Mark Twain's Birthday

Today is Mark Twain's birthday.  In honor of that I thought I'd post one of my favorite bits of writing from him, found in "Life on the Mississippi," which is a collection of memories and writings all about that great river.  Captivating stuff, and a fun read.

This particular passage speaks well to the shift that comes as one moves from novice to skilled artisan.  Beauty gets redefined, understanding deepens, worldview shifts.  I do not think, as this passage indicates, that the ability to see beauty fades, rather that we understand things to be beautiful in different ways, if we let ourselves.  Here, Twain is talking about the process of learning to "read the river" as a riverboat pilot.

"Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.


I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark."

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain.

Death: Before and After.

We only had a couple of days in Paris before we moved on again.  Paris (like any major city) is impossible to "do," in the sense that you hear sometimes ("Well, we did London last year and this year we are going to do Paris).  There are so many layers; so much history, so much present, so many cultures, so much much much that I think you could live there for years and never “do” it all.  I lived in New York City for almost ten years and never made it to the Statue of Liberty, after all.

We happened to be staying a stone's throw from Notre Dame de Paris, and almost accidentally the trip became (mostly) about this structure.  Of course it is art-historically significant and I studied it just a bit in college, and of course I was roughly familiar with it as a structure, but truly photos can never prepare one for actually inhabiting a building.  What a breathtaking space.

It is a Gothic cathedral (perhaps the Gothic Cathedral) that is vast: Vastly wide, impressively long, and tall in a way that quite successfully makes a human feel tiny in the presence of god, which is what that space was meant to do after all.  The builders employed a brand-new architectural conceit that we call a “cluster column,” that is, on the face of the piers that hold up the distant roof are carved delicate, tiny columns, one next to the other in a cluster, almost like a handful of asparagus, or maybe like holding a bunch of drinking straws of various sizes.  The effect of this is to draw your eye up up up to the vaulted roof, you almost can’t help but follow the columns up to the heavens and there, peering up at the roof in awe you realize you are gazing heavenward and feeling small.  Success in architecture. 

This is a building that was begun in the 11^th century and took a couple of hundred years to build.  Thousands upon thousands of stones to be dressed and put in place, tons of iron to be smelted and cast and forged, beams to be hewn out of trees.  It is a representation of millions upon millions of labor-hours of work across generations.

I was particularly smitten by the hinges.  There are of course three main doors into the western end of the Cathedral (this is normal for cathedrals, especially of this style).  Each entrance had a pair of doors and each door had three hinges.  “NBD,” as my students say.  But these hinges are something else.  Large in scale, as everything is large in scale in this structure, and strong, but visually delicate, almost spidery.  They are massive pieces of forged iron, but have an æsthetic identity that is almost light.  Knowing as I do a little bit about blacksmithing made me appreciate these hinges even more:  the idea of forging them, even in parts, of getting that intricate detail without deforming the steel, of achieving that level of symmetry again and again really is a staggering thought.  To look at these hinges was to look at the work of a true master, a person who is so comfortable with their hands and their tools and their material that they can make things that no other, or few other, humans on the planet can make.  This person or these people lived a thousand years ago, and not only does no one now know their names, there is probably no way to even find out what their names were.  All we have is their work which stands still, a thousand years later, as testament to lives lived in service to making things with their hands that are of use and that are beautiful and that are made in a way that with care they will still do what they are intended to do a thousand years hence.  What in my life does the same?

Which brings me to the Paris Catacombs.

Different from the Roman catacombs in almost every way, the Paris catacombs are a series of tunnels that started as an underground quarry for that white stone that is ubiquitous here.  In the late 18^th century they started to collapse, and engineers were sent down to shore them up.  At the same time, several cemeteries were being emptied, and all of the bones were brought down into the tunnels and stacked down there, since there was nothing else to do with the space.  This resulted in a spectacularly creepy environment deep deep underground.

We have to a certain extent become inured to skulls and bones, I think.  We see so many toys and Halloween decorations that are skulls and bones that I thought this would be more of the same: slightly creepy but mostly cool, and a fun afternoon.  I was wrong on all counts.

As a starter, walking down a continuous stone spiral staircase some 9 or 10 stories underground is enough to creep me out.  No elevator, so no quick escape if needed.  No landings, either, just a relentless spiral down down down into the clammy darkness.  The monotony of this part of the walk is meditative in its way, though the meditation is less than relaxing.  At the base of this stair is a hallway, about 6 feet wide and maybe seven and a half feet tall in the center of the gently arched ceiling.  Electric wall sconces light the way every thirty feet or so on alternating sides, meaning that the light is patchy, yellow, and barely lights the floor which is sloping, pitted, and, as my wife pointed out, “not something you would ever find in the States.”
The depth of this tunnel is almost palpable, you are keenly aware of the hundreds of feet of stone above you.  Every so often there is a tunnel off to the right or left, dark as dark can be and locked off with an iron door like a prison door.  I always find that not knowing evokes feeling considerably more than knowing, and the mystery of the dark tunnels with locked doors intensifies the already heightened feeling of extreme creepiness.

Then you get to the bones.

It is almost like some Disney exhibit, there are so many.  Like the entrance to some ersatz “pirate cave.”  But these are real.  And there are thousands upon thousands of them.  Six or seven foot retaining walls have been built out of femurs, with courses of skulls either facing in or out.  In some places the skulls have been arranged in a shape, like a heart or a cross.  In others they just continue in a long row, face after fleshless face staring forever across the hallway at face upon fleshless face staring back.

I had a real “poor Yorick” moment as I walked through the cool damp semidark:  All of these bones had been a person, had been a child, had grown up, might have been a parent or a sibling or a grandmom or a granddad.  They probably loved and were loved, they might have sung songs or played with their children, or enjoyed a sunset.  They had birthdays and holidays, they celebrated and cried.  There was a human life attached to each of these tens of thousands of femurs, each of the tens of thousands of these skulls.  No one will ever have any way of finding out who these people were, where they lived, or what their favorite food was.  We won’t know who their first kiss was or what they did as a job, or what was important to them.  These people have been dead for hundreds of years.  All we have are their bones.  Which of course is where the rest of us are are all headed in time.

Which brought me back to Notre Dame de Paris, and to the door hinges.

The people who made the door hinges are long lost in time (“Lost in time like tears in rain,” as Roy Baty says in the Blade Runner movie), but those hinges remain, and they keep doing the work they were intended to do.  Every morning the doors swing open and every evening they swing shut, and the hands of the people that put those doors on the hinges and the hinges on the building, though long decayed to bones, are accessible to us. 

We are so temporary, so fleeting, so small in space and time.  What the Catacombs and Notre Dame made me think about is the import of making my short time here really mean something, and of how much I want to make some things that live longer than I do, even briefly.

Warning: Extreme Tree Geekery!

 

 Ok, the time has come.  I have to write about the "propped up trees" phenomenon.  It might be my favorite thing about being here.

In every garden we visited, and in other places as well, we saw evidence that some trees are revered enough that arborists and gardeners will go to great lengths to save and protect them.  Which of course I love.  The trees in these gardens are not allowed to grow in a way that Americans might say is "natural."  They are pruned and trained into picturesque shapes that are as much living sculpture as anything else, often twisted shapes that look as though they have survived hundreds of years of buffering by the wind on some cliff face somewhere.

The thing is, this makes them really beautiful.  I always am struck by the ways that tree trunks can twist and hold that twist, or can grow horizontally and then vertically to reach the sun.  They really are sculptural objects in their own right, and they are everywhere already.  So lucky are we.

But in a Japanese garden or on temple or palace grounds, they are sculpted more deliberately, often to the limit of what the tree can endure.  This is where propping them up comes in.  Then there are the trees that obviously have some historic or religious significance (sometimes there is even a plaque describing it, but of course I can't read any of the plaques here).  These trees are propped up to keep them alive, and again, great lengths are gone to to keep them going. 

The props themselves are sometimes beautiful examples of woodworking.  They are often round poles (occasionally a foot in diameter, see below) with perfect mortice and tenon joints.  They are tied to the tree with a biodegradable twine, and often the tree is wrapped with bark or a grass mat to protect it.  It really is quite lovely to see, and the reverence that is accorded the trees is so lovely and so touching.  These are venerable beings, after all, much older, in many cases, than the gardeners who tend them.  They should be accorded the respect and gratitude we accord our elders, don't you think?  I love that there is such ubiquitous evidence that many people here feel as I do about trees.

Last thing before we move on to some photos:  I started this post with a piece of kanji that a student taught me.  It means (depending on how it is used) either "tree" or "wood"  Two of them next to each other means "small forest" and three of them means "forest."  I am digging the pictogram thing.  Intensely hard to parse, but my students have been teaching me a few characters and it is fun.  So three down, about 5,000 to go, and then I can start in on the pronunciation.  How hard can it be?

Ok, on to the photos of propped up trees:

 We'll start with a pretty run-of-the-mill propped up tree.  This is a lovely little pine on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.  There are two perfectly fitted mortices in the cross-piece.  Lovely piece of work.

 A slightly more elaborate propping up.  Also at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

 I wish I had some idea about this tree.  It is right at the corner of the castle building, and there was a huge plaque detailing its significance, but of course I could read none of it.  There was a date from the early 19th century, but that was the best I could figure out.  The trunk is about four feet in diameter, and the poles holding up the branches are each a foot thick.  You can get a sense of the scale from the police car there next to the tree.  This was one of the first things I saw in Japan and it won me over immediately.

 A close up of the whole process:  Wrap the branch in bark, then lash it with twine to the support pole.  This way as the tree grows it won't hurt the tree.  In a couple of places we even saw examples of the tree growing to support its own weight and growing off of the support.  Pretty triumphant to see that.

 

 A really nice example of the tree and the prop becoming a threshold into a space.  There is another photo of a similar thing later on, but this is a lovely one.  Many of these trees are bred to grow very slowly, so there is no guarantee that this tree is as callow as it seems, it could be quite old.  Again, this practice is so normative here that there is no comment on it, no way to know anything other than what we see.

 Maybe my second-favorite propped up tree.  So lovely.  This is in Katsura Villa, I think, so of course some of the top arborists in the nation are caring for this one.  I just love the horizontal and the tow verticals set up by this particular tree.

 The base of the supports for this tree land in a gravel garden, as this is in a Zen garden.  I love that the monks rake around the posts, acknowledging them as important objects and incorporating them into the raked pattern.

 A really tall propped up tree here.  Those supports are about thirty feet tall.  Still made the same way, with a perfect mortice at the top and lovingly lashed to the branches.  This  one is so tall that at first you are not aware of them as branch supports, but then you look up and realise that they are not a light post or something, that they are a part of the support system for the tree.

Sometimes support is in tension not compression.  Here is a little tree that is being trained to hang out over a path in a beautiful way.  Callow youth, this one.

I love it when the tree twists around like this.  Looks like the muscles in an arm, don't you think?  Here is an example of a tree that has been so tortuously trained that it could never stand on its own.  But it lives on.  The will to live is tenacious, even in (maybe especially in) trees, and they cling to life with great force of will.

 And here is my all-time, hands-down, favorite propped up tree.  At the entrance to Katsura villa.  Truly lovely, not least because all of the heartwood has been eaten by rot or mold or something, but the sapwood is still keeping the tree alive, twisted though it is.  The supports here are bigger than a foot in diameter.

 Here is another shot of this one.  You can see clear through it.  It is so beautiful, I just sat and stared at it for a long time.  The students were making fun of me after a while, but I did not care, it is just lovely.  I am so thankful that i have seen this old lady, when ever I start feeling like I have reached my limit I will remember her and remind myself to avail myself of support systems and lean on things that I need to lean on.  So much wisdom to learn from trees, and from those who take care of them.

 A nice example from inside Katsura Villa.  The ma created by the supports, the way they are there and not-there as the tree reaches out over the water is pretty amazing.

 From Tneryu-ji Zen temple in Arashiyama.  I love that the one branch has been trained so completely horizontally so that a real threshold has been made.  This is a very typical type, see below.

 From Bizen somewhere on the walk to the sword museum.  Using a tree as a lintel for entry into the house is a very common sight here, and one that I really dig.  What nicer way to delineate space than with trees?

And this poor lady gets the prize for most punk rock tree.  Holy crap.  There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and this is one propped up tree that really shocked me.  I don't know if some terrible thing happened in its past, or if the gardeners are just over zealous, or what, but this is just crazy.  Nice one to end on, I think.