Cathedral Rock, Sedona
*
TO VAN GOGH IN HEAVEN
Vincent, on the one hundredth
anniversary of your suicide,
how do you feel about
your paintings selling now for millions —
your cypresses and wheeling stars,
your wheat fields, your crows,
the white church at Auvers
buckling on all sides
under the storm-laden sky —
The street urchins in Arles
shrieked: “Carrot head!”
and threw rocks as you walked
through the dusty, sun-brilliant town,
carrying your easel
like an awkward wing.
And even then
you were the richest man.
Now hanging in the best museums,
your clouds and shimmering
spirals of your mind.
And you only shrug.
Some say your last words were
“So, I can go.”
Others claim the correct translation
is, “This is the way to go.”
You’ve no time for such quibbles.
If there is a heaven,
you paint in the fields all day,
in the wind of flowering orchards.
At night you go
to your yellow café,
and are loved.
~ Oriana
*
Mary:
In your opening poem the lines
carrying your easel
like an awkward wing
seemed to encapsulate Van Gogh's life, his passion in his art at once a gift wonderful as flight, numbering him among the angels, but also costing him the ease of an ordinary life… an "awkward" gift that separates and isolates, a two-edged sword.
*
HOW VINCENT VAN GOGH’S SISTER-IN-LAW MADE HIM FAMOUS
~
In 1885, a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Johanna Bonger met Theo van
Gogh, the younger brother of the artist, who was then making a name for
himself as an art dealer in Paris. History knows Theo as the steadier of
the van Gogh brothers, the archetypal emotional anchor, who selflessly
managed Vincent’s erratic path through life, but he had his share of
impetuosity. He asked her to marry him after only two meetings.
Jo, as she called herself, was raised in a sober, middle-class family. Her father, the editor of a shipping newspaper that reported on things like the trade in coffee and spices from the Far East, imposed a code of propriety and emotional aloofness on his children. There is a Dutch maxim, “The tallest nail gets hammered down,” that the Bonger family seems to have taken as gospel. Jo had set herself up in a safely unexciting career as an English teacher in Amsterdam. She wasn’t inclined to impulsiveness. Besides, she was already dating somebody. She said no.
But Theo persisted. He was attractive in a soulful kind of way — a thinner, paler version of his brother. Beyond that, she had a taste for culture, a desire to be in the company of artists and intellectuals, which he could certainly provide. Eventually he won her over. In 1888, a year and a half after his proposal, she agreed to marry him.
After that, a new life opened up for her. It was Paris in the belle epoque: art, theater, intellectuals, the streets of their Pigalle neighborhood raucous with cafes and brothels. Theo was not just any art dealer. He was at the forefront, specializing in the breed of young artists who were defying the stony realism imposed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Most dealers wouldn’t touch the Impressionists, but they were Theo van Gogh’s clients and heroes. And here they came, Gauguin and Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec, the young men of the avant-garde, marching through her life with the exotic ferocity of zoo creatures.
Jo realized that she was in the midst of a movement, that she was witnessing a change in the direction of things. At home, too, she was feeling fully alive. On their marriage night, which she described as “blissful,” her husband thrilled her by whispering into her ear, “Wouldn’t you like to have a baby, my baby?” She was powerfully in love: with Theo, with Paris, with life.
Theo talked incessantly — of their future, and also of things like pigment and color and light, encouraging her to develop a new way of seeing. But one subject dominated. From their first meeting, he regaled Jo with accounts of his brother’s tortured genius. Their apartment was crammed with Vincent’s paintings, and new crates arrived all the time.
Vincent,
who spent much of his brief career in motion, in France, Belgium,
England, the Netherlands, was churning out canvases at a fanatical pace,
sometimes one a day — olive trees, wheat fields, peasants under a
Provençal sun, yellow skies, peach blossoms, gnarled trunks, clods of
soil like the tops of waves, poplar trees like tongues of flame — and
shipping them to Theo in hopes he would find a market for them. Theo had
little success attracting buyers, but Vincent’s works,
three-dimensionally thick with their violent daubs of oil paint, became
the source material for Jo’s education in modern art.
When, a
little more than nine months after their wedding night, Jo gave birth to
a son, she agreed to the name Theo proffered. They would call the boy
Vincent.
Jo van Gogh-Bongen and her son, Vincent
As much as he looked up to his brother, Theo also fretted constantly about him. Vincent’s mental state had already deteriorated by the time Jo came on the scene. He had slept outside in winter to mortify his flesh, gorged on alcohol, coffee and tobacco to heighten or numb his senses, become riddled with gonorrhea, stopped bathing, let his teeth rot. He had distanced himself from artists and others who might have helped his career. Just before Christmas in 1888, while Theo and Jo were announcing their engagement, Vincent was in Arles cutting off his ear following a series of rows with his housemate Paul Gauguin.
One day a canvas arrived that showed a shift in style. Vincent had been fascinated by the night sky in Arles. He tried to put it into words for Theo: “In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.” He became fixated on the idea of painting such a sky. He read Walt Whitman, whose work was especially popular in France, and interpreted the poet as equating “the great starry firmament” with “God and eternity.”
Vincent sent the finished painting to Theo and Jo with a note explaining that it was an “exaggeration.” “The Starry Night” continued his progression away from realism; the brush strokes were like troughs made by someone who was digging for something deeper. Theo found it disturbing — he could sense his brother drifting away, and he knew buyers weren’t likely to understand it. He wrote back: “I consider that you’re strongest when you’re doing real things.” But he enclosed another 150 francs for expenses.
Then, in the spring of 1890, news: Vincent was coming to Paris. Jo expected an enfeebled mental patient. Instead, she was confronted by the physical embodiment of the spirit that animated the canvases that covered their walls. “Before me was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man with a healthy color, a cheerful look in his eyes and something very resolute in his appearance,” she wrote in her journal. “ ‘He looks much stronger than Theo,’ was my first thought.” He charged out into the arrondissement to buy olives he loved and came back insisting that they taste them. He stood before the canvases he had sent and studied each with great intensity. Theo led him to the room where the baby lay sleeping, and Jo watched as the brothers gazed into the crib. “They both had tears in their eyes,” she wrote.
What happened next was like two blows of a hammer. Theo had arranged for Vincent to stay in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise to the north of Paris, in the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, whose homeopathic approach he hoped would help his brother’s condition. Weeks later came news that Vincent had shot himself (some biographers dispute the notion that his wound was self-inflicted). Theo arrived in the village in time to watch his brother die. Theo was devastated. He had supported his brother financially and emotionally through his brief, 10-year career, an effort to produce, as Vincent once wrote him, “something serious, something fresh — something with soul in it,” art that would reveal nothing less than “what there is in the heart of ... a nobody.”
Less than three months after Vincent’s death, Theo suffered a complete physical collapse, the latter stages of syphilis he had contracted from earlier visits to brothels. He began hallucinating. His agony was tremendous and ghoulish. He died in January 1891.
Twenty-one months after her marriage, Jo was alone, stunned at the fecund dose of life she had just experienced, and at what was left to her from that life: approximately 400 paintings and several hundred drawings by her brother-in-law.
The brothers’ dying so young, Vincent at 37 and Theo at 33, and without the artist having achieved renown — Theo had managed to sell only a few of his paintings — would seem to have ensured that Vincent van Gogh’s work would subsist eternally in a netherworld of obscurity.
Instead, his name, art and story merged to form the basis of an industry that stormed the globe, arguably surpassing the fame of any other artist in history. That happened in large part thanks to Jo van Gogh-Bonger. She was small in stature and riddled with self-doubt, had no background in art or business and faced an art world that was a thoroughly male preserve. Her full story has only recently been uncovered. It is only now that we know how van Gogh became van Gogh.
How
exactly did the tortured genius, who alienated dealers and otherwise
thwarted his own ambition time and again during his career, become a
star? And not just a star, but one of the most beloved figures in the
history of art?
Jo Van Gogh-Bonger was previously
known to have played a role in building the painter’s reputation, but
that role was thought to have been modest — a presumption seemingly
based on a combination of sexism and common sense, since she had no
background in the art business. There were intriguing indications for
those interested enough to look. In 2003, the Dutch writer Bas Heijne
found himself in the Van Gogh Museum’s library and stumbled across some
letters, which prompted him to write a play about Jo. “I just thought,
This woman’s life is a great story,” he says. Luijten likewise told me
that the letters between the brothers, and those exchanged with other
artists and dealers, were littered with clues. He searched the museum’s
library and archives and found photographs and account books that
contained more hints. He corresponded with archives in France, Denmark
and the United States. He began to formulate a thesis: “I started to see
that she was the spider in the web. She had a strategy.”
The
very first entry in Jo’s diary — which turned out to be a collection of
simple lined notebooks of the kind used by schoolchildren — intrigued
Luijten. Jo started it when she was 17, five years before she met Theo. A
young woman of that era could look forward to only very narrow options
in life, yet here she wrote, “I would think it dreadful to have to say
at the end of my life, ‘I’ve actually lived for nothing, I have achieved
nothing great or noble.’” “That, to me, was actually very exciting,”
Luijten says. It was a clue: She was not content to follow her family’s
maxim after all.
Before leaving Paris, Jo corresponded with the
artist Émile Bernard, one of the few painters with whom Vincent had had a
relationship that was both close and free of discord, to see if he
might be able to arrange an exhibition in Paris of her late
brother-in-law’s paintings. Bernard urged her to leave Vincent’s
canvases in Paris, reasoning that the French capital was a better base
from which to sell them. There was sense in this. While Vincent had not
generated enough of a following to warrant a one-man show, he had had
paintings exhibited in a few group shows just before his death. Perhaps,
over time, Bernard would be able to sell his work.
But Jo’s
instincts told her to keep the paintings with her. She declined his
offer. This was remarkable in itself, because time and again her diary
entries show her to be riddled with insecurities and uncertainty about
how to proceed in life: “I’m very bad — ugly as I am, I’m still often
vain”; “My outlook on life is utterly and completely wrong at present”;
“Life is so difficult and so full of sadness around me and I have so
little courage!”
Over the next weeks, dressed in mourning, she settled into her new home. She unpacked linens and silverware, met her neighbors and prepared the house for guests, all the while caring for little Vincent. She seems to have spent the greatest amount of her settling-in time — months, in fact — deciding precisely where to hang her brother-in-law’s paintings. Eventually, virtually every inch of wall space was covered with them. “The Potato Eaters,” the large, mostly brown study of peasants at a humble meal that scholars consider Vincent’s first masterpiece, was hung above the fireplace. She festooned her bedroom with three canvases depicting orchards in vibrant bloom. One of her guests later remarked that “the whole house was filled with Vincents.”
In addition to Vincent’s paintings, she had inherited the enormous trove of letters that the brothers had exchanged. In Bussum, in the evenings, with her guests taken care of and the baby asleep, she pored over them. Nearly all, it turned out, were from Vincent — her husband had carefully kept Vincent’s letters, but Vincent hadn’t been so fastidious with the ones his brother had sent him. Details of the artist’s daily life and tribulations — his insomnia, his poverty, his self-doubt — were mixed with accounts of paintings he was working on, techniques he experimented with, what he was reading, descriptions of paintings by other artists he drew inspiration from.
He
often felt the need to put into words what he was trying to achieve
with color: “Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheat fields
have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold,
green, red and yellow bronze.” Repeatedly he sought to explain his
objective in capturing what he was looking at: “I tried to reconstruct
the thing as it may have been by simplifying and accentuating the proud,
unchanging nature of the pines and the cedar bushes against the blue.”
He described his harrowing mental breakdowns and his fear of future
collapses — that “a more violent crisis may destroy my ability to paint
forever,” and his notion that, should he experience another episode, he
could “go into an asylum or even to the town prison, where there’s
usually an isolation cell.”
By the end of her first year on her
own — living with Vincent’s paintings and his words, reading deeply,
immersing herself from time to time in these gatherings — Jo had
experienced a kind of epiphany: Van Gogh’s letters were part and parcel
of the art. They were keys to the paintings. The letters brought the art
and the tragic, intensely lived life together into a single package.
Jo
would have appreciated the view of the French Impressionists she had
met in Paris that the notion of following rules on how and what to paint
had become impossibly inauthentic, that in a world lacking a central
authority an artist had to look within for guidance. That was what
Monet, Gauguin and the others had done, and the results were to be seen
on their canvases. Bringing an artist’s biography into the mix was
simply another step in the same direction.
The letters also
pointed to the audience Vincent had intended. Vincent, who once sought a
career as a minister and lived among peasants to humble himself, had
desperately wanted to make art that reached beyond the cognoscenti and
directly into the hearts of common people. “No result of my work would
be more agreeable to me,” he wrote to Theo, quoting another artist,
“than that ordinary working men should hang such prints in their room or
workplace.” Vincent’s letters and paintings seemed to reinforce Jo’s
own longstanding convictions about social justice.
As a girl, influenced by Sunday sermons, she longed for a life of purpose. Just before agreeing to marry Theo, she visited Belgium, and the minister whose family she was staying with took her to see the living conditions of workers at a nearby coal mine. The experience shook her, and helped fuel what became a lifelong dedication to causes ranging from workers’ rights to female suffrage. She counted herself as one of the “ordinary” people Vincent had written of, and she knew that he had considered himself one as well.
After
consuming her tortured brother-in-law’s words alone in her guesthouse
one night during a storm in 1891, with the wind howling outside, she
wrote in a letter, “I felt so desolate — that for the first time I
understood what he must have felt, in those times when everyone turned
away from him.”
She was now ready to act as agent for
Vincent van Gogh. One of her first moves was to approach an art critic
named Jan Veth, who in addition to being the husband of a friend was at
the forefront of the New Guide circle. Veth was outspoken in his
rejection of academic art and in promoting individual expression. At
first, though, Veth dismissed Vincent’s work outright and belittled Jo’s
efforts. He himself later admitted that he was initially “repelled
by the raw violence of some van Goghs,” and found these paintings
“nearly vulgar.”
His
reaction, despite his commitment to the new, gives a sense of the shock
that Vincent’s canvases engendered at first sight. Another early critic
found Vincent’s landscapes “without depth, without atmosphere, without
light, the unmixed colors set beside each other without mutually
harmonizing,” and complained that the artist was painting out of a desire to be “modern, bizarre, childlike.”
She
pressed an envelope full of Vincent’s letters on Veth, encouraging him
to use them, as she had, as a means to illuminate the paintings. She
didn’t try to come across like an art critic but instead poured her
heart out to the man, trying to guide him toward the shift in thinking
that she felt was needed to perceive a new mode of artistic expression.
She explained to Veth that she had begun reading the correspondence
between the brothers in order to be closer to her dead husband, but then
Vincent stole his way into her. “I read the letters — not only with my
head — I was deep into them with my whole soul,” she wrote to Veth. “I
read them and reread them until the whole figure of Vincent was clear
before me.” She told him that she wished she could “make you feel the
influence that Vincent has had on my life. ... I’ve found serenity.”
Her
timing was good. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga later characterized
the “change of spirit that began to be felt in art and literature
around 1890” as a swirl of ideas that coalesced around two poles: “that
of socialism and that of mysticism.” Jo saw that Vincent’s art straddled
both.
Jan Veth was among those trying to process a shift from Impressionism to something new, an art that applied individualism to social and even spiritual questions. He listened to Jo and came around. He wrote one of the first appreciations of the artist, saying that he now saw “the astonishing clairvoyance of great humility” and characterized Vincent as an artist who “seeks the raw root of things.” In particular, Jo’s effort to bring her brother-in-law’s life to bear on his art seems to have worked with Veth. “Once having grasped his beauty, I can accept the whole man,” the critic wrote.
Something similar happened when Jo approached an influential artist named Richard Roland Holst to ask him to help promote Vincent. She must have pestered him relentlessly, because Roland Holst wrote to a friend, “Mrs. van Gogh is a charming woman, but it irritates me when someone fanatically raves about something they don’t understand.” But he came around, too, and assisted Jo with one of the first solo exhibitions of Vincent’s art, in Amsterdam in December 1892.
Veth and Roland Holst complained at first about Jo’s amateur enthusiasm. Each man found it unprofessional to look at the paintings with the artist’s life story in mind. Such an approach, Roland Holst huffed, “is not of a purely art-critical nature.” It’s not clear from her diary how consciously Jo used her lay status or her position as a woman to her advantage with these men of power, but somehow she got them to drop their guard and simply look and feel along with her.
When Jo asked Roland Holst to make a cover illustration for the catalog of Vincent’s first exhibit in Amsterdam, he crafted a lithograph of a wilting sunflower against a black background, with the word “Vincent” beneath and a halo above the sunflower: an aesthetic canonization. Shortly after, the organizers of another exhibition hung a crown of thorns over a portrait of Vincent. Time and again, critics at first resisted the idea of looking at Vincent’s life and work as one, then gave in to it. When they looked at the paintings, they saw not just the art but Vincent, toiling and suffering, cutting off his ear, clawing at the act of creation. They fused art and artist. They saw what Jo van Gogh-Bonger wanted them to see.
Jo worked doggedly to build on her early successes with critics. She did much else in her life, of course. She raised her son. She fell in love with the painter Isaac Israëls, then broke it off when she realized he was not interested in marriage. She eventually remarried: yet another Dutch painter, Johan Cohen Gosschalk. She became a member of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers’ party and a co-founder of an organization devoted to labor and women’s rights.
But
all these activities were woven around the task of managing her
brother-in-law’s post-mortem career. “You see her thinking out loud,”
Hans Luijten told me. In the early days, he said, she went about it as
modestly as one could imagine: “She identifies an important gallery in
Amsterdam and she goes there: a 30-year-old woman, with a little boy at
her side and a painting under her arm. She writes to people across
Europe.”
Her training as a language teacher — she knew French,
German and English — came in especially handy as she expanded her reach,
attracting the interest of galleries and museums in Berlin, Paris,
Copenhagen. In 1895, when Jo was 33, the Parisian dealer Ambroise
Vollard included 20 van Goghs in a show. Vincent’s intensely personal
and emotion-filled approach had been ahead of its time, but time was
catching up; in Antwerp, a group of young artists who saw him as a
trailblazer asked to borrow several van Goghs to exhibit alongside their
own work.
Jo learned the tricks of the trade — for
example, to hold onto the best works but to include them as “on loan”
alongside paintings that were for sale in a given show. “She knew that
if you put a few top works on the wall, people will be stimulated to buy
the works next to them,” Luijten says. “She did that all over Europe, in more than 100 shows.”
A key to her success, says Martin Bailey, an author of several books on the artist, including “Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum,” was in “selling the works in a controlled way, gradually introducing van Gogh to the public.” For an exhibit in Paris in 1908, for instance, she sent 100 works but stipulated that a quarter of them were not for sale. The dealer begged her to reconsider; she held firm. Bucking her tendency to doubt herself, she proceeded methodically and inexorably, like a general conquering territory.
*
In 1905, she arranged a major
exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’s premier modern-art
showcase. She reckoned that it was time for a grand statement. The
success she had had in promoting her brother-in-law’s art boosted her
self-confidence. As more and more people in the field came to agree with
her asessment of Vincent, she shed her youthful hesitancy. Rather than
hand over the task of organizing the show, she insisted on doing
everything herself. She rented the galleries, printed the posters,
assembled names of important people to invite, even bought bow ties for
the staff. Her son, Vincent, now 15, wrote out the invitations. The result was, and remains, the largest-ever van Gogh exhibition, with 484 works on display.
Critics
came from all over Europe. The hard work of translating the artist’s
vision into the vernacular was mostly done by this time. Fourteen
years after she was handed her task and had the epiphany to sell the art
and artist as a package, everyone in the art world seemed to know
Vincent personally, to know his tragic lifelong struggle to find and
convey beauty and meaning. The event cemented the artist’s reputation as
a major figure of the modern era. Prices for his paintings rose two- to
threefold in the months after.
There was one caveat. The work of Vincent’s later period, when he was in an asylum in the South of France and after, which today is probably the most beloved part of his oeuvre, made some people uncomfortable. To some early critics, these paintings seemed clearly the product of mental illness. The unbridled intensity that Vincent brought to a lone mulberry tree, or a stand of cypresses, or a wheat field under a blazing sun, was off-putting. As one critic wrote, in response to the Amsterdam show, Vincent lacked “the distinctive calm that is inherent in the works of the very Great. He will always be a tempest.”
One painting in particular, “The Starry Night,” which many today consider one of Vincent’s most iconic works, was singled out for criticism. The discomfort over its distortions began with Theo, after Vincent sent the painting to him and Jo from Saint-Rémy. Jo may have initially shared her husband’s uneasiness toward it. She didn’t include it in any of the early exhibitions she arranged, and she eventually sold it. Throughout her life she mostly held onto what she believed to be Vincent’s best work. But she got the owner of the painting to lend it for the Amsterdam show, suggesting that she had come to embrace its intensity.
One reviewer — who had a fit over the whole exhibition, calling it a “scandal” that was “more for those interested in psychology than for art lovers” attacked “The Starry Night,” likening the stars in the painting to oliebollen, the fried dough balls that Dutch people eat on New Year’s Eve. That kind of criticism, however, only seemed to bring more attention to the painting, and ultimately to give further validity to the idea of art as a window into the mind and life of the artist. It may also have confirmed for Jo her reappraisal of Vincent’s more stylized work. She bought the painting back the next year. It eventually ended up at the Museum of Modern Art, becoming the first van Gogh in the collection of a New York museum.
Gordenker stresses that Jo’s approach worked because it suited the times. “It was a moment when everything came together. There was a return to romanticism in art and literature. People were open to it. And her achievement informs our image to this day of what an artist should do: be an individual; suffer for art, if need be.”
It takes some effort today to realize that people did not always see artists that way. “When I was studying art history, I was told to unthink that notion of the starving artist in the garret,” Gordenker says. “It doesn’t work for the early modern period, when someone like Rembrandt was a master working with apprentices and had many wealthy clients. In a sense Jo helped shape the image that is still with us.”
Vincent van Gogh: At Eternity's Gate, 1890*
The
Van Gogh Museum itself is another product of Jo van Gogh-Bonger’s
efforts to realize Vincent’s ambition of democratizing his art. By numbers alone it has succeeded spectacularly. When
the original building was opened, in 1973, it was with an expectation
of receiving 60,000 visitors a year. In 2019, before the pandemic, more
than 2.1 million people jostled for the chance to spend a few moments
before each of the master’s canvases.
*
In 1916, at age
54, Jo confronted the most formidable challenge in her campaign to bring
Vincent to the world. For all the success she had had in Europe, the
United States, with its conservative and puritanical society, lagged in
appreciating the artist. She left Europe — left her whole world — and
moved to New York with a goal of changing that. She spent nearly three
years in the United States, living for a time on the Upper West Side and
then in Queens, networking, explaining the artist’s vision and, in her
spare time, translating Vincent’s letters into English.
She found it tough going at first. “I supposed the American taste in art was advanced enough, fully to appreciate van Gogh in which I have been rather mistaken,” she lamented at one point in a letter to the art promoter Newman Emerson Montross. But change came. She eventually arranged a show with Montross’s gallery on Fifth Avenue. Shortly after, the Metropolitan Museum featured an exhibition of “Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings,” to which Jo contributed four canvases.
Jo, meanwhile, continued to believe that the letters to Theo — in which Vincent came through as a romantic figure, a tragic figure — would open up his soul to America and beyond. Having the letters published in English was her last great objective.
It proved to be a race against time. Her health was failing — she had Parkinson’s disease — and the publisher she had contracted with, Alfred Knopf, wanted to produce only an abridged edition, to which she would not agree.
She returned to Europe and lived her last years in a spacious apartment on Amsterdam’s stately Koninginneweg and in a country house in Laren. Her son, Vincent, and his wife, Josina, moved close to her, and Jo found happiness in the hour she spent each day with her grandchildren.
Otherwise, she kept remarkably fixated on her life’s mission: shipping canvases to one exhibition after another, wrangling with the publisher, all the while coping with the pain and other symptoms of her illness. Requests for paintings for possible exhibitions kept coming at a furious pace — Paris, Frankfurt, London, Cleveland, Detroit — and she remained closely involved, until she no longer could. She died in 1925 at age 63.
There was one other homage Jo paid to her brother-in-law and her husband, possibly the most remarkable of all. Late in her life, while she was translating the letters into English, she arranged to have Theo’s remains disinterred from the Dutch cemetery where he had been laid to rest and reburied in Auvers-sur-Oise, next to Vincent. As with the Amsterdam exhibition, she undertook the operation like a general, overseeing every detail, down to commissioning matching gravestones. Hans Luijten told me he found it a striking manifestation of her single-minded devotion. “She wanted to have them side by side forever,” Luijten said.
A wife’s digging up her husband’s remains is such a startling image it yanks one back to the central question of Jo’s life: her motivation. Why, finally, did she fasten herself to this cause and carry it across the length of her life? Certainly her belief in Vincent’s genius and her desire to honor Theo’s wishes were strong. And Luijten noted to me that in promoting van Gogh’s art, she believed she was also furthering her socialist political beliefs.
But people act from smaller, simpler motivations as well. Jo’s 21 months with Theo were the most intense of her life. She experienced Paris, joy, a revolution in color and culture. With Theo’s help she vaulted out of her careful, conventional world and gave herself over to passion.
Moving
today through the museum that houses all the paintings Jo couldn’t bear
to part with, another notion surfaces: that, in devoting herself
utterly to Vincent van Gogh, in selling him to the world, she was
keeping alive that moment of her youth, and allowing the rest of us to
feel it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/magazine/jo-van-gogh-bonger.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR2jgQvOBNiLh67N59WfL-3syO7l1C-etzmB9vGTtsdVq36542BFKJrUUhc
Mary:
Wonderful article. I knew nothing of this. I like the one critic's remark “He will always be a tempest.”
Oriana:
Precisely: until recently, we knew nothing of this. How did Vincent rise from complete lack of recognition to being a superstar? Thanks to his sister-in-law? This is such a surprise.
A somewhat parallel story in poetry is Emily Dickinson. It's mainly thanks to persistence of Mabel Todd that we have those astonishing poems.
Vincent van Gogh: Church at Auvers, 1890
*
JANE AUSTEN AND WALKING
Every character in Jane Austen has a way of walking. Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice walks “at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity”; her story resolves on a long walk with Mr. Darcy when they match strides. Marianne Dashwood escapes from oppressive and tedious society to run in the rain, but then the escape makes her ill; at last, she walks with her sister Elinor in a state of relief and mutual understanding. Emma’s father worries so much that he prohibits her from walking beyond their property without a companion; it is partly her confinement that makes her imagination go astray.
In Persuasion, Anne Elliot, who has mourned her mother some thirteen years, grieves to leave the family home, and give up her solitary strolls there, under “the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country.” Her repetitive steps eventually lead her out, into a wider world. It is as she walks by the sea in a coastal town that she begins to wonder if life may hold more for her. Austen’s characters walk to be themselves and to change.
In Austen walking may be escape, memorialization, independence, recklessness, empathy, self-definition, imagination, leadership. The writer knew interiors of “closeness and noise… confinement, bad air, bad smells,” and she knew what it was to go out, to put one foot after another, to be invigorated by “liberty, freshness, fragrance, and verdure” and to think about someone you loved, who was mortal and far away.
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Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra loved to walk. They walked the green hedgerows around the rectory at Steventon where they grew up. After their parents decided to leave this childhood home, the two grown sisters walked on excursions around coastal Lyme and in the small city of Bath where they lived off and on, and in the countryside in Kent, where they stayed with a brother who had become wealthy and owned an estate. They were very close to two other Austen brothers, who had gone to sea, and for a time the sisters shared a household with one of these brothers near Portsmouth and walked the busy streets around the harbor. All these places Austen regularly walked were the landscapes for her books, and knowing them by foot and eye was part of how she imagined her characters into them.
At Chawton Cottage, the house where Jane Austen lived with her mother and her sister from 1809 to 1817, and where she wrote her published novels to completion, their windows faced a fairly busy road. Austen biographer Paula Byrne notes that they were “opposite the inn and close by the village pond.” Austen reported in letters to her nephews on the postchaises and the eight coaches that ran by each day.
Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra were genteel, but without money, and they did not have much space to call their own. The cottage was a belated offer from their wealthiest brother. In the years I spent learning Jane Austen’s novels, I gradually also learned to see that, for the Austen sisters, their own historical moment did not feel to them like the steady upwards progression we are inclined to impose when we study from afar. Instead, they saw a reversal: women in the 18th century had been a vigorous part of the Enlightenment, had been voyaging and writing novels and treading ground that was again off limits to them as, in the early 19th century, England battled the Napoleonic Wars, and consolidated its empire, and as religious conservatism grew.
At the same time, other aspects of life might be opening out and forward. Jane and Cassandra Austen followed with careful attention what their two sailor brothers were reporting to them of the world. Jane Austen believed in abolition, and was proud that her brothers sailed to catch what became illegal slave ships after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. The sisters talked over their world as they walked. They loved the freedom of a discovered prospect, as did the poets they admired, whose lines ran in their heads. Walking itself was changing. In some ways, it was becoming more possible for ordinary people to walk toward change.
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In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit brings out how, in Austen’s England, new kinds of walking came together with other transformations. The growing middle class no longer lived by working the land themselves. Revolutions in the United States and France changed some old rigidities and not others. Public places were becoming safer, more populated and interconnected.
Landscape became a place for artistic experience and naturalist observation. J.M.W. Turner was filling his notebooks with landscape watercolors, and John Constable was sketching clouds and treetops as he walked about, spending days in what he called “skying.” Austen’s favorite poet, William Cowper, whose anti-slavery poems were political anthems, wrote of long countryside rambles. Cowper influenced Dorothy and William Wordsworth, who were out walking, too. Austen’s novels seem to refer to Wordsworth’s wonderful walking poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” For Wordsworth, the metered feet in his poems genuinely were the measure of his stride, a rhythm that freed his imagination.
Walking—a way to be yourself that is also a way to pay attention—is a continual integration of experience. ~
https://lithub.com/on-jane-austens-politics-of-walking/?fbclid=IwAR1HmSD5QEPXNkMkqf4YxfCbngL_dRvd1OqImIQzirhFdwz3xDPuHgWsO2o
Bath Abbey
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DOSTOYEVSKY AND THE ABYSS
~ When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book III, Chapter 3
This sounds so totally like Dostoyevsky, with his psychological daring to move between extremes. I don’t doubt that for Dostoyevsky, prose was what poetry is for many poets: you have to be willing to let go of control. So I believe those who try to imagine a sequel to Brothers Karamazov that was to be “Alyosha’s story”: while Dostoyevsky’s intention was to make Alyosha saintly, if he lived longer and started writing the novel, soon enough Alyosha would experience a fall, a real one, “head down and heels up” into the abyss -- because innocence must be lost for the sake of maturity.
I don’t know if Dostoyevsky -- or maybe we should say, Dostoyevsky's creative-cognitive unconscious -- would go as far as to make Alyosha become a tzar-assassinating revolutionary, but a would-be saint who ends up visiting prostitutes sounds pretty likely, and a prostitute’s love saves him in the end -- wait, I’m sliding into Crime and Punishment. Whether writing poetry or prose, you can’t avoid your central themes, and even prose can go into unplanned wilderness. But that’s of course the wonderful (and sometimes shattering) experience of writing, no matter what the genre.
Below: a page from Dostoyevsky's notebook at the time he was beginning to work on his last novel.
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“...the [writer's] job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” ~ Ken Kesey
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TO UNDERSTAND THE AVERSION TO POWERFUL WOMEN, LOOK TO THE GREEKS, SAYS MARY BEARD
~ The Western world’s demonization of women in power can be traced back to Ancient Greece, argues the celebrated UK classicist Mary Beard. For clear evidence of this centuries-long thread, look no further than the online depictions of Hillary Clinton as Medusa, freshly beheaded by a Trumpified Perseus, that made the rounds in the US presidential election in 2016. In this lecture at the British Museum in 2017, Beard contends that this Ancient Greek disdain for female power continues to shape language and attitudes in less obvious, but similarly destructive ways. With sharp humor and a slew of incisive examples, Beard makes the case that, to truly overcome archetypes of powerful women as irresponsible, dangerous and conniving, female power needs a new framework focused on results, and decoupled from prestige. ~
https://voxpopulisphere.com/2021/04/15/video-mary-beard-women-in-power/
This is long, but you can get something of worth if you watch just ten or so minutes of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGDJIlUCjA0
Mary Beard (an interesting name in this context) starts talking about Ancient Greece at 17.5 minutes. By the way, I thought I myself would watch only . . . oh, no more than 15 minutes of the video, but found myself riveted and watched it to the end.
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“The most lost day in life is the day we don't laugh. ~ Charlie Chaplin
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ARE MASS SHOOTERS MENTALLY ILL? (redux)
~ “I’m a former psych nurse and a current corrections nurse. The way I see it, mental health has it wrong. What I observe is that most violent people are completely sane. It’s just a different set of values. If you value power and control over others then being violent is the most sensible, most effective means to that end.” (signed "M" — a response to an article in Psychology Today that likewise says there is no clear evidence linking shootings to mental illness)
In the course of working as a creative-writing instructor in prisons, I happened to meet a former hitman serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole. He was a radical white supremacist (though he had killed for money regardless of race). By radical I mean that being Eastern European wasn't white enough for him. Aside from having no conscience, he came across as highly intelligent, self-controlled, and self-confident. He was by far the best writer in the group. Under different life circumstances, he might have become a successful trial lawyer (psychopathy is high among trial lawyers, actors, CEOs, and surgeons).
When the nurse said “a different set of values,” I suddenly remembered that man at Folsom Maximum Security prison (he typically dismembered the bodies; it was his trademark).
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From another source:
“Most of the research shows that people with mental illness are actually less likely than the general population to go on to shoot somebody else or to commit mass violence,” said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “To be honest, it’s quite frustrating as a psychiatrist to have this kind of false narrative be perpetuated because it’s a distraction from the story we should be telling.”
The general claim that psychiatric disorders are tied to gun violence is “a gross oversimplification,” said Jeffrey Swanson, a psychiatrist and behavioral scientist at Duke University. He and other scientists have known this for nearly three decades.
Metzl said there are many other factors that are strongly associated with shootings, including access to guns, a state’s gun laws, an attacker’s past history of violence, substance abuse, misogyny and racism, to name a few.
And while most mass shooters have a history of showing symptoms — emphasis on “symptoms” — of a mental illness, only about a quarter actually have a diagnosis of a mental illness. This rule also applies to those with personality disorders, said Michelle Galietta, a forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Galietta said when researchers looked at 1,100 patients recently discharged from psychiatric hospitals, they found factors like a history of violence, substance use and childhood trauma were more likely to predict a future gun attack than a past diagnosis of a mental illness.
Galietta said only a few symptoms of mental illness — such as anger, impulsivity, emotional feelings of isolation — increase a person’s risk for carrying out violence.
Most active shooters, according to the FBI and Secret Service, are male, white and relatively young, with an average age in their 30s.
Domestic violence is one of the strongest predictors of future gun violence.
When it comes to mental health, few of these shooters would match the criteria for a mental health diagnosis, but most show signs of anger, impulsivity, social isolation and alienation. Many are also disaffected.
“They’re disconnected from healthy relationships and from belonging to a broader community,” said Jeffrey Swanson.
These feelings evolve into what the Secret Service calls patterns of “aggressive narcissism” — whereby the attackers “unrealistically believe that they were deserving of certain relationships, successes, or benefits, with some reacting angrily when they did not obtain what they believed they deserved.”
One sweeping characterization Swanson can make of mass shooters: “They’re marinating in hate towards other people.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/why-mental-illness-cant-predict-mass-shootings?fbclid=IwAR2wCtaCoi8IyiCe5KrB86zQAHaJOXVTtr-TOYQ5yLoNJph8haJ_-HQ6sv4
Joseph Milosch: GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: THE CONFEDERATE GUN CULTURE AND THE OLD WEST GUN CULTURE
In the USA, it is a typical day with gun deaths: suicides, homicides, police shootings, and a list of the usual reasons: second amendment, movies, TV, and mental illness. Robert Spitzer, a political scientist, writes that the modern American gun culture grew out of our revolutionary and frontier history. Americans have more guns than people, more gun shops than food stores, more gun shops than the combination of all the McDonalds, subways, and Starbucks.
There seems to be a correlation between the Republican response to COVID 19 and the news media response to Gun violence. The Republican response to COVID deaths was to blame poor health due to CPOD, lung cancer, heart conditions, or old age as the cause of death. They diminished the importance of the virus. Similarly, the media reduce the gravity of mass shootings by labeling them as a modern affliction.
They blame the social sickness on mental illness, religious zealots, political fanatics, and racism. They mislabel gun violence to misdirect attention away from these murders, which are the natural behaviors of gun cultures. From colonial days, we experienced massacres based on religious differences and enforcement of slavery. Tim Widowfield discusses the slaveholders’ fear of a successful and revengeful slave uprising.
Because of the slaveholders’ fear, they created among the plantations a commitment to penalize with total, unremitting, and merciless violence any indication of rebellion. Today, the news commentators describe this fear as social, economic, and political dissatisfaction of the working class. However, the working class adopted the plantation owner’s fear of slaves emerging as equals with whom they would have to compete.
Today, the White supremacy movement has absorbed the Confederate and Cowboy Gun Culture. They employ euphemisms to describe this fear. The diaries of the Western settlers are full of vigilante action against the murders of frontier women and children. The western gun culture ignores these killings and the frequency of bushwhacking in their mythology. Also, there were massacres against native American women and children.
George Custer’s genocide against the Plain Indians was a continuation of a hundred years of genocide against the Native Nations. Tombstone and Dodge City had frequent mass murders. The cowboys came into town shooting, and we called it boys blowing off their trail dust. In the 1970s, historian Richard Hofstadter coined the phrase gun culture to characterize the American relationship and heritage to guns.
Today, the gun culture is a merger of the Confederate gun culture personified by Andrew Jackson with the Cowboy gun culture of the Old West as personified by John Wayne. Overwhelmingly, it is composed of white men and women. The group uses an excuse of personal safety to justify their willingness to react with unrestrained fury and sudden violence. This permits a gun culture to refuse to take responsibility for gun violence.
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Being openly bigoted is apparently a source of pride to this driver. Note, however, that the car is Japanese.
"The fact that we are discussing creating a mental illness data base, which would involve massive HIPAA violations, rather than a white supremacist data base, which would involve a few hours on Twitter, is telling." ~ Bunny Sparber
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HOW THE U.S. COULD CUT DOWN ITS GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
~ Next week, President Biden will announce a number that could shape the rest of his presidency: a new goal to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The announcement marks the country's renewed commitment to the Paris accord, the international climate change agreement that former President Donald Trump withdrew from. Environmental groups, scientists and major business leaders are urging the Biden administration to cut emissions 50% by 2030, as compared to 2005 levels.
That target lines up with scientific assessments of the reductions needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. To limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions need to drop to net-zero by 2050. Above that and sea levels rise to extreme heights, heat waves get more intense, and hurricanes and wildfires become even more destructive.
A 50% cut would not be the world's most aggressive target, but it would put the U.S. among the four most ambitious countries. Going back to 1850, the U.S. has pumped more emissions into the atmosphere cumulatively than any other nation.
Still, achieving that target by 2030 won't be simple, requiring both political buy-in and a sweeping deployment of cleaner cars and clean energy sources.
1. Renewable energy takes over, coal fades away
The fastest and largest way to cut emissions by 2030 is likely through the way we generate electricity. Across three independent assessments which ran simulations of different policies, the power sector would have to make up the majority of the overall emissions cuts.
Solar, wind and other renewables, already growing rapidly, would produce roughly half of the country's electricity by 2030, according to an analysis by the University of Maryland and World Resources Institute.
That would be significantly faster than current federal estimates, which forecast renewables being below half of the energy mix in 2050, 20 years later. If renewables continue to grow at the current rate, the country would need to turn to other carbon-free sources of energy like nuclear power, according to a Princeton University analysis.
The recent growth of solar and wind has largely been driven by their falling costs, making them cheaper options than fossil fuels in some locations. The Biden administration recently announced an initiative to drive those costs down even farther, cutting the price of solar by more than half by 2030.
"We saw a record amount [of renewables] in 2020, even despite the effects of the pandemic," Arostegui says. "So we're looking at an acceleration of trends that are in place, not a wholesale new process that doesn't have any basis in what's going on in reality."
On the flip side, fossil fuels would shrink correspondingly, with coal power dropping to just a tiny percentage, if not disappearing completely. Because both renewable energy and natural gas are more affordable, coal power plants are already on the decline. Many have closed and existing power plants aren't being operated as much.
"It actually is uneconomical in many cases to continue to burn coal, even regardless of the climate and health impacts of that," says Nathan Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland. "So coal is struggling already, and it's unlikely that it will continue in any significant form beyond 2030."
Still, to meet a goal of 50% by 2030, both of these trends would need to happen far faster than they currently are, either through new policies or spending. Politically, coal communities are fighting to keep the industry afloat. The Biden administration has already brought up potentially using a "clean electricity standard," a rule that requires utilities to get increasing amounts of their electricity from low-carbon or carbon-free sources.
2. Car dealerships look very different
Today, transportation is the country's largest source of emissions. While cars have been getting cleaner on average, Americans have been buying more SUVs and other large vehicles, causing oil consumption to go up.
Today, electric cars make up about 2% of new cars sales, but to achieve deep emissions cuts by 2030, new car sales would need to be between 50 to 100% electric by then, according to several analyses. That would produce significant air pollution and health benefits, according to a report from the University of California Berkeley and others, if the vehicles run largely on electricity from low-carbon sources like solar and wind.
That's not far off from recent announcements made by major automakers. GM is planning on an all-electric future, aiming to phase out internal combustion engines by 2035. Volvo has also committed to going electric by 2030.
That doesn't mean the roads will look dramatically different then, though. Most cars last for a decade or more, meaning that gas-powered vehicles will still be a large part of the overall mix in 2030.
Several states already have mandates that require increasing sales of zero-emission vehicles. But to boost sales nationwide, researchers say the federal government would need to adopt a similar policy or vastly tighten fuel economy standards to require much cleaner cars. The Biden administration says it's currently drafting new fuel economy rules, replacing Trump administration standards that loosened requirements for automakers.
Still, requiring car companies to make cleaner cars is only half the battle. To encourage consumers to buy them, researchers say that strong tax incentives will need to be in place, as well as "cash for clunkers" programs which provide incentives for trading in older vehicles.
3. Buildings, industrial plants and land all get in the game
"Industry defies an easy overall solution," Hultman says. "Each industry has its flexibilities and frankly, inflexibilities, and it's up to them to sort through that. It also means there's a tremendous amount of support that can be done by research and innovation."
Energy used by homes and buildings is also a major emissions source. The federal government would need to dramatically speed up energy efficiency programs, including standards for appliances. It could also phase out the use of natural gas in heating and cooking, something the industry is already fighting in a number of states.
Biden's infrastructure package calls for retrofitting more than 2 million homes and buildings to make them more energy efficient.
Forests and farmland would also need to play a role, since they absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Conserving more land, as proposed in Biden's 30x30 goal, would prevent emissions from being released, while planting trees or encouraging farmers to use techniques that boost carbon absorption could suck up greenhouse gases that have already been emitted.
With just nine years to implement these programs, climate experts say speed will be key. Many policies take years to develop and then, more years to affect overall emissions. As other countries evaluate their own emissions targets in preparation for climate negotiations this fall, they'll be looking to the U.S. to see if its commitments are more than just words. ~
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/987667828/how-the-u-s-could-halve-climate-emissions-by-2030
Oriana:
Makes me look forward to 2030. The air should be cleaner, and there should be much less traffic noise, with more electric cars. And eventually — imagine! — there will be only electric or hydrogen cars.
SEAGRASS: RICE OF THE SEA?
~ Growing up in southern Spain, Ángel León paid little attention to the meadows of seagrass that fringed the turquoise waters near his home, their slender blades grazing him as he swam in the Bay of Cádiz.
It was only decades later – as he was fast becoming known as one of the country’s most innovative chefs – that he noticed something he had missed in previous encounters with Zostera marina: a clutch of tiny green grains clinging to the base of the eelgrass.
His culinary instincts, honed over years in the kitchen of his restaurant Aponiente, kicked in. Could this marine grain be edible?
Lab tests hinted at its tremendous potential: gluten-free, high in omega-6 and -9 fatty acids, and contains 50% more protein than rice per grain, according to Aponiente’s research. And all of it growing without freshwater or fertilizer.
The find has set the chef, whose restaurant won its third Michelin star in 2017, on a mission to recast the common eelgrass as a potential superfood, albeit one whose singular lifecycle could have far-reaching consequences. “In a world that is three-quarters water, it could fundamentally transform how we see oceans,” says León. “This could be the beginning of a new concept of understanding the sea as a garden.”
It’s a sweeping statement that would raise eyebrows from anyone else. But León, known across Spain as el Chef del Mar (the chef of the sea), has long pushed the boundaries of seafood, fashioning chorizos out of discarded fish parts and serving sea-grown versions of tomatoes and pears at his restaurant near the Bay of Cádiz.
“When I started Aponiente 12 years ago, my goal was to open a restaurant that served everything that has no value in the sea,” he says. “The first years were awful because nobody understood why I was serving customers produce that nobody wanted.”
Still, he pushed forward with his “cuisine of the unknown seas”. His efforts to bring little-known marine species to the fore were recognized in 2010 with his first Michelin star. By the time the restaurant earned its third star, León had become a fixture on Spain’s gastronomy scene: a trailblazing chef determined to redefine how we treat the sea.
What León and his team refer to as “marine grain” expands on this, in one of his most ambitious projects to date. After stumbling across the grain in 2017, León began looking for any mention of Zostera marina being used as food. He finally found an article from 1973 in the journal Science on how it was an important part of the diet of the Seri, an Indigenous people living on the Gulf of California in Sonora, Mexico, and the only known case of a grain from the sea being used as a human food source.
Next came the question of whether the perennial plant could be cultivated. In the Bay of Cádiz, the once-abundant plant had been reduced to an area of just four sq metres, echoing a decline seen around the world as seagrass meadows reel from increased human activity along coastlines and steadily rising water temperatures.
Working with a team at the University of Cádiz and researchers from the regional government, a pilot project was launched to adapt three small areas across a third of a hectare (0.75 acres) of salt marshes into what León calls a “marine garden”.
It was not until 18 months later – after the plants had produced grains – that León steeled himself for the ultimate test, said Juan Martín, Aponiente’s environmental manager.
“Ángel came to me, his tone very serious, and said: ‘Juan, I would like to have some grains because I have no idea how it tastes. Imagine if it doesn’t taste good,’” says Martín. “It’s incredible. He threw himself into it blindly, invested his own money, and he had never even tried this marine grain.”
León put the grain through a battery of recipes, grinding it to make flour for bread and pasta and steeping it in flavors to mimic Spain’s classic rice dishes.
“It’s interesting. When you eat it with the husk, similar to brown rice, it has a hint of the sea at the end,” says León. “But without the husk, you don’t taste the sea.” He found that the grain absorbed flavor well, taking two minutes longer to cook than rice and softening if overcooked.
In the marine garden, León and his team were watching as the plant lived up to its reputation as an architect of ecosystems: transforming the abandoned salt marsh into a flourishing habitat teeming with life, from seahorses to scallops.
The plant’s impact could stretch much further. Capable of capturing carbon 35 times faster than tropical rainforests and described by the WWF as an “incredible tool” in fighting the climate crisis, seagrass absorbs 10% of the ocean’s carbon annually despite covering just 0.2% of the seabed.
In southern Spain, however, the team’s first marine garden suggests potential average harvests could be about 3.5 tonnes a hectare. While the yield is about a third of what one could achieve with rice, León points to the potential for low-cost and environmentally friendly cultivation. “If nature gifts you with 3,500kg without doing anything – no antibiotics, no fertilizer, just seawater and movement – then we have a project that suggests one can cultivate marine grain.”
The push is now on to scale up the project, adapting as much as five hectares of salt marshes into areas for cultivating eelgrass. Every success is carefully tracked, in hopes of better understanding the conditions – from water temperature to salinity – that the plant needs to thrive.
He and his team envision a global reach for their project, paving the way for people to harness the plant’s potential to boost aquatic ecosystems, feed populations and fight the climate crisis. “We’ve opened a window,” says León. “I believe it’s a new way to feed ourselves.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/09/sea-rice-eelgrass-marine-grain-chef-angel-leon-marsh-climate-crisis?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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KELP FARMING IN ALASKA
~ While farmers in much of the US spend the late spring patiently waiting for their crops to mature, a small band of sea farmers have taken to the cold ocean waters of Alaska to harvest the state’s newest cash crop: kelp.
Huge demand for seaweed, hauled up in slimy green bunches from the Pacific Ocean, has kickstarted an industry that existed as a mere fantasy only five years ago.
“There’s lot of interest in sustainability,” says Beau Perry, head of Blue Evolution, a California-based company at the center of Alaska’s nascent seaweed boom. “As we deal with climate change and the movement towards plant-based diets, all of those trends play towards seaweed being a new sort of star ingredient.”
In recent years, farmers in Alaska have begun growing sugar kelp and ribbon kelp – two species that occur naturally in the ecosystem of remote communities like Kodiak and Ketchikan. With a $6bn (£4.7bn) global market for seaweed, residents are hopeful that kelp farming is a sustainable way to cultivate – and harvest – the coveted aquatic plant.
“There’s huge potential in Alaska. There’s so much space and it really fills an interesting niche,” says Alf Pryor, co-owner of Kodiak Kelp Company. “There’s a lot of potential for tons of different kinds of products … [I] see it taking off pretty quickly.”
A career salmon fisherman, Pryor along with his wife, Lexa Meyer, were drawn into the kelp business recently as a way to supplement their income. But interest in kelp farming is now so intense that Pryor believes a new farmer might have to wait up to three years for the necessary permits.
Unlike in other parts of the world, where wild kelp is harvested by ships, Alaska’s aquatic plants are grown by farmers in a months-long process, which begins in the dead of winter.
After Pryor and Meyer find roughly 50 plants they consider ideal for breeding, the wild kelp samples are sent to a facility run by Blue Evolution. The company extracts spores from the kelp and grows seedlings on pieces of string known as “seed pipes”. These pipes are given to farmers, who then wind the string along long ropes, which dangle from a free-floating frame in the ocean. Over a six-month period, the spores mature before they are harvested in late spring.
Pryor’s experience as a gill-net fisherman helped him to switch to mariculture, including redesigning a 25ft skiff to harvest kelp more efficiently. Even with his technical knowledge, he’s found that farming requires constant vigilance, including a sharp eye for drifting rafts of bull kelp, rogue groupings of wild seaweed that can crash into the ropes of young kelp and tangle into the plants.
“It’s kind of a constant battle, trying to keep stuff out of the farm,” says Pryor, who monitors the young plants once a week over the winter with his team.
In early May, the couple harvested nearly 200,000 pounds of kelp from their operation, which spans 18 acres and uses nearly 50,000 feet of rope – one of the largest hauls of kelp in the history of Alaska.
Blue Evolution hopes to buy “at least 50 tons” of seaweed from farmers like Pryor and Meyer, says Perry – a five-fold increase on the company’s purchase last year, and a figure he hopes to double next year.
The plant is of particular interest as studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of seaweed in animal feed as a way of reducing methane emissions. It is also being tested for properties that can mimic fossil fuels or plastics.
In coastal towns like Kodiak, where the fishing industry is the main employer and incomes are seasonal, the burgeoning kelp farming industry is seen as a way for families to find work during slow periods.
“For small coastal communities, [seaweed farming] could be a big deal,” says Pryor. “Just from the farm that we did this year, we put between 30 and 40 people to work.”
Alaska’s experiment with kelp is nothing new: each year, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of seaweed are harvested around the world, with China and Japan leading global exports. But in recent months, the harvesting of wild plants has been dogged by controversy.
In summer 2018, the proposed wide-scale harvest of wild kelp led to a fierce row in Scotland, where environmental groups say the dredging of kelp forests could cause irreparable harm to marine life off the coastline because the plants play such a crucial role in preserving a healthy ecosystem.
In Alaska, companies are required to follow strict government rules on cultivation: strains of seaweed crops, taken from wild plants, must be grown within 50km of the source plant. This ensures genetic strength and diversity are maintained, says Perry, with salmon hatcheries in the state following similarly strict guidelines.
On the whole, any environmental damage from the cultivation of farmed seaweed – which requires wild plants be picked for spore extraction – appears to be “minimal”, says Matthew Bracken, an associate professor of biology at the University of California Irvine.
“Kelp have major benefits for the environment both naturally growing and growing in these cultures,” says Bracken. “When the sun is shining, [kelp plants] are going to absorb carbon dioxide from the water … And given increases in [carbon dioxide] concentrations in the ocean generally, this is a good thing.”
Because seaweed is seen as a tool for mitigating the damaging impacts of ocean acidification, Perry believes the product is good for the environment – and for business.
But for Bracken, the surge in cultivation also highlights major advances in understanding the life cycle of a kelp, which has long mystified researchers.
“It’s not like plants where you just put seeds in the ground. They have a complex life. You have to really understand that well and be able to then magnify it,” says Bracken. “It can teach us a lot about how life works.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/11/ingredient-changing-fortunes-alaska-seaweed-kelp
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SOME LIFE WISDOM
~ There’s no proper way to prepare for the death of a loved one. No matter how hard you want to hold onto someone, they’ll leave you eventually. Keep a memento to remind yourself of them if that’s how you grieve. It’s almost the end of the road for my dog, that’s why I keep a picture of him and me in my wallet.
You can’t set goals if you don’t create habits. Goal-setting is a lost cause because people don’t understand they need to implement habits first. They want huge growth without putting in the work. It takes three months to fully implement a daily habit.
You are your toughest critic. To this day I still look at articles I’ve written and I’m confused as to how they got so much attention. Don’t start criticizing things that do well. Move on to the next creation.
You are going to be lazy (maybe even a few hours a day). This is okay. Productivity isn’t about working nonstop. It’s about being smarter with how you allocate your time.
Embrace your flaws and move on. ~
https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/10-hard-truths-that-no-one-wants-to-accept-in-life-74baaae42461
There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path. ~ Buddha
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“SOMETHING OUT THERE, BUT NOT A CHRISTIAN GOD”
~ Is there a God?
I’ve asked myself that question over and over for as long as I can remember.
A better question will be if there is a God like the Christian Bible says there is. A God who created the universe in a few days, cast our first human ancestors out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple and flooded the earth because he was angry that humans weren’t doing what he felt they should do.
I would say, without a doubt, there is no God like that.
I can’t believe there would be a God who professes in one breath that he loves his little humans, and in another commits genocide and kills everyone off except for a few people in a boat with two of every animal, bird, and insect on earth.
I can’t believe in a God that “…so loved the world, he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” (John 3:16 — English Standard Version) but allows little children to be abused, raped, die from starvation, live in cages, and wither away from any number of a thousand different diseases.
No amount of free will makes up for all the suffering when we still have to bow and scrape to a God and his Son, who only pay attention to his sinful creatures when it is time to bring judgment and armageddon on them.
I can’t believe in a God who is all-powerful and omnipotent, yet allows his most important creation to have free reign to destroy his other creations and allows evil to thrive and influence the powerful among humankind.
I cannot believe in someone who expects us to pray and worship him and allows us to think he answers us, when luck, location, and chance are the reason some of us fare better than others.
I can’t believe in a God that would give a few fortunate people untold riches when they pray for it but would allow other people to die in poverty and starvation when they pray to the same God.
I can’t believe in a God like that.
But there are wondrous things that happen all the time; patterns that are only seen if you look carefully.
How was everything in place at precisely the right moment it needed to be to create the Big Bang?
How were the conditions always ripe for every piece of matter to evolve into what we see now, billions of years later?
Sometimes it takes millions or billions of years, but can you believe the earth and everything in it, and the universe all happened by chance?
My mind cannot fathom how it could have all happened by luck and happenstance.
It makes me wonder if there is not some ever-present force, call it “the universe,” or “mother Nature,” if you will. What if there was something behind the scenes, tweaking the threads and encouraging one piece of matter to combine with another, or pushing one person into the influence of another.
There are so many unanswered questions, and humans don’t live long enough to answer them all. Even with hundreds of years of science, we are no closer to understanding the nature of the universe.
The sad thing is: humans will destroy the only home we have and our existence in the process. All those years of study will be lost with us, and the universe will go on evolving.
Maybe an alien civilization will find our remains and study us and find that we were close to understanding everything, but our greed and stupidity caused our society to implode.
I believe in something, but it’s not the God from the bible. I don’t fault anyone else for their beliefs, but I chose not to believe in fiction and fairy tales.
But, I can’t ignore that there is some force at work in the universe, causing creation and evolution, casting universes to close, and bringing people and events together seemingly by chance.
There is something at work, and it makes me feel good knowing we aren’t alone in the universe. ~
Oriana:
I posted this article even though in the end it disappointed me. Maybe what I can't forget is the my mother bursting into laughter when someone used the phrase "non-brain-based intelligence." She simply couldn't control herself.
Even so, "cosmic intelligence" has a nice sound to it, and now and then I like to think that perhaps . . . perhaps . . .
“SOMETHING-IST”: FINALLY A LABEL FOR “I BELIEVE THERE IS SOMETHING OUT THERE”
Practically all my friends are something-ists. They don’t believe in god, but say, “I believe there is SOMETHING out there.” I alone don’t hedge my bets. I see the universe as entirely natural, without deities, demons or angels — and without the SOMETHING OUT THERE that’s supposed to account for rare coincidences. Our consciousness, dreams, thoughts, hallucinations, cultural influences, memorable fictional characters, etc. — and how many people in the same conference room share the same birthday — these are all natural phenomena, even if we don't have a complete understanding of them, or an explanation for everything that happens.
As my parents taught me: "In nature there is nothing supernatural. By definition." We can’t explain what consciousness is or how it works, but the new science of chaos and complexity has given us a useful term: emergence. It’s bottom-up self-organization that’s evident in bird-migration, for instance. A single neuron firing is meaningless — like a stranded ant, separated from its colony. But a million neurons firing together adds up to a pattern.
I don't thnk there is free-floating, brain-less consciousness “out there,” even though a lot of people speak of “cosmic consciousness” (and they don’t mean the laws of physics; they mean a mysterious, all-knowing intelligence that’s friendly specifically to them). If evidence for it can be produced, I will change my views. Meanwhile, the interesting news that in the Netherlands atheists now outnumber traditional believers — but not Something-ists.
~ “For the first time the Netherlands has more atheists than believers, according to a recent survey conducted by Ipsos. Slightly more than 25 percent of the people are atheists while 17 percent believes in the existence of God. The majority, 60 percent, is between believing and disbelieving in God. … The majority categorize themselves as either agnostics or ‘something-ists’. Agnostics say they can not know if there is a higher power and somethingists believe that there must be a some sort of higher power beyond material.
The number of believers is higher among the young than it is among the elderly.
Despite the relatively small percentage of believers, 53 percent of the population believe in some form of life after death, and over 40 percent define themselves as ‘spiritual persons.’
Something-ism is a benign kind of belief. No one has been killed in the name of Something-Out-There. No one has died as a martyr for Something-Out-There.” ~
Winter in the Netherlands
Mary: ORDERLY LAWS OF NATURE, BUT NO CENTRAL PLANNING
On atheists and “something-its” — one mistake I think is in assuming there is/was some greater power out there creating/planning everything, or there is not, so all the wonders of life and the universe occurred by chance … by very long sequences of chance events. It's all planned or it's all luck and happenstance.
Neither side of this dichotomy satisfies me. Chemistry is not a matter of chance, but of order--reactions determined by the structure of atoms and molecules, structures determined and limited by the potentials of protons, neutrons and electrons. All of these contribute to determine the geometry of molecules and their potential actions and interactions.
From what we know and have discovered, all matter has the potential and tendency to interact, to form links and bonds, structures and forms, to attract or repel, grow or collapse, in regular and ordered ways. This ordering doesn’t come down from above or in from without, but from the most basic elements ability to interact, to form and break bonds in ways dependent on the structure of the elements themselves.
And it seems once you have elements, they won't persist long without forming compounds, that some compounds will form structures with increasing complexity, in a process that eventually leads to the complex ordering of living organisms that can absorb energy, store it, use it, reproduce, and grow in increasingly complex ways. Order and complexity are not imposed on matter, they are its essence.
As matter increases in organization and achieves life, life increases in complexity and achieves consciousness. Human consciousness is the highest form of that organization we are aware of, but it may be simple hubris to think we are the be all and end all of consciousness. We may be simply another step in a larger process of the universe becoming an integrated consciousness, and one that is self aware. If you want to call that God, it would be a god in process, not yet complete.
I find that a much more satisfying idea that the usual Gods of human religions, who are largely disappointingly less than the best of us...petty, vengeful, irrational, demanding, and unjust...creatures I could not respect, much less worship. Their credibility is destroyed by even one tortured, suffering innocent.
Well I guess that's my apostate's creed.
Oriana: THE UNIVERSE IS AN INTERTWINED WHOLE
I think you’re saying there is only nature, and life and consciousness arose as part of the evolution of the universe. I agree. I see no need for “Something Out There” that specifically arranges coincidences and appears to protect us. Such a belief leads us to the problem of evil and innocent suffering all over again. But if you talk to someone who happened to survive a bad accident, say, they tend to believe they were chosen to survive “for a purpose.” Barring that, that dead mother in heaven prayed for them — but here we are back to a sort of primitive “protectivism” that seems to be one of the main engines or any religion.
Still, no one can deny the existence of mysteries, or at least astonishing phenomena. One of them is “quantum entanglement.” When two particles (or groups of particles) are entangled, a change in the quantum state of one particular instantly affects the quantum state to its “twin” — even if those particles are separated by a huge distance.
One way to explain this is to postulate that the Universe is in incredibly connected whole — somewhat in the manner of a complex living organism (I am not saying that the Universe IS such an organism, though some have speculated along those lines). For me it’s enough to think of the Universe as an immense whole, so that what happens at point A is bound to affect point B (and C, and D, and so on). Some of its interconnectivity encompasses consciousness as well — not that we know how to define consciousness, but communication is part of it.
I better quit before I get embroiled in matters beyond my (and perhaps anyone’s) understanding. My point is simply that there is no need to reach for supernatural explanations of certain mysterious-seeming coincidences when the solution may lie in quantum mechanics and the laws of nature in general — with room for some randomness and probability.
But all this is pretty irrelevant to people who seek not the answers to difficult questions, but rather simply special protection for themselves — the sense that “Something Out There” watches over them like a Guardian Angel, ready to interfere on their behalf. That of course doesn’t explain the bad things that happen to good people, and we’re back to where the started — even though sophisticated-sounding terms have been used, e.g. “Cosmic Consciousness.”
But at least Some-thing-ists” don’t believe in stuff like the Second Coming, and none among them would be willing to kill in the name of Something Out There. That is already tremendous progress.
Some may point out that no cathedrals will be built to Something Out There. No, but a planetarium show is quite magical. And a scientific worldview need not exclude an astounding level of interconnectedness, or a new definitions of consciousness.
Mary:
Yes, quantum physics!! I can't pretend to understand it, but some of the (mind-bending) implications suggest time and distance are not absolute but functions of consciousness...so those particles aren't engaged in spooky action at a distance, distance is a function of our consciousness, not of the universe itself. Wow.
Oriana:
addendum:
Unexpectedly, reading about Schopenhauer, I came across this passage:
“Kant thought there are “things-in-themselves” and we just can’t know them. Schopenhauer said there are not things, there is only one great “thing-in-itself,” the universe. The world is one field, which burbles along in a way we will never be able to access.” (Jennifer M. Hecht, Doubt, p.395)
This gets us back to quantum entanglement. How does a particle “know” what has just happened to its entangled twin a great distance away? Both particles are interconnected parts of one universe, one field.
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COVID-RELATED LUNG TRANSPLANTS
~ In a year when covid-19 shattered the pleas of so many who prayed for miracles, a Georgia man with two new lungs is among the fortunate.
Mark Buchanan, of Roopville, received a double-lung transplant in October, nearly three months after covid left him hospitalized and sedated, first on a ventilator and then on the last-resort treatment known as ECMO.
“They said that it had ruined my lungs,” said Buchanan, 53, who was a burly power company lineman when he fell ill. “The vent and the covid ruined ’em completely.”
At the time, only a handful of U.S. hospitals were willing to take a chance on organ transplants to treat the sickest covid patients. Too little was known about the risks of the virus and lasting damage it might cause, let alone whether such patients could survive the surgery. Buchanan was turned down at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, according to his wife, Melissa, who said doctors advised her to withdraw treatment and allow him to die peacefully.
“They were telling me to end his life. I told them absolutely not,” recalled Melissa Buchanan, 49. “We all started Googling any place that would take someone who needed a lung transplant.”
It took calls to several hospitals, plus a favor from a hometown physician, before Buchanan was accepted at the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital, 350 miles away in Gainesville, Florida. He received his new lungs Oct. 28.
Nearly six months later, the transplant landscape has radically changed. Covid-related transplants are surging as hospitals grapple with a growing subset of patients whose organs — most often hearts and lungs — are “basically destroyed by the virus,” said Dr. Jonathan Orens, a lung transplant expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Nearly 60 transplants were performed through March 31 for patients with covid-related organ disease, according to figures released Monday by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees transplants in the U.S. That includes at least 54 lung and four heart transplants recorded since new codes for covid-specific diagnoses were adopted in late October. One patient received a combination heart-lung transplant. Another 26 patients eligible for covid-related lung transplants and one eligible for a heart transplant remain on waiting lists, UNOS data show.
Nearly two dozen hospitals have performed the surgeries, with new sites added every month.
“You’re seeing it move around the country, and it’s moving around pretty quick,” said Dr. David Weill, former director of the Stanford University Medical Center’s lung and heart-lung transplant program who now works as a consultant. “It’s like wildfire, where centers are saying, ‘We did our first one, too.’”
The upsurge in transplants has been fueled largely by the broad reach of the virus. As U.S. covid cases top 31 million, with more than 580,000 deaths, thousands of patients who survived particularly serious infections are left with badly damaged organs that pose life-threatening complications.
“I think this is just the beginning,” said Dr. Tae Song, surgical director of the lung transplant program at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “I expect this to be a completely new category of transplant patients.”
Tens of thousands of patients whose organs were otherwise healthy have developed severe, chronic lung disease after contracting covid. Because it’s a novel disease, exactly how many will go on to need lung transplants isn’t yet clear, said Weill, who has called for the development of a lung transplant registry to track outcomes.
So far, the rise in covid-related transplants has not dramatically affected the existing waiting lists for organs. Of the more than 107,000 patients on waiting lists, about 3,500 need hearts and more than 1,000 need lungs. Most of the rest are waiting for kidney transplants, which have not been subject to a significant increase because of covid.
Most covid-related transplants are performed on patients whose lungs have been irreversibly weakened by the disease. Thousands of covid survivors have developed ARDS, or acute respiratory distress syndrome, which allows fluid to leak into the lungs. Others develop pulmonary fibrosis, which occurs when lung tissue becomes scarred.
“What was once a scaffold of soft, living cells turns into a stiff mesh that’s not capable of exchanging gases,” said Song.
While conditions like pulmonary fibrosis typically develop over months or years, often in response to toxins or medications, covid patients seem to get much sicker, much faster. “Instead of months, it’s more on the order of weeks,” Song said.
Not everyone is eligible for a transplant. In many covid patients, damage isn’t limited to a single organ. Others have preexisting conditions such as diabetes or obesity that can complicate recovery from surgery or preclude it entirely. And, often, those who have been sedated for weeks or months aren’t likely to survive the trauma of transplant.
Successful transplant candidates are likely patients younger than 65 who are otherwise healthy and whose lungs will not heal on their own, said Dr. Tiago Machuca, chief of thoracic surgery at UF Health Shands Hospital, who helped draft suggested guidance for covid-related lung transplants.
It remains unclear whether widespread vaccination will stem the number of covid patients who require transplants — or whether transplant candidates among survivors will continue to rise. There’s no doubt, however, that the pandemic has changed the profile of those considered for lung transplantation, Machuca said.
“Before covid, transplanting patients with acute respiratory failure was a ‘no,’” he said. “I think this is expanding the limits of what we felt was possible.”
https://khn.org/news/article/covid-spawns-new-category-of-organ-transplants/
Apollo, the god of plague and healing; mosaic on Cyprus
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3-D STEM CELL SPHEROIDS FOR ORGAN REPAIR
~ When pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) were first isolated from human embryos in 1998, they promised a new age of regenerative medicine. These cell lines, the first lab-grown cells capable of differentiating into all the types of cells in the body, would produce new cells and tissues to replace those damaged by age or disease. The field’s prospects grew in 2006, when researchers reprogrammed mature human cells back to a pluripotent state to produce induced PSCs, thereby avoiding controversial embryonic sources.
The journey to the clinic, however, has often slowed to a crawl—particularly for therapies that could restore function to solid organs like the liver, kidney, pancreas and heart. Often that’s because too few PSCs are available to differentiate into the specific cell types needed for a treatment, especially when preparing cells for more than a single individual. A cardiac repair treatment, for instance, may require starting with upwards of a billion PSCs per patient. The standard 2-D cell-culture systems used today, which grow PSCs as monolayers on flat, rigid plastic or glass surfaces, can't economically produce enough cells for many important therapies.
From monolayers to spheroids
Modern 3-D cell-culture methods avoid many of the problems of monolayer growth. The cells can grow efficiently in a liquid suspension culture that is agitated (either shaken or stirred), achieving higher cell densities than cells grown in a monolayer. For example, in 2018 researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a new 3-D system in Cell Death and Disease that could generate 1.5 billion viable PSCs for every 1.5 liters of culture medium—enough for high-throughput drug-discovery screening and most solid-organ regenerative therapies.
When grown properly in 3-D suspension culture, PSCs pack themselves into clusters called spheroids, where they encounter microenvironments like those they experience in the body. "Pluripotent stem cells like to be in contact with each other," says David Kuninger, director of R&D at Thermo Fisher Scientific, in Frederick, Maryland. PSCs grown this way remain pluripotent and genetically stable, he adds.
A new 3-D suspension culture medium developed by Thermo Fisher manages all these feats. PSCs cultured in StemScale PSC Suspension Medium form spheroids with a consistent size and uniform population of cells. “That’s incredibly important when you want to do a targeted differentiation," Kuninger says. And it helps affordably cultivate between 1 and 1.5 billion high-quality PSCs per liter—enough for both medical therapy and high-throughput drug-discovery screening.
PSCs grown this way can reliably differentiate into all three of the cell layers, or germlines, formed in early embryonic development, Kuninger says. They also differentiate efficiently into beating heart cells called cardiomyocytes, midbrain dopaminergic neurons for studying Parkinson's disease, and many other cell types. What’s more, they can be easily isolated, stored frozen for future use, and used in closed and automated systems, which facilitates the large-scale manufacture of cell-based therapies.
Scaling Up
It’s still more straightforward to use standard 2-D cell culture to characterize many key cellular attributes, including pluripotency and differentiation efficiency. But “a 3-D system supports the transition from the cells' initial development towards generating robust populations at scale,” Kuninger says.
That means more stem cell treatments to join those already on the market for blood disorders, and those currently in clinical trials, such as the autologous PSCs for macular degeneration, PSCs for treating Parkinson's disease and cardiac repair, and for other indications, which are being tested in dozens of clinical trials.
While the number of cells required for these treatments varies, all of them, as well as early-stage drug discovery efforts, require high-quality cells, and more of them, Kuninger says. "That's what is going to enable scientists who do this kind of translational work.” ~
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ending on beauty:
. . tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
~ Robert Frost, Tree at My Window
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