21 January 04
Peace Through Drawing
Butuki was kind enough to comment on my sketches of the scissor-tailed flycatcher and wondered what my field notebooks looked like… alas, I have none. I should, I think.
Or at the very least I should draw birds more often.
I once took an illustration class where one of the assignments was to illustrate a collective noun (pride of lions, murder of crows, etc.). I chose skein of snow geese, and spent the next three weeks seeking out reference material from which to draw these beautiful birds. Photos. Bird videos I stuck on “pause.” Stuffed specimens in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. No live birds, sadly; this would be an easy task in Davis in the winter, but not in Cambridge. Yet there was plenty of material from which to draw.
I will never, now, misidentify a Ross’s goose for a snow goose. Why? Because I learned that bird, inhaled it, almost, by drawing it. It doesn’t matter that the sketches, most of them, weren’t very good; it’s the act of seeing that makes the difference. Looking as hard as that at the scissor-tailed flycatcher has made me commune with it in a different way than looking at it through binoculars, and certainly with photographing it. It was like a meditation.
The best part? Since that time on Monday morning I’ve been on a kind of high. I think I should listen to this voice that speaks of the healing power of being with birds long enough to do, say, thirty sketches. They don’t have to be large, they don’t have to be finished, and they certainly don’t have to be any good. I just have to show up with a pencil and sketchbook.
20 January 04
Catfight In Iowa
The Democratic presidential primaries opened yesterday with a stunning defeat of the frontrunner Howard Dean, the caucus being won by Massachusetts senator John Kerry. I haven’t been following the campaigning lately but it seems that Dean and Richard Gephardt fought each other bitterly leaving Kerry and John Edwards of North Carolina to pick up votes. Gephardt has now dropped out of the race. I have been interested in Dean for the past year because of his committed anti-war stance, and am definitely a bit disappointed by these results. It may be though that his rhetoric or tone simply, as they say, won’t play well in Peoria anymore, and I will fall back on ABB (anybody but Bush) logic. Let’s hope the candidate that emerges as the survivor over the next few months is truly the best one to take on Bush in November.
19 January 04
Hijacking a Birder
This morning we spent a good hour with the scissor-tailed flycatcher outside Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus. I did some sketches; Numenius took a lot of photos (one of which is here) and also managed to catch a short video clip (844 kb, Quicktime) with the digital camera during which the flycatcher regurgitated one of the magnolia fruits it had been eating.
A theoretical ecology postdoc arrived last week from Cambridge University. He was introduced to us as “a British birder.” This is the very best kind: a knowledgeable and highly skilled birder who has nevertheless never seen our common sparrows, much less megararities (such as the flycatcher). So people have been adopting him all week. He had managed to get to 83 new birds this morning by bike alone.
Thinking a nice round number like 100 was probably preferable, some birders hauled him off in a CAR: we joined them for part of the day and saw cinammon teal, marsh wren, song sparrow, and snow geese. Poor guy hasn’t opened a bank account yet or done any laundry since his arrival. Blame the birds, and blame the abducting birders.
Richard introduced us to a British birding term: “papped.” The scissor-tailed flycatcher got papped this morning (from “papparazzied,” photographed to excess).
18 January 04
The Drowning Of The City Of Ys
This is the title of a medieval legend from Brittany concerning a king Gradlon who built a city below sea level for Dahut his daughter. Dahut turned wayward, letting a prince, or perhaps the devil, steal the key to the floodgates of the city and thereupon open the sluices, drowning the city. Gradlon escaped, Dahut didn’t, and to this day fishermen sometimes hear her singing or playing bells below the waters.
We just heard Shira Kammen, accompanied by Tim Rayborn and Jim Oakden, perform a rendition of this ballad in a concert this afternoon at the Davis Community Church. Shira Kammen is a favorite musician of mine, renowned for her performances on medieval bowed instruments (e.g. the vielle). The first half of today’s concert featured songs in Middle English, the second half being the Breton tale with a bit of dancing as well as singing of some of the refrains by the audience.
Medieval music provides the performer very little to go upon. Many of the verses in today’s concert survived without any known melody. But that makes it up to the musician to supply inventiveness and creativity, and there’s nothing wrong with that!
17 January 04
A Very Lost Bird
I was looking out my office window yesterday morning when a gray bird, about the size of a small thrush, flew into the large valley oak to the north. It looked like a northern mockingbird.
But: no white flashes. None.
The bird was a scissor-tailed flycatcher. They nest in Oklahoma and Texas; usually they spend the winter in Central America. This one apparently is happy to be in Davis. Sylvia Wright first spotted it on December 12, when it was seen only by her and one other person, though she did manage to get a good photo.
I called a few birding friends, and within twenty minutes about twelve people were there. The provost came down to look for it. We had all kinds of people asking whether we were conducting a psychology experiment!
Postscript, Monday, January 19, 2004: We saw the flycatcher well for over an hour this morning. Numenius took lots of photos, one of which can be seen at left.
16 January 04
Waves Coming and Going
An entry for the Ecotone topic on Coming and Going
It’s been a week of playing with sound. On the laptop that is, where it’s easy to take a recording from a CD (the sound sampled at 44,100 times per second) and open the file in a sound editor and look at the waveforms. If you zoom down far enough, to ever shorter and shorter periods of time, you see the individual sample points, approximating the continuous sound wave. (Dogs must find CD recordings dreadfully lo-fi, being unable to render the upper octaves of their hearing.) That we perceive these pressure waves coming and going as sounds of different frequencies is a marvel.
Outside, a Pacific tree frog, by far the commonly encountered frog around here, is going ‘crickle, crickle’. This is their time in the cycle of the year—plenty of water around to keep them happy and able to wander about freely. At left there is a plot of the sound spectrogram of their call (time is on the x-axis, frequency is the y-axis). Their call pattern is strikingly periodic: a two-part ‘crickle’ every second or so.
It’s cloudy, and I don’t know what the phase of the moon is. But I do know that 29.5306 days from now, it will be at the same phase. Such is the periodicity of this universe.
15 January 04
Coming and Going
There is a Hebrew blessing for everything, just about, and there is certainly one for entering and leaving your house. I’ve seen several translations of this but the one I like best is “blessed are you in your comings and goings.” For a culture that has spent much of its history on the move, at least mythologically, it’s a good blessing, focusing on the present and the inevitable but bringing “home” into it. It’s packed with resonance yet wholesome. Blessed are you in your comings and goings.
I come and go all the time; I’ve lived in four countries. USA-Spain-UK-France-UK-USA. The years I spent in Boston I moved seven or eight times in as many years. You keep your pack light; you get restless; you move on. (Sometimes you are made to move on because of circumstances outside your control, but part of me believes there’s more control available here than I’d like to think.)
I’d like a blessing, instead, for staying put, something I seem to find almost impossible. Blessed are you in your sitting down. Blessed are you in your emptying your head of shopping lists. Blessed are you in your quiet time, in the quiet time you seem to shove aside as though you feared it.
Blessed are you in the fog and the moonlight and the breath you take to enfold them. Blessed are you in your breathing. Blessed are you—in your place.
(Ecotone Wiki joint post on Coming and Going)
14 January 04
In Search Of Early Music
While stumbling around the radio waves Saturday looking to practice recording music digitally straight to the laptop with our new iMic, I came across the radio show Harmonia, a weekly hour-long program from Indiana University on early music. This week’s program was on early American music, and I managed to record some shapenote tunes and a jig or two. I’m glad I finally found this show, which should become a staple on Saturdays for me.
13 January 04
Is Religion Inherently Violent?
This is a question being asked in a class I’m taking here at UC Davis—a class that is going to involve a lot more work than I had bargained for when I signed up. Lisa’s post on William Stafford over at field notes has prompted me to jot down a few things from what we’ve learned so far.
Given that most world religions have their origins in sacrifice, animal or even human (or divine), it’s interesting to speculate. Religion pushes humans to an ultimate commitment, for which they’d be willing to undertake violence (and do, to an alarming degree: many wars and genocides in history, recent and less recent contain religious elements). When this religious commitment gets paired up with a national one, it becomes very dangerous, and much more likely to engender violence.
The language of religion is often suffused with violence (“the wrath of God”); its symbolism, no less so (the Christian cross, for example, is a symbol of extreme violence perpetrated on its founder). Rn Girard believes that religion is inherently violent, because of the notion of sacrifice that is at its core. Its function is to limit violence through violence (so that religion becomes a kind of legal system through animal sacrifice).
The kind of religious violence that seems to be on the increase worldwide can be linked to fundamentalism, that is, a re-renewal of the foundations of a specific religion. The fundamentalist Christian sects that seek to blow up government buildings in the United States share this with Al-Qaeda: they perceive the world as heading down the slippery slope to evil and corruption, and it is the duty of the religious practitioner to “correct” this tendency. At whatever cost, apparently.
With all this it will be interesting to explore how a religion of NON-violence can emerge; how a Jesus, or a Buddha, or a Gandhi can come about in the first place.
A final note: I have learned a great deal about the life of undergraduates in the last few days, in particular how much time they spend standing in line, waiting to buy books, getting treated rudely by staff, and adapting to the whims of different professorial styles. They are condescended to routinely. It sucks, basically. (I’m learning the lingo.)
Ecotone wiki joint post on “Coming and Going” is due on January 15…
12 January 04
Prayer And Printer Cartridges
For those who are in a titanic struggle with their recalcitrant printer, or at least need some more ink or toner, there is a group of Cistercian monks in Wisconsin, who are raising money for their abbey by selling printer cartridges. Their business, entitled LaserMonks, is two years old and growing rapidly, and their prices are excellent. (From Slashdot).