TRAVEL: The Sierras, Drive Day to Mammoth

Bishop Creek Canyon was my first Sierra place. It's one of many steep canyons with snow-fed creeks' inevitable fall from mountain pass to valley floor. 

I learned to love to hike here, took burros to Bishop Pass, and learned to fish for the small and elegant dashing rainbow, stocked for our amusement. Yet still was our wonder  engendered, in this virtual shelter compromise place: between power, water, and its silent powerful creation.

Western aspens, small and tough, grow along the plunging diagonal drainages, towards the low place stream bed, alternating chevrons striping the canyon walls with lemon burnt orange slashes of dancing leaves.

Over 20 years of Sierra autumns have accrued to me when I come to see them now.  

So easy to forget that the Sierras' scanctity was looted by wily municipal water and power companies who dammed and drained the power for California's southern growth. 

South Lake is the damned gem of Bishop Creek Canyon. Today I find it almost drained. Two years of drought conditions and water demands legislated and purchased have left a sad portion of the once sparkling bountifully full lake.  Its water is pumped to distribute to the Bishop Cone, Los Angeles swimming pools, and stream flows to maintain fish populations.


It's ghastly to see the ramparts of  of the dam, white concrete matching the granite bouldered lake bed, so stripped, so sêche, not even dried water plants remain.  Like seeing thousands of bald heads caused by chemotherapy at once, or your spouse's.

You-Tube has a short video about this small scale shame, with only 27 views.  When I think of the Sierra lovers who come here, I'm grieved beyond measure.  I guess Americans reason that that snow and rain will come soon again, and this only need be borne short time.

We drive up to North Lake, high and windswept, the aspen groves stripped of gold, and winter nearing.  It is full and lovely yet, too distant to drain and receive the elusive promises of replenishment the Chandler Decree protects.

      

BOOKS: Sophie's Choice, by William Styron - Walking in her Shoes

Following Deliverance with this novel added bias-ridden substance to my idea that modern culture seeks ever more shocking novelties of experience to consume.  Perhaps consumption of fictional violence enables us to remain desensitized to real world violence.

In this novel, however, the actual historic violence of the Holocaust is used as narrative within the fictional account, both sensitizing and desensitizing the reader at once.  Styron seems to intend this, partly as a didactic function, and also as apologia; he quotes Elie Weisel's analysis of how the meaning of the Holocaust is devalued in artistic product at the same time he attempts to address the issue.  It produces the effect of literary fingernails on a blackboard.

Sophie is an overdetermined ultimate victim: of patriarchal society, of racist stereotyping, of female objecthood.  All that is left to her is sexual oblivion and death delivered from an uber-male "savior" who turns predatory and fiendishly cruel when a paranoid schizophrenic episode occurs.

She is an unusual victim in that she is quite a guilty one. On the platform at Auschwitz, the Nazi officer performing the selections between work and crematory offers her the choice to "save" one of her two children from death; the other must go to the gas chamber. She chooses her daughter and keeps her son alive, a reverse completion of the sacrifice of Isaac.  Where is God? the chorus sings.

She has so little identity left that she cannot choose martyrdom; or perhaps the life force in her drives her to survive no matter the cost.  Styron compels every reader to cast himself in a revival of her play: what would your choice be, walking in her shoes?  

And, having made the choice Sophie did, how could she/you/they all go on living after surviving the death camps, anyway?  

Her delivery is accomplished by a lover sufficiently mad and sadistic to provide them both with an operatic love-death; an irony because the one transcendent path, music, was also denied her by the total entrapment of her circumstances.

But Sophie's story is only one of three in the novel. Stingo, the Southern-born narrator, has his own guilt he needs to expunge, an American version of geno-doom, slavery.  His writing sojourn in New York is financed with recently discovered blood money from the sale of a family slave. 

He becomes enthralled with Nathan, a madly brilliant and handsome Jew, and tangled in a love triangle with Sophie as their common object, a woman so beautiful she summons gaze and desire in most any man she meets, a modern Bathsheba/Suzanna. 

He is a deeply funny narrator, until he isn't, tormented as he is with urgent sexual need and his attempts to bed a woman.  His graphic descriptions and language of his sexual life, at first amusing, come to have their own repellent quality, a counterpoint to the abusive cruelty and downward spiral to death Sophie experiences with Nathan. 

His fulfillment comes during a misguided flight attempt to "save" them both from Nathan's slimy power.  Their sexual interlude has a disturbing wrongness about it; their escape to freedom was always doomed. 

Isn't his "love" for Sophie really narcissistic homo-erotic yearning for Nathan?  His monstrous creative gift feeds on and yearns for Nathan's attention, as he competes with Sophie. Nathan feeds on Stingo's artistic freedom, his need for attention, and his non-Jewish birth circumstance.

During his stay in a mad pink-painted boardinghouse, Stingo's stash of money is stolen. Styron doesn't tell us who took it - but probably Nathan, just to make Stingo more dependent and anxious.

Sophie's Choice is compelling reading.  But I found it lurid, didactic, and obvious. The best writing in the novel, to me, are descriptions of and reactions to fine weather and music. 

They ring with revelation of the power and nature of music, and make Sophie's tragedy profound in a way that none of the other misfortunes she suffers can do. Even the power of music can no longer sustain her life after the grotesque events she suffers in war.

I think this novel would have made a fine opera; it has a hyper real, naturalistic quality that fits American realist style as set for me by Theodore Dreiser. 

BOOKS: Deliverance, by James Dickey

Bored with my summer lite reading, I browsed our bookshelf and found an unread book I'd purchased during my 100 Greatest Novels of All Time Reading Project.  

I remember when the film came out; it was 1972 and friends who saw it were shocked.  The film's subject matter and imagery breached taste levels with a level of graphic realism not yet seen in popular culture.   An expanding media reality expertly created vacuums of expectation and filled them with ever more shock content which became an ongoing spectacle and staple.  

I did not see Deliverance. My life then was about Baby World and the intimate delight of little feet and first words, and I wanted little else but an occasional Hawai'ian vacation.


So, now, tough and clear, I read.  From its first sentence, Deliverance is a fine work of compelling descriptive and narrative power. The would-be adventurers survey the map of the wild river they intend to canoe, and it snaps and tenses until they subdue it by staking it with their beer steins.  Was ever there a clearer warning of the debacle to come?

Their macho-survivalist leader, Lewis (Lewis & Clark?)persuades them to make the trip because the river basin will soon be forever hidden by a new dam. He does nothing to prepare as a true woodsman would, and I marvel that his charisma is so persuasive. 

Ed Gentry is a civilized middle-class family man, Lewis' thoughtful and admiring buddy.  He knows himself and his limits and accepts his artistic and marital dimensions. At one point when his wife asks him if she's done something wrong, he tells her no, but "...it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy". 

Gentry has constrained his sexual rapacity by transforming it into the energy of an observer and voyeur; this strategy permits his fidelity. But his inside isn't tender, it's raw and ruthless, and Gentry will soon need this power to survive.

He should know better than to make the trip but he goes along because Lewis models macho, allowing him a tourist version of an explorer/pioneer past. And the fantasy of recovering his manhood, lost to the tool world: office, city, sports, and monogamy.

I've seldom read nature writing that conveys its power with more clarity and precision than Dickey's. As Gentry is connected to the life of the river, with its "packed greenness", I am too, as memories of singular rafting and canoe trips are summoned for me.

A description of Gentry climbing out of the canyon to save his friends is breathtakingly cinematic. His ascent of the cliff is so intense he describes it as "fucking" the cliff.

They "get away with it"; but they will pay.  Dickey's view is a dark one.  The seekers' encounter with primal forces does nothing to deliver them from a terrible trial. 

There is a certain solemnity in viewing a lake created by a dam upriver. The vast surface of the water presses upon the land it took, doing what led water will do.  It covers and hides, smothers past and possibility. It has the beauty and poignancy of a veterans' cemetery, this river grave.

What would the valley beneath hold this present day, if not water?  What denizens of the air living on valley updrafts escaped drowning?  What shelter did the creatures of the craggy rocks and grassy alluves find?

Are the beneficiaries of this watery largesse deserving? Is that a question one can ever answer?

The blue volume above, the blue volume below, halves of this lost space; the shape of plaint to sere and inattentive souls.

Ed Gentry and his wife, years later, sit evenings on their porch overlooking another dammed lake. The lost river remains in his soul, he says. But he seems to have no scars,  his countenance as calm as the ersatz lake he watches over.

 "The world is easily lost", says Gentry.  He is, after all, a modern man, a private ambiguous hero whose distance from his deed has deepened as the years have passed.  The dam has made a funeral for his acts, but the lake testifies mutely to his soul every day.




  

ART: Perceptual Cell: Light Reignfall, Dark Matters, and Breathing LIght - James Turrell at LACMA

personal photo taken without permission at LACMA

I once went to an immersion chamber for a "float" during my later Flower Child years.  I lay in warm salt water, heated exactly to 98.6 degrees, with my visual field limited to the top of the plastic tank, dimly seeking drug-free transcendence. 

That experience eluded me, and the promise of it still mostly recedes, trusting I know it when I know it.

I always go easy on Earth Art, Light and Space Art.  Probably because I won't discard my environmental politics or my zen aesthetic, I critique not, and don't explain.  

The Turrell palette, I think, is entirely modern. Those new tubes of paint only, derived from chemistry - hansa, napthol, quinacradone; the bright cheerful hues replacing the old European masters palette. Turrell triumphs with this ascendance.

The Joffrey Ballet dances a Gerald Arpino ballet called Light Rain, I recall as I wait. I expect to have a rain experience, joining willingly while the sky releases.   

I lay down on a flatbed with a drawer-front,  a panic button is placed in my hand, and I recall MRI's and morgue storage drawers.

Attendants wear white lab coats, and the circle dome looks like 20's Futurist architecture. I opt for the "soft" program, a less active viewing experience.  

The Light Reignfall chamber experience is a very lovely: blue.  I will always possess the memory of Turrell blue.  It is manganese and pthalo, darkening to periwinkle with the intensity only illuminated rays achieve.

Distance is not perceptible in the chamber. Limitation is structured by the body's cone of vision, and a half-dome sky arcs above one's reclining body.

A madly flickering field of intense colors yields each to the other, then holds  - did pink ever so sharp and hard, negate its affectionate nature here? 

Did red ever look so soft, manifesting the root chakra, muladhara energy so powerfully?  

Yellow green is sour wretched vilest bile. 

Yellow wishes it were sunshine, and fails.

Wait for the instant that blue moves to violet. It is a fleeting violet, that only flowers and dioxazine purple give. Did you see it?  Trust that you marked it, like viewing a nano-particle. 

I see the blue light

coming for me

Inexorable

so gentle, so kind

body boundary dissolves 

periphery lost

I blue

Watch forever dawn

it is here now

it is over now

not ever forever

everlasting

ever ending never 

doctor my eyes

Are they open or not?

Don't know

No matter.

I see anyway

I see always

I can't talk about it.

Dark Matters, which I view after the chamber, is a dark traverse to a seat for 10 minutes of black silence.  Darkish brown orange shapes emerge but take no form and fade.  I am reassured when the young woman who invited me to share the viewing with her tells me she saw the same thing.  It's easy to find a metaphor for this:  Plato's Cave, and the subjectivity of vision.  

I wish I would go to Kentucky, have that total dark cave experience now.

I attend the last environment of the day, donning booties to enter Breathing Light.

 While waiting, I look up the stairs at the room's occupants.  I see them moving within deep bright color fields.  I love mounting the stairs, as if to a high altar, and enter the room. 

The air seems dense with color, palpably foggy.

A downsloping white floor forces attention to one's balance, and at the end a beautifully defined lozenge-shape seems to be a wall.  It is not; the guard warns us not to step off - it is open and deep below.  He demonstrates with a dancer's gesture - dipping a sweeping leg and pointed toe into the void.  He won't state how deep it is. He is grumpy and I turn away.

Looking backwards, the waiting area below is framed by a neon inset around the the breathing room's entry, and then also deeply colored itself, mostly with saturated opposite hues to the upper room.

The guard will not let me take a seated yoga position, and so I rotate, watching below and then rotating back to the void-wall. The spaces glow with the now familiar Turrell kaleidoscope.

It's over now.  I love the celebration Turrell makes. 

Long attention to photographing and painting the natural world has gifted me; I no longer seem to require an external reset to move to a certain awareness of the fleetingly lovely. 

I do love this created manifestation, to be called up when I wish for it. 

   

IN MEMORIAM: Ruth Asawa

The East Coast art museums, as broadly provisioned as they are compared to the West Coast, kindled my love of modern "craft" art, and as I age I attend to it attentively.

The work of these artists, attracting less popular attention than pricey painters, and less critical attention than conceptual art, attracts me all the more for its transcendence of didactic trends; its presence is wordless.

It waits for the viewer, and remains its unique somatic body while filled with void.

I was saddened to know of the passing of Ruth Asawa. She is best know for woven metal hanging structures which cast the most lyric shadows on gallery walls. 

She was featured in an exhibit at LA Valley College a few years ago and I was glad to see them there.  (See 12-13-10 blog.)

Most touching, I never knew that she was among many Japanese who were interned during World War II. 

It's not hard to understand how nativism was manipulated by a cynical Roosevelt to build support for the war effort, but every time I drive by Manzanar I feel such shame.

She said she did not feel hatred about her interment in Arkansas. It was part of what made her who she was.

She also made several public sculptures for San Francisco, was active as an arts advocate, started a high school there (why didn't I ever know about her?  She could have come to a CAEA convention so easily. Overlooked.)

 She also drew.  This is a fascinating abstract I found in the Harvard Museum Collection.

Farewell, brave woman,mother, and artist. 

TRAVEL: Another Eastern Sierra Sojourn

 Our favorite place - how does one designate this?  It is a macro-micro semblance of the whole one seeks; fresh and familiar at once.

Seasons change here, and  the earth's energies are  always visible. Vast skies fill and empty with clouds, wind, sun, moon, stars.  Lakes tremble beneath the wind's passage, and reflect bounteous light.

Streams spill with fresh snow melt, leaving the mountainsides sparse spotted in late summer with snow patches. Collisions and uplift that created the rubble beneath the slopes are revealed now, great gray and red slab sides clutching at the tumbled rocks like a woman lifting a ruffled dress. 

This year we stayed at Tamarack Lodge, as we love to do, delighting in its quite genuine (1927) log cabin vernacular style.  A lake is steps out the door, as is a winter cross-country ski center. We still love the restaurant, too, perhaps the only place in the Sierras, famous for its trout, that serves it.

The lake was peaceful to kayak, dark winebottle green and glowing.  

After all these years of going to the Sierras, I saw my first bear on foot, at the Twin Lakes Inlet, about 30 feet away.  All those dire warnings in Alaska and not a bear did we see.

Rock Creek Lakes Hike (Little Lakes Basin, Mosquito Flat Trailhead) 

I made it to Heart Lake, the fourth lake.
It was a tough hike for me - it's all at 10,000+ feet.

Water levels were good except in the second lake, Mack, which looked quite choked with grasses at each narrowed end.  We had a lot of fun fishing in Rock Creek Lake, too, which had been stocked and gave us the only fishing plenty we enjoyed on this trip.

Summer is a slower bite.

mountain pride penstemon 

Stair lakes - blue gems strung together with rocky waterfalls: as you ascend, they descend: nature composes its own chord patterns.  And their key signature is wildflowers.

  

 How I loved this discovery: they are Alpine columbine, and if I hadn't decided to explore around the farthest lakebed I reached that day instead of using the trail, I would never have found them.  Red columbine, yes, and now these, pushing into my face on a rock escarpment that I climbed up to return to trail.

I call these the queen of the mountains:  it is a mariposa lily, and is a singularly pure and imposing bloom giving me special joy whenever I find it. 

Best guess on these among the many fritillaries depicted in my Sierra Field Guide is that these two are Yuba fritillaries.  

John loved fishing Rock Creek Lake  this year, and on the shore in the group camp area I found a lovely path to follow and found a new bird.

This is a red-breasted sapsucker, with a limited range on the Pacific Coast.  I heard the 5 rapid taps described by the Cornell Ornithology website, and watched it flying high in the aspen-pine forest canopy.

I love this book - I carry it with me on most hikes, though it's more comprehensive than I need. Field identifications are very easy with it. The drawings are beautiful.  I can't imagine how the author/artist found so many specimens to draw.


Virginia Lakes Hike

I went back to try this hike after fishing Red and Blue Lakes for eastern brook trout, a fish native and labeled "wild" - most of the fish in the ES are hatchery-grown stocked rainbows.

They are about 6 - 8" long and very colorful, and they fight quite hard.  It's easy to release them, too, and they swim away with great speed, which is gratifying.

The lakes are rather close together, and so the hike, while tough for me, was exciting. Streams and waterfalls are close and connect the lakes as you cross them.

The trail cuts across the rubble façade on Blue Lake leading higher to Cooley Lake.
On the way, an old miner's shack, leaning precariously as do these mountains, seeking that angle of repose.

No California vintage wine for dinners here.  

 

This hike has such contrasts between mixed coniferous forest, bald violent slides of rubble,  meandering waterfalls and streams, and then the round-the-bend discovery of the next lake in the diadem. 

 

 At Frog Lakes, the far point of my hike that day, I could see the summit in the distance, and found this flower, baby elephant ears growing stream-side - a new flower for me.

At Frog Lakes, a peaceful pond to rest beside before going back down to a shower and dinner at my favorite ES restaurant, The Historic Mono Inn.  It's an early 1900's coach house overlooking the eerie and vast waterplain that is saline Mono Lake.  

No where is the light like this - the sunset and twilight last and last, and James Turrell, like the lilies of the field, has no array like one of these.

When I return home, I have an appointment to experience his Perceptual Cell at LACMA, a kind of MRI with color. One reclines and is motored into a viewing chamber to experience one's perceptions in a very controlled and pure way,  no sunset intruded upon by arcing bats, an evening insect hatch, or the onset of mountain night chill.

We sat on a patio in the warm evening, drinking a light red recommended by the gracious host, and lingering until I had to be drawn away to begin the next day of joy.

The Northern California Coast at Point Arena

We drove across the Yosemite high country, and stopped in Berkeley one night to celebrate a 65th birthday with our good friend Trish.  Then on the a house party with Trish, Judith, John's cousin, and Katharine, his sister.  

The contrast between the two regions is more  remarkable than country-hopping in Europe.  Sun and warmth and endless cumuli chasing across the hard blue sky, then bare gray fog sky over all, the sun bounty lost for days in certain lengths of shoreline.

Strange monstrous sea plants and huge barricades of driftwood suitable for use in a play about French Revolution are strewn along the wide gray strand. One passes between deep wide dune hillocks tufted with tousled sea grass, and emerges on a land's end of dystopian beauty.

Point Arena's small fishing cove with an East-coast style chowder house pier restaurant, was    pleasant, and here we found some sunshine and internet access. It had been very spotty all during our trip,

the first time it had ever bothered me - with no smart phone, by choice, I marveled at my appetite for instant connection and information that I lived without for so many years, making due with a card catalog at at the local library.

We had a few memorable games of Scrabble with our family, Trish winning most of the time because she is very very good at it, but also uses all the trick Scrabble words that John and I don't know because we never did that in the 50's and 60's when we learned to play. 

I remember laughing so those two evenings, as I hadn't in several weeks, as she placed words like "xi", "suq", "ai" - all of which she assured me were in the Scrabble Dictionary, boggling my mind at penetration of the global vernacular and slang into language.

When we got home, I thought that I would be satisfied, if choice or need be, if I never went anywhere but the Sierras. 

BOOK REVIEW: Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver

I'll tell you upfront. They say I'm a person with issues about weight. Then I look around. I conclude, I'm staying on the horse I rode in on, though it's name is InDenial.   

This novel is a poignant, brutal tale about obesity and its looming presence in the U.S. It's a narrative given by a financially successful sister about her beloved talented brother who fails as a jazz musician and returns home.

His appearance is shocking because he has become morbidly obese.  Even worse, he cannot face the fact that he washed out, and keeps talking about his "glory days" and his come-back plans, to everyone's great pain.

His sister Pandora, married to an increasingly  unsympathetic husband, decides to save her brother and together they undertake a liquid diet that will last 9 to 12 months.  It's a fascinating story, if you've ever dieted, and how they manage to defeat their hunger seems miraculous. 

The story of Edison's graceless fall and his sacrifice, though he will never burn so brightly again, is an acerbic moral tale recommending examined self-acceptance.  

It's a world where we tell affluently-born children they all are the best and the brightest, that they are entitled; and the  have-nots learn their status from the media and want a 29-minute silver bullet fix. 

There's a sort of Midwestern pragmatic craft artisan ethic working behind this story's shell.  Enduring work matters, the quest for satiety is a trap evolution has laid, and just showing up is worth less than it seems, though one can't manage without it. Disappointments will happen, and they are the making of real character.      

I liked this tough read tremendously, yet I have simply not been able to discuss this novel with anyone. My house is made of glass, and so I can throw no stones even though its rooms are full of elephants - targets all.

Reasons for obesity in the U.S. may be much more banal than Edison's plight. Cheap fast food, working absent parents, our biological mandate to choose high-calorie foods, severed from nature and the work of the land, common disappointments, sexual boredom, amoral marketing, the value of an attractive appearance, 

plaque on doctor's office, Beverly Hills

laden with status and power messages, the easy slide into loneliness.

The novel's end is a twist; though Shriver does warn you. Of course, it had to turn out like that.  It's the way the real world is.

Isn't it?