13 November 04
This Evening’s Entertainment
(A one-sentence post.)
The four of us pursued the fly as it zoomed from halfway up the wall to the lamp and back but it met its end not through any mammalian strategem neither rubber bands nor paws swiping at the ground but rather through the enterprise of a spider two feet down from the ceiling who waited patiently and then wrapped.
12 November 04
Nearly Eight Months Old
The tiny kittens we hauled out of the carport are no longer tiny. They are now outgrowing the green mat on the counter we put there to try and discourage them from sitting on the keyboard. (It doesn’t work.)
Charlie likes eating, corks from winebottles (merlot and grenache preferred, but he’ll take anything), eating, playing with balls especially ones that bounce, eating, sleeping, eating. Diego likes catnip, a feathered toy, the space behind the bathroom door, spitting in fun, getting into the bag of walnuts, and jumping up high to see out. They both like snogging (substitute nursing which I’m guessing at this point will never go away).
11 November 04
A Day With Humboldt
Today was a holiday—Veteran’s Day—and I stayed at home all day, venturing out only to go to my Spanish class in the evening. A storm came through, and we’ve had 1.68 inches of rain in the past 30 hours. My rainy day activities including pondering sparrows with the kitties and finishing the book Humboldt’s Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich. Alexander von Humboldt was one of these amazing figures in natural history, making contributions to botany, geology, anthropology, and of course geography, he founding the field of plant geography. His drive as an explorer was incredible: I can’t believe how he hauled the finest of scientific instruments and tens of thousands of specimens during five years of adventures in South America between 1799 and 1804. How nice to have the luxury to haul out the Times Atlas of the World and trace his route up the Orinoco and through the Andes.
10 November 04
Rivers
qb of Frizzy Logic went to meet Natalie of Blaugustine and bought a picture this week. There are tantalizing glimpses of them, not quite straight-on. I was mesmerized by their accounts and images of this encounter, and by Natalie’s art.
The next day I got a note from another artist friend in the UK, Brian Pike. We knew each other back when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Cambridge and I wasn’t. His topic was enthralling, though: human color perception. I argued that different cultures had a different sense of color. He didn’t think so: he said if I asked a Yanomami indian to point out their reddest red, it probably would be pretty close to mine. oh, I said. (I said this a lot when I lived in Cambridge.)
His route to becoming an artist was complicated, but I for one am so glad he did.
From the hauntingly spare images of lonely houses on Yorkshire moors to monkeys in Tamil Nadu, whose texture is only whispered across the continents at 72 dpi, I want to go buy a picture, too. I want to show up on his doorstep and have a cup of tea and plunge my face into these images that remind me of something I can’t quite remember. He says Paul Klee is the most important artist of the 20th century. Not Kandinsky, I’d say? There would be chocolate biscuits.
(I guess I’m pining for Yorkshire. People who know what Yorkshire’s like in November will probably think I’m nuts, though Coup de Vent seems not to mind.)
Brian’s art has kept us in touch, I think. And I wonder how many other friends I had who could have done something this but chose other, perhaps easier, ways, with whom I have now lost all contact. Like with Natalie and qb, the images jump, shortcircuting language. I love words. But I love breathing through my eyes, too, having this other river that flows through my soul.
9 November 04
Sketch Until You Crawl
That is the idea behind the first World Wide SketchCrawl. On Sunday November 21 spend the entire day in a sketching marathon. (From Danny Gregory.)
And if you need to find something to write with for this endeavor, have a look at Glenn’s Pen Page, with information about pens, pen stores, companies, and ink.
8 November 04
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
This morning as I was getting my bike out along the driveway past all the beekeeping equipment on my way to work—in a hurry, I was late—a rock wren popped out into a small patch of sunlight.
I have a special fondness for wrens, as I mentioned recently in a comment over at Via Negativa. They’re small, they’re not very brightly colored, but they are cheerfully busy. They chatter. They scold. They have personallity.
Then, coming home tonight, way after dark after a dinner in Sacramento commiserating with some friends about Tuesday’s results, I heard some geese calling overhead through the fog. I’m pretty sure they were white fronted geese. Winter is here: our valley is flooded in parts and the waterfowl take over. Switching places with the ducks, they move out in to the fields to feed at night.
It is hard to stay in a place of despair with this around me: a rock wren and night-feeding geese.
7 November 04
Seen on a Trip to the Coop
It’s rare to see political graffiti in the US, but maybe times are a-changing. We spotted this today on the side of a large shed the other side of the railroad tracks from the food coop in Davis. Is the ambiguity in the message intentional, or do they need an editor?
6 November 04
Gossamer
The spiders spin a strand, jump onto it, and drop into the breeze. They can travel for thousands of miles like this. We looked up into the sky today as we walked through the Arboretum and there were hundreds of them, floating softly like white wisps of dreams, waiting to make a good landfall. It’s a leap of random faith: unlike fledgling birds that make their first southward migration without really knowing where they’re going but that can at least rely on instinct, and the southward sun to aim for, and some kind of internal magnet, the spiders are completely at the mercy of the winds that carry them aloft.
Numenius and I looked up at the gossamer and we talked about hatred.
There’s a lot of it about. Liberals don’t like to use the word about themselves, it’s somehow dirty, it’s what THEY—the others—do and have and spread. Not us. But over the last few days many people I know—most of them in the blogosphere—have admitted to feeling hatred. (In addition to anger, rage, grief, perplexity, dumfoundedness, fear nay terror, numbness, isolation, like running away, like getting a long-lapsed antidepressant prescription refilled, and so on.)
Butuki over at Laughing~Knees is asking some pretty tough ones, questioning our assumptions about who we are—as Americans, as voters, as members of the world community. Chris Clarke is expressing in particularly searing form contempt for certain other liberal assumptions. Elck at The Vernacular Body suggests a most intriguing exercise: try to find five things you LIKE about Bush. Rana at Frogs and Ravens is being brutally honest about her emotional roller coaster this week. And over at Velveteen Rabbi, something extraordinary is going on: people are writing, respectfully, really wanting to understand, from somewhat opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are doing what I’ve come to understand as almost impossible: they are really trying to talk.
Here’s what I think we can learn, we liberals who are still reeling from these few days of heartache and disappointment. We have just had a full-on dose of what it feels like to be marginalized. We feel isolated. We see something the victorious don’t see, and they don’t care that we see it. Our truths are irrelevant to them. We feel like we don’t matter. We feel judged because of who we voted for, assumptions are made about us. We read about and hear people writing us off, and it hurts. (Some of the things said are, well, hateful.)
Well, guess what. A significant fraction of Americans feels like this ALL THE TIME. Whether marginalized by the color of their skin or the way they speak or the work they do or the trailer they live in. Welcome to their world. And, since this fraction is one we’d like to have on our side, maybe we can use the experience to LISTEN to them for once instead of assuming we know what’s good for them and telling them to vote for us or with us.
That, and explore this hatred thing a bit more. Look inside a bit. And leap out and jump into the sky on a strand of gossamer, trusting to the universe to provide…
5 November 04
While We Fulminate…
The young take action.
The most encouraging news I came across today was that about 85 students in Boulder High School in Colorado staged a protest in the school library, saying they were concerned about the future of the country and refusing to leave until Republican politicians came and met with them. No Republican came to speak with them—a spokesman for Governor Owen told them the best way for them to practice democracy was to go back to their classroom—but their Democratic congressman, Mark Udall, came over and spoke with them for about an hour.
The students consider their action a success.
4 November 04
Learning Difference
This evening I led a discussion following a showing of the film of Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight at one of the undergraduate housing complexes here at UC Davis.
My co-leader bailed; she had a calculus test. (I’d rather be almost anywhere than in a calculus test, so I let her go happily.) But I don’t interact with undergrads very often and was a little nervous. The group ended up being about 35, about 30 more than I was expecting.
After the film it emerged that two of the students had been living in LA at the time of the Rodney King riots; the father of one of them was a policeman. She was a little shaken by the portrayal of the cops in the film (well, it’s true they don’t come off so well). It was good for the other students (and me) to hear her perspective; her father spent over two weeks with almost no sleep.
We then did an exercise where each person wrote down a time they had felt out of place—followed by something they might say to the people that made them feel this way. The cards were shuffled and everyone read out a different person’s card.
Here are three at random:
“When I moved to a new school, I felt out of place. I would have told the other students to give me a chance to show what kind of person I was, rather than judging me.”
“I felt out of place around my boyfriend’s hispanic and black friends. I grew up in a wealth white/asian community, while my boyfriend grew up in a poorer diverse community. Although I never felt any classism or racism toward his friends, I never felt totally accepted as a person. I was always seen as a “rich white girl.”
“After the elections, I was in a study group with some of my long-time study friends. They all happened to be Republican and chided me about my Democratic beliefs and my opinion of the outcome of the election. Though at the time I felt uneasy and out of place, I know that if the elections had turned out the opposite way, our feelings toward each other would have been reversed.”
I learned a lot this evening. These students have much to teach me. We need to keep talking to each other, all of us…