Mr. Wilson's Arboretum

March 17, 2003

Go Green

On Saint Patrick's Day I make the effort to wear something green. The hue is a chief symbol of the day, and more than harps or leprechauns, it goes beyond Celticism per se, for who can lay claim to a color? Ireland may call itself the Emerald Isle, but Green, in shades from chartreuse through hunter, is coming soon even to the center of our local island.
It can't come soon enough.

Green has always been my favorite color, ever since I was very young and endorsed it because I thought that dinosaurs were green. By now, the idea of one color being better than another seems politically incorrect, but I am convinced that some have greater moment than others...
Musing on it, I ponder how Green is the color of growth, but also of putrid, decaying death. Yet the Green of rot is also the Green of growth, albeit on a smaller scale, as Life recycles itself.

We don't like to think about death and decomposition, whatever the color. It takes the geologic distance of fossilization to make such realities approachable, as in the form of the dinosaurs, beloved of children everywhere. The dinosaurs provide a scientifically sanctioned gateway into the Mysteries, via authorized stories about who-we-are-and-how-we-got-here. Since these fundamental ideas are otherwise ill addressed, it's no wonder that children are drawn to the charismatic figures of the prehistoric giants, who take on the characteristics of initiatory guardians.

The fascination with dinosaurs is one of my earliest memories. Like the gods, they are real-yet-not-real; nowhere to be found in this World, except in artifacts endorsed and explicated by certain guardians of "the truth," who may attest to their reality. I was one of those kids that knows all about dinosaurs, but much of what I knew has now changed, as science updates itself.
For one thing, I knew they were green.

Green is a conventional color for reptiles, in coloring books and cartoons, and in the popular imagination. Greenness marks the dinosaur as the Other, for people, (and mammals in general,) are very much not green, except in metaphorical envy, or physical illness. Science has come to recognize that dinosaurs most likely enjoyed a range of coloration as wide as that of their descendants, the birds, but Green, today's color of nostalgia, is hard to let go of, especially in the case of a class which has only a past, and no future.

It may be that our future depends on a clearer understanding of our relationship to the Other. The issue is reflected in the difficulty we have in reconciling our Humanity with our animal ancestry. Changing the color of the dinosaurs is a way of mediating this relationship; of being more honest about our common ancestry, but as Saint Patrick's Day proves, we will still be left longing for the Green of the Old Country, or the old serpent, so summarily expelled. As anodyne I offer an exotic alternative, in the form of the one green mammal: the Sloth.

The Sloth is not really green in and of itself, but during the rainy season algae grows on its gray-brown coat, providing camouflage, and a virid reminder that the true keepers of the Green Mystery are the Plants. They are the main source of the color, and the foremost embodiment of Otherness among living things; alien to us ambulatory animals, yet intrinsic to our existence. To them Saint Patrick owes his hue: to the old sod, rather than any gemstone. Not the emerald isle, but the kingdom of chlorophyll.

If Saint Patrick's Day is to be a Holiday outside of Ireland, then it should have new symbols. What could be more fitting than a slow-moving, tree-hugging, American mammal, inverted amid the verdure, with plants actually growing on it? Let's welcome Spring with a glass and a Bradypus: the Green Man for the new millennium. Fear not for saurians of the past; the dinosaurs are gone for birds of many colors, but if you can't grow a green coat of your own, at least wear one.

March 5, 2003

Ash Wednesday

Lent seems almost beside the point this year. Or perhaps too pointed for us to readily embrace. Mortification is in the offing, but rather than show a willingness to give anything up, our nation is demanding that the rest of the World surrender everything to us. The actual sacrifice required of America is hardly being discussed. It does not appear that the cost of war will be assumed as a spiritualizing ascesis, rather it will be extracted in the usual way, from those least able (or willing) to pay.

Our days are already Lenten, pleasures suspended; rendered unfulfilling. Not by accident the season occupies the livid landscape of the guttering late Winter. And a brutal Winter it has been, but the political gamesmanship is even more agonizing, and one has the awful desire simply to get it all over with. Surely forty days should be enough? Then back to Spring, and business as usual...
But there is no good end that way, no change in humanity's historical habit of self-destruction.

The pale gestures of Lent, if offered sincerely, can change us.
Even the little denials, the cigarette not smoked; the chocolates not indulged in; the unnecessary purchase forgone, even these will make different people of us, if we follow through on the implications of the abnegation. The denial is just a tool, used to effect a greater change. By altering a habit we depend on, we unleash our capacity for transformation; our ability to change into new, and we hope, better, people. Which is to say, we have the chance to be reborn.

Lent is meant as a period of reflection, meditation and self-restraint, which prepares us to face the Mystery of Rebirth. We desecrate the Mystery if we equate it with victory in battle. Fighting a Lenten war seems impropitious to me. If we can just resist for this little while the urge to glut upon our violent strength, (for we have better strengths,) if we can restrain ourselves for the duration, at the end of our ascesis we may find that war is not the necessity we thought, after all.
But if we decided that it is, we can still go ahead and attack, on Easter Sunday, and really show the rest of the World what kind of "Christian nation" they're dealing with.

February 25, 2003

Had Enough Yet?

February 17, 2003

Putting the Politics in Park

I’m on record as being dubious about Presidents Day as an appropriate Holiday, but it’s here again and I’m stuck with it. At the risk of trivializing the impending war, I’m going to use the occasion to discuss a meaner use of political power, in as much as we have a current situation directly affecting Central Park.

The go-ahead has been given for a large-scale art installation in the Park, a project by the husband and wife artist team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude entitled The Gates. These gates are banners of bright orange fabric, supported by metal poles. Thousands of them are to be erected, lining miles of the Park’s pathways and dominating the landscape for two weeks in February of 2005.

The project was first proposed in 1979 and was rejected by the Parks Commission. It’s not hard to see why. People who are concerned with the Park for its own sake will generally have a negative reaction to such an imposition of ego and hardware onto “our” Park. That the idea has resurfaced, and been accepted, appears to be the direct result of the current mayor’s friendship with the artists. Such are the perks of power.

Of course the birdwatchers are against it. And I must admit that I partake of the revulsion. Indeed, the resistance is so febrile that it must itself bear investigation. Certainly there is an element of not-in-my-backyardism. We haven’t come up with any truly powerful ecological argument against the project. After some basic concessions, like using self-supporting bases instead of digging holes for the poles, it looks as if the piece can be mounted without leaving a permanent scar. It’s said the billowing fabric could disturb some birds, but this doesn’t seem to be a terrible problem. They’re known to acclimate to such things, and February is a time of relatively little activity. When I was asked for arguments against it, I offered that Christo is a lousy artist. That’s not really a practical argument, and was said as a joke, but it’s more or less what it comes down to.

I’ve never liked Christo/Jeanne-Claude much. Again, I want to question my motives, as the attitude goes back to my days as an art student, when it was just “Christo”. I thought of him as a vulgar popularizer of the then contentious “earth art” movement. I don’t think the critique is entirely wrong, though I’ve tried to give him a chance, and some of the works are at least attractive, but the artist I compare him to unfavorably is Robert Smithson, the main protagonist of earth art, and an important figure in my own development. From the mid-sixties until his untimely death in 1973, Smithson was a provocative and invigorating force in the art world, and his influence was still strong when I came to New York a few years after he died. He moved sculpture beyond formalism and out of the gallery with his landscape-based “earthworks” like The Spiral Jetty, and, just as importantly, with his writings.

One landscape of particular interest to Smithson was Central Park. In his last published essay, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, Smithson adopts the Park’s designer as an ancestor: “America’s first ‘earthwork artist’ ”. (As usual, Vaux gets short shrift.) Smithson was interested in contrasts and contradictions; Olmsted’s picturesque remaking of what was then a bleak wasteland in mid-Manhattan served as a mirror image of his own abstract incursions into the disrupted or “entropic” sites he favored for his projects. This “dialectical” equivalence serves to remind us that the Park is a work of art in and of itself.

This may be the most substantive argument Park lovers have against The Gates. It’s not about the Park’s ecology, but the Park’s place in the cultural ecology of New York City. Central Park is a sacrosanct work of art which should not be subject to the humiliation of having another work of art superimposed upon it. It was with good reason Smithson preferred to do his work in the desert, or a quarry, or an abandoned salt mine.

Well, this is almost true. But a park, however artful, is not quite the same as a work of art. It is used in a different way, and its use is subject to political pressures. Olmsted himself was finally forced out as the Park’s Commissioner by changing political (and demographic) tides which “democratized” the Park. Throughout its history there has been a dialectic between an “elitist” and a “populist” concept of the Park. It was conceived by cultured (and wealthy) people who wanted a park to match the great public places of Europe, and also to increase the value of real estate uptown. Theirs was a Romantic view of Nature, by way of American Transcendentalism. The Park would be for quiet contemplation and relaxation. The lower classes, in so far as they had access, would be edified by the models both of Nature and of their social betters.

I will say that my own use of the Park is basically in this elitist tradition. I do find that close contemplation is instructive, on many levels. And not that I’m jealous of it, but there is a certain elitism inherent in birdwatching; in seeing what most others do not see. I hope I harbor no class animosities, but I avoid the noisy crowd. Still, I fancy myself, like Smithson, a dialectician, and I have sought in these pages to give fair consideration to that which I have rejected. I am certainly dedicated to the proposition that the people of the city, all the people, should be able to enjoy their Park. Unfortunately, in so doing, we are apt to destroy it.

The story of the Park since Olmsted’s day is generally of a shift towards serving this broader public, with “natural” and picturesque features sacrificed to accommodate active recreation, team sports, and larger gatherings. The nadir was reached under the autocratic Commissioner Robert Moses, when paving proliferated and automobiles were encouraged. These remains the worst desecrations the Park has ever suffered, and a great deal of its artistic integrity must have been sacrificed in the process.

Once the postwar money ran out, the Park was allowed to deteriorate. Maintenance funds were cut while age and heavy usage took their toll. By the time Smithson wrote about it, in 1973, Central Park had numerous decrepit features, and a reputation as a mugger’s playground. The pendulum didn’t start to swing back until the next decade, with the creation of the Central Park Conservancy.

The Conservancy is a sort of public/private partnership, in which the City has ceded the better part of its management authority in order to obtain the philanthropic benefit of a group which somewhat resembles the original patrons of the Park: high-minded, well-intentioned, and not above self-interest. They have raised huge amounts of money, and accomplished a lot of badly needed restoration. In the process, they’ve also pimped the Park to various corporate interests, allowing massive events like the Disney movie premiere which trashed the Great Lawn immediately before its restoration. The same thing happened to the North Meadow, where a stadium-scale concert was held prior to a year-long maintenance project. By incorporating destruction into the rebuilding process the Conservancy has engaged in its own sort of dialectic, but they’re running out of places to work with. Lately it’s the smaller East Meadow that has been used for rallies and concerts, and it has been reduced to a dustbowl, with no sign of immediate improvement. Meanwhile, I’m starting to hope that they never get around to “fixing” the old Lily Ponds and the rest of the North Woods.

The Gates project, I think, belongs with the Disney movies and the amplified concerts, and none of them belong in the Park. The Christo/Jeanne-Claude team has become an artistic trademark which can be applied to any landscape, without regard. Their pretense of incorporating the planning and construction activities into the artwork per se seems to me a hollow borrowing from the techniques of conceptual and process art, delivered in a sort of corporate happy-speak. The account of their Umbrellas project given on their website does not even mention that two of their workers were killed in the service of their “art process”. They do not develop what Smithson would call a dialectic of the landscape; they simply put their mark, orange fabric, upon it.

At the end of his essay Smithson actually proposes an artwork for the Park. Despite his fascination with entropy and decay, Smithson felt that Olmsted’s great work should be maintained. Viewing the debris strewn mud slough that had developed in the Pond, he envisioned a “mud extraction sculpture”, a real process piece, including a documentary film following the transportation of the mud from point of extraction to point of deposition on “a site in the city that needs ‘fill’ ”. In typically dense fashion, Smithson combines public works with avant-garde art to the point of self-parody. Such humor seems alien to Christo’s pompous work, and his overweening project does the Park no service, either.

Needless to say, Smithson’s film was never made, but the Conservancy did finally finish rehabilitating the Pond, just last year. It only took three decades. Still, that’s the sort of thing they should stick to, and not go getting mixed up in the art world. But I guess we have the mayor to thank for that, and as long as politicians are getting such fringe benefits, I’d say they’re well enough compensated, and not in need of Holidays of their own.

February 14, 2003

Valentine from a Park in Winter

Winter doesn't love us much
The leaves of Fall, the Summer lawns, are gone
And Spring's blooms but a rumor
Yet to come, yet to come

The heart of Winter holds its warmth
Close to the breast and blows a kiss
That freezes on the wing
Brittle wind, brittle wind

Wind and wing
And water sharp as shattered glass
Winter loves us not at all
But love it back, love it back

Seasonless through passing time
We will love as love we can
Winter-tested hearts aflame
Valentine, Valentine

February 2, 2003

If I were a Groundhog, I might just sleep in...

January 20, 2003

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

is a mouthful of a name for a Holiday, combining as it does the name of the man, and of his father, and the father’s namesake: the founder of the Protestant Reformation, whose name tellingly recalls Saint Martin, who might be considered a model of Christian reform, as he is celebrated for charity, although he gave, not as Jesus suggested: everything, but did at least give away half of his cloak...

This is still a young holiday, and the name is apt to shorten, though “King Day” doesn’t sound quite right either, summoning up hereditary rule. “MLK Day” trips off the tongue, and maybe that’s where we’ll end up generations down the line, when the Holiday is so well ingrained as to be rendered in impersonal initials, sort of the way we always say “the Fourth of July”, rather than “Independence Day”.

In the meantime, we’ll have to struggle with the words, and the meaning too. I didn’t find much inspiration on a frigid day in the Park, where several Coots were squeezed into a small opening in the ice now spreading across the Reservoir. These birds, whose plumage is almost entirely black, appeared to be segregated from the mixed flocks of gulls and ducks that occupied larger expanses of open water. It didn’t seem like an auspicious sign for the Holiday, but those are birds and we are Human beings, who like to think of ourselves as something beyond the merely Animal.

Exactly what this Holiday means, and how it should be celebrated, remain in flux, and may be interpreted differently among different constituencies. Certainly the issue of race is central, though we would hardly sponsor a Holiday called Race Day. Indeed, there was resistance to the creation of a Holiday at all, but there was a stronger consensus that it was needed, that it was an appropriate and necessary gesture; an admission of wrong and a rededication to right, rendered in a form that conferred the proper moment upon the utterance.

The racial boundaries of Dr. King’s era seem to have expanded into today’s concept of diversity. I have sometimes construed this Holiday as a way of focusing on issues of our diverse identity as such. The very notion of Identity is a door straight to the Mysteries, for which cause it is charged and unpredictable in all its manifestations, the idea of race not least among them. Race, which must be acknowledged and ignored, celebrated and disregarded, all at the same time, for we are all the same, and we are all different.
That’s what I call a Mystery.

Perhaps we’ll be comfortable with MLK Day about the time a shrinking World has mixed our gene pool into a single race, something which could happen faster than we’re prone to imagine. Would that be a threat to our identity?

That there is a threat inherent in the very notion of race is the great taboo in our discussions of the matter. Dr. King’s accomplishment was that he offered a way around the threat and the fear, and that’s what I really want to talk about today. And it doesn’t even have anything to do with race.

It was King’s dedication to nonviolence that made him an acceptable vessel for the new Holiday. This is not to say that he represented a “safe Negro”, as has sometimes been asserted. By refusing to wield the customary tool of power, he was able to retain that spiritual potency which is so often sacrificed when religious figures engage the secular world directly. By maintaining this difficult position, balanced on the fulcrum of a Mystery, and through being martyred for it, he was transformed into a symbol. And a true symbol, fit to rank with the old Holidays of the Ancestors. These are symbols with real power: the power to guide our choices in hard places. If we choose Dr. King’s way, including his pacifism, we will not often be wrong.

The True Holidays are alive; changing and responsive to our needs. Today, I say there is a great irony played out that testifies to the vitality of this new Holiday. For the secular rulers of our nation are unmatched in strength, and just the sort who could only be defeated by a peaceful warrior. They have much in common with those who said that Dr. King was weak in that he did not fight with weapons. The institution of his Day serves to condemn their warmongering; their palpable desire for conflict; their pride in being willing to kill. They say they are willing to die, but so was Dr. King, and so must we all be. We all have to die, but we do not have to kill, at least not other people, the ones who are so unlike, and yet so like to us. He would have us try another way.

When we choose violence and the rule of might, we dishonor the legacy of Dr. King, which we have enshrined among our national symbols. If our leaders thought his was a safe Holiday they were wrong, for it makes them hypocrites if they celebrate it, and un-American if they do not. That’s a working Holiday, whatever you call it.

January 7, 2003

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Season

Already in progress…

January 6, 2003

Epiphany

So what is left?
At the end of the Holidays?
After the songs and the snowfall; the parties and the presents; midnight and morning? All in celebration of what?
To know that would be an epiphany indeed.

On the First Day of Christmas I posed three Riddles. I assumed that they all had the same answer, and that I knew what it was. Yet I've also said that Riddles may have more than one answer, if we can guess as much.

Who is as a Cherry without any Stone?
My Mother told me that this is Mary, and I suppose she should know better than I. Neither womb nor fruit can take precedence in a birth of this kind.
Or of any kind.

Who is Child and Parent at once?
One who is Father and Son to Himself, yes, but less rarely, anyone who has fostered children, and not by blood alone. Every parent was once a child, nor is that status lost, though generations pass.

Who is Born with the Reborn Sun?
I, for one; along with many others, if only by happenstance. Yet if there is One beyond coincidence, He was only born that all of us might take heart in the returning light of a new morning, a new year, and the same old Sun.

Maybe you have other answers, wiser than mine.
Let them open a way into the New Year.
Then you will be as wise as those travelers from afar, who, guided by a star, came to realize.

January 5, 2003