an effort to explain why we so often feel that everything's going downhill—even though by most statistical measures the opposite is true. It carries the title "Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse." He bases his argument on what he calls two "well-established psychological phenomena."

1. We often seek out and pay attention to negative information. Our news sources, whatever they may be, emphasis such information. I'm referring here not only Fox News but also the more well-researched, mature, and reliable liberal press. The issue of the Times in which the article I'm referring appeared also carried headlines on page one informing us that nutritional science "is failing us"; that very few states includes climate change education in their curriculum for all twelve grades; that the night sky as we know it is disappearing due to light pollution and wildfires; and that the late Cormac McCarthy's celebrated writing career "would never happen today."

I have grown increasingly sensitive over the years to the fact that headlines and lead paragraphs, whatever the news happens to be, often carry adjectives such as "alarming," "unsettling," and "surprising." Alarming to whom? To the economists, pundits, scientists, and pollsters whose prognostications more often than not turn out to be wrong, one way or the other?

2. Mastroianni's second point is that over time we tend to forget about the bad stuff, and as a result, the past develops the sheen of a Golden Age. No argument there. In fact, thirty-five-odd years ago I made the same argument in a piece titled "Cultural Requirements." And due to the marvelous powers of desk-top computing, I can easily find the text and reproduce a few lines here. (You can read the entire essay in my book Mountain Upside Down.)

It is of the essence of culture, I think, in its nutritive capacity, to be exemplary rather than typical or symptomatic. Those who argue differently face a Catch-22, the illogicality of which has not in any way diminished its popularity as a journalistic hook. It goes like this:

A) Culture is in decline. Look at TV, look at films, etc.

B) But no, look at this fine book, or this jazz performance.

A) Yes, but the things you’ve just mentioned aren’t truly representative. The masses know nothing about them. They’re the tastes of an elite. Therefore, culture is in decline.

 The flaw in this line of analysis stems from a stubborn determination to equate mass culture, which is only occasionally significant, and exemplary culture, which may well be unpopular or obscure in its day, although it increases in significance with the passage of time. Anyone who expects popular culture to rise to the level of that body of resilient works of art and thought which, having retained their vigor through time, offer us a vision of the past, is bound to be disappointed. No one in our day is likely to be as cryptically profound as Heraclitus, as proper as Confucius, as compassionate as Christ, as noble as El Cid, as observant as Jan van Eck, as cosmic as Giordano Bruno, as feverishly romantic as Cervantes, as clever as Shakespeare, as sublime as Mozart, as charismatic as Napoleon, as melancholy as Leopardi, as guileless as Therese of Liseaux, as intellectually perverse as Wittgenstein, or as humane as Jean Renoir. When we examine the climate of our own times the commonplace habits and artifacts we meet up with daily or read about in the papers, and not the isolated ideas and images that posterity will remember us for, tend to dominate our field of view. Therefore, it would appear that our culture is “in decline.” It’s a simple matter of perspective.               

Nicolas of Cusa, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, argued that the infinitely large and the infinitely small amount to the same thing, which is God. It’s a thought worth pondering; yet I must say that in the end the idea of “infinity” in either form, being mathematical and abstract, leads us away from the truth. Whatever else he, or she, (or they?) may be, God is not an abstraction. Nothing real is abstract.

I’m more inclined to endorse the remark of Thomas Aquinas that “we know God implicitly in everything we know.” But this slant presents us with problems as well. Perhaps we ought to dispense with the theological nostrums altogether, (though they’re always there, in the logical substratum of our personal attempts to show or to explain the way we feel about things) and merely echo the sentiment of an odd and now slightly obscure French novelist, Henry de Montherlant, who once wrote: "Life is a wonderful thing. When you turn it over and examine it thoroughly, when you see that which is, you feel like getting down on your knees. That which is—three remarkable syllables!"

Mastroianni extends the argument to other aspects of modern life, including politics and morals, but the reasoning is the same. Yet he bases his argument, not on reasoning, but on 574,000 survey responses. He writes:

While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

Well, it hardly seems necessary to interview that many people to get at the truth. All you need to do is look inside your own head. 

Modern life presents us with plenty of serious challenges, needless to say. But I think Flaubert was right when he remarked, two hundred-odd years ago: "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times."

One avenue I might recommend to improve the doom-and-gloom mood would be to scuttle the grade school lectures about climate change and develop a K-12 curriculum devoted to poetry, not only as a literary genre but also as a mental discipline designed to open the richness of daily life—"that which is"—to wider view. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani once expressed the belief that poetry should "empty into the reader's heart a charge of spiritual energy that contains all parts of the soul, making all life fall into place." Of course, the effect isn't permanent. As we shift our perspective or expand our field of view, we are reminded once again of the many parts of life that remain painfully out of joint. But both perspectives are valid, and the refreshment we take from one makes it easier to face, and change, the other. 

Building upon that foundation, it might be possible to develop a deeper understanding of what history is, bending it away from the currently popular but historiographically jejune "hermeneutics of suspicion" toward a deeper and more mature "hermeneutics of recovery and understanding."

But that's a subject for another time.

  

Summer Solstice Meditations

 The winter solstice is a big deal, or at least it can be imagined to be. The sun had been retreating, day after day, but now it seems to be returning. That's great! On the longest night of the year, it makes good sense to gather together around a fire of some sort.

The summer solstice has less of a claim to the imagination, though in this epoch of climate change, perhaps we should all celebrate the fact that the sunlight will grow less prolonged and severe.

Hilary and I decided to celebrate this less-than-staggering astronomical event with an overnight trip to Myre-Big Island State Park, a few miles from the Iowa border, near Albert Lea. Not many people go there mid-week, and even fewer, I suspect, when the temperature hits 90 degrees.

An added deterrent was the predicted level of "ground-level ozone," something I'd never heard of. Evidently the combination of sunny skies, warm temperatures, and low humidity creates an environment conducive to a reaction of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, the result being a dramatic increase in ground-level ozone. The warning I read advised "children and older adults, and people who are active outdoors" to avoid prolonged or heavy outdoor exertion. Like hiking?

I had always imagined ozone to be a thin, wispy gas, way up in the stratosphere, protecting us from various harmful forms of solar radiation. I don't see what purpose it serves down here on the ground.

For whatever reason, our favorite campsite (#52) was available, with no other site reserved for several hundred yards. And the park is only ninety minutes by freeway down the lovely Bemis Moraine from Minneapolis. So we went.

Myre-Big Island is a grand and curious park, with at least four distinct areas of natural interest. The oddest thing about it is that it wraps itself around a large lake that can be seen from many vantage points, yet the lake itself has little recreational value. Cool breezes blow across it. Pelicans and cormorants drift here and there. Deer drink on the shore near herons and egrets poised to feed on passing minnows. But no one swims in it, and there are precious few boats around. Which is good.

Our plan was to hike the shady, marshy trails in the southwest corner of the park during the afternoon heat, and hike the Pelican Trail across the high, open fields the next morning when heat (and ozone?) would be low.

What one notices on such rambles is the beauty of the grassy, rolling hills covered with golden alexander, and the shady woods full of well-spaced burr oaks and walnut trees. 

The sumac fruit is still green and succulent. The migrant birds have gone north, and the songs and chirps of the same few species assault the ears again and again: common yellowthroat, redstart, yellow warbler, red-eyed vireo, field sparrow, catbird. To be surprised by the slurpy call of the indigo bunting, the buzz-buzz of the clay-colored sparrow, or the irritated chatter of the house wren was always a treat.

For every bird we saw, we heard twenty.

The heat of the day persisted into evening, and we decided not to put the rain-fly on the tent. This would allow such breezes as there were to flow through it, and it would also make it possible to see the stars through the mosquito netting in the roof.  This can be a great experience, not only for its poetic effect, but also because one tends to wake up frequently during the night when sleeping on the ground, and the movement of the stars reminds us that time is passing and the discomforts of the night won't last forever.

Yet I have to admit that on the longest day of the year, I also felt a little bit exposed without the rain fly, because our tent has a panel of transparent netting right along the ground, and campers taking their evening walk around the campground—a common habit—would be able to see me lying there on the ground in evening light, covered with a sheet and defenseless.  

Of greater interest than the birds at this time of year are the prairie plants. There were lots of white indigo in the fields on the first part of the Pelican Trail. I noticed just now that this plant is listed as "native, rare" on the Minnesota Wildflowers website.

We also spotted the clump of compass plant we'd admired a few years ago on the same trail, but they were still a few weeks from blooming.

We investigated the four backpacking campsite along the route. All of them were along the shore of the lake, and several were nice. But you would have to carry in your water, and I had to remind myself it would be a drag hauling your comfy and indispensable camp chair way out there.

The various butterflies and dragonflies along the trail were also beautiful and intriguing. And fleeting. And nameless.

It was getting hot by the time we got back to our site and broke camp. By midday we were exploring the backstreets of Albert Lea, trying to find Edgewater Park.

Past Lives — a Love Story?

I saw a sneak preview of the Korean/American film Past Lives a few days ago. It's a quiet, enigmatic film—in many ways the opposite of the frenetic Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and it's been getting a lot of press. It follows a few decades in the life of Nora, who leaves Korea at the age of twelve along with her parents, who have arranged for the family to emigrate to Canada. Nora seems unperturbed by the change; She's bright and willful. In an instant she's become an adult and moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright.

The plot centers on Nora's relationship with Hae Sung, the boy she left behind in Korea when both were pre-teen kids. At some point Nora and a friend (her mother?) are having some fun on the laptop, looking up people they knew in Korea, and Nora discovers that Hae Sung has also been looking for her. They reconnect via Zoom or Skype, and begin a vague, dreamy correspondence about where their lives are going, how they still think about each other, and so on. Should Hae Sung pay Nora a visit in New York? No, he's studying engineering and plans to go to China to learn Mandarin. It will be good for his career. Maybe Nora should visit him in Seoul? No thanks.

Nora finally suggests that it would be best if they discontinue their conversations. Reluctantly, Hae Sung agrees.  

At a writer's retreat, Nora meets Arthur, a likeable novelist and self-styled "New York Jew" in the Joel Fleischman mold. On their first evening together (as I recall), Nora shares a few bottles of beer with Arthur, and also the Korean concept of “inyun,” a personal connection established in past lives and now bearing fruit—not dissimilar, as far as I can tell, from the Turkish concept of "kismet."

A few frames, and ten years, later, we find Arthur and Nora married and living together in a tiny Brooklyn apartment.

Although the film isn't long by modern standards, it seems to have taken a long time to reach this point. Nora is lively and interesting to look at, and she and Arthur seem to be a good pair, but many viewers will be eager for the other shoe to drop.

Yes, Hae Sung plans to visit New York. Nora agrees to spend some time with him, of course, and Arthur is pretty cool about. Hae Sung has a good job and a fiancée in Korea, but as Arthur puts it: "He's coming half way around the world to see you, after all."

What happens? I'm not going to say. Nor do Nora and Hae Sung have much of interest to say to each other, though they visit quite a few bits of New York scenery while moodily not saying it. All the interesting conversations take place between Nora and Arthur as he grapples with the challenge of sharing his life with a woman who only dreams in Korean, and she struggles to find a place in her heart for Hae Sung's dyed-in-the-wool Korean-ness, and perhaps her own. (Isn't that what the play she's writing and rehearsing is all about?)

The street scenes in Past Lives are colorful and fun to watch. Viewers are likely to be reminded at various points of Woody Allen's Manhattan and Nora Ephraim's You've Got Mail, and even Everything, Everywhere All at Once, in so far as that film considers alternative life paths for its characters, and also creates a meta-verse where they actually take place.

The concept of "inyun" is really just a red herring, though it makes for good late-night conversation at the bar. In the end, what's fated to be is what is;  what "might have been" doesn't fall within its purview. Every life contains more than a few unfulfilled possibilities, which may be worth pondering briefly but are not worth dwelling on. Nor can any single relationship, however deep and strong, be all-absorbing or fully realized. We remain mysterious to one another. 

Or as the Argentine/Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: "I love you just the way you are, but do not tell me how that is."  

Barbershop Big Bang Theory

I came upon an article in Scientific American recently suggesting that the universe began with a "bang" rather than a "bounce." That was the story we were told as kids, of course, and it even appears in a flashback in Annie Hall (!977) where the young Alvy Singer tells his psychiatrist, "Why do your homework? The universe is expanding, and someday it will explode." The kid's got a point.

More recently, theories have been floated suggesting that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion in an endless series of bounces. So, which is it?

I have often pondered this question while sitting in the barber shop waiting to get a haircut, though a second question often comes to mind first: "I made a reservation online half an hour ago, when there was a half-hour wait; so why do I have to wait an additional half-hour once I get here? Did I pass through a wormhole or what?"

Though I find the question of the origin of the universe intriguing, the first thing that caught my eye in the article was the last phrase of the headline—"New Studies Find."

This is wretched journalism, and not in the least bit scientific. The proper phrase would be "New Studies Suggest." Nothing in astrophysics is definitively "found," and the origins and dim past of the universe will probably remain murky 'til the end of time, and beyond. The "findings" referred to in the article are merely speculations, and shaky ones at that.

Astrophysicists have established with some degree of confidence that in the first few milliseconds during which our current universe expanded—a blindingly hot phase known colloquially as the "inflationary period"—the universe behaved very differently than it does now. The speculations under review here deal with conflicting explanations of irregularities that have been detected recently within the cosmic microwave background, which is commonly considered the "footprint" of that nascent universe. The authors of the current article describe and also critique theories such as bispectrum and loop quantum cosmology before concluding that before the Big Bang produced our universe from a "singularity," there was ... nothing. The mass required to reverse the expansion of a previous incarnation and keep the "accordion" pumping simply does not exist.

Personally, I have my doubts. Four fifths of the mass required to explain the rotation of the galaxies we can see and measure—the infamous Dark Matter—has never been detected at any wave-length. We presume it's there because without it our gravitational formulas don't work. Well, maybe there's even more Dark Matter out there than we think, that we also can't see, that would make a different gravitational formula more accurate while also supporting the theory of an accordion universe—the "bounce" theory mentioned in the title.

Yet such arguments overlook a more basic point. Even if current evidence supported the "accordion" theory of numerous expansions and contractions, it would leave the question unanswered. How did the universe—whether singular and unique or seesaw and musical—get going in the first place? Where did it come from?

Thinking about this issue at any great length will make you seasick. I would not recommend it. But such questions do have their amusing side, because language is incapable of even phrasing the question correctly. For example, a moment ago I asked the question, Where did the universe come from?  Such a question makes sense if it refers to something discrete, like a wood tick that suddenly appears on my forearm, crawling toward my hand, as I'm driving. Where did that come from? It wasn't there a split-second ago. The window's closed, and I doubt if it fell from the inside roof of the car. Weird!

One thing I know for certain is that wherever it came from was somewhere else.

But you can't ask where the universe came from unless you believe there's somewhere else it could have come from. But that place would also be a part of the universe, which includes everything. Right? The question makes no sense.  

Yet it must be asked.   

Another question that makes no sense to me is this: I've been waiting patiently, thumbing through Golf Digest or Minnesota Monthly, until my name rises to the top of the list on the computer screen. I sit down in the barber chair, and the stylist asks me a question like "Why are we here today?" or "What are we thinking of?" Oh, my God. These are profound questions. Why are we here today? Why is anything here today?  

But I think I know what she's driving at. And I have an answer ready.

I point to my hair and say, "A little shorter, please. And could you clean up that unruly fluff on the back of my neck."

   

Marvelous May: Forest-shaping

May is the gardening month par excellence, though it doesn't seem to get going until Mother's Day. The weather is cool, the vegetation is fresh, and we discover how well things did over the winter--or not-- which will determine what the new garden will require.

Variations on two common phrases have run through my mind more than once when scattering grass seed, assaying plants at a nursery, or lugging a tub of mulch or topsoil around the garage into the back yard.

— Gardening in the triumph of hope over experience.

— A garden is what springs up while you're making other plans.

Last summer was hot and dry; patches of our front yard became a desert, and several newly purchased plants didn't do well. I considered it a minor miracle to see that the blue beech (Carpinus caroliniana) that we planted last year, which did nothing but drop leaves for the rest of the summer, made it through the winter. It's still the same size as when we planted it, but its new leaves have a beautiful golden sheen. And I was equally pleased to see that two robust chokecherry trees have appeared nearby it in the midst of all the grape vines and Virginia creeper.

Two chokecherries amid the foliage

On the other hand, for several weeks I scrutinized the two witch hazel bushes we planted last year almost daily, looking for new buds, before concluding that I was staring at a couple of dead sticks.

If I had done my research before purchasing the plants I would have learned that—to quote the Chicago Botanic Garden—witch hazels "have preference for well-drained, loamy, acidic soil [which] means that they grow less than happily in clay soil." The soil out back, especially in the band of woods at the edge of our yard, is mostly clay.

I also read just now that the witch hazel is commercially grown and harvested "for the extract of its bark and roots, which is distilled into the common astringent that bears its name." I don't know anything about that, but last summer I watched the squirrels frolicking all over these plants, leaping onto them, bending them down to the ground, and basically going wild in every direction. Even this spring I saw a squirrel spinning around in the dirt at the base of the dead stump. Something in the bark appeals to them.

A few days ago we made a trip across town to the St. Croix River Valley to visit the Out Back Nursery, which specializes in Minnesota-grown native species but doesn't seem too concerned about the retail trade. As usual, our goal was to find a few shrubs to fill in the woods behind our house. After considerable hemming and hawing, we came home with another blue beech, a hazelnut shrub, and a gray dogwood similar to the ones that have lined our deck for the last thirty-five years.

A couple of nannyberry bushes had been doing quite well, but the rabbits girdled them during the winter and I cut them down, hoping they'd bounce back. One of the two is now, a month later,  a flourishing two-foot shrub. (It will take years to return to its former height, of course.) The other, larger, specimen still looks pretty dead. I tried to dig out the roots, but I couldn't lift them; they'd gone too deep. I gave up when the handle of the shovel sounded like it was starting to crack and simply repacked the soil and cut off the stump even closer to the ground. (You never know?)   

A blue beech (left) and a hazelnut

We planted the blue beech and the hazelnut within the deer-proof enclosure a few feet from the moribund nannyberry. (They say a black bear can smell a ripe hazelnut two miles away. That would be just our luck.)

Meanwhile, I'm thrilled by the new growth on the volunteer black locust. I'd say it's now at least four feet high and six feet across. (But maybe I'm exaggerating.) It seems to be suckering up from the roots of the two mature locusts nearby. I would have preferred to see it sprouting ten feet to the east, but it's a welcome addition to the woods just the same. 

Alongside this heavy-duty and perhaps Quixotic forest-shaping we also added a few annuals for color where the sun lingers for an hour or two—browallias, impatiens, astilbe, foxgloves. They don't look like much from a distance but add a little sparkle at close range. We also planted a few wishbone flowers, formally known as Torenia. They're named after my great-great-uncle Olaf (or so I'm told), the eighteenth-century Swedish bishop who "discovered" them in Viet Nam while serving as a ship chaplain for the East India Company.

We've planted them in the past: they never do well. 

Meanwhile, a columbine blew in last year that we hadn't seen in a decade. This year, it's back.

And the other day I transplanted a four-foot buckeye tree from near the woodpile alongside the garage back into the "woods," and I'm almost shocked to see that three weeks later it seems to be doing well. Dr. Seuss would have liked it.