The Subtle Landscape

  This week, courtesy of NPR, I had occasion to listen to a fascinating program about stem cells on Speaking of Faith.  Host Krista Tippett visited the regeneration lab of Fr. Doris Tayor at the University of Minnesota.

  Problem with organ transplants is rejection.  Patient has to take powerful drugs for life to avoid a new heart from making an Alien-like exit.  Ms Taylor is working on a method to build a new heart out of one’s own cells. 

  Not yet in human trials, she starts with a heart from a rat cadaver and washes out all cells leaving an interstitial “scaffold”.  Then she uses stem cells to build a new heart upon that structure.  Below you can watch a video showing steps in the process culminating in a new beating heart!*

   Speaking of Alien: the video reminded me of the horrible part of Alien Resurrection where Ripley stumbles upon a lab filled with disturbing experiments with/on humanoids eerily similar in presentation to Dr. Taylor’s rat hearts in beakers.

  For her part, Taylor says she wouldn’t undertake anything she wouldn’t do on her mother.  People tell her that “she isn’t building hearts, she’s building hope”.  “The universe has given me tools: I’m going to use those tools.”  Progress is a series of discoveries.  When ill, our ancestors chewed on willow bark which we now use in the form of aspirin.

  Marveling over the beauty of the natural architecture of a heart with Dr Taylor, moderator Tippett said that “One of the things that I’ve been fascinated in… with scientists in general is how scientists have such a regard for beauty”.  Reminded me of a post far above in which I discuss nuclear weapon development by scientists eager to push forward savoring the “sweet technological problems…” 

  I’m all for progress and favor stem cell research, but I’m beginning to disagree with Keats’ famous lines from Ode to a Grecian Urn: 

  This here universe is a whole lot more complicated than that.   Billowing cumulus might be beautiful, but so is a mushroom cloud.  Taylor indeed does give us hope.  We can make ourselves sick (physically or metaphorically), but we can also make ourselves well.

  All parts of our bodies are continually regenerating and the stem cells do the work.  Taylor calls it “endogenous repair, internal repair”.  Ageing of tissues and bodies is the failure of stem cells.  Stress ages stem cells by a known process. Decrease stress increase the life of a cell and a body.

  “… there’s a spiritual component to all of this” Taylor says.  “What we think impacts who we are.  She recruited well known Tibetan Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard and measured stem cells in his blood before and after a meditation session.  “What we found was a huge increase in the number of positive stem cells in blood.”

  In an unrelated study of the neurological correlates of happiness at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Ricard was subjected to an extensive  examination with hundreds of sensors affixed to his noggin for a three hour ride in an MRI.  He was so far outside normal parameters that he was dubbed the “happiest man on earth”.  Wonder what he knows.

*Interestingly (but I guess not surprisingly), process sounds very much like morphogenetic architecture in which a pattern or process is observed in nature, algorithms developed, computer let loose, and voila: an, uh, as yet unbuilt research lab for the Santa Fe Institute designed by son and friends.

** For the complete interview and more video go to:http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/stem-cells/

  While driving across our beautiful state earlier this week, obsessing about problems and desperate for creative insight, I turned on the radio.  Iowa Public Radio, to be precise, and a program about lucid dreaming.  That’s when you’re in a dream and know it.  There is even such a thing as dream yoga in which adepts reportedly develop remarkable facility.

  The discussion also recounted a wide range of dream research and anecdotes.  Abraham Lincoln had a dream premonition of his assassination shortly before the tragic event.  Sting and Johnny Cash, to name but two, have had songs come to them in dreams.

  Solutions to important math problems have appeared in dreams.  Or moments after a sunrise awakening.  (Which brings to mind the incredible underpinning mathematics seems to provide our universe.  Hmm, brains certainly aren’t rectilinear…)

  One of the cofounders of Google had his flash of insight appear to him in a dream.  A Nobel winning chemist whose work had to do with the chemical transmission of nerve impulses in the brain owes his prize to a dream.

  “Sleeping on it” works.  A study was done in which a problem requiring a creative approach was presented to two test groups.  One group got the problem early in the morning and allowed half a day to solve.  The problem was given to the second group shortly before bedtime with the answer due by noon the next day.  Second group was far more successful.

  Brought to mind two of the most incredible dreams I’ve had.  Both occurred during visits to my terminally ill brother.

The first was when I joined him at a beautiful secluded meditation retreat in the mountains of Oregon.  He had been diagnosed just weeks prior.  He looked fine and acted fine, but wasn’t.

  We arrived at night in a blizzard.  My emotions were roiling and after meeting his friends, both enrobed monks and lay people, I slept in my clothes it was so cold.  Wood heat.  My dreams were of such utter tranquility that I awoke with a smile certain that all would be ok.  And he was during the next seventeen months during which I visited him several times.

  When I arrived for what proved to be my last visit though, his condition had worsened dramatically over the short interim since my previous appearance.  I was so shaken that upon first seeing him I called the nearby Golden Gate Bridge something other than that.  Clearly the end was near.  Couple weeks.  He could see that I was shocked and joked about my mistake.  I was nearly overwhelmed.

  Several of his fellow Tibetan Buddhists were there with us.  That night I dreamt that my wife was giving birth to another child, another girl and I was in the next room waiting for the announcement.  There was some sort of muffled commotion and I went in.  

  Those about me were sobbing. The baby had been born, but wasn’t yet breathing.  It looked healthy and was clean of all birth fluids and blood etc.  I held her and talked softly to her.  She smiled and began to cry.  We were all overcome with joy and so that was what we decided to name her – Joy.

  Next morning, amazed at the tone and nature of that dream given the situation and my mental state, I recounted it to my brother.  He said “I’m tellin’ ya man, there’s somethin’ to this stuff…”

*Interviewee was Robert Waggoner/International Association for the Study of Dreaming.

  OK.  Enough.  Enough with the peace and quiet.  I’m not a girlie man.  Back to the blood, guts, and gore.  Real thing this time though, with The Bard’s representation to boot.

  Sunday (October 25) is St Crispin’s Day.  It’s named for twins Crispin and Crispinian who were martyred in about 286AD.  They were removed from the liturgical calendar by Vatican II, but they’re not what make the date noteworthy anyway.  Several historically important battles have been fought on October 25s: The Battle of Balaklava (The Charge of the Light Brigade) in 1854, The Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific in 1945, and The Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

  The event at Agincourt occurred because King Henry V of England invaded Europe to prosecute his claim on the throne of France, the hand of Princess Catharine daughter of Charles VI King of France, and a dowry of 2 million crowns.  It is notable because of the fact that the English force of some 6,000 defeated catastrophically the French who numbered perhaps as many as 30,000. 

  Several factors worked to King Henry’s advantage including: the composition of the forces, the nature of the battlefield, and the sure knowledge that defeat would mean annihilation.  The resulting motivation helped overcome fatigue, hunger, and disease.

  Over 80% of Henry’s men were archers/longbowsmen.  Half of the French were dismounted knights and men-at-arms, a thousand or so mounted knights, and the balance archers.  These counter posed armies came to face each other in a very narrow strip of recently plowed open muddy land surrounded by dense forest.

  Short and simple, the English and Welsh archers on the flanks loosed tens of thousands of arrows killing and wounding many, hitting French horses on their unarmored hindquarters driving them madly through their own ranks. 

  The armor laden French pressed forward wave upon wave, but slogging through the muddy bottleneck tired quickly, were easy prey, and fell in huge piles.  Some even drowned in the mud.  Crucially, they were unable to outflank their opponents because of the thick wood on both sides.

  Once all arrows had flown, the English moved upon the French with hatchets and swords.  Without the weight of armor they tore through the horrible wallow with relative ease.  At the end of some three hours there were approximately 112 dead Englishmen, and as many as 10,000 French.  Uh, whoa.

  King Henry’s glory has regaled far more than just those with particular interest in military history through the agency of one William Shakespeare.  His Henry V dramatizes the story and Hank’s “St Crispin Day Speech” has to be one of the most stirring and momentous in all of literature.  After reading the play, you should rent and watch the film version with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role.  Or maybe be lazy and just watch the clip below.  Either way, be careful with your cutlery for a while thereafter.

The huge dunes in the foreground were formed by the interaction of wind, water, and stone over the course of many eons.  They are the largest and most extensive (330 square miles) in North American and comprise the Great Sand Dunes National Park in south central Colorado.

  Most of the sand came from the San Juan Mountains to the west, but the larger grains were shed from the Sangre de Christos on the east such as Kit Carson and Crestone (pictured below) – two of Colorado’s fourteeners.

  The dunes loom some 700 feet above the sand sheet and sabkha just to their west.  The visual effect of the afternoon sun upon them is unforgettable.  Why should the sun on a big pile of sand have such an impact?  Well, not long (in cosmic terms) after life evolved beyond a simple unicellular state, as ability to discern between light and less so developed.

  Billions of years later we see in 3-D and Technicolor, but the pre-primal legacy still influences our perceptions.  The incredible lights and shadows of the dunes mediated by the undulating ridges transfix one’s gaze.

  All visitors thus moved, if only for a moment, what better place for an artist to imbue and convey?  Wife is artist-in-residence here and as usual has made the most of the situation.  Observations from many points of vantage have inflected her current work while observers, young and old alike, have added tactile impressions to their experience of this unique bit of terra firma NA.

  Bonus for this here strong back is that the location of the park, far far removed from the nearest town makes for a similarly prehistoric level of noise and light pollution.  Have seen more falling stars than I’ve fingers and toes.  Me lucky boy.

    Ever see the movie Heat?  It’s a really great cop v robber flic with Pacino (cop) and De Niro (robber).  Val Kilmer is a steely with chinks bad guy too.  Ashley Judd’s his wife.  De Niro and crew are skilled, astute, and only go after the largest of hauls.  Last one eight figures.  Movie is wonderful, mesmerizing, in your face violence.  In fact, De Niro demands that his last victim “look at me, LOOK AT ME!” before delivering the revenge fueled coup de grace.

  My savor of the gunplay and bloodletting came to mind while reading a bit about the President of Liberia – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – the first female president of an African country.  Question: “If women ran the world, would wars still exist?” Answer: “No. It would be a better, safer, and more productive world. A woman would bring an extra dimension to that task – and that’s a sensitivity to humankind.  It comes from being a mother.” 

  Question: “But if women had power, they would be more likely to acquire the negative traits that power breeds, like selfishness and territorialism.”  Answer: “It would take a very long term of women absolutely in power to get to the place where they became men”.*

  What is up with us men?  I remember studying the Yanomamo people who inhabit a bit of the jungle between Venezuela and Brazil.  Napoleon Chagnon wrote the best selling anthropology treatise of all time about them.**  They were fascinating for having been theretofore untouched by civilization.  Real time look at primal.  Garden of Eden it was not.  Guys sat around blowing hallucinogenic drugs up each other’s noses all day while women slashed, burned, and cooked.  Third of the men died violent deaths.

  I’ve read elsewhere that our incredible inability to get along is what led to the original diaspora from Africa.  Group gets to 5,000 or so in size, factions arise, violence attends, they spread out.  Years on, given half a chance, a group more technologically advanced wipes out one less so.  Jeesh.

  Somehow though we’ve made it this far.  Truth and beauty do exist and are known to exist by men and women alike.  President Sirleaf might well see more soulful women than men, but some men have tamed or cathected their urges and transmogrified their blood lust. 

  Mountaineers, for example, challenge gravity and weather to suffer a cold and frightful experience risking their contribution to the gene pool all the while.  First ascensionists get to pick the line and have naming rights when successful.  Sometimes position and kinesthetics combine to make a stairway to heaven.  On the massive Gogarth Sea Cliffs in North Wales for example, Ed Drummond put up a spectacular route which he named “Dream of White Horses”. 

  Or – just saw an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s late work.***  Unspeakable beauty.  Unspeakable.  The representation below of one picture from his “Peony Blossom Paintings” conveys only the slightest of hints of an in-person experience, but alongside panel six he has a haiku by Takarai Kikaku inspired by 14^th century samurai Kusunoki Masashige: 

Ah, The Peonies

For which

Kusonoki

Took off his Armour

Cool, huh?

* NYT Mag, 8/23/09

** Yanomamo, The Fierce People by Napoleon Chagnon, Holt Rinehart Winston 1968

***Cy Twombly: The Natural World Selected Works 2000-2007.  The Art Institute of Chicago May 16 – October 11, 2009

  Ever I hear folks arguing vociferously about the ascent of man I think about fathers coming out of the bleachers at little league games.  Ridiculous irrationality.  Give me a break.

  On the one hand you have folks who believe that an old dude of their own race awaits them in the hereafter.  A scary throwback to Old Testament literalism.  On the other, well, scientist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote: “Most important scientific revolutions involve the dethronement of human arrogance”.  How many times have thinkers of one stripe or another claimed to have reached the end?

  Myself?  I think that the middle ground, if you want to call it that, will be found in relation to consciousness.  Significantly, it’s origin and nature have not yet been discovered.  Sure, correlates of mental phenomena have been observed through brain imaging, but there is no consensus about how thoughts actually arise or what constitutes mind (as opposed to a brain).

  Some respected thinkers believe that consciousness might be another force – like gravity say – and similarly permeate all existence.  As I’ve mentioned before, approximately 75% of the universe, that has been calculated to exist, has not yet been found.  I think it works out something like this: Consciousness x Bell’s Theorem* = that 75%.

  Dial in the richness of Jung’s observations and there you have it.  In the September 20, 2009 New York Times Magazine there was an article about his long hidden “Red Book” titled The Holy Grail Of The Unconscious.  The book is said to stem from his mid-career “confrontation with his unconscious” during which lucid and florid dreams and visions came in “incessant streams”.  It is spectacularly illustrated by his own hand.

  He believed that we are all linked by a collective unconscious holding the whole of our history pretty much all the way back to stardust.  It manifests in each of us through the myths and archetypes that are made to constellate differently in an individual life by the forces borne upon them. 

  “Together, the patient and I address ourselves to the 2,000,000 year old man that is in all of us.  In the last analysis most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.  And where do we make contact with this old man?  In our dreams.”***

  There are many today skeptical, to say the least, of the utility of dream interpretation or any aspect of the “talking cure” for that matter.  I’d first refer them to the Gould’s words above and then simply say that once aware of Jung’s perspective it is incredible to follow him through a particular set of memories, dreams, and reflections – especially his own. 

  Herefrom echos my approach (only offered nearly seventy-five years ago). “I have been convinced that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of space and time.  This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness”.***

  Read some of his stuff, I’ll bet you’ll find resonance.

* Bell’s Theorem proves the non-local nature of reality.  cf July 18, 2008 below.

** From his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

***NYT October 4, 1936

  Knee hurts, so instead of running early AM I’ve been riding my bike lately.  Trouble is it’s now fall and dark.  Oh well – the better…  Upon the razor’s edge once again.  More juice.  Might coast from time to time, but better not drift mentally till sunup.

  Right turn and fifty yards out of my drive I drop down a steep hill.  Feel like Batman falling off a lofty ledge Gotham dead of night.  Shirt flutters, cool air streams by my face, I use my night vision to search for potholes.

  Zoom through intersections and by homes asleep to another steep hill the climbing of which has me off the seat, pounds my heart, and puts me into oxygen debt. Just near the top, a light goes on in house on left.  Kitchen.  Lady.  Uh, sweet!

  Roll down other side a short way turn right and up beneath trees spread both sides touching middle.  Blocks the little starlight not already filtered out by clouds.  Hit puddle, sprayed from behind feel wet line up back must look like skunk.  Then nearly toppled by an acorn, but it crunches.

  Level out, cool down, cross a busy road against the light.  Down longest hill yet into a park and a cloud.  Thought of last time through  and a gorgeous field of daisy-like flowers stretched toward dawn.  Now though, dream dark, came to mind Piazza Campo Di Fiori* in Rome upon which a tennis match played 1606 ended with the brutal murder of one opponent by the other – great painter (and brawler) Caravaggio.

  Funny, vigorous exercise almost always exorcises my demons. Or at least quiets them for a while.  Especially if hair on the back of my neck is up.  Quoting Holderlin Jung wrote: “Danger itself fosters the rescuing power”** 

  Out of the cloud mine sleep as I climb another hill then glide down the far side sharp turn right under bridge along swift creek.  Best Chinese restaurant in town on far side.  Ducks float in eddy to avoid Peking.

  Up last hill by kids’ elementary school (man, that was a long time ago…) turn left & coast to driveway. Twenty mile loop complete.  Stow bike  hose off French roast pat dog KISS WIFE ok. 

*”Field Of Flowers” in Italian.

**Carl Jung, Modern Man In Search of a Soul

***Painting is Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa which hangs in the Uffizi in Florence

  Here is Eakins’ Agnew Clinic.  Similar to his picture above, this honors a retiring surgeon also emphasizing his service as an educator.  The roiling factor here though is more subversive.

  Eakins thought that there was nothing more beautiful than the human body and went to great lengths to provide his students with the benefits of his talents.  Including once disrobing for a young coed to show a real male body in motion.

  On several occasions he allowed mixed gender life drawing classes.  Such disregard for the mores of the time brought trouble upon him and he was released from his position.  His choice of subject matter in the Agnew Clinic – a partially nude woman undergoing a mastectomy – was his retort.

  Eakins was born in Philadelphia in 1844 and thus lived his early years hearing whispers of war, was sixteen when the Civil War broke out, and twenty-one when it ended.   The mood in the birthplace of our nation must have been especially dark and turbulent through those developmentally crucial years.  The ramifications upon his fertile cortex must have been like that of acid rain on a forest.

  Jump forward a hundred years.  World War II had been won, factories were busy, and our democratic engine of capitalism had a full head of steam.  Everything was great – as long as one was white, straight, male, and in conformity.  Unbeknownst to the “Fathers Who Knew Best” there grew an undercurrent of disquiet and seething.

  The wake left on the leading edge of American consciousness shaped the art of the 1950s.  Its profile is just as impossible to capture in one work or one artist as during the 1850s, but a glimpse of an inflection might be had just as with Eakins.

  Robert Rauschenberg has been called a Neo-Dadaist which as defined by Oxford is “a movement characterized by anarchic revolt against traditional values”.  Here’s one of his pieces.  I’m not going to say that it foreshadows the incredible tumult of the sixties, but it sure does raise a few questions.  It’s called Monogram and was completed in 1959

  The 1960s did come and saw foment and ferment of historic proportions.  Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Vietnam War brought response in all sorts of protest art.  Pop Art mocked the rise of our Consumer Society.  In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  (1962), the sane and savvy, if sketchy, McMurphy was lobotomized for trying to help.

  “One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”.

  From the early days of the republic through the antebellum years, the American zeitgeist had been ebullient, dynamic, and filled with ambition and wanderlust.  Lewis and Clark, The Oregon Trail, Santa Fe, etc. The War Between the States however, catalyzed a wrenching change in its trajectory.

  600,000 lives were lost during the horrible conflict that followed our nation’s youthful exuberance – over 1% of the population. That’d translate into an incomprehensible 3,000,000 today.  Impossible for that not to be transformational, but the nature of the impact was not reserved to society’s human fabric.  As Lewis Menand wrote in his The Metaphysical Club: “… the United States became a different country.  The war alone did not make America modern, but the war marks the birth of modern America.”

  The secession of the south allowed what was left of congress to be a venue of action not seen since.  Progress.  It created the first system of national taxation; first national currency; public universities; completion of the transcontinental railway; and set the Republican Party up to promote industrial capitalism for years to come.

  The impact upon the common consciousness was darkly profound.  Democracy was supposed to progress with ayes and nays not blood and gore.  A proud American culture had given way to astonishing horror and irrationality.  “To some the war seemed not just a failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas.”

  This came to mind the other day when I was thinking about a picture I’d seen in Philadelphia Museum of Art a few months ago while paging through a tome on American Art at home the other day.  In the book I saw an image of the picture below, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri painted by George Caleb Bingham twenty years before the Civil War.  I know nothing of the history of that work, but can imagine the take of contemporaneous urban viewers. 

  “Wow.  Wish I was there instead of behind this desk headed for idle conversation with friends this evening.  That.  That’s living.  Trap a few beaver.  Fish.  Float down the river.  I want to be part of the wild west.  See stuff not seen before (Well, except for by Indians)”  In actual fact, thousands of people paid to view such pictures and get their only taste of the frontier.

  Now look at the picture from Philadelphia painted by Thomas Eakins ten years after the war’s end.  Gross*.  The title is The Gross Clinic.  “This is what our guts look like folks.  Get used to it.  Shit happens.  We obviously can not predict the outcome of this case just yet.  He might die.  Whatever.  We’re learning from our mistakes.”  Eakins thought this the best of his work.  He submitted it to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia only to see it rejected.  He sold it to Jefferson Medical College for $200. 

  The above is hardly scholarly, but it is impossible for me to imagine either picture to have been executed at the time of the other.  The spirit of a time is also a great reality.

*I heard somewhere that usage of the word “gross” to mean disgusting dates from this work.  A perusal of the OED yields nothing that would hold to the contrary.

**The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001

 Much the same as a bird convincing its brood that their wings will indeed lift them, in his poem The Master Speed, Robert Frost describes the incipient power of their union to a young couple.  “No speed of wind or water rushing by” though, this is something far beyond the physical realm.

  At the heart of the “master speed” is “the power of standing still” – the ability to simply be fully present and find the mundane extraordinary. Ironic the difficulty that pace presents to assume, especially in these harried days.  But only thus can a way begun to be found to live lives “wing to wing and oar to oar”.

  Frost spent a few years at the same college from which I graduated and that thought took me to my freshman year roommate.  He’s now an artist and in 2003 produced a series which comprised his Monogamy Project. 

  In the catalogue he wrote “ Painting and monogamy are dated practices oversteeped in tradition and held in suspicion.  Having thus been marginalized they become, surprisingly, areas that are ripe again for truly liberative activity.  It is my intention to celebrate these options.”

  There are six paintings in the series: Was a boy; Was adolescent; Am a man; Is a woman; Is a cellist; Am a father.

  Here’s Am a Man:

  At first it surprised me that therewith my artist friend discussed the philandering of poet William Carlos Williams.  He includes Williams’ poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower in which a tortured regret and plea for forgiveness are conveyed.  “Having your love, I was rich…”

I get it now.

  Here’s Is A Woman:

  Here he allows himself to “make this a beautiful painting… Follow all of my desires that call for full color and ripe shapes… To desire is to be alive… Desire gets us off the couch…”  Being my father’s son, and even though he wasn’t much into poetry, I get this part right away.

  The catalogue, in its entirety, comprises a provocative “love poem” and at the end of a recent reading I reconsidered Frost’s beautiful metaphor of wings and oars.  The visual images of the generative rhythms pop up right away, but what gives it its power is thought of the epic voyage that follows. 

*Craig Stockwell is the erstwhile roommate.  www.craigstockwell.com