Eight Years Ago Today: Georgia O’Keeffe, at one with nature

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 15, 2009, not a word different.]

Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.

Thor's Day: Of a mystical bent

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)

By Morris Dean

[Originally published on January 22, 2012.]

About three years ago, I included myself among “others of a mystical bent,” and I even quoted Rilke. Admitting to a mystical bent surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn’t meant to get into anything like that.

Mystical bent?

William James (1842-1910)

Yesterday, I referred to myself as "of a mystical bent." Admitting this surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn't meant to get into anything like that.
    Maybe I'm ready to try to say what spirituality (or being spiritual) means for me?
    Phrases like reverence for life [Albert Schweitzer], benevolence toward the humblest living creature [Charles Darwin], practice compassion [Dalai Lama], and The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth [Chief Seattle] come to mind.
    What can I say? Dwelling on such concepts in the awareness of nature and of our life on Earth casts a sort of numinous spell over me, a feeling that resonates with William James's characterization of mystical experience as "a deepened sense of significance." And, even when I'm not "having the experience," I try to maintain an abiding sense of the deep significance of things, the deep significance of choices and actions.
    James even excuses my inability to say much about this deep sense: "There is ineffability: the subject of a mystical experience cannot find words to describe it."
    Rainer Maria Rilke came close, very close indeed, in his Duino Elegies and other writings:

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
                [–Sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX, Stephen Mitchell's translation]

"Insects own the world"

Bernd Heinrich

The bumper sticker on the 1992 Honda Accord that we "inherited" from our daughter (who now drives a boat) occasionally gets an admiring comment. It features a statement attributed to Chief Seattle (1780-1866), a Duwamish chief (not a Suquamish chief, according to Wikipedia): "The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth."
    Or to the insects? I'm reading Bernd Heinrich's stunning book Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003), whose accounts of animal adaption to winter are mind-boggling. I'm not going to quote one of those particular accounts just now, but rather this general statement about insects [pp. 178-179]:

To an entomologist and anyone who aspires to be one, there is no life-form on earth as diverse, varied, tough, and inventive as the insects. In their teeming millions of species, they own the world [emphasis mine]. We may not like many of them that compete with us for food, fiber, timber,or that suck our blood and spread our diseases, but we are obliged to acknowledge their tenacious success, and we may admire many of them for their stunning beauty. Within the animal world they have collectively pushed the limits of things possible, in terms of diversity, beauty, noxiousness, social organization, architecture, powers of flight, sensory capabilities, and ability to survive extremes of climate. And when I contemplate these organsms that are much more ancient than us, and that will long survive us, I wonder about the "secret" of their success....
    Insects' success is derived from exploiting individual specificity. No one way is best. Insects achieve their success through their diversity, where each individual case is special within the generalizations. Each species is adapted ever more specifically into a specialist niche, catering to specific individual needs. An ever-greater narrowing down to the specific has resulted in miniaturization, and ever-greater diversity. Insects exhibit an exhilaration and a celebration of the exceptions, where anything goes that can. There are few boundaries, because there has been no enforcement or encapsulation by or in laws. That is why they are so successful, and I suspect that it would be difficult to find an entomologist who is also a theist, who believes that there is a force or a power that hands down rules because "he" deems them good. No entomologist could fathom why fleas, mosquitoes, tsetse flies, migratory locusts, and dozens of other insects would have been deliberately created and let loose to cause indiscriminate and unimaginable agony to millions of totally innocent human children and adults over all the ages of humanity.

At Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, during coffee with a friend who had retired at the end of February, I thought of the Earth's not belonging to us.
    We had lots to catch up on, mainly books and movies and TV programs. He recommended the 2008 film, Dean Spanley. "If you like dogs [which he knows we do], you'll love it." And did we ever! Last nigth. For it, I could have added another "E" to my "ExtraOrdinary" rating.
    We talked about Christopher Hitchens. "No," I said, "he hasn't died, but he is suffering from esophageal cancer. Hitchens said on 60 Minutes that the chance of surviving esophageal cancer is five percent."
    I thought of my own "Barrett's esophagus."
    My friend asked me if I'd read god Is Not Great. He said he'd only read comments about it.
    I was surprised that he hadn't heard of Sam Harris, or his book The End of Faith, which had been a self-affirming book for me, as I've described elsewhere on Moristotle.
    I told him about Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape, about its proposed central moral value, the well-being of conscious beings.
    "Conscious beings includes other animals," I said.
    "Yes," he said. "One of my daughters is a vegan, and [his wife] and I are almost-vegetarians. Respect for all conscious life."

    That's when I thought of the bumper sticker. "Gaia," I said. "The living Earth itself created all the life on it, using the materials of its molten beginning over its four and a half billion years."
    He agreed.

The Earth created us. And insects, too—Bernd Heinrich got it wrong: insects don't own the world, any more than we do.
    But they will likely inherit it from us (still be on board after we're all gone).

To protect a necessary fantasy

As I lay ruminating in the early morning hours of yesterday, the realization that Gamma was telling me "So there!" wasn't the only thing that came to me. I had a dream in the hour or two that followed. I can remember only two, maybe three things about it.
    Two African-seeming personages were speaking to me (I wasn't "on screen"; they faced my dreaming mind, so to speak). I understood that they were father and son, the father being the primary speaker. He was astonishingly striking (only his head was presented), his face as long as a horse's, the distance from his eyes to the tip of his nose four or five inches and the distance from there to his lips another four inches. A sort of totem pole face. [I am reminded this morning, by Wikipedia, that the totem pole derives from "cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America"—that is, Chief Seattle's people.]
    I wish I could remember the older man's words. At the time of my dreaming I understood that he was telling me there was a religious key of some sort that would unlock the mystery of the "So there!" folks I wrote about on Friday. Glad of this knowledge, I made a mental note to write about Friday afternoon's email interchanges and revisit that day's post. Yesterday I found that writing about the interchanges was enough for one post. But today....

Today I'll try to articulate the beginnings of a "religious" understanding of the "people who don't want the truth," as my old friend the judge characterizes them.
    It seems to me that whatever belief they espouse with their voices raised and their faces red (at once threatening opponents and brooking no debate) is their talisman. A talisman (from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) is:

An object bearing a sign or character engraved under astrological influences [!] and held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune, something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects

    "The scientists [who say the evidence shows that Cameron Todd Willingham did not murder his children] are 'latter-day supposed experts'" absolves Texas Governor Rick Perry. I did not put an innocent man to death!
    "There is no global warming" averts the potential catastrophe threatening the Earth. We and our descendants are safe!
    "There is no credible evidence of evolution" wards off an unimaginable horror. We aren't the descendants of monkeys!
    "Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements of being a naturally born American" is the magical charm that might avert the evil of our having a "black" president. Obama will be disqualified!
    "The Bible is true" is a talisman with enough magic for all exigencies. Suffering will be rewarded! Evil will be punished! We will not die, but will live forever and ever!

To the people wearing these talismans about their necks, the things to be averted are to them truly evil. Unimaginably, heart-sickeningly so. To be avoided at all costs, not least the cost of the truth:

Governor Perry did put an innocent man to death. "In a clemency plea four days before the execution, Willingham's attorney raised questions about the forensics. Perry has said he examined the information. But he did not delay the execution."
    Human activity is raising global temperatures.
    We evolved from simpler life forms.
    Obama is our legitimate president (and arguably more legitimate than George W. Bush, given the extraordinary fact of his having been appointed by [a 5-4 vote of] the U.S. Supreme Court).
    Suffering often goes unrewarded.
    Evil often goes unpunished.
    We are all going to die, not to awake again.

If, as seems to be, religion is a support system for mutually assuring people's most profound protective fantasies, then a whole variety of lesser sorts of delusionary practices would seem to serve the same purpose. A pertinent project for cultural relativism would be to discover what it is about a particular culture that explains its members need for the culture's distinctive fantasy. In other words, what is it about the people who seem to need to believe, for example, that President Obama is not legit that defines their culture, over against the rest of us, who accept the fact that he is our legal, elected president?

Georgia O’Keeffe, at one with nature

Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.
    I was arrested by a short scene in Taos, New Mexico (about 1929 perhaps). The local artists are enjoying some native dancing and O’Keeffe asks Tony Lujan (the fourth husband of her friend Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan, 1879-1962, the creator of Taos’s little artists’ colony) what the dance means. I didn’t write down precisely what he says, but the gist of it is that the dance expressed that we humans are “one” with other living creatures—neither above nor below them—and with the very Earth, the same concept, perhaps, as that expressed by my daughter’s bumper sticker quoting Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”