Change, Constancy

Wind and rain in the night. Flowerblanketing snow in the early morning. Hummingbirds swarmed our feeders in lieu of nature's nectar. By late this afternoon the snow was gone and the yellow flowers of arrowleaf balsamroot were turned greedily toward the sun sinking in the west.


Down the hill, arrowleaf flowers glow yellow against springgreen grass on the rough spit of foothill that thrusts between two alfalfa fields . One by one, 14 longnecked elk leave the alfalfa for the safety of as yet leafless scruboak and the already green maples. They pass darkly across arrowleaf studded openings into more brush, whitepatch tails signaling their presence and passage.

Still scruffy muledeer cross the elk's paths and, tawny forms in the last rays of sun, slip from the brushy spit onto the Irishgreen fields, spread out with exuberant sprints, highspirited replacement grazers taking the evening shift.

Inviting Contemplation -- same view to the west: April 9 and March 30

Art and Writing, Images and Contemplation

An article in this morning's New York Times, after new snow fell during the night, has put me in a contemplative mood.



The article is a review of "'Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings,' a spare, studious show that offers, along with many stimulations, a retreat from worldly tumult — the religious fervor, the courtly pomp, the expressive self-promotion — that fills much of the museum." What struck my eye, as so often, is the intersection of visual and written images.

With a few lines and a little color, the artist depicts a man standing in a pavilion looking out over a quiet landscape. I wonder what is in his mind, and imagine there is pleasure and peace. With a different set of lines, this time drawn according to calligraphic conventions, he creates written characters, windows into his mind. Over the years since the painting was created, various scholars and artists have added their seals to the work, stamping the painting with their approval.



The article cites a15th-century Chinese writer's wish list: “A nice cottage. A clean table. A clear sky with a beautiful moon. A vase of flowers. No cares of the world.” And this drawing reflects that clarity, that simplicity, that focus. Here the characters and the landscape are so visually intimate that written text and drawn trees feel like the same species.

I return to the work by Zarko Radakovic and Nina Pops (their response to a text by Peter Handke featured in the previous post) and feel again the textual beauty of a painting and the painterly quality of text.

And then I remember an exhibition Zarko and I saw twenty-five years ago in Cologne, Germany, and my accompanying thoughts:

Driving rain in the night. This morning delicate clouds veiling the mountains remind me of Tao Yuanming’s poem “Return Home”: The clouds rise aimlessly out of the mountains, / The birds, tired of flight, contemplate their return home, and of Li Zai’s 15^th-century drawing after those lines.

For the rest of the Times article, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/design/14asia.html

Interdisciplinary Work: Literature, Translation, Art

My friend Zarko Radakovic, about whom I've written here before, is working on a fascinating interdisciplinary project with an Austrian novelist named Peter Handke (his novel "The Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" is the source of this blog's name) and a Serbian artist who works in Cologne, Germany named Nina Pops.

It starts with Peter Handke's novel called "Bildverlust," or The Loss of Images. It continues as Zarko translates the novel into Serbo-Croatian. And it finds another dimension as Nina Pops creates a visual image in response to a passage of the translation.

The translation in Zarko's handwriting and the painting work together, word-image and visual image, to create a new work.

I find the whole thing provocative and inspiring.

Subtle Beauty

Disciplinary nodes

Lyn and I picked these dry plants on the San Raphael Swell. Besides their simple beauty, they work as a metaphor for me of interdisciplinary work.

The swellings are those biology or music or history emphases, those disciplines where we gain depth of focus and the tools we need to investigate whatever problem or question we're interested in. The stems between the swellings are the connections without which we remain in disciplinary isolation.

And the snowy ground behind them?

I think I'll just let the metaphor rest.

For an interesting look at recent thinking on interdisciplinary studies, see
http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi08/le-wi08_Inter_Studies.cfm

Stormy Weather