Sally and I are just back from Reno after becoming acquainted with our grandson Tate, now about six weeks old. It was a good thing for us to see, the love of his parents, and it was also good to be able to express our love as grandparents. I'll now (happily) have to change my note about myself on this blog--no longer "virtual" but an in-the-flesh, honest-to-god grandpa. The hope part of this title also applies--what better manifestation of hope could there be?
It occurs to me that I haven't been much abiding by the avowed subject matter noted in the header to this blog: local life is not much present. Here is a beginning attempt to attend to that deficiency.
Last night thunderstorms brought four-tenths of an inch of rain to the very dry earth. I was noticing earlier yesterday how the grass had already begun to wilt. But tonight the frogs started to sing again after being very quiet during most of a dry spell in the first half of May. There was a strong south wind all day yesterday that led to near calm and mosquito-friendly air by 7:00pm. The rain came just before midnight, while Sally and I talked with friends on main street, Wadena. The town was quiet and mostly dark, and frequent lightning flashed as we drove north toward home.
The weather report suggests that we may have a wetter week upcoming. Let's hope so. It makes me feel better, knowing that some patterns persist in our altered world. I connect the good weather news with good news about our grandson, Tate. We just got word from our son, Colin, that Tate, now nearly a month old, is doing better after a very scary time with liver enzyme issues. All the events, personal and public in our lives, remind me to remain hopeful rather than optimistic about just about everything. I'm still struck by how farmers around here plant when the earth seems so dry that nothing would germinate. And sometimes their hope is rewarded, and after a dry time the rain comes.
The bloodroot pictured above has just finished blooming. The cowslip is in bloom in the ditches and swamps, and prairie smoke is blooming now too, as well as lilacs and chokecherry. Wild plum is already past. This is one of the best times of year here.
James B. Comey, loyal Republican, loyal to President Bush, shows what a man of honor looks like amongst the toadies of the Bush administration. He has been loyal, I would say to a fault, but when it comes to basic human decency and a commitment to honor his oath to uphold the Constitution and the Republic, he has been steadfast. No wonder that he is gone from this corrupt administration, where the American way bears no resemblance to the foundation laid by Madison, Hamilton, and the rest. If Shakespeare were here today, what a tale he could write.
This photograph of Europa rising over Jupiter's horizon is a result of the New Horizons project, a joint effort of NASA, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Southwest Research Institute.
This is an amazing project, and these sets of images meant to convey the beauty of space are extraordinary. Even though this photograph in particular is reminiscent of the iconic images of the earth rising over the moon's horizon that have become a part of the visual vocabulary of most of the world, Jupiter seems a very cold, lifeless beauty, not quickening the sense of longing and belonging that the images of earth rising do. Here is a quotation about this image from the New Horizons folks.
"New Horizons took this image of the icy moon Europa rising above Jupiter’s cloud tops with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) at 11:48 Universal Time on February 28, 2007, six hours after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Jupiter. The picture was one of a handful of the Jupiter system that New Horizons took primarily for artistic, rather than scientific, value.
This particular scene was suggested by space enthusiast Richard Hendricks of Austin, Texas, in response to an Internet request by New Horizons scientists for evocative, artistic imaging opportunities at Jupiter. The spacecraft was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Jupiter and 3 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Europa when the picture was taken. Europa's diameter is 3,120 kilometers (1,939 miles).
The image is centered on Europa coordinates 5 degrees south, 6 degrees west. In keeping with its artistic intent - and to provide a more dramatic perspective - the image has been rotated so south is at the top."
Thirty-five years ago the famed physician, scientist, and essayist Lewis Thomas commented on one of the earthrise photographs in his essay "The World's Biggest Membrane." The essay first appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine and was later included in Thomas' Lives of a Cell (1974).
"Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.
It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology. . . . It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing that the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night."
Last night we watched The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 movie about a disconnected man trying tragically and hopelessly to connect. He wants to connect to whatever society is in power, and unfortunately the one in power is the fascist society of 1930's Italy. The result of his choice is destructive and violent to himself and others. The story seems instructive of the Virginia Tech massacre, and generally about our desire to belong to a society that we know, in some part of our being, is corrupt and unsupportable. How hard it is to avoid wanting to be a part of respectable society, whether we're Huckleberry Finn, Colin Powell, George Tenet, or Marcello Clerici. Huckleberry made the heroic existential choice, the others could not. Clearly, it is much harder to act than to read about it in literature [duh!], or look at it in photographs. The literature and the photographs help us to understand. But understanding isn't enough.
This is a photograph of an astronaut's suit with camera and transmission equipment that was used by NASA as part of a student awareness project. No one is in the suit.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.
I begin to wonder just who has a grip on reality--maybe I just don't get it? Today, the Washington Post reported that "The president said that Gonzales' testimony before skeptical Judiciary Committee senators last week 'increased my confidence' in his ability to lead the Justice Department. Separately, a White House spokeswoman said, 'He's staying.'"
Each day the universe that contains the limits of the surreal for the Bush administration expands further. Can this expansion continue until January of 2009? Or will some force of gravitational morality cause the universe to begin to contract?
`Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.'
Today I am no longer an expectant grandfather. Tate Bradley Robertson was born into this world yesterday in faraway Reno, Nevada. I can't even imagine what the weather was like yesterday in Reno on Tate's birth day, but In north-central Minnesota yesterday was beautiful, sending much needed rain to what had been a cool and dry month. Last night, with the wind coming up, choirs of frogs insisted that spring was arrived. The frost is mostly out of the ground by now, and the lilac buds have greened and are just about ready to open. The talk of the rain here at the farm was a good respite from a week's talk of tragedy in Virginia and foolishness in Washington.
My wife, Sally, found this nice piece by Thomas Merton about the rain speaking with so much more eloquence than the voices of politics and commerce we hear all around us. I like to think that the way Merton hears the rain in his cabin is kin to how we are able to hear it at the farm too. And that, even though separated by half a continent, we'll be able to help Tate experience a little of our life here in the weeks and years ahead.
"The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligent perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows.
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."
Photographs sometimes mislead and sometimes they tell the whole story. This photograph appeared in the N.Y. Times.
William Henry Jackson's "Phantom Curve" (late 1800's) and Robert Adams' "Clear Creek Canyon, near Idaho Springs" (ca. 1970). If you click on the Jackson photograph to enlarge it you will be able to see the man standing at the base of (what's left of) the rock formation to the right of the tracks.
Robert Adams is the most literate of photographers, and his photographs of Colorado and the West remain the most important model of landscape photography for me. This image called "Burning Oil Sludge, North of Denver, Colorado" (1973) is part of a show held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2006 called "Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance."
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