botanizing

Red Riding

A Redwing Blackbird rode a Red-Tailed Hawk.  This was in today’s wind gusts.  The hawk had flown from a tree and was gliding, wings stiff and straight, across a field.  The blackbird was behind and above the hawk—a nuisance bird of the sort that tails hawks.  This blackbird, fast over the hawk and flitting back and forth—its red wingbars flashing—slowed and settled on the back of the Red-Tail.  I watched its wings fold as it sat on the hawk’s back.  The hawk batted—tilting right and left—and the blackbird lifted—up a foot or two on quick wings—and just as quickly the blackbird settled again on the hawk’s back.  The blackbird seemed less interested in pestering the hawk than in catching a ride.

In Santa Croce with no Baedeker

On the piazza where Dante as a statue stands with head and shoulders against the heavenly blue sky, we face the Victorian façade of Florence’s Santa Croce, and I think about E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View.  Forster’s Lucy had no Baedeker and neither do I.  I had attempted to order from Amazon a Blue Guide for Florence, which would have detailed the architecture and art and provided a map of the interior of the Church, but they couldn’t procure a copy for me.  I fear that we will be lost in Santa Croce.  Lucy and I go forward, without guides, around Dante to the side entrance, make our way to the ticket kiosk, and finally into the church.

“[H]ow like a barn!  And how very cold!” exclaims Forster’s narrator.  The chill in these old churches is like sitting on cold, wet stone in spring woods, except that the church is also dark.  It is not like a barn; there is no smell of hay or manure or the oil of machinery.  Cold, old stone lacks the lively smells of barns.

“Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper.”  Forster tweaks us.  The iconography of Medieval church art is narrow, reifying the Church’s power through the repetition of images—annuciation, Madonna with child, crucifixion, assumption.  Frescoes are pedagogical—almost comic book versions of history.

In Giotto’s frescoes of the life of St. Francis in Santa Croce, I see emotion and the painter’s sensitivity to the human. I am intrigued by Giotto as a step away from the Medieval.  Giotto steps toward the Renaissance, at least we are told to look back on him from that perspective.  He has willed emotionality and glints of individual feeling, not just glints of the ever pervasive late Medieval gold leaf, in the figures of his paintings.  He has allowed drapery a hint of sensuous shadow and depth.  Yet, when faced with Giotto, I feel his primitive simplicity—his work has the sensibility of a very different time.  I want to understand this art—the work of Giotto and other artists at the beginning of the Renaissance—but I don’t understand the church and its role in the artists’ lives, and that, I think, is a severe limitation.

I am a disconnected tourist walking in dim Santa Croce.  Lucy watched the tourists—noses as red as their Baedekers, Forster tells us.  She watched the tourists at the Machiavelli memorial:  “Advancing towards it very slowly and from immense distances, they touched the stone with their fingers, with the handkerchiefs, with their heads, and then retreated.  What could this mean?  They did it again and again.  Then Lucy realized that they had mistaken Machiavelli for some saint . . .”  Among the tourists, I, too, stood before St. Machiavelli, but now a perimeter around the memorials has been cordoned.  We can touch neither the stone of Machiavelli’s grave, nor that of Galileo or Michelangelo’s graves.  These three graves delight me.  Curmudgeonly, gay Michelangelo, logical, insightful Galileo, and Machiavelli of ruthless politics all buried in a cathedral—as if everyone were welcome to burial here (at least if his talents approached genius).  Michelangelo’s ornate tomb has a crowd. My companion tourists light candles for him.

We walk out to the Pazzi Chapel.  It’s a stately place, a rectangle with columns in relief and between them are moulded arches.  Between the arches and the architrave reside apostles in high, blue roundels.  The apostles speak with the voices of sparrows. Then I realize my deception--birds flutter.  Perhaps, after all, it is a barn.

We return to the Piazza Santa Croce.  Back to space and light and the early spring air of Italy.  Here, Forster offers refuge: “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, many return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.”

*  *  *
Notes:

I have taken my title from that of chapter 2 in E. M Forster’s A Room with a View.

Baedekers:  “Verlag Karl Baedeker is a Germany-based publisher and pioneer in the business of worldwide travel guides. The guides, often referred as simply "Baedekers" (sometimes the term is used about similar works from other publishers), contain important introductions, descriptions of buildings, of museum collections, etc., written by the best specialists, and are frequently revised in order to be up to date. For the convenience of travellers, they are in a handy format and in small print.”  From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker)

The quotes from E. M. Forster’s (1908) A Room with View are taken from a Bantam Classic published in 1988 (which I purchased in 1992 in Lihue on the island of Kauai and read on my return flight from Honolulu to San Francisco), including:
“[H]ow like a barn!  And how very cold!” p. 19.
“Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto . . .” p. 19.
“Advancing towards it very slowly . . .” p. 20.
“Over such trivialities . . .”  p. 15.

The photographs:  Giotto fresco of St. Francis death; Dante statue on Piazza Santa Croce; Donatello relief of annunciation; Machiavelli grave memorial; Pazzi chapel; ceiling of Santa Croce.

I was in Santa Croce on 10 March.

Slipping into Spring

I carefully pick my steps.  The forested north side of the hill I walk still has snow.  Under the trees and shrubs the snow is thin. There is more on the trail.  A thick dust of crystalline snow slides from my steps on the trail.  This snow dust remains from snowfalls on Wednesday and Thursday nights and it lies on top of several inches of snow that have been tightly compacted by walkers over the winter months.  Beneath the snow surface, ice squeals and its radiating cracks expand—‘plank,’ I hear, and ‘plank’ as the weight of my footfall forces the cracks outward.   The walk is slippery on the trail than angles upward over the steep slope.

When I reach the ridge, I continue westward.   On the landscape below, lower loessal hills look like waves in a broad sea.  These standing waves slope to the southwest, and each has a sharp crest, falling to a northeastern trough.  As if breaking waves of water, each crest has a white lip—but these are frozen crests, and the white is a lip of snow held in the northern shadow of each little hill.

As I walk along the open ridge, I begin to find buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus) in flower among the stones and grasses.  These first buttercups of the season always please me.  I walk downslope below the trail to look for other plants in flower.   A few plants of Gray’s biscuitroot (Lomatium grayi) have begun to flower.  Their yellow-flowered umbels are still tight as if huddled against the cool wind that streams across the ridge. 

Despite the bright yellow buttercups, my attention is drawn to clustered spires of new green leaves.  The clumps of new leaves are numerous.  The pointed leaves are four to five centimeters long, and I think initially that they might be onions. I break a leaf and crush it beneath my nose.  It’s not onion. These, I realize, are leaves of the blue-eyed grass (Olsynium or Sisyrinchium).  The stiff leaf spires, like Gothic pinnacles, aspire to light and air.

Milan

After we arrive at Malpensa airport, we get tickets for a shuttle bus to the central train station in Milan.  The full size bus at the shuttle stop is half enclosed by a semicircle of travelers—a tail of travelers extends to the baggage claim doors.  The bus is loaded and leaves soon after we arrive at the shuttle stop; the bus departure leaves still the large semicircle of travelers to wait for the next bus.  It pulls-up in ten minutes. 

As the fresh shuttle unloads, the passengers move to retrieve bags from the cargo bays—at the same time ticketed passengers anxious to board shove their bags into the bus.  In this pandemonium, the driver pushes through the crowd; he throws his arms and spews angry Italian.  The driver pulls luggage from the cargo bay and pushes people back.  He reloads luggage piece by piece.  He hollers at people.  His voice is harsh.  His scold is hot.  When I lift my bag to make it easier for him to grab, he scolds me too.

There is an uncomfortable hour in the tight seats of the hot and airless bus that becomes cold and airless as we bounce past a woodland of birches and patches of pines in the airport’s countryside.  The landscape becomes industrial as we find an autostrada then shift to another.  We enter a nondescript city.  Apartments and restaurants.  Farmacias and tabacchis.  It’s a miscellany along the tight streets that have heavy traffic.

*

We return by train, arriving in Milan as we had ten days earlier in the early afternoon.  The Stazione Centrale is a little hell; there are no shadows; every motion bangs and echoes.  Lines are long.  The toilets need correct change.  We can’t make the telephones work, and no one knows how many numbers should be dialed.  We stow our bags at the train station and take the subway to the Duomo. 

After days in Tuscany, where the marble facades of the mildly subdued churches seem mostly odd because of their colors, sometimes green or pink or both, the cathedral in Milan is shocking.  Its ornate Gothic façade recalls French cathedrals.  [Is Milan really a Paris suburb?] The Piazza Duomo is a pigeon place.  The birds are so tame and dense it is difficult not to step on them.  The people are similar.  A hawker badgers us to buy cheap bracelets.  “No,” we say and shake our heads, but still he follows us; his sales song repeats.  He throws a bracelet onto my folded arms as I walk.

The Duomo has a skirt of sales banners. We face the façade, contemplate going in, but indecision sends us outward.   Through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, through posh, expensive Milan, where the men at café tables wear good suits, we emerge at Piazza Scala with its statue of Leonardo and take a turn up the Via Giuseppe Verdi to look for lunch.  The Café Verdi has its windows hung with familiar posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn among photographs of divas.  The image cacophony draws us in.

We return after lunch and a walk through the artful neighborhoods near the Brera gallery to the Duomo, to the subway, to the Stazione Centrale.  We get tickets for the shuttle bus to the airport.  The driver loads bags.  He is calm and tells us where to depart at the airport to get a shuttle to our hotel.  It’s dark when the bus leaves the train station.  The streets are lit by yellow lights.  The stores and bars are bright.  I wonder what Milan might be.  I have been in the city only briefly—too briefly to judge, yet my quick sense is that this is not a city for me.  The city seems an image of images.  Its core is an advertising banner.  The images grab and flutter, but they don’t engage; we know them too well.  Our bus takes wide turns from one small street to another and passes to the broad, indistinct margin of the city with its lights of sales and blocks of repetition.

[We arrived in Milan on 7 March near the beginning of our travels and returned on 17 March as we prepared to leave Italy.]

Night along the Arno

The Jet-Lagged Day

Yesterday was a thirty-hour day.  I woke at 3.00 a.m. in Milan to catch an early flight to Amsterdam, later had a ten-hour afternoon flight to Seattle, and finally had a late night flight across Washington to my home.  I’m over-long and don’t fit well in the confined space of airline seats, which makes flying unpleasant.  In the discomfort of airplane seats, I don’t sleep.  In my thirty wakeful hours yesterday, there were many spans in which my head bobbed in a sleeping fall and an awakening snap of my neck. 

It was midnight last night when I walked in the door of my house.  Sleep there was easy, and rising this morning with the first light and the call of quail was comfortable.  Now, however, I’m entering that stretch after lunch when I would in Europe have been going to bed.  Weariness climbs my limbs.  My head grows heavy.  I’m having a cup of tea and it might just put me to sleep.

Virginia Woolf at 50

“[Y]es: & my infirmities will of course increase.  To begin with my eyes.  Last year, I think, I could read without spectacles . . . & now I can’t read a line (unless held at a very odd angle) without them.”  This was in September 1929; Woolf was 47.  Aging was on her mind.  A few months earlier she had been to her oculist.  “Perhaps you’re not as young as you were,” the oculist told her.  “It means that one seems to a stranger not a woman, but an elderly woman,” Woolf responded to herself.

As she approached 50, it was less aging than death that occupied her thoughts.  Lytton Strachey was dying.  On 18 January 1932, as her 50th birthday approached, Woolf heard that Lytton was again “very ill.”  On the 21st, she wrote in her diary that “last night Lytton was dying ‘much worse’.”  On the 22th:  “Lytton died yesterday morning.”  She is full of Strachey:  “I see him coming along the street, muffled up with his beard resting on his tie:  how we should stop:  his eyes glow.”  Perhaps at 50, our impressions of others are stronger than our senses of ourselves.  We see others, the living and the dead, sharply cut in cloth and laughter, stories and scents; we see ourselves as younger figures, more imaginatively, with so much more that there was to be. 

On her 50th birthday, 25 January 1932, Virginia Woolf did not remark in her diary on the day. 

*

I have been fascinated by Virginia Woolf and by her circle of Bloomsbury friends.  I admire the Bloomsbury sense of life as art and the will those friends had to live as creatively as possible. Reading about Woolf and Bloomsbury, spending time with their books and art, and traveling to the places they lived has added to my sense of their creative lives.   

*

The approach to my 50th birthday, which was on Monday, was more filled by joy than it was for Virginia Woolf.  Friends and students celebrated the approach of my birthday.  There was an evening with my graduate students and colleagues, and the next day there was a surprise party in the English class that I am co-teaching this semester.

Washington State University, where I am on the faculty, has in its library archives the personal library of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.  WSU acquired the core of the collection, consisting of about 4000 books, soon after Leonard Woolf’s death in 1969, and there were later major additions.  It’s a collection that includes books that Virginia Woolf inherited from the library of her father, Leslie Stephens, and those that Leonard gave to Virginia.  There are the books about which Virginia wrote in the essays of her Common Reader.  There are early publications of Hogarth Press, which Leonard and Virginia founded in 1917.  I have been to exhibits in the archives that had displayed various items from the Woolfs’library, and I have wanted to take a closer look at the collections.

As a surprise party for my birthday, my English class arranged to have the archives show us materials from the Woolf collection. Trevor Bond, the Special Collections Librarian at WSU, had pulled a few special items, arranging them around a table in the archive, where we could hold the books and leaf through the pages.  There was Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the dust jacket designed by her sister Vanessa Bell and the bound story "Kew Gardens."  A delicate copy of Two Stories, the first publication that Virginia and Leonard printed as Hogarth Press, lay on the table for us to see.  Only 150 copies of Two Stories were printed and few remain.

At Hogarth Press, Woolf would often sew bindings.  She had learned the art of book binding when a girl.  In the years, especially the earliest years, at Hogarth Press, Woolf would turn to binding after writing.  Holding those early volumes published by Hogarth Press was a little like holding Virginia Woolf’s hand.  One could think of her long fingers stitching together the pages.

I had a wonderful birthday party in the Woolf archive.

*   *  *
Notes

“[Y]es: & my infirmities . . .” p. 254 in A. O. Bell, editor. 1980. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three 1925-1930.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,  New York.

“Perhaps you’re not as young . . .” and “It means that one seems . . .” ibid, p. 231.

“last night Lytton was dying . . .” p. 64 in A. O. Bell, editor. 1982. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four 1931-1935.  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,  New York.

“I see him . . .” ibid, p. 64.

Insights on the Virginia Woolf material came from Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996; Chatto and Windus, London) and over the years from various other books on Woolf and Bloomsbury.

The photographs taken by DL are (1) Trevor Bond describing Two Stories by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, (2) a copy of the original publication of Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," and (3) a bit more of my birthday party.

756 W Hwy 26

Return of the natives

Wind shivers over the hills that slope to the Snake.  I’ve come down to the river to look for flowers.  In the canyon of the Snake River, ten miles and a thousand feet lower than the town where I live, is the closest place where I can count on the earliest flowers. Native wildflowers.

In town, the cultivated snowdrops have held drowsy heads of unopened flowers since the snow melted a week earlier and there was also the single pansy in flower in a bed on the heat-reflecting south side a campus building I pass each day.  These are not what I come to the Snake to find.  I want to see the return of the natives.  I look for the response of plants that have lived on these hills for thousands of years to the lengthening days and the warming soil.

I am not disappointed.  The flowering season has begun. Among new leaves of native grasses, the white-flowered heads of salt and pepper plant (Lomatium gormanii), a parsley relative, stand two inches tall.  The burgundy stamens of these flowers are just beginning to emerge from still in-curled petals.  The salt and pepper flowers are not alone.  Tucked by stones, flower stalks of the smooth prairie star (Lithophragma glabrum) flail in the wind.  I kneel on the soil to put my face nearer these fresh flowers.  Glandular hairs on the stalks of the prairie flowers glow in the backlighting sun, which is low, still on winter-time, in the early afternoon.

*   *   *

Notes:
The first and last photographs are smooth prairie star (Lithophragma glabrum) and the middle is salt and pepper plant (Lomatium gormanii).  There has been too much work and too little time to post - this writing actually dates to 23 February.