In this edition of Notions & Notes, I wander around through the idea of the ephemeral, or what is fleetingly felt, and the illusion of capturing it through photographs or art or writing or walls. Associations with light and awe naturally arise, but so does death, because life itself is brief. Ephemerality is all the more sadly beautiful knowing it will slip out of our fingers in a moment.
In a four-year expedition looking for a mythic land, Donald Baxter MacMillan took these incredible photographs of the arctic north. They are more than a hundred years old.
These were one of those random internet discoveries that I happened to find because I like to daydream about the arctic north.
“Long May They Reign” by Nora Caplan-Bricker
In December, I remember hearing a little-noticed news story that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would not extend endangered species protection to the monarch butterfly. It made me pause and notice I hadn’t seen monarchs in the abundance I remembered from childhood in a long time. It also made me think about the importance such an official status could have on the existence of a species, as global warming has already begun showing its effects.
Nora follows the story of a butterfly named Flamingo and the current plight of his species and their annual migration over hundreds of miles of this damaged planet. There are so many moments in this essay that sound out like a clear bell, and I needed time to sit and let them resonate for a while. I’ve pasted some of those moments below, but you should absolutely sit down and read the entire essay here.
“But the world has dulled your capacity for wonder if you cannot be awed by monarchs, which undertake one of the longest annual migrations of any insect on earth. A paperclip weighs a gram; a monarch weighs about half that.”
“People who rode horses here decades ago have described similar scenes—of sitting, frozen in awe, as butterflies descended on their mounts, drawn by the smell of sweat. Imagine a horse that looked for an instant as if it were made of butterflies, at risk of dissolving into a flurry of wings.”
“It’s the abundance—the mysterious gathering of monarchs that flew hundreds of miles alone—that makes the migration astounding. One butterfly can make your breath catch; a roost of 100,000 can transport you into a dream.”
“The response to the COVID-19 crisis suggests that we are capable of the kind of collective action that could slow the advance of climate change and repair other forms of ecological devastation. But it also illustrates the limits of what we can do as long as our leaders keep denying reality—as do most politicians, on both sides of the aisle, when it comes to the enormity of the environmental catastrophe before us.”
“But then a cloud moved. When sunlight slanted across the upper branches, the monarchs opened their dazzling wings one by one. They blazed like little lanterns. I watched one drift up into the sky, weightless, and I felt it: the joy of living on this damaged planet, and a will to witness whatever comes next.”
Because I promised to add where I “discover” these notions & notes, I can boast that I call Nora a friend and remember walking our dogs around Jamaica Pond while she talked about her process of puzzling together the pieces of this essay. (Long walks with friends is one of the blessings of this past year.) However, I had no idea from our conversation exactly how brilliant this essay would be, one of the most stunning I’ve read this year.
Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series
Ana Mendieta’s work is fleeting and deftly resists categorization. It existed in a moment, and unless you were there to bear witness, the only way for us to look at her art is to look at an image, a copy, a ghost of the original. Photos and film digitize what was built from dirt, flowers, flesh, and flames.
In a posthumous retrospective, Traces, at the Haywood Gallery in London, Mendieta is mentioned as having drawn a direct connection between her Silueta Series and neolithic art. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth-body sculptures I become one with the earth […] I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really [a] reactivation of primeval beliefs [in] an omnipresent female force; the after-image of being encompassed within the womb, is a manifestation of my thirst for being.”
(Seriously, read the whole essay that accompanies the retrospective.)
If these images seem haunting, knowing the remarkable story of her life and death might change how you see them to be like the faint form of a ghost reflected in a mirror or caught in a photograph. They capture what cannot be seen directly, an image of a life that was lived and ended suddenly, but never fully disappeared.
Micah Blue Smaldone plays this song in the chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery. He has two perfect albums and that’s it. The first time I saw him, he was on a kick learning complicated Greek stringed instruments, which he played mesmerizingly for us on the floor of SPACE art gallery. He performs every now and then in some small, seemingly secret venue like an old mill Biddeford or the gallery in Portland. I’ve gotten to see a bunch of these performances because he and my husband hung around the same punk scene in high school. I wouldn’t otherwise have “discovered” his music, and it’s so damn gorgeous that I’m sure if more people knew about it he wouldn’t be able to live the quiet, creative life he lives.
Poem with Not Children In It
by Claire Wahmanholm
Instead, the poem is full of competent trees,
sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide
clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow
older without somersaulting or spinning. They grow
old while thinking about themselves. They sleep well
and stay out late, their nerves coiled neatly inside
their grown bodies. They don’t think about children
because children were never there to begin with.
The children were not killed or stolen. This is absence,
not loss. There is a world of difference: the distance
between habitable worlds. It is the space that is
unbearable. The poem is relieved not to have to live
in it. Instead, its heart ticks perfectly unfretfully
among the trees. The children who are not in the poem
do not cast shadows or spells to make themselves
appear. When they don’t walk through the poem, time
does not bend around them. They are not black holes.
There are already so many nots in this poem, it is already
so negatively charged. The field around the poem
is summoning children and shadows and singularities
from a busy land full of breathing and mass. My non-
children are pulling children away from their own
warm worlds. They will arrive before I can stop them.
When matter meets anti-matter, it annihilates into
something new. Light. Sound. Waves and waves
of something like water. The poem’s arms are so light
they are falling upward from the body. Why are you crying?
I included this poem with this particular theme because it somehow stretches out the horror of a single instant in the same way our memories of something terrible and sudden happening always seem to be recorded in slow motion.
Down a rabbit hole on light (as a concept)
It started with this beautiful essay by Benjamin Swett in Orion in which he addresses his sleeping wife to talk about the Muir Web, the movement of light in Shaker architecture, and a branch tapping against the window.
“We surround ourselves with dogs and cats to ensure that some intelligence is watching us, but just outside, right there, is the wind. If I can take comfort in that, if I feel something in that— for in some ways it has generated this whole line of thought—it is not in its vastness but in its attributes, the way it touches down in places where we are, the way it crosses us and swings this branch. Perhaps this is the most we can hope for, these points of contact, these moments when you and I, here, can listen to the stirring of those hundreds of thousands of leaves we cannot see. Perhaps just being alive to the possibility of such contact, even with something as impersonal as the wind, is enough. But then again, we are not alone in this. We have each other.”
That led me to search for more of Henry Plummer’s photographs and thoughts on light in architecture. I found this video of another of Plummer’s books to be very soothing.
But Plummer also opened the door into discovering there’s a whole field of study on light for which there are lecture series, awards ceremonies, and architectural societies. There were too many interesting things, and it felt dizzyingly beautiful to find how much I didn’t know. If you too like that feeling, roam around that Light Matters series—I highly recommend this “Brief History of Rome’s Luminious Rotundas.”
Also in the Light Matters series, is this fascinating article about what we can learn about humanity from our light habits. There is something truly terrifying about light pollution and the prospect of losing our stars.
Although I live in Boston with constant light pollution and a personal grudge against a particular street lamp (I’ve failed to take it out with a slingshot), I wonder if anybody “gets used to” stars in all their true magnitude. One of my most incredible memories of stars is laying on a big stone at Dead Horse Point with fellow writer Gale Marie Thompson. A canyon opened just feet from our sneakers. We talked about awe and space and were silent with the stars for hours. We looked into the night sky so long that a strange physical sensation came over me—as if gravity had reversed and I were falling up into the night sky. My rabbit hole about light reminded me of that night and a vague memory of Gale mentioning that she was preparing something about space and writing, but I never followed up on it until now. She mentions that night at Dead Horse Point in this great conversation about our fascination for space.
These amaretti cookies are light and delightful and don’t last long. People are always more impressed than they should be about these deceptively simple cookies.