The Subtle Landscape

Thank God for Kutta-Joukowski

January 13, 2012

Know that a bird’s flight feathers are analogous to the blades on an airplane’s propeller? It is actually the other way around of course, birds came before airplanes after all, but that is the manner in which the astonishment came to me.

And I’m not the Lone Ranger. Long before Kitty Hawk there were attempts at manned flight designed around the avian wing. The problem was propulsion. Wright Brothers, or someone else, would have been aloft sooner had they understood how birds do more than just glide.

OK, you’ll remember that the mechanics of flight revolve around a curved surface – an airfoil. As it moves through air (or water – think penguins) the molecules flowing over the curved top must move faster than those with the shorter path to travel below. This creates a drop in air pressure above and lift*.

Well, the outermost part of a wing – the hand wing – is composed of stiff slightly pointed primaries which are longitudinally asymmetrical. When a bird in flight flaps downward the narrower portion of the primaries curve creating airfoils and voila forward ‘lift’ occurs.

The several primaries on both wings of a bird combine into an analogue for a multi-blade propeller. One on each wing. Try it yourself next time you find a feather. Hold it by the bare part of the shaft and move it through the air as had its original owner. You won’t take off, but you’ll get the idea.

My favorite bird? Cooper’s Hawk. It is incredible to watch them Top Gun song birds. Cuts bird seed budget line item way back.

*Bernoulli’s principle, developed in the eighteenth century, explains the ramifications of the pressure differential, but not why the air moves faster on top than underneath. Explanations of flight and lift always bothered me because I was unable to get that part. I’m happy to report that the Kutta-Joukowski theorem, developed in the twentieth century addresses that aspect. It is complicated and I don’t completely understand, but feel better to know that I might one day.

Posted in Science, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Beauty

January 6, 2012

Last weekend while discussing politics in general and the (then) up coming Iowa caucuses in particular a friend offered that President Obama is a Moslem. I didn’t know which response should come first: who cares or no he’s not.

I guess it is elementally a case of an evolutionarily natural wariness of the ‘other’, but isn’t the internecine conflict between and amongst the three closely related Abrahamic religions crazy? Obviously Islam would not be the subject of so much attention but for Bin Laden et al. But, uh, Hitler was born into a Catholic family.

And was confirmed, and sang in a choir in a monastery. Stalin was born Eastern Orthodox and attended seminary. Stalin became an atheist and Hitler sort of backgrounded his own religion, but, still, why don’t horrors perpetrated by Christian soldiers come up in polite conversation while recent violent jihads do?

One’s personal belief system aside, we all have amongst our friends observant Christians, Jews, and Moslems. And there is beauty in each tradition. The case in point: in Arabic the word for beauty, virtue, and goodness is the same. Thus in the Muslim mind they are not separate concepts.

On NPR’s fascinating “On Being”** the prominent Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr said that “There is a very deep nexus between beauty and happiness. And happy is the person who realizes inner beauty. And ugliness in Arabic also means evil.”

On the same program were other clerics including the Dalai Lama who said: “One of my Muslim friend explained to me one interpretation of Jihad, not only sort of attack on other, but real meaning is combative attack your own wrongdoing or negativities.” To which Dr. Nasr responded: “The greater Jihad, the bigger Jihad, is to combat your own negative forces within you. Yes, yes.”

And back here in the caucuses was the struggle to appear to be the least tolerant – xenophobic even. A leader in the current issue of the Economist reads re runner-up Santorum: “Now is the time for consenting adults to lock their bedroom doors”.

Jeesh. On this subject therapist James Hollis writes***: “One oppresses what one fears. Fear is responsible for the oppression of women and gay bashing, the latter most notably by young men insecure in their own psychological reality”.

Scratch the New Year’s resolution in my last post. Jihad!

*The Arabic calligraphy above reads: “God loves beauty”

**Show broadcast Sunday January 1, 2012

***What Matters Most,Gotham, 2010

Posted in Politics, Religion | 2 Comments »

Live Your Life

December 30, 2011

Clearly and obviously I am among the more dazed and confused. Can’t stay on topic. Short attention span. Where some, most it seems, see the path before them plain as day – even if it be one requisite of adroit maneuver – I usually can’t see my own fingers if arm’s at full extension.

Sometimes there’s something going on in my head that causes not a little distress. Though I’ve had florid (sober) hallucinations, I’ve have never heard voices and never lost a reality test (at least not one of which I was aware), but I have indeed felt the weighty presence of an uninvited emotional tone.

Makes me think of a couple of things. First the Russell Crowe/John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind. Like I said, I don’t have manifest imaginary friends but do occasionally have stuff I sometimes successfully banish to the periphery. A dismal succession of future events more often than a winning lottery ticket.

Secondly Julian Jaynes. I’ve previously mentioned his incredible book Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The chief premise is that human preconsciousness was characterized by auditory hallucinations – voices -“gods”. Of which such things occurring here and now are vestigial traces. From barely discernable rumblings all the way to schizophrenia. Hmmm.

Maurice Sendak. Listening to an interview with him yesterday on that wonderful NPR “Fresh Air” program I heard him tell Terri Gross: “…which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean… when I was younger I was afraid of something that didn’t make a lot of sense… [but now I know that] There’s nothing to worry about.”

Maybe there’s hope. I do indeed agree that it can help to write shit down.

GROSS: Well, I’m really glad we got the chance to speak because when I heard you had a book coming out I thought what a good excuse to call up Maurice Sendak and have a chat

SENDAK: Yes, that’s what we always do, isn’t it?

GROSS: Yeah, it is

SENDAK: Thank God we’re still around to do it.

GROSS: Yes

SENDAK: (Who’s 83) And almost certainly, I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you.

GROSS: Oh, God what a…

SENDAK: …It doesn’t matter. I’m a happy old man.

GROSS: I wish you all good things

SENDAK: And I wish you all good things… Live your life, live your life, live your life.

That’s going to be my New Year’s Resolution.

*If you haven’t ever listened to “Fresh Air” you are doing yourself a great disservice. Go to the website and listen to the podcast of this interview. It was played yesterday as an encore from September because it was the most commented upon interview of the 2011.

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Literature | 1 Comment »

Hallelujah

December 23, 2011

Yesterday I was reading an article* about Carlos Jimenez, a young (52 which is younger than I am anyway) architect in Houston and remembered visiting him in his office about a decade ago. Looking back through my notes, I remembered that he introduced me to the concept of generosity in architecture – its power to enhance the quality of one’s living.

He had entertained thoughts of entering the priesthood. Those thoughts had long ago left him but, “my Catholic background was very beneficial because I learned a lot about human qualities that have a kind of transformative power. And as I do architecture, I realize that one has a duty to transform certain realities. Any project calls forth an occasion to solve its problems and aspire beyond them. That is when a work of architecture arises…”

As opposed to a thoughtless agglomeration of rooms. There are differences both subtle and not so. It is no surprise that great architects relish opportunities to design places of worship whether they be churches or museum. People visit those building types hoping to be moved spiritually and are thus prized consumers of finely wrought spaces.

All makes me think of the off quoted notion (here and elsewhere) that “architecture is nothing but frozen music” and am sure that many folks more quickly recall being moved by music than by moving through built space. It is universal. Incredibly so.

A few months ago on NPR’s Fresh Air I heard a researcher describe a situation involving a profoundly handicapped young woman. She had been born with only the most ancient components of a brain enabling only the most basic physiological systems.

There had never been any concern for her experience of life because no one figured there was awareness. One day, for some reason, someone brought in a music box, wound it up, and pushed go. It was immediately apparent that there was register as she turned toward the device ever so slowly in a process reminiscent of a slow motion take of a flower turning toward the sun. There were gasps all around.

Those of us more fortunate can notice differing effects of the differing permutations of particular arrangements of notes or rooms. Take the exact same sets of either, rearrange them, and voila – something new, but generative of very different emotion.

Like this for example:

Or this:

*Architect, December 2011

**Jimenez was on the shortlist for the design of a new art museum in a city by the Mississippi. Here is what he said about the site: “I am struck by the rich potential of the chosen site…challenge will be to address these two compelling forces (urban grid and the river) in a building that bridges and filters one and the other. The collection, the galleries, light, space, flows, views, landscape, all must merge”. His aesthetic is similar to the one selected, but method of delivery more sensual.

Posted in architecture, Music | Leave a Comment »

How To Never Have A Sick Day

December 16, 2011

I obviously like words. I have the OED on my hard drive and enjoy just cruising through it from time to time. My son used to call me Mr. Big Words, but truth be told I am almost always dead last in a Scrabble challenge. Guess I’m just good at looking stuff up.

I should probably come clean though and fess that my favorite words are monosyllabic, terse, and widely understood. Even among non English speakers. I remember a drunken Swedish stevedore reeling them off on a North Sea wharf long ago even before I heard George Carlin do so.

They come in handy. Our first dog would hide when she heard me strapping on my tool belt because she knew what to expect. Our recently passed pal Sauger wouldn’t though, but he was a guy and must have understood.

I’m sure I’m responsible for the, uh, clever part of our three kids’ vocabulary. Isn’t it an event of which to be proud when your child is first heard to say “oh crap” when the family gets caught outside in the rain? Or drops the f-bomb at Thanksgiving dinner while sporting a cherubic first step grin?

Furthermore, I’m happy to relate that there is no longer any reason to feel even a twinge of guilt for having set such an example. Exemplar is more like it. Salty language has been proven to be an avenue to salubrity. “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear” said psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England in his study “Swearing as a response to pain”.

He and his colleague Claudia Umland undertook a project in which subjects held their hands in freezing water for as long as they could. Some were told to spew epithet(s) of choice without relent and others to keep mum. The former withdrew their hands long after the latter group gave up.

Scientists theorize that cursing emanates from a different part of the brain than does pitter patter. A part (the amygdala) more closely associated with emotion and the fight or flight response. It has been an evolutionary advantage to feel one’s self gird quickly up at the first note of pain through whatever sensory system the message might have arrived.

Hmm. I read somewhere that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney said that trolling his mind for just the right word was indeed like throwing a line in a pond to catch a fish. What could be the metaphor or simile for my more base proclivity? Like plunging a stool?

Oh well, could though be why I haven’t had a sick day in thirty-five years. I’ll have to ask Dr. Brother. And hope he doesn’t say anything to Mom.

*Study was published in the journal NeuroReport in July 2009. I read about it in Scientific American.

Posted in Family, Science | Leave a Comment »

I Need The Eggs

December 9, 2011

Interestingly, in his new book Who’s In Charge* cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga wrote: “…we are people, not brains” by which he means that, uh, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. That though an emergent property of the bit of grey matter up top, a meeting of minds can not be understood as can, say, theIndianapolis 500 by the mechanics of an internal combustion engine.

He holds that: “analyzing single brains in isolation cannot illuminate the capacity of responsibility”. Rather, it is “an interaction between people – a social contract”. One, crucially, able to be honored or broken. And it’s irreducible. A solitary test lap would be meaningless.

Makes me think of the Buddhist imperative to “forget the self”, because there’s not one really there to begin with. It’s (they say) a construct assembled by the brain from inputs internal and external to aid us in navigation through a daily routine. If some combination of influences doesn’t make you feel trustworthy or un-, you will have no ability to feel either.

Perhaps the example of feral children can provide a useful, if horrific, example. Romulusand Remus aside, there have indeed been cases of infants and children who survived early extreme neglect, sometimes actually with the nurturance of wild animals. If protracted, a child’s mental and psychological development ends at a prehensile stage.

Beyond hope and possibility of resurrection. Should a one not be exposed to language – in any form – by puberty, the potential for later acquisition would have thus been rendered forever lost. But, with luck and the agency of a “Good Enough Parent”**, a child grows to become part of a rich network with myriad relationships – some inchoate and fleeting some deep and long.

Of the latter sort, I like the way Woody Allen put it in his film Annie Hall. “I-I thought of that old joke, you know, this, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And uh, the doctor says ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says ‘I would but I need the eggs’. Well, I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and…but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”

I do.

*I read about this book in a review by Raymond Tallis in the 11/12-13 WSJ. Gazzaninga first gained prominence in the 50’s when he pioneered split brain research. That is, brains in which the tissue connecting the halves – the corpus callosum – had been severed. This lead to the knowledge of hemispherical specialization. Interesting to note that the corpus callosum is more substantial in females. I wonder what the ramifications of that are…

**I’ve heard this phrase a lot, but it’s capitalized in reference to the eponymous great book by Bruno Bettleheim.

***Perhaps the eggs come frequently to mind because Annie Hall came out – and won the Oscar – in 1977. The year I got my roommate.

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Family, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Best Doggone Dog In The West*

December 2, 2011

That’s Sauger looking over Great Sand Dune National Park during a road trip with his soul mate a few summers ago. He’d already turned twelve by then which is old for a big dog – just check out his grey muzzle. He loved his home, but wouldn’t be separated from her if it was within his power not to be and he thus enthusiastically accompanied her on this artist-in-residency.

Although we have many photos of him with friends and all family members, I am quite drawn to the one above. It makes me think hard about what the world must have looked like through his eyes. It makes me remember the subtle new verve in his demeanor I noticed when the two of them picked me up at the dusty windblown airport about an hour from that remote park.

He’d seen things. Smelled them first probably. Ya, imagine the rich sensual experience it was for him, an Iowa boy, to take it all in from high up the side of a mountain. Then near the end of their stay, it must have been an immensely satisfying, if uncomplicated, recapitulation of an incredible existential adventure.

He’d had to worry about blowing sand, coyotes at night, weird birds and bugs, a thundering herd of elk, steep mountain trails, and the cold snow rimmed (in summer!) mountain lake far above tree line – all the while keeping close tabs on his companion. He and she had survived it all – together – and their bond deepened to unplumbed depths by the end of the experience.

In his book Dogs Never Lie About Love, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson goes to a very great length to describe canine capacity for emotion and our capacity to be drawn into it. “Perhaps it harks back to a time when humans were more like dogs, more spontaneous, more capable of expressing joy, able to experience intense emotions and enjoy the world outside our skins more immediately, in the same way we see our dogs doing.”

“If any species on earth shares this miraculous ability with us [to love intensely and completely] it is the dog, for the dog truly loves us, sometimes beyond expectation, beyond measure, beyond what we deserve, more, indeed, than we love ourselves.”

Holy Dogs. Our friend Sauger moved on earlier this week just a few months shy of his fifteenth birthday. He was strong and vigorous till nearly the very end and the marvel of vet, friend, and foe.

Here’s how it is for his favorite artist: “It came to me that every time I lose a dog they take a piece of my heart with them. And every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of their heart. If I live long enough, all the components of my heart will be dog and I will become as generous and loving as they are.”

Jeesh. Best doggone dog in the west.

*From the lyrics to the song you just heard. See the movie if you haven’t.

**cf post of 6/9/10 for Sauger’s near drowning

***cf post of 10/17/09 for more about the Sand Dunes

****cf post of 5/8/09 for a photo and emotional prelude

*****cf post of 11/21/08 for a photo and a brief look into his mind

Posted in Family | 2 Comments »

Wonder When The All Clear Will Come

November 25, 2011

Though it is not exactly the story he tells, in his new book The Bear History of a Fallen King, French cultural historian Michel Pastoureau shows how the coming of consciousness gave its bearers power which descendents have yet even now to effectively tame.

In prehistoric times bears were feared, perhaps deified as a result, and thus immortalized on cave walls. Common in Europe they were more than a match for dimwitted pre-humans. Once the light went on however, so was the hunt and the rest, well, history.

By the time of Charlemagne in the late eighth century it was mere sport. He led forays that were responsible for incredible ursine carnage – thousands upon thousands. By the 1200 sightings in the wild had become rare. Bears did however make trifling appearances in zoos, circuses, and traveling minstrel shows. They’re there now nearly extinct.

Reminds me of a roundtable discussion amongst nuclear weapon developers on NPR a decade or so ago. Moderator asked about what had led to a particular cold war multiple level of magnitude increase in throw-weight. Answer? “It was a sweet technological problem. Hee, hee, hee.”

Fortunately, we also are thus far this side of extinction. But cf the ongoing decimation of species, climate change, and pressure of well armed hungry thirsty populations, the all clear is not yet out.

Funny thing though is that, with luck, the significant expansion of North American breeding bear populations might be an indicator of a new coming to conscience. They are messy, destructive, and sometimes violent and deadly. Yet, “The people [in their range] look at these bears as members of the community”.*

If a friend was killed or your kitchen destroyed by Yogi or Boo Boo the incident would not be something of which to make light. However, yesterday was Thanksgiving and maybe we should look with favor upon the fact that these days the response to an initial minor incursion might not be to whack. That there’s maybe an incipient wonder about the cosmic distribution of sentience and consciousness.

*WSJ; 11/21/11; As Bears Multiply, Human Clashes Rise.

**Photo on top of Cro-Magnon painting in Chauvet cave from Smithsonian 12/10

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Evolution, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Wonder If He Still Had An Accent

November 18, 2011

OK. See that guy? That’s William Godfrey. He was born in Kent England late eighteen-forties and began life in an orphanage. Somehow left/escaped and in 1855 made his way to the states as a stowaway. Found work as a butcher’s apprentice. Few years later mustered into the Union Army.

Was captured and taken to the infamous “Can this be hell?” Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp shortly after its opening in February 1864. Roughly one in three fell to its deadly mix of beatings, squalor, and disease. Before succumbing, one, hometown Geneseo Illinois, showed a tintype of fiancé. Her name, Myra, was the last word to leave friend’s lips.

Emaciated and dehydrated, Godfrey said that he survived interment by making his way, under the dark of each night, over and around the dead and dying to a fetid creek. Months felt like eternity, but miraculously, come summer, he became part of a prisoner exchange and led a group of forty men driving 200 cattle 300 miles to meet Sherman in Atlanta.

Fourteen survived to join the General’s conflagratory march to the sea. There, he boarded a ship which caught fire and foundered off Cape Hatteras. Didn’t know how to swim and went down three times that he remembered – the last of which fondly… Came to on deck of another ship making north.

Marched in a parade in Washington, DC. Eastern army was done up in crisp uniforms and white gloves. Passing before President Lincoln’s box, Godfrey and the rest of the Western army were bedraggled, barefoot, barehanded, and bareheaded. They felt disgraced, but were fed and regained energy and horizon.

War ended soon thereafter and he mustered out to homelessness. Thought of that tintype which he’d somehow kept, made his way to Geneseo, and even though the scrap was by then but a vestigial facsimile found where lived she of whom it had been taken. Found her in a garden. Found her beautiful beyond any dream.

She’s the one in the photo below, at lower right. Great-Great-Grandma Godfrey. Babe in starched linen is my mom. Grandma Gretchen is holding her with Great-Grandma Lu standing behind. Grandpa Godfrey was gone by then, but had apparently led every town and county parade – fully festooned – till he was no longer able. Wonder if he still had an accent.

Posted in Family | Leave a Comment »

Wash of the Zeitgeist

November 11, 2011

The three pictures you see below were all painted by Iowa native son Marvin Cone. All come up for auction next week. All are interesting – all the more in juxtaposition.

The first, just below, is titled “Sunlight and Shadows – Luxembourg Gardens Paris 1929”. Though it is expected to draw the least interest and least dinero I quite like it for a number of reasons. First, it is indeed pleasant to look at. Though not exactly exuberant, it conveys a fine sense of the joy concomitant with a stroll through a park in the height of fall foliage.

And I know that park. It’s not far from the Louvre and my first perambulations therein followed shortly after an eye-opening Art History 101 and during a revelatory term abroad. I fell under the spell of the ‘City of Light’ the moment I stepped off the train.

And further to that point – the painting, having been executed in 1929, came well after the height of impressionism and a decade after the creation of cubism by Picasso and Braque probably just blocks away. I relate in a proud and positive way to the combination of naiveté and insouciance indigenous to this great state.

The painting below – “White Barn No.1” clearly, if blandly, has turned away from what some (still!) would call European avant-gardism. Stated more positively, it is a visual metaphor for the hard working, simple and straight-forward valued folks of our nation’s heartland.

“Farm Silhouette” at bottom is expected to make the highest bid of the three lots – $125,000 to $175,000 – and for me also has the most complex emotional tone. On one hand it evinces a crepuscular nostalgia for rural America.

On the other, well, it made me think of the Cormac McCarthy title Outer Dark and the outer dark is not a good place to be… “They aint a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me… I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God aint put out the sun and gone away…”

Cone painted “Farm Silhouette” in 1948 – long after the sunset of Regionalism, after the horrors of WWII, after the incredible industrialization ofAmerica, and after he and his better known brethren (Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry) were compared with the social realists of 1930s Russia. As an artist, on that bluff, he must have felt from afar the wash of the abstract expressionist zeitgeist.

“Farm Silhouette” is the only one of the three I’ve seen in person and an interesting experience it was. Next to last on the scene, I took a call from a soon to arrive expert. “Where do you have it?” “We’re in the vault.” “Get it out of there; the blue tone of the fluorescents won’t do it justice.”

We moved to a room bathed in natural light and even though not directly before the sun, what a difference it did make. Slapped myself in the head for the umpteenth time.*

Clearly the painting is in very good condition with original frame and stretcher. Black light inspection showed no in-painting or restoration. Paper trail (aka provenance) seamless all the way back to the artist.

Lot to think about…

*cf post of Sept 23, 2011. Also, I recently listened to a tenured painting professor bemoan a temporary studio classroom lit with fluorescents. “Unbelievably shitty…”

Posted in Art | Leave a Comment »