theburnishedopal

[theburnishedopal]

My article on renosterveld in the summer issue of Langscape, the magazine on Biocultural Diversity from the organization Terralingua. I’m pround to tell some of the story of renosterveld in the context of supporting biocultural diversity and the richness of landscape and language.

[theburnishedopal]

Blue

Blue is people’s favourite colour. It’s the colour of obsession, as told in Maggie Nelson’s wondrous book Bluets. It’s the colour of some pieces of art I saw in the Kunstverein in Goettingen, and it’s the colour of the Conservative party in the UK, who have just elected a new leader. 

There’s nothing like being in a gallery space to set your mind back on track. Experiencing very mild Sunday afternoon blues, I walked five minutes out of the door down to the art gallery on Gotmarstrasse, Goettingen, which I’ve walked past perhaps four or five hundred times, and not visited. The moment I walked through the front door, I luxuriated in the feeling of these old German buildings, with high ceilings, whitewashed walls, glimpses of green-filled rear courtyards through wood-framed windows, and curved wooden banisters alongside wide stone steps. These buildings have seen the Romantic period, have seen Nobel Prize winners and poets and spirited women (which have not often enough been the Nobel prize winners, certainly the poets, although that’s another topic for another day). I was soothed and I hadn’t even set eyes on any art yet.

As it turned out, the exhibition was not great, but the colour play pleased my soul, especially the deep, bright blue. I visited another exhibition (austellung) in the Altes Rathaus, a beautiful building in the very centre of the town. Whenever I go in there I am reminded of how much I like the painted medieval coats-of-arms high on the wooden walls, one representing every village and county in the region, giving the visitor a little idea of its identity and personality. 

Within an hour, I was inspired enough to wish to draw or paint, and got as far as a pencil drawing of Angela Merkel which unfortunately turned out rather more to resemble Hitler. Some left-wing activist could no doubt make a satirical sign out of such a notion, but it was entirely not my intention. Somehow the side parting, the shadow under the nose and the stiff formal jacket contrived to hint that way. I’ve just been inspired by Merkel’s 2019 Harvard address, in which she espouses breaking down walls and not accepting things the way they are, so in fact my will to sketch her intelligent features were in response to her antifascism, but the universe has a dark sense of humour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ofED6BInFs 

[theburnishedopal]

Dubuffet’s Primary Coloured Sanctum

A passage in Rebecca Solnit’s essay “A Short History of Silence”, in discussing various forms of silence and feminist waves of emergence from such silences, references Susan Sontag’s description of male artists choosing silence. Marcel Duchamp and Arthur Rimbaud, for example, chose silence as a gesture of scorn, or transcendence, or departure - but “only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively.” Solnit elaborates, “It’s the quiet some choose after being heard and valued - the antithesis of being silenced.”

In September 2016, I travelled to the village of Périgny-sur-Yerres, outside of Paris, where Jean Dubuffet worked in his 70s in his workshop, now open to the public at certain times such as Paris’ autumnal Week of Culture. It is not any kind of workshop - it is a huge abstract construction of organic shapes in primary colours classic to DuBuffet’s paintings. The space can be peeled back in layers like an onion. The exterior is fabricated from resin walls, painted in white with black outlines. As a visitor I enter through a door into a building shaped a little like a giant tortoises’ shell and pass through increasingly complex chambers, where reds and blues are introduced into the colour scheme. Finally, along with the other visitors, I entered the inner chamber, the core or nucleus of the space, which is decorated (note use of the word ‘decorated’, a traditionally feminine activity; the masculine options would have been ‘fabricated’ - in truth it is both fabricated and decorated) in a much smaller-scale, more intricate design of many manifestations of the organic shapes. These shaped 3D walls are carved out of polystyrene using electrically heated wire tools that DuBuffet designed himself, and outlined in black and painted white, blue, red and yellow. The guide tells us that DuBuffet used to come and meditate in this peculiar inner space, this sanctum (sanctum from the latin sanctus meaning holy) following the mammoth effort it would have taken to create.

What hammered away in my head during the visit was the clarity of the freedom this man had to create his space in as untraditional a way as he liked. Meaning not that he lived in a period where it was possible to do so, but that he had resources freely available to him and the agency to innovate; that he did not feel sufficient self-doubt or uncertainty to prevent him from requesting what he needed to realise the designs in his head, both tool and product; that he was within sufficient psychological, material and political security to singularly pursue and execute an original vision. And not on a small scale; on a large one.

When looking at large scale art we find fewer female artists because the cultural, societal and physical spaces accessible to women exist in smaller quantity than for men. Women subsequently turn inward, work on the small scale, often in the decorative arts; jewellery, textiles, illustration, so called ‘crafts’, arts of exquisite finesse and delicacy; large scale sculpture and painting is made far more commonly by men, such as Turrell, Hirst, Long, Goldsworthy, Gormley.

The DuBuffet workshop demonstrates staggering assurance on many fronts, two being i) that he can get it built, and ii) that he can have such a space for private use and solo meditation. As I peer at the painted polystyrene I ask myself - What did people ask of him? Did anyone ask about the reasonableness, the practicality, the necessity of such a creation? I am curious about these questions because I am curious about barriers both experiential and psychological to achieving art. Such questions would not form barriers to the work’s completion per se, but would introduce seeds of doubt and scepticism into the process, which in the context of unequal division of literal, geographical, conceptual and conversational space across gender, could form the first hurdle at which women are more likely to fall.

[theburnishedopal]

Metamorphosis, a police escort and the Midnight Fremont Summer Solstice Parade

I kneel down on the deck of the float, sun cloaking my shoulders in warmth. I am absorbed in the action of stitching blue thread through pale blue netting. The stitches are rough but regular. Slowly I make my way across the chassis floor, following the rough line Dave has cut in the shape of butterfly wings, occasionally making mistakes, breaking and tying off the thread, then rethreading and starting anew along the same line.

I am helping to make wings for ‘Metamorphosis’, a butterfly-inspired float. The float will house Dave and Jon’s long-running band, The Shamaniacs, while they play peculiar reggae-rap-psychedelic-rocknroll for two hours as they are pushed through Fremont with thousands of people lining the streets, under the Solstice sun. The float is human-powered, although a generator will project the band’s sound.

The float is pale green and flat, with a pull bar at the front and a push bar at the back that are wrapped in foam and duct tape for comfort. Dave and Jon will be relying on friends and family to push them along the length of the parade. A clear plastic U-shaped gazebo stretches over the float, and handmade paper flowers dangle and decorate all the support beams. I ziptie plastic cutout butterflies onto the front post. One of them is a Camberwell Beauty. It has a smear of free chocolate across the center – I think it’s been in the hands of Jon’s seven-year-old daughter.

We work through the evening, surrounded by bustle and creativity. Up the street, a gigantic Sasquatch is taking shape. His hand now waves slowly, just like a dull giant, but his flesh and eyes glow with colour and thought. Next to us people paint bright yellow and glitter on wood. People stick faces of police brutality victims onto a float which resembles a four-poster bed opposite us. Some kids practice their stilt walking. Outside the Powerhouse, the Art Studio which is vomiting all this creativity out into the street, guys with waxed mustaches and quizzical green eyes use power tools to build the centerpiece float. Designed by Pacific Northwest artist Carl Smool, it will have four giant gargoyle heads atop fabric skyscrapers – the ‘Corporate Gargoyles’. Yesterday evening, I spent hours stipple painting one of the heads to resemble stone. Carl creates papiér mâché pieces of art for activism. Somehow he is overseeing everything.

Jon’s daughter, Samantha, was the inspiration for Metamorphosis, as she flitted about the solstice last year in butterfly wings. She runs around in a black leotard, occasionally coming back to check on progress.

I am privileged to work on the float and get to know Dave and Jon a little. Jon plays me the Shamaniacs’ music. It is unashamedly exuberant and upbeat and I say so; Jon looks at me knowingly and nods. “I am joyful, I’m very joyful,” he says. He is. He talks constantly about life in Seattle, where he has ended up, things he considers achievements, ideas, channeling spirit energy. “I opened the first vegan restaurant – truly vegan restaurant –in Seattle. We didn’t even serve coffee ‘cause we thought it was bad for you.” I find comfort in his take on things. He is wildly positive with childish enthusiasm, but just a shade of self-reflection adds an edge. A girl needs an edge to know where to look. It’s like a horizon.

Dave is wild-haired and thoughtful. He has a quieter, focused energy. He talks of science and ideas too. “I think the next scientific revolution is that we are going to find we are all interconnected”. Wow. A girl likes a conversation to get her teeth into.

Dave and Jon’s old, old friendship is touching. Dave needs a box to sit on during the parade – his detached cruciate ligament won’t let him stand on shaky or wobbly things, like a solstice parade float! He looks around for Jon, and calls to him to make him a wooden box. Jon goes down to the Powerhouse, finds the right tools and pieces of wood, brings them back and makes him a wooden box. Is there any purer expression of friendship than making a friend a box to sit on?

The night gets darker and the wings are complete. We mount them onto the rods and hoist them. Other band members arrive, smoke, eat pizza, tell stories of busking. The floats surrounding us take shape – a rotating silver cone covered in inflatable sharks; a red robot with cake costumes; Sasquatch has hair. The preparation and frantic clean-up is so good natured. Jon and I agree that the community art process is the same fix, somehow, as spending time out in the hills or forests. Soul-making.

We gather outside the Powerhouse and the heads of the Fremont Arts Council explain to us with megaphones and cheering what happens now. It is Friday night, the night before the big Solstice Parade day. The floats are to be moved to the parade head location on Leary Way, in what is known as the Midnight Parade. This involves all the floats being drawn down through Fremont in the middle of the night with a police escort. There is palpable excitement. I hadn’t planned on being there so late, but I agree to stick around and help push Metamorphosis down through to the parade head.

Cops on motorbikes have arrived. Night has fallen and the flashing blue and red lights gleam off their white helmets and off the glittering floats.

As it turns out, to my joy and fortune, the Shamaniacs’ float is last in the main parade tomorrow, which means it is first out on the midnight parade. The safety vests check the Avenue up and down. The cops line up either side, Danny DeVitos in shades and uniforms straddling their bikes. Two organizers pull out a giant boombox on wheels, begin playing Motown, and we wheel out Metamorphosis onto the road. We go slowly down the hill, and each float comes out one by one behind us, with whoops and cheers. I look back when we are stopped at the traffic lights to see this ghostly parade of peculiarities which cannot really be made out in the night light. There are enough hands pulling/pushing Metamorphosis that Joe, a busker and band member, and I, sit on the front of the float, at the head of the parade, laugh and dangle our legs off the side, as we make our way through the late night neighbourhood streets. I couldn’t have stopped grinning if I’d wanted to.

People spill out of bars and cheer as we go by. The cops’ lights continue to flash. The organizers with the boombox at the head announce the parade will be taking place tomorrow. Joe pulls out a selection of small percussion instruments from his backpack and presses some into my hands. We make rhythmic noise in time with Stevie Wonder blasting out into the street and laugh at Jon’s mad dynamism. He and his wife Betsy are pulling the float and Jon is stamping, leaping, getting off on the energy. The whole experience is surreal. We pass by my office building, which has a large Saturn planet atop the roof. Tonight, the Saturn is lit up. We see the clear yellow sliver of moon straight ahead in the west.

We reach the parking lot that is the head of the parade and pull Metamorphosis in to her overnight resting place. The other floats follow suit and people toast with plastic cups. We gather and breathe. I try and express my gratitude for sharing the experience. Betsy nods knowingly too. I feel like I have found some of Fremont’s blood.

*******

The next day, I gather my housemates and friends, we dress in green, and make our way out into this sunny day to Fremont. The streets are now full of daygoers, children, street stalls, dogs, tents and free sunglasses. We stop at the Brouwer’s Café for pre-parade Dutch courage. Then I feel like we should head back up to the parade head, to join our parade crew.

I was asked if I’d like to be in the parade when up at the Powerhouse working on the floats, and thought, why not. I have roped my friends in to being green ‘money bunnies’. This is the crew that surrounds the Green Hat float. A giant green top hat turned upside down. The money bunnies wear green bunny ears, a white rabbit comes out of the hat, and we poke sparkling green hats on sticks into the crowd for donations to Fremont Arts Council. We have the boombox to explain to the crowd how the parade happens every year and ask for donations, and we also have our own ragtag marching band. A little apprehensive about getting my friends to fundraise – no-one likes asking strangers for money – they are wonderful, game, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s pretty fun. People are very generous. It’s fun to interact with the crowd. They clearly love the parade. Women put five dollar bills in my hat and blow kisses.

Lily dances and shimmies her way through the whole thing. Somehow Kristin hops up onto the boombox and dances as it is maneuvered down the open streets. I have no goddam idea how that happened because that thing was almost impossible to push in a straight line, so who knows how she managed to stand and dance on top of it in actual motion.

It is blazing hot and we are soon thirsty, but this energy keeps us going. For sure I have felt Solstice fever the whole weekend. I couldn’t concentrate on a thing on Friday. The fever gets channeled through a creative act, like stipple painting a gargoyle head or stitching a giant butterfly wing. This is the culmination, the celebration.

Around us are naked cyclists body-painted rainbow colours, samba dancers, marching bands, overtly sexual hoopists, musicians and photographers. It’s a colourful riot.

We finally get to Gasworks Park, the parade finale, and shore up the green hat, now full of dollar bills. We get free beer tickets and t-shirts. We go claim our beers and sit in the beer garden. Everyone is talking to everyone. Half the people outside the beer garden are half naked. I proudly show the housemates the Toilets sign I painted. We watch someone climb bare-handed up a pole on the gasworks tanks and then proceed to do parkour to the top of one of the giant silo ladders.

“I love that we can see a family and a baby in a stroller,” says Suz, “and then right behind them is a woman with painted gold tits.” What’s weird is how normal it is. Some dude is wearing nothing but sheep bones. Vertebrae down his front, and a ram’s skull slung around his waist cradling his penis.

The sun fades from its sixteen hours on Seattle. The Solstice fever abates. Now we are into the lengthening and the ripening, with a harvest on the horizon.

[theburnishedopal]

Renosterveld and Medicinal Plants in Malmesbury

The wealth of plant diversity in renosterveld and fynbos, two natural shrub-scrub habitats found only in South Africa’s Western Cape, offers many plants which have medicinal purposes and soothe ailments, if only one knows how to identify them. Traditional South African ‘bush doctors’ have harvested and prescribed these plants to the sick for thousands of years.

Nowadays, in the Swartland agricultural mosaic of the Western Cape, renosterveld is critically endangered and only small fragments remain, mostly on hillsides and rocky outcrops known as “koppies”. One of the larger fragments is  known as “Klipkoppie”, and was formerly a landfill site, and home to a large motocross trail network. It recently been designated a nature reserve, and the motocross is officially forbidden, although motorbike and quad bike riders regularly flout the ban and ride freely across the reserve, which can cause damage and erosion to the plants and soils. Another issue which, according to the council, threatens the integrity of the renosterveld ecosystem is the digging up and harvesting of medicinal plants by local Rastafarian ‘bush doctors’.

If one stops in the vibrant section of town by the taxi station, one can find people selling fruit and vegetables and snacks along the sidewalk. Among the melee, I find a group of Rastafarians sitting next to an open sack, spread across the concrete, upon which have been displayed various bundles and packages of medicinal plants. The young Cape woman generously explains to me each of the plants and what they are good for. Her husband is the bush doctor and knows more, she tells me, but he is currently inside the Fish&Chip shop. I look through the window and see a Rastafarian man, dressed in the traditional sack, with dreadlocks down to his waist and bare feet, looking up at the board behind the counter and choosing his meal.

When he comes out, the pair of them point to the different plants and explain what they are good for. On one side of the sacks are bulbs and roots, and on the other are bunches of herbs and wrapped leaves. They show me large bulbs of cinnamon root, which is good for piles and clogged arteries; wild mountain garlic which has a bunch of squid-like tentacles and smells pungent; bunches of renosterbos and sage for tea or smudging (cleaning a house by burning and spreading the sage smoke to remove unwanted spirits); a paper bag of aloe leaves; ointments prepared with aloe and Vaseline; ‘elephant’s feet’ and ‘kankerbossie’ (cancer bush).

The woman explains that her husband goes to the veld every week to harvest in the fynbos from anywhere she calls generally “the Mountain”. I have an image of the Rasta in his sack with a large spade, digging up bulbs and picking leaves from the omnipresent renosterbos. “I can cut a piece for you, 20 rand, 30 rand, how much you need”, he says, indicating the cinnamon bulb.

I see with my own eyes that the harvesting is happening, and that the critically endangered renosterveld is home to this kind of unregulated activity, but I am charmed by the connection these people have to their local ecosystem, and the traditional knowledge that is alive and kicking on the Swartland streets. In the time that I talk to them both, at least two or three men come to ask the Rasta man about a cure or boost for something, and he sells them a little pack of leaves for high blood pressure or fertility or so on. I am also struck by the vibrancy and energy of the black and coloured community down in the town. It makes the white person’s way of life, in malls and air-conditioned cars, look very dull and sterile.

None of the plants I saw were critically endangered plants, nor was the amount so great. I know that medicinal plants are lauded as an alternative means of income for people wanting to manage their renosterveld and fynbos rather than clear for agriculture. It seems to me that the knowledge of the bush doctors and link they cultivate between the renosterveld and the local communities is something to be supported rather than an undesirable activity to be suppressed.

[theburnishedopal]

Drought and Survival

The first thing I hear about the Swartland landscape is that it is dry. The area is suffering the third drought year in a row, and this is the driest year in 120 years. Dam levels are critically low and all across the city of Cape Town, billboards and signs on buses and trucks urge water conservation through fewer laundry washes and keeping daily usage to under seven litres per person per day. When I collect the hire car at the airport, the Avis rental desk has a small notice telling customers that their car may be dusty or dirty on the outside, because car washes are limited to save more water.

Farmers growing wheat and wine across the Swartland, the agricultural heartland north of Cape Town, are primarily concerned with drought. Some farmers have dams on their land and some have access to groundwater reserves, but all farmers are glad when rain falls from the skies. When I arrived in September, there had been almost no winter rain, and yet since then there has been unexpected odd grey and cloudy days when fronts roll in across the Atlantic Ocean bringing 5-8mm rain.  Now in November, the last two days have had a peculiarly strong storm, and in one night the dam on Teubes Mostert’s farm, where I am living, filled up. Teubes attributes the rapid filling to the lack of vegetation on the hillsides above the farm, due to the bush fire last year which burned through the natural renosterveld vegetation and exposed shaley soils.

The rain settles the dust across this generally hot and dry landscape, and cleans the crops, so that in the hours after rainfall, the green vines glow and shine, and the golden brown wheat stubble fields look dark with moisture. The contours of the land are clearer, and the colours sharper. Yesterday on the drive back up from Cape Town, I looked out over the patchwork quilt of vineyards, wheat fields and red-brown hummocky hills set against a backdrop of a shining rainbow, dark pewter clouds heading towards the eastern wall of mountains, and late afternoon sunlight streaming from the seaward western sky. It was a symphony of elements that harmonized in that particular hour and led the eye in an intimate, looping dance.

The drought and the monoculture fields generally tell one ecological story: death. Monoculture crops are hostile to biodiversity and insects, mammals and other creatures generally regarded as pests are hounded, trapped and poisoned out of there. The stems of native bushes and grasses are dry as old sheep bones picked clean by scavengers and bleached by the sun. The ground is so very thirsty that it sucks any moisture instantly, desperate for prolonged rainfall but creeping forward to ‘Day Zero’, when the taps will be shut off across the Cape and emergency water reserves will be allocated.

But from certain vantage points the region in its complex agricultural matrix tells very much a story of life and survival. Plants sucking every microscopic drop of water they can and expending every ounce of energy into reproducing as fast and efficiently as possible. Flocks of qualia birds thriving on ripe grains. Trucks passing each other in clouds of dust on the dirt roads, taking hay bales to livestock farmers to feed their cattle. The immutable wheat. All life in a sense, and part of a shared rhythm which makes up this fascinating agricultural landscape.

[theburnishedopal]

Modern Ills

I am so angry and bewildered by how anxious everyone is. Most of my friends have suffered or currently suffer from anxiety in one form or another. 

One friend told me she’s taking sleeping pills at the moment, because she can’t stop her mind racing at night. She wakes up and is unable to stop her mind’s voices telling her she’s worthless. This goes on for an hour or so and she gets up, but she’s scared of waking her housemate, so she tiptoes around in the middle of the night. She makes tea, takes a pill and sleeps until she rises for work, heading off to teach kids in a zombiefied state, dreading repeating the whole thing the following night.

Another friend who just visited me is taking anti-psychotic drugs, prescribed to her to manage anxiety. She panics and starts sweating at the smallest thing that feels alien to her. These things happen a lot in everyday life. She’s vomiting in the mornings because of the drugs she takes. She’s told me how much deep, deep self-loathing she has, that she has never felt good enough and hates the way she is. Not just - wishes she had different hair or something. Hates everything about the way she is. It’s appalling, such a deep disconnection inside her to society, to the world.

Another friend is going through a long period of applications and interviews for jobs in psychology. She told me the next interview she has, she’s going to take Diazepam to calm herself before going in, in case she comes across too scattered or childishly enthusiastic. Each time she gets a rejection, it makes her feel less able to cope with the next interview. She has Diazepam alongside other drugs she takes for depression and ADHD.

Another friend drinks to cope with her self-esteem issues. Another writes a lifestyle blog and Instagram’s her anxiety into the public domain as a means of catharsis. All these friends are young women in their twenties, but I have male friends who have suffered anxiety too. One spent a long time in therapy and still has real connection and empathy issues. One developed a psychosomatic gastrointestinal illness at the same time he was experiencing bouts of extreme anxiety.

I am shocked at how many people are not able to cope with so much of life. What is going on with everyone that they feel this way? Mental illness, particularly in females, particularly related to societal pressures, is not new - we know about the valium and the Sylvia Plaths of the fifties - but why does it seem to be so ubiquitous? Humans are more numerous now. We are more digitally connected, but less physically and socially connected. The social media and internet news drugs keep us hooked and helpless. As bad water spread cholera, as rats and fleas spread the bubonic plague, is the internet spreading mental illness? 

[theburnishedopal]

documenta 14

A short time before I came to Germany, I read Marina Abramovich’s autobiography, ‘Walk Through Walls’. Abramovich is remarkable, and her way of seeing the world is eloquently expressed in the biography. I identified with her travels and curiosity and desperation to find out something, whatever it is... how the world works, how to truly connect with the world...but something, leading her from Amsterdam squats to Hindu temples to the depths of the Brazilian jungle.

One of the first festivals Abramovich exhibited one of her performance pieces was documenta in Kassel, Germany. I’d never heard of Kassel until reading this, nor documenta. I learned that the festival takes place every four years, shows primarily performance and film work, and has hosted many revolutionary and thrilling artists since the first one in 1955. 

I was thrilled to learn 1) of this piece of revolution and magic 2) it was happening in summer 2017 and 3) that I was moving so close to it exactly during the period it was taking place, a one-in-four-year chance. Kassel is a half hour train ride from Gottingen. Excitedly scouring the program, I read that this year it is twinned with the city of Athens, and many pieces are based on migration and on democracy. One piece at the Kunsthochschule was called ‘Butterfly Project’, and I couldn’t work out what it was about from the program, but if it was vaguely butterfly-related, I was interested. One drizzly August Saturday, I made it over there to see if I could find some Abramovich-spirit still haunting the German streets.

Kassel itself is larger and more eclectic than Gottingen, with a mixture of architecture springing from the rubble of its more extensive WW2 bombings, owed to the large munitions factories located there (apparently there are large weapons manufacturers still located in Kassel. Hey, stick with what you know!) I walked the length and breadth, visiting venues at the underground train station, the Nordstadtpark, and the central Freidrichsplatz. One of the first pieces I saw was a truly disturbing film made by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor called Commensal. It is about a small cannibal who draws a comic book of his killing and eating a woman, with racial motivations, and it is shown in the basement of an old tofu factory. The most unbearable part of the experience was the smell. It wasn’t so bad at first but the longer you stayed in there in the dark, the more you could smell the thick plastic strips that curtained the door, and this underlying sourness, like something rotten covered over with chemicals. As I grew more repulsed by the film, which I couldn’t stop watching, the smell became more and more difficult to tolerate. Eventually I left holding my breath, desperate to drink in some clean air. The guy at the door looked up at me from his chair with an expression of understanding, like he’d seen the expression on my face on pretty much everyone exiting the building.

So far, so memorable. I saw a much more wholesome (but not better) film piece at the Naturkundemuseum by Khvay Samnang. A thick-torsoed, river-water-skinned dancer writhes manically in the rainforest of Cambodia wearing a series of different animal heads made from thin woody stems. It’s great. 

I walked through the serene, green stadtpark down Gustav Mahler Treppe (Steps) to the Kunsthochschule to go and find Butterfly Project. On arriving, I discovered what in my head may have been a series of pinned butterfly cases or drawings was in fact an exhibition of stools, handmade by the students of the school. The project was based on the ‘Butterfly Stool’ of a Japanese artist, Sori Yanagi. Each one of the stools was different, some with a sense of humour, like the rubber tyre folded back on itself, some with ecological resilience, like the stool with coarse flat-bladed grasses poking up through the slats of the seat, daring the sitter to try and ‘sit’ them to death. 

The stool I ended up examining the most was a square oak design based on an intricate Chinese puzzle, because I and the artist were the only two people in the hall, and I had a lengthy conversation with her. She explained the process, from convincing her woodwork tutor that she could realise this design to making the 1:2 prototype and to sanding the dip in the lid to make a comfortable shape for the arse. We talked about the details, the fact that, while appearing complicated, this was in fact one of the most simple versions of the Chinese wooden puzzle game that everyone in China knows. We laughed about the madness of art students across the world, and she told me that Georg-August University in Gottingen holds the world’s most important collection of literature on an ancient Indo-European language called Tocharian. Her favourite writer spent ten years in Gottingen as a scholar of this language, wrote a book about it called ‘Ten Years in Germany’ or 十年在德国, which she read and decided to move to Germany to study art. I told her to visit me in Gottingen and we can seek out the Tocharian library together.

[theburnishedopal]

Goats and feathers in the Meisner NaturPark

The Meisner Naturpark lies to the south of Kassel and Gottingen, in the federal state of Hesse, Germany. The area is well known for the legend of Frau Holle, the character from one of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the fairy tales collected by the Brothers’ Grimm. Frau Holle, or Old Mother Frost, bestowed good fortune on those who helped her with housework. In making her bed, she shakes out feathers, which fall as ‘snow’; for this reason, when snow falls in Hesse, people say that “Frau Holle is making her bed”. Frau Holle is another version of the goddess Freya of the Norse myths. In the Meisner Naturpark, you can visit Frau Holle Lake, a small reedy pond in a hollow with a cool microclimate. A large wooden carved statue of Frau Holle stands proudly at the far edge of the lake. Apparently she incited anger from some feminists who claimed that the male carver had carved her boobs too generously. Whether it’s the boobs or the proud gaze, the lake is guarded by her presence and she imbues the region with intrigue.

Our group was guided by one of the knowledgeable park rangers, supplemented by the local expertise of ecologist Dr Loos. The park is a well-managed mix of traditional farming practices, calcareous grasslands and subalpine beech and birch forest. Goats are used on hundred-year-old field terraces to graze and maintain rich species diversity. Among other interesting and rare plants, we saw bee orchids (Ophrys spp.), which mimic feeding insects with their dark hooded flowers, attracting real insects to their nectar to obtain pollination services. The plant even uses the same pheromones as the insects themselves in order to attract them. A biological marvel, sitting serenely by the trailside. 

In the calcareous grasslands we found classic species; clover, buttercups, birds-foot trefoil, euphorbia, and plenty of insects, including what I thought was a six-spot burnet moth (zygaenid family), but is in fact not six-spotted at all and is a German cousin. As our trail wound through the rocky limestone outcrops, we also heard a yellowhammer,, and found it at eye level sitting in an oak tree.

This limestone can prove fatal to livestock. Coming upon a large sinkhole, we learned of a farmers’ two cattle, pulling a cart, fell through the hole many years ago, almost taking the farmer with them. Their bodies lay on the floor of the limestone shaft for many years. We lay on our bellies on the soft turf, which was full of skipper butterflies and blues, and army-dragged our bodies over to the edge of the hole to peer down and catch a glimpse of a cattle skull (no luck). 

As well as the yellowhammer, we saw tree pipits and buzzards, and learned of the presence of eagle owls in the region, although sadly we didn’t encounter them. Up on the highest point of our trail in the subalpine beech forest, we saw thousands and thousands of lupins, which were planted there in the fifties to conceal the damage done to the region from mining and logging. Now the lupins were everywhere, as they are an American species and act semi-invasive in this spot in Germany. In full flower, they did brighten things up, so I can understand the previous park managers’ intentions.

[theburnishedopal]

A Life of David Foster Wallace

The way out of solipsism, for Wallace, involved cultivating an ethos of attention—an intentional devotion to inhabiting the lives of others. He insisted that this practice involve not just imaginative vigor but imaginative humility: we must imagine the interior lives of others as impossibly multiple and ultimately beyond our imagining.

[theburnishedopal]

“it would've been a disaster if I'd done it then. I wouldn't have had enough distance. I think it would've been too sentimental. Over-identifying with her in a way that leads to not truly identifying with her at all.”