"the oblivion born before the flames have died"

 

Giordano Bruno by Fidus, 1900

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

~from "Campo dei Fiori" by Czeslaw Milosz

Giordano Bruno was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake in Rome on February 17, 1600. The precise nature of his heresy is a matter of dispute. In any case, his executioners feared his words enough that they clamped his tongue before burning him alive.  

*An interview with Czeslaw Milosz that includes discussion of "Campo dei Fiori" is here. 

New to Me

 

Flamenco singers, Sonia Delaunay, 1916

Conventional wisdom says that people past their first youth stop listening to new music, and there's some research to back that up. I have to admit my experience bears this out. I'm far more likely to revisit 50-year-old pop songs or country classics or beloved Beethoven symphonies than go hunting for anything unfamiliar. I probably can't name more than a dozen artists who've come on the scene in the past 5-10 years, and most of the ones I do know are mega-celebrities. I don't think I deserve any culture points for having a favorite track by Lizzo.

That said, I'm not completely stuck in the distant past. Delila Black, for instance, first came on my radar about 10 years ago, and I've been following her ever since. Lately she's been getting some great attention from the music press here (like this and this), and I'm like, where y'all been? Her work has evolved over the years and I love it all, but I'm particularly fond of this track. On the other hand, there's no resisting this lockdown masterpiece:

I like to think I was a little ahead of the curve on Delila Black's music, but I'm way behind the curve in discovering Estrella Morente. She's long been a big star in the flamenco world. Her father, Enrique Morente, was a famous cantaor and Estrella began performing very young, releasing her first record in 2001, when she was 21. I first became aware of her about two weeks ago. I don't know anything about flamenco, but even a naive listener can hear the beauty and passion in her singing:

And while we're on the flamenco theme, here's a lovely performance I happened to come across thanks to the Youtube algorithm:

I think I might make these new (to me) music posts a regular thing. It'll give me a nudge to get out of my comfort zone a little more often — though that is, of course, a fine place to be. 

Pandemic dogs and an author interview

I've spent the pandemic year locked down with my 3 dogs, and let's just say it's been a mixed experience. I love my dogs, there's no doubt. It's hard to imagine life without them and even harder to imagine surviving this lonely year in dogless house. But having three hyper canines underfoot all day every day turns out to be ... a bit much. 

I thought my being here all the time might soften Dudley and Katie's velcro tendencies. Surely a human you have access to 24/7 loses some of her novelty, right? But it turns out, no — a round-the-clock human is endlessly fascinating. Even little Pixie, who's always been by far the least people-focused of the three, has decided that she needs to monitor my every move. I can't pour a cup of coffee or empty the dryer or take out the trash without the entire pack's supervision and assistance. Just getting out of bed in the morning spurs a wild doggy orgy of celebration — barking, leaping, dancing. She is risen.

I'm sure this is mostly my fault for handing out too many treats, rewarding their constant attention with attention of my own. Did I mention that it's been a lonely year? And the good news is that for all their overwrought attachment, none shows any sign of developing separation anxiety. On the rare occasions when I leave the house, they just go to their beds and sleep — storing up energy for my return. The welcoming festivities are, needless to say, intense. At least I never feel forgotten.

This year of effectively sharing a cage with dogs has me pondering the human-animal relationship even more than I usually do, so I was eager to dive into Colin Dayan's new book, Animal Quintet, and to ask her a few questions for today's Q&A at Chapter 16.  Relationships — mother/child, human/animal, black/white, living/dead — are at the core of all the pieces in the collection, and Colin Dayan is always unsparing in her depiction of the harm we inflict on the Other. But the stories she tells are also driven by a passion for understanding the wild beauty of experience. (You can read my review of her 2016 book With Dogs at the Edge of Life here.)

***

*1912 photo from the Library of Congress. From the record: Photo shows Walter W. Johnson, a mining engineer and designer of gold and tin dredges, who traveled around the Seward Peninsula on the family "pupmobile" and on horseback. Johnson wrote on the back of his copy of the photo, "When it was time to coast, the dogs would jump aboard without command."

**Dudley and Katie displaying their constant faith that if you sit, a treat will come. Pixie's more of a skeptic.

"All who have travelled this perishing life..."

All who have travelled this perishing life,

Let us gather and wait for our healing.

But time is no healer,

And time too will die in the vanishing stars.

Great Rembrandt, the master of light and of shadow,

Of tortuous path, ambiguity,

Come paint our faces,

The dazed lakes of eyes wishing for some

Other life, jowls full with unfinished living,

And brows soft with unceasing hope —

Come paint our faces, the cradles

Of sun through white shutters,

The graveyards of dark afternoons,

Stirrings of tea in a lifetime of mornings,

The touch of the lips kissing skin —

Yes we remember —

The plantings of seed pods that may never bloom,

Visits of uncles, the births of our children:

We've witnessed it all, without knowing why.

Come paint our faces,

The lights and the shadows,

The ends and beginnings,

All lost in the sea of uncertainties.

~ Alan Lightman, from Song of Two Worlds

*Two African Men, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1661. Read observations about this painting here, here, and here.

"You will call this mountain home..."

 

When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring

in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel.

My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard

it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake.

And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:

You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again.

There will always be more of it underground than you

will ever see with your eye. And so it turned out to be true.

And so when I stood on the mountain that became my home,

I beheld a dirt sea, and saw our moon, which has two faces.

I learned that one face of our moon is dappled with maria,

and that the sunbeams here are newborns that lie

on each other, purpling into the fog and outstretched pines.

~from "Dear, beloved" by Sumita Chakraborty

*Kystlandskap i måneskinn ("Coastal Landscape in Moonlight"), Knud Baade, 1808-1879