You may think you know Gauguin well. You may think Gauguin is not worth knowing. But Gauguin at the Tate Modern makes the kind of impression that is not common. The reassembly in one place of works scattered in museums around the world, and the choice not to tell a predictable biographical story, made this a source of constant surprises.
One of these was the shock of recognition. In a room halfway through the gallery space, dedicated to exploring the sacred in Gauguin's work, "The Yellow Christ" met me with a shock of recognition. I grew up with this painting, even if my memory of it was half submerged, as it comes from the Albright Knox Art Museum. But the painting next to it, "The Green Christ", from the Belgian national museum, I had never seen. Its alternate title, "Breton Calvary", throws new light on its close companion. In the "Breton Calvary", what looks at first like the moment following the crucifixion, is revealed as a weathered sculpture, a pieta. Yet the "Yellow Christ" seems to show the Breton woman praying, not around a statue, but around a crucified man.
Then I turn, and see "Vision of the Sermon", this one from the National Galleries of Scotland. Breton women praying in the foreground frame a semicircular area delineated in solid red, where on one side of a tree a cow stands. On the other Jacob wrestles with the angel. The curatorial suggestion that what we see is the externalization of the women's perception of the sermon transforms how I can see any other work by Gauguin: as a kind of visual magical realism, so far from the false primitivism that he seemed to exemplify before.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Time in London
Staying in the heart of the City of London was a pragmatic decision, because it put us on the Northern subway line that took us within a 20 minute walk of the British Museum's collections storage.
But it was also a sentimental decision. Looking at a map of this part of London, today the financial center (and thus never until now a place we had stayed) the first striking thing is the map of the old city surrounded, but not erased, by the new. London Wall Street literally traces the arc of the great wall of the old Roman city of Londinium. The main streets in the City run out like rays from a center point.
Somewhere here, I knew, a Temple of Mithras had been found during construction work. I wanted to find that piece of physical memory, whose location was somewhat hazy in the various sources I read. And eventually, we found it, but along the way we found much more.
I was taken by the street names, references to the crafts that once were practiced, and my eye was drawn to the London Guildhall. I walked us past it, expecting nothing, and found a massive ornate building that looked as if generations of earlier buildings had been gradually covered up. I guessed that it had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, and guessed that the oldest part might have 16th century roots. In fact, it was started in 1411.
Buried beneath the Guildhall, open for visits through its art museum, I found my dose of Roman materiality: the east gate of the original Roman amphitheater. Once we knew it existed, we were able to see a blue arc of pavement in the courtyard of the Guildhall, showing the outline of the amphitheater. The Temple of Mithras was anticlimatic, standing rebuilt and open to rainfall, covered in green moss, next to the building called Temple Court on Queen Victoria Street. But what they brought to our walk through the City of 2010 was a sense of thousands of years of history.
This would have been enough to make the City come alive for me. But there was more. As we walked through the abandoned streets on Saturday, devoid of the bankers and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks during the week, a Song Cycle of early modern music flowed out of corners and byways. "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, John Dowland, 1604" occupied the corner of Milk Street and Russia Row as we wandered down toward the banks of the Thames, following the echoes of time in London.
But it was also a sentimental decision. Looking at a map of this part of London, today the financial center (and thus never until now a place we had stayed) the first striking thing is the map of the old city surrounded, but not erased, by the new. London Wall Street literally traces the arc of the great wall of the old Roman city of Londinium. The main streets in the City run out like rays from a center point.
Somewhere here, I knew, a Temple of Mithras had been found during construction work. I wanted to find that piece of physical memory, whose location was somewhat hazy in the various sources I read. And eventually, we found it, but along the way we found much more.
I was taken by the street names, references to the crafts that once were practiced, and my eye was drawn to the London Guildhall. I walked us past it, expecting nothing, and found a massive ornate building that looked as if generations of earlier buildings had been gradually covered up. I guessed that it had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, and guessed that the oldest part might have 16th century roots. In fact, it was started in 1411.
Buried beneath the Guildhall, open for visits through its art museum, I found my dose of Roman materiality: the east gate of the original Roman amphitheater. Once we knew it existed, we were able to see a blue arc of pavement in the courtyard of the Guildhall, showing the outline of the amphitheater. The Temple of Mithras was anticlimatic, standing rebuilt and open to rainfall, covered in green moss, next to the building called Temple Court on Queen Victoria Street. But what they brought to our walk through the City of 2010 was a sense of thousands of years of history.
This would have been enough to make the City come alive for me. But there was more. As we walked through the abandoned streets on Saturday, devoid of the bankers and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks during the week, a Song Cycle of early modern music flowed out of corners and byways. "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, John Dowland, 1604" occupied the corner of Milk Street and Russia Row as we wandered down toward the banks of the Thames, following the echoes of time in London.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Thoughts on Karaoke
Yes. Karaoke.
Not something I expected to ever have experience in, and therefore not something I ever thought about (except that I loved Bill Murray's Lost in Translation).
So it was somewhat surprising to be annoyed when, at what turned out to be midnight, the staff of the UC Presidential Postdoc retreat at UCLA's Lake Arrowhead conference center turned on a sound system, thereby ending karaoke night.
Beginning at the beginning: my third UCOP Postdoc is currently in his second (and last) year. One of the commitments in these mentored fellowships has been to come to two events a year: a day-long conference held at the Oakland Airport Hilton; and this weekend retreat.
I hate things that are scheduled by my job that assume I am available evenings or weekends. So it has not bothered me that in the previous four years (the most recent postdocs overlapped for one year) I have not made it to the weekend retreat. My reason was a good one: it has traditionally been held in spring, coinciding with the archaeology professional meetings. Not just me, but at times my postdocs, were better occupied being at that meeting.
But with the budget crisis, last year the program held only the fall meeting in Oakland, and this year, they moved the retreat into the fall term and dropped the fall meeting. (So effectively, the current postdocs participate in the same two events over the course of a two year period, although not in a uniform order as before.)
So, with the weekend retreat in fall, and my latest postdoc at the point where we need another campus to consider hiring him (one of the goals of the program is to diversify the faculty at UC by keeping promising young PhDs in the system as new professors), I gritted my teeth and let myself be kidnapped and held prisoner.
Excuse me. I mean I went to spend two days in intimate, all day forced contact with strangers.
Let's try again. I journeyed with a group of like-minded people to a rousing revival meeting in which we reaffirmed our common commitments to teaching, mentoring, and research.
And remarkably, that last one seems to be true. There are unexpected beauties to being in the company of like-minded strangers. I hate eating breakfast in public with people I don't know (I do not wake up well). But I met wonderful people, even at breakfast.
So by the evening, when I came to the room for our keynote address by a former postdoc, I happily signed on the karaoke list: after all, why come to an event like this and try to avoid the artificial bonding opportunity? And at least this wasn't any artificial trust exercise involving blindfolds.
(The speaker's current research is looking at murders in the Phillipines that are attributed to disputes about signing "My Way" in karaoke bars, which she relates to masculinity and power. Not sure I quite buy the arguments...)
After the talk and discussion, it turned out I was one of only two brave souls to have volunteered. I played it cautious, and went for Willy Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (which has a vocal range of about 3 notes).
The set up was not ideal: we were using the speaker's computer as the karaoke machine, with the words projected on a screen in front of the room, so you had to stand either with your back to the room or sideways (I chose sideways).
And as someone who had never done this weird thing before, I have to say I found the way the words were projected confusing: two lines were posted, highlighted word by word; as you finished the top line, and went on to line 2, the top line was replaced by the third line. This really, really confused me: linear order is apparently important in my lyrics, if nothing else. (I think it was especially confusing because the screen changed from lines 1-2 to lines 3-2 to lines 3-4, 5-4, 5-6 etc. Can you tell I have been dwelling on this?)
But even worse: there was a score at the top of the screen! and I only scored 74!
UNLEASH THE OVER-ACHIEVER!!!
When the next (and only other) volunteer went ahead, with polish, panache, and a good voice (and, I intuit, experience) and registered a 94, I had to return to the scene of the crime.
I will spare you a song by song narrative. (I couldn't do it, anyway; that's an indication of how enthusiastically I threw myself into the game.) I analyzed what others were doing as the score went up and down, and deduced that being on key mattered not a bit; even singing the right words seemed to be unimportant. But making sounds at the same rate as the words were highlighted-- now that, the karaoke machine liked.
The culmination of my night was not, alas, "My Way". That would have made this a perfect story. (And to be honest, I thought about it but then they turned off the machine...) Personally, I enjoyed "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" the most; others enjoyed a song I can no longer remember the title of but let's just say was a tad more suggestive than I remembered.
Only about half a dozen of us participated in any way. Both of my postdocs in attendance-- one in her first year as assistant professor, and the afore-mentioned second-year postdoc-- made token efforts, singing back-up to avoid what they clearly feared would be my insistence on them singing alone. (I wouldn't actually have forced them to sing, and it is illuminating how they assumed that, even after knowing me for more than a year each.)
Karaoke in a pine lodge seems sort of exotic. Karaoke at all fascinates me: I can sing, but I do not think that my singing in this context was at all good. You cannot choose a key, so you are stuck with what the machine does; loud gets better scores than style; and I found myself semi-shouting and alternating between a falsetto and my increasingly deep natural voice.
And it did not create any kind of community. There was a bar at the end of the room, and the fellows (and a few brave faculty) surged back there and hovered in the semi-darkness in apparent desire to avoid being noticed. (Clarification: my drink of choice all night was ice water.) Most of the faculty slipped out after the talk. The director of the program kept explaining to me and anyone who was listening that last time (two years ago) people were happy to participate, and that they had a lot of people who were part of bands then. So I think this was a failure as a bonding exercise.
But: I got a lot better idea of what motivates people to spend hours pretending to sing old standards to a pre-recorded music track. And I think I could even understand coming to violence, say, if someone else sang "My Way" her way, and the machine, in its infinite detachment, gave it a higher score.
I, by the way, ended the night with a 96 score on my best effort-- and yes, that was the high score.
Not something I expected to ever have experience in, and therefore not something I ever thought about (except that I loved Bill Murray's Lost in Translation).
So it was somewhat surprising to be annoyed when, at what turned out to be midnight, the staff of the UC Presidential Postdoc retreat at UCLA's Lake Arrowhead conference center turned on a sound system, thereby ending karaoke night.
Beginning at the beginning: my third UCOP Postdoc is currently in his second (and last) year. One of the commitments in these mentored fellowships has been to come to two events a year: a day-long conference held at the Oakland Airport Hilton; and this weekend retreat.
I hate things that are scheduled by my job that assume I am available evenings or weekends. So it has not bothered me that in the previous four years (the most recent postdocs overlapped for one year) I have not made it to the weekend retreat. My reason was a good one: it has traditionally been held in spring, coinciding with the archaeology professional meetings. Not just me, but at times my postdocs, were better occupied being at that meeting.
But with the budget crisis, last year the program held only the fall meeting in Oakland, and this year, they moved the retreat into the fall term and dropped the fall meeting. (So effectively, the current postdocs participate in the same two events over the course of a two year period, although not in a uniform order as before.)
So, with the weekend retreat in fall, and my latest postdoc at the point where we need another campus to consider hiring him (one of the goals of the program is to diversify the faculty at UC by keeping promising young PhDs in the system as new professors), I gritted my teeth and let myself be kidnapped and held prisoner.
Excuse me. I mean I went to spend two days in intimate, all day forced contact with strangers.
Let's try again. I journeyed with a group of like-minded people to a rousing revival meeting in which we reaffirmed our common commitments to teaching, mentoring, and research.
And remarkably, that last one seems to be true. There are unexpected beauties to being in the company of like-minded strangers. I hate eating breakfast in public with people I don't know (I do not wake up well). But I met wonderful people, even at breakfast.
So by the evening, when I came to the room for our keynote address by a former postdoc, I happily signed on the karaoke list: after all, why come to an event like this and try to avoid the artificial bonding opportunity? And at least this wasn't any artificial trust exercise involving blindfolds.
(The speaker's current research is looking at murders in the Phillipines that are attributed to disputes about signing "My Way" in karaoke bars, which she relates to masculinity and power. Not sure I quite buy the arguments...)
After the talk and discussion, it turned out I was one of only two brave souls to have volunteered. I played it cautious, and went for Willy Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (which has a vocal range of about 3 notes).
The set up was not ideal: we were using the speaker's computer as the karaoke machine, with the words projected on a screen in front of the room, so you had to stand either with your back to the room or sideways (I chose sideways).
And as someone who had never done this weird thing before, I have to say I found the way the words were projected confusing: two lines were posted, highlighted word by word; as you finished the top line, and went on to line 2, the top line was replaced by the third line. This really, really confused me: linear order is apparently important in my lyrics, if nothing else. (I think it was especially confusing because the screen changed from lines 1-2 to lines 3-2 to lines 3-4, 5-4, 5-6 etc. Can you tell I have been dwelling on this?)
But even worse: there was a score at the top of the screen! and I only scored 74!
UNLEASH THE OVER-ACHIEVER!!!
When the next (and only other) volunteer went ahead, with polish, panache, and a good voice (and, I intuit, experience) and registered a 94, I had to return to the scene of the crime.
I will spare you a song by song narrative. (I couldn't do it, anyway; that's an indication of how enthusiastically I threw myself into the game.) I analyzed what others were doing as the score went up and down, and deduced that being on key mattered not a bit; even singing the right words seemed to be unimportant. But making sounds at the same rate as the words were highlighted-- now that, the karaoke machine liked.
The culmination of my night was not, alas, "My Way". That would have made this a perfect story. (And to be honest, I thought about it but then they turned off the machine...) Personally, I enjoyed "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" the most; others enjoyed a song I can no longer remember the title of but let's just say was a tad more suggestive than I remembered.
Only about half a dozen of us participated in any way. Both of my postdocs in attendance-- one in her first year as assistant professor, and the afore-mentioned second-year postdoc-- made token efforts, singing back-up to avoid what they clearly feared would be my insistence on them singing alone. (I wouldn't actually have forced them to sing, and it is illuminating how they assumed that, even after knowing me for more than a year each.)
Karaoke in a pine lodge seems sort of exotic. Karaoke at all fascinates me: I can sing, but I do not think that my singing in this context was at all good. You cannot choose a key, so you are stuck with what the machine does; loud gets better scores than style; and I found myself semi-shouting and alternating between a falsetto and my increasingly deep natural voice.
And it did not create any kind of community. There was a bar at the end of the room, and the fellows (and a few brave faculty) surged back there and hovered in the semi-darkness in apparent desire to avoid being noticed. (Clarification: my drink of choice all night was ice water.) Most of the faculty slipped out after the talk. The director of the program kept explaining to me and anyone who was listening that last time (two years ago) people were happy to participate, and that they had a lot of people who were part of bands then. So I think this was a failure as a bonding exercise.
But: I got a lot better idea of what motivates people to spend hours pretending to sing old standards to a pre-recorded music track. And I think I could even understand coming to violence, say, if someone else sang "My Way" her way, and the machine, in its infinite detachment, gave it a higher score.
I, by the way, ended the night with a 96 score on my best effort-- and yes, that was the high score.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Dining in the 18th century
Gotland Island.
Here the medieval walled city of Visby persists as a fragment from the 13th century, its narrow streets winding past half-timbered houses whose upper stories I could reach up and touch.
Along the streets we pass the skeletons of churches, St. Karin's, St. Lars, St. Per and St. Hans, St. Clement and more-- so many that we could not pass them all in our two days of wandering. The northern Gothic buildings, so much more austere than the more familiar churches of France and Italy that dominate our imagination, also beg the question: in this tightly packed town, what called for the preservation of these precincts, unused after the churches were burned in 1525 by Germans from Lübeck?
Clearly, Visby is a city that has prized the material traces of its own history long before the modern period of nostalgic longing for ruins that led to its designation as a World Heritage site.
This is what that the archaeology of "picture stones" on the island done by my friend Alexander tells us as well: erected from the 5th to 12th centuries, picture stones were marked points on the landscape of farmsteads. There a few remain today, while others were removed when the network of Christian parishes was established.
I am used to seeing layers of history on the landscape. Driving the southwest coast of the island, we marvel at stone foundations revealed at a medieval dig site, only inches below the surface of green fields encircled by still-visible traces of earthworks, and a "stone ship" setting from the Bronze Age conjures even deeper history.
So it is surprising to me that the experience that most imposed the sense of continuity and history on me during our visit to this dense knot of built time, was dinner in a countryside farmhouse preserved by Alexander's mother and step-father, in the process of restoration.
To say "in the process of restoration" brings up entirely the wrong kind of imagery: this was a building where university students exploring historical architecture had stripped away sections of wall board, where peeling strips of layers of hand-printed wall-paper were visible everywhere. A building where no water or electricity can be added, and where the boards on the stairs maintain an unevenness that speaks to country craftsmanship.
Dinner was served on the second floor of this ravished beauty, lit by the long northern summer evening light streaming through large mullioned windows located on three sides of the room. Candles on the table added a golden glow to a long table set with porcelain that suggested the luxury of a prosperous past.
At one end of the room, a built-in glazed tile stove that had been rebuilt was given its first trial for our dinner party. The small fire heated the tile surface so much that we could barely touch the surface, adding a warm glow on a summer evening, but making me wonder what winter would be like.
As conversation and wine flowed equally, despite the reality of dining in a restoration work-in-progress, I gradually felt the reality of past lives pressing in on me. This is the paradox of ruins and life: preserved in collapse, stone boats, medieval churches, and picture stone emplacements distance us, beckoning toward a past we cannot touch. But history is a work in process, connected to us by dwelling, restored by being in place.
Here the medieval walled city of Visby persists as a fragment from the 13th century, its narrow streets winding past half-timbered houses whose upper stories I could reach up and touch.
Along the streets we pass the skeletons of churches, St. Karin's, St. Lars, St. Per and St. Hans, St. Clement and more-- so many that we could not pass them all in our two days of wandering. The northern Gothic buildings, so much more austere than the more familiar churches of France and Italy that dominate our imagination, also beg the question: in this tightly packed town, what called for the preservation of these precincts, unused after the churches were burned in 1525 by Germans from Lübeck?
Clearly, Visby is a city that has prized the material traces of its own history long before the modern period of nostalgic longing for ruins that led to its designation as a World Heritage site.
This is what that the archaeology of "picture stones" on the island done by my friend Alexander tells us as well: erected from the 5th to 12th centuries, picture stones were marked points on the landscape of farmsteads. There a few remain today, while others were removed when the network of Christian parishes was established.
I am used to seeing layers of history on the landscape. Driving the southwest coast of the island, we marvel at stone foundations revealed at a medieval dig site, only inches below the surface of green fields encircled by still-visible traces of earthworks, and a "stone ship" setting from the Bronze Age conjures even deeper history.
So it is surprising to me that the experience that most imposed the sense of continuity and history on me during our visit to this dense knot of built time, was dinner in a countryside farmhouse preserved by Alexander's mother and step-father, in the process of restoration.
To say "in the process of restoration" brings up entirely the wrong kind of imagery: this was a building where university students exploring historical architecture had stripped away sections of wall board, where peeling strips of layers of hand-printed wall-paper were visible everywhere. A building where no water or electricity can be added, and where the boards on the stairs maintain an unevenness that speaks to country craftsmanship.
Dinner was served on the second floor of this ravished beauty, lit by the long northern summer evening light streaming through large mullioned windows located on three sides of the room. Candles on the table added a golden glow to a long table set with porcelain that suggested the luxury of a prosperous past.
At one end of the room, a built-in glazed tile stove that had been rebuilt was given its first trial for our dinner party. The small fire heated the tile surface so much that we could barely touch the surface, adding a warm glow on a summer evening, but making me wonder what winter would be like.
As conversation and wine flowed equally, despite the reality of dining in a restoration work-in-progress, I gradually felt the reality of past lives pressing in on me. This is the paradox of ruins and life: preserved in collapse, stone boats, medieval churches, and picture stone emplacements distance us, beckoning toward a past we cannot touch. But history is a work in process, connected to us by dwelling, restored by being in place.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
35 Years of Equinoxes
Memory works in strange ways.
Spring of 1975 was my second semester at Cornell, and I started taking the courses I had planned as steps toward the major. One of these was introduction to geology, which I remember as being taught by a Professor Swan, although in fact his name was (and is, I have just found out) Cisne; which of course means swan in Spanish, a language I did not know in 1975.
So I should approach my memories of spring 1975 with some degree of skepticism: clearly, my later knowledge of Spanish transformed what I knew that Spring into something I could not have known for at least three more years.
But some things about that spring are very memorable, and even if they have been transformed, the sensibility they convey is, I am sure, true to that first Cornell spring.
To return to geology: the lecture I was enrolled in met at eight or nine in the morning. My inability to make it to calculus sections scheduled at 8 AM for the entire fall semester had impressed on me the need to solve the intractable contradiction between Cornell's optimism and my reality, which even then dictated late nights and delayed mornings. So instead of attending my assigned lecture, I went to the second lecture of the same material, which I remember as meeting at 11 AM.
Associated with the course was a laboratory section, and here again, I took the approach of seeking a time I would absolutely be able to attend, signing up for what seemed to be a relatively unpopular Saturday lab.
Which, it then transpired, secretly met on Tuesday evenings. Why secretly? because Cornell had set aside two nights a week-- Tuesdays and Thursdays-- for exams held during the semester, called prelims, not midterms. So meeting on one of these evenings created the possibility that two things would happen at once. So every historical record says I attended lab on Saturday, but that was true only on the rare occasions when we went on a field trip that required daylight.
For me, the evening lab was even better than my Saturday goal. By evening I was awake and just beginning the long night, and so I expected a semester of success. Geology promised to be my favorite course.
And it didn't disappoint me, not just because of all this, but because it was where I met Rus. My memory of meeting him is one of the details I am suspicious of; while I know the entire story, I am not certain I have located it at the right point in the semester. In my memory, the first lab session, while we were all meeting each other, was when another woman in anthropology and I decided to follow up the class by going off to College Avenue for coffee. Rus, already a year ahead of us in anthropology, walked with us down the path that led from the engineering quad across the creek and down to College Avenue.
Where we found that so many people had the idea of a late night coffee that a line wound out the door and down the block. As we paused to think about what to do, Rus issued his famous invitation to come to his apartment down the block, where, he told us, there should be chocolate chip cookies he had made that day, if his room-mates had left them. After a few moments hesitation, we headed over (and yes, there were cookies).
I cannot be sure what week this was. I remember walking across a campus glazed with ice from a sudden storm; weeks of early spring warmth, dinner with Rus and his room-mates, the shared pain of studying for archaeology prelims in what surprisingly turned out to be the class I enjoyed least, and probably in consequence, did worst in.
By March 21, when we both returned from spring break, we had spent enough time talking about music, archaeology, and life around the Great Lakes. We count our first anniversary from March 21, 1975. And so as I write this we have spent 35 years engaged in a long conversation that still is threaded through with talk about music, and archaeology, and places we both have been.
I have no trouble remembering this anniversary, because it comes on the day when the day finally catches up with the length of the night. From here on, light grows at the expense of dark and the days grow warmer, the evenings start later, and I am able to work in harmony with the rest of the world.
Spring of 1975 was my second semester at Cornell, and I started taking the courses I had planned as steps toward the major. One of these was introduction to geology, which I remember as being taught by a Professor Swan, although in fact his name was (and is, I have just found out) Cisne; which of course means swan in Spanish, a language I did not know in 1975.
So I should approach my memories of spring 1975 with some degree of skepticism: clearly, my later knowledge of Spanish transformed what I knew that Spring into something I could not have known for at least three more years.
But some things about that spring are very memorable, and even if they have been transformed, the sensibility they convey is, I am sure, true to that first Cornell spring.
To return to geology: the lecture I was enrolled in met at eight or nine in the morning. My inability to make it to calculus sections scheduled at 8 AM for the entire fall semester had impressed on me the need to solve the intractable contradiction between Cornell's optimism and my reality, which even then dictated late nights and delayed mornings. So instead of attending my assigned lecture, I went to the second lecture of the same material, which I remember as meeting at 11 AM.
Associated with the course was a laboratory section, and here again, I took the approach of seeking a time I would absolutely be able to attend, signing up for what seemed to be a relatively unpopular Saturday lab.
Which, it then transpired, secretly met on Tuesday evenings. Why secretly? because Cornell had set aside two nights a week-- Tuesdays and Thursdays-- for exams held during the semester, called prelims, not midterms. So meeting on one of these evenings created the possibility that two things would happen at once. So every historical record says I attended lab on Saturday, but that was true only on the rare occasions when we went on a field trip that required daylight.
For me, the evening lab was even better than my Saturday goal. By evening I was awake and just beginning the long night, and so I expected a semester of success. Geology promised to be my favorite course.
And it didn't disappoint me, not just because of all this, but because it was where I met Rus. My memory of meeting him is one of the details I am suspicious of; while I know the entire story, I am not certain I have located it at the right point in the semester. In my memory, the first lab session, while we were all meeting each other, was when another woman in anthropology and I decided to follow up the class by going off to College Avenue for coffee. Rus, already a year ahead of us in anthropology, walked with us down the path that led from the engineering quad across the creek and down to College Avenue.
Where we found that so many people had the idea of a late night coffee that a line wound out the door and down the block. As we paused to think about what to do, Rus issued his famous invitation to come to his apartment down the block, where, he told us, there should be chocolate chip cookies he had made that day, if his room-mates had left them. After a few moments hesitation, we headed over (and yes, there were cookies).
I cannot be sure what week this was. I remember walking across a campus glazed with ice from a sudden storm; weeks of early spring warmth, dinner with Rus and his room-mates, the shared pain of studying for archaeology prelims in what surprisingly turned out to be the class I enjoyed least, and probably in consequence, did worst in.
By March 21, when we both returned from spring break, we had spent enough time talking about music, archaeology, and life around the Great Lakes. We count our first anniversary from March 21, 1975. And so as I write this we have spent 35 years engaged in a long conversation that still is threaded through with talk about music, and archaeology, and places we both have been.
I have no trouble remembering this anniversary, because it comes on the day when the day finally catches up with the length of the night. From here on, light grows at the expense of dark and the days grow warmer, the evenings start later, and I am able to work in harmony with the rest of the world.
Friday, March 5, 2010
What a long strange trip it's been...
to borrow a line from one of the songs that runs through my head whenever I am on the road.
Driving California takes a lot of time. I don't actually know how long the state is in miles; but in hours, from here north you can drive more than six hours without running out of state, and the same six hours won't get you to the Mexican border on the south. The state is more than fourteen hours long; in the time it would take to go from end to end, I could have driven from Boston to Chicago.
Which I realize doesn't mean that these two distances are the same. The size of a space measured in time has no direct relationship to the length that might be measured by a surveyor.
That was especially obvious as we rambled in a loose circuit from here to Santa Barbara and back. The Salinas valley stretches out forever, seeming an endless succession of fields nestling in the loops of the river. As we drive through here, the 70 mile an hour speed limit apparently the minimum for locals and truckers, we can see bands of rain and sunlight for miles ahead. Driving north through this slow terrain, we decided to leave our normal route through the Santa Cruz mountains and instead followed the Carmel valley northwest.
In truth, the time it took to reach Carmel along this route was far less than the Santa Cruz way would have taken, especially since we would doubtless have run into the ironically named rush-hour traffic, falling into lanes of cars inching forward painfully slowly. But as the miles rolled by on what at times was a one-lane road, deserted for tens of miles not just by other cars, but even any livestock, the fifty plus miles of this diagonal line taken at 30 miles per hour seemed to last for most of the afternoon. Around each new bend, live oaks covered in California's version of Spanish moss, fields of native chaparral and grassy pastures succeeded one after another. Where the road cut through the rocky hillside, thin beds of sandstone folded over themselves, or standing tipped almost vertical, gave way to cobbles and pebbles eroding out from loosely consolidated clay. More than any part of our journey, this new segment of road seemed vast and the possibility that it might simply go on and on hovered over us.
In contrast, driving across the hills from Half Moon Bay to San Mateo as the sun went down behind us over the Pacific Ocean seemed to take no time at all: charging back into the Bay Area traffic maelstrom erasing the sense of peace that the Pacific, grey and churning, nonetheless created. As the sun sank low each evening we spent on the ocean-- Half Moon Bay, Carmel, Cambria, Santa Barbara-- the most distant edge of the water turned glossy and silver. After the rain swept through, clearing the air of all dust, whitecaps were clear across the entire width of these bays, striking distant cliffs and rocks offshore.
One ocean, the same everywhere, yet constantly different. In the moonlight deep indigo blue crested in whitecaps as stylized as a Japanese print. In the honey light of the setting sun, where San Gregorio Creek stained the Pacific with a perfect semi-circle of brown sediment, rings of pure turquoise and aqua led out to the grey edge of the sky. With the full sun briefly shining from an almost artificial blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds, ocean reflecting blue and white and grey and pink and yellow as the morning sun streamed down over the mountains to the east.
What remains: a line of whelks, most bone white, one showing flecks of brown. A banded stone, washed by the ocean. A piece of coral, tumbled so long in the surf that the facets made where branches broke off are glassy to the touch. The sound of the ocean, not trapped in the shells but in my memory. Rain in sheets joining sky and ocean. The spectrum of color briefly shimmering on the right. And everywhere green.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Travel, maps, and memory
As Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, a place I had visited enough times to no longer count them as individual visits, I was wandering around Amsterdam for the first time in my life. Back at the hotel room overlooking a canal, watching TV images of canals breaking and floodwaters rising in the French Quarter, I found myself remembering not the images of places in the city, but the map of the streets criss-crossing the areas I knew first hand.
It occurred to me then that the way I remember places I've been was peculiar. Planning the next trip to another new place, Amelia Island, has me thinking again about travel, maps, and memory.
I love travel. Not just new places, but the journey itself. Being in motion, going somewhere.
My reaction to travel is independent of the length of the trip or the distance to be covered. What makes travel so enjoyable for me is the possibility of something new and unforeseen happening. Something that will set one day off from another so well that even years later, I will remember another time and place.
Of course, there is a curious contradiction here: the more I travel, the more difficult it is to reconstruct with precision when I had a memorable day.
The airports and their procedures blur together (even as they become ever-more baroque in a doomed attempt at perfect security). Over the years, I have lost the nervous feeling that used to hit on take-off and landing. Recently, I have found myself developing more anxiety just before I travel, as I worry that something critical will be left undone. But travel itself is routinized and I am living each trip as a repetition of something now basically familiar.
The experiences of place that follow routine voyages still stand out in memory. But they are set free from their moorings. They stand out like isolated gems, or strings of pearls. Yet, they are not without anchors in time and space.
I sometimes spend time with maps, retracing itineraries. Seeing the map reminds me of the place. Seeing the place made the map memorable for me originally. Where other people use photos, I use maps.
And even though I no longer can count on remembering what year I visited each place, the sequence of voyages seems to remain clear. (I have to say "seems": absent something like my experience of New Orleans' drowning as I first committed the map of Amsterdam to memory, how can I be sure my sense of sequence is right?)
I find myself committing each new place to memory in part through contrasts and connections to previous places. Places I love are connected by the trees-- individual trees-- I saw, or the rocks cut through along the highway. Places I remember are layered on each other with these features tying them into bundles.
And over all of them are the maps, and the itineraries traced like lines across their surface. The whole a globe with scribbles dense in spots, empty in others.
Off to draw some new memories of place.
It occurred to me then that the way I remember places I've been was peculiar. Planning the next trip to another new place, Amelia Island, has me thinking again about travel, maps, and memory.
I love travel. Not just new places, but the journey itself. Being in motion, going somewhere.
My reaction to travel is independent of the length of the trip or the distance to be covered. What makes travel so enjoyable for me is the possibility of something new and unforeseen happening. Something that will set one day off from another so well that even years later, I will remember another time and place.
Of course, there is a curious contradiction here: the more I travel, the more difficult it is to reconstruct with precision when I had a memorable day.
The airports and their procedures blur together (even as they become ever-more baroque in a doomed attempt at perfect security). Over the years, I have lost the nervous feeling that used to hit on take-off and landing. Recently, I have found myself developing more anxiety just before I travel, as I worry that something critical will be left undone. But travel itself is routinized and I am living each trip as a repetition of something now basically familiar.
The experiences of place that follow routine voyages still stand out in memory. But they are set free from their moorings. They stand out like isolated gems, or strings of pearls. Yet, they are not without anchors in time and space.
I sometimes spend time with maps, retracing itineraries. Seeing the map reminds me of the place. Seeing the place made the map memorable for me originally. Where other people use photos, I use maps.
And even though I no longer can count on remembering what year I visited each place, the sequence of voyages seems to remain clear. (I have to say "seems": absent something like my experience of New Orleans' drowning as I first committed the map of Amsterdam to memory, how can I be sure my sense of sequence is right?)
I find myself committing each new place to memory in part through contrasts and connections to previous places. Places I love are connected by the trees-- individual trees-- I saw, or the rocks cut through along the highway. Places I remember are layered on each other with these features tying them into bundles.
And over all of them are the maps, and the itineraries traced like lines across their surface. The whole a globe with scribbles dense in spots, empty in others.
Off to draw some new memories of place.
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