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diff --git a/theredplanet.txt b/theredplanet.txt index a5fb455..52cd53b 100644 --- a/theredplanet.txt +++ b/theredplanet.txt @@ -1,4 +1,79 @@ -## sketches +In May of 2015 I was on holiday in Apalachicola, FL, a place I made a number of trips too in the early part of the century, compelled to return by something I've never been able to precisely put my finger on, though certainly the sun had something to do with it -- its clarity, the pure whiteness of the light in that area is unmatched by anywhere else I have been. On this trip, as with others at the same time of year in years past, the midday temperatures were beginning to reach the upper registers of which the Florida coast is justly famous for, and so I found myself retreating from the sweltering heat of the beach to the shaded porch of the cottage where I was staying -- always the same cottage -- when I happened across a photo of a 1964 Dodge Travco. What intrigued me, aside from the arrestingly beautiful lines of the object itself, the brilliantly shiny aquamarine blue that hearkened back to times when shape, color, form were more important than the almighty bottom line that has long since swallowed such concerns, was a point of minutue that stuck with me, namely that its owner had named it. The Travco in the image was named Myrtle. + + +# Notes + +## Mast year: + +When all the trees in a region produce a bumper crop of fruit. The way it happens is organized by some form of intelligence, though the exact mechanism still eludes scientists: + +http://www.outdoors.org/articles/amc-outdoors/mystery-mast-year/ + +The idea of nature spirits, perhaps along with the intelligence of individual trees seems as good an explanation as any. + +## Trees communicate, share resources and favor their young + +https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other + +Simard: Kevin Beiler, who was a PhD student, did really elegant work where he used DNA analysis to look at the short sequences of DNA in trees and fungal individuals in patches of Douglas fir forest. He was able to map the network of two related sister specials of mycorrhizal fungi and how they link Douglas fir trees in that forest. + +Just by creating that map, he was able to show that all of the trees essentially, with a few isolated [exceptions], were linked together. He found that the biggest, oldest trees in the network were the most highly linked, whereas smaller trees were not linked to as many other trees. Big old trees have got bigger root systems and associate with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They’ve got more carbon that’s flowing into the network, they’ve got more root tips. So it makes sense that they would have more connections to other trees all around them. + +In later experiments, we’ve been pursuing whether these older trees can recognize kin, whether the seedling that are regenerating around them are of the same kin, whether they’re offspring or not, and whether they can favor those seedlings — and we found that they can. That’s how we came up with the term “mother tree,” because they’re the biggest, oldest trees, and we know that they can nurture their own kin. + +## attention + +Economist Herbert Simon sums up (with his (in)famous quote) the reasons why I’m so strict about internet use (and general communication) during residencies: + +In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. + +Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.""" Craig mod + +#Writing + +## I Remember California + +> I remember redwood trees, bumper cars and wolverines +> The ocean's Trident submarines +> Lemons, limes and tangerines +> I remember this +> +> I remember traffic jams +> Motor boys and girls with tans +> Nearly was and almost rans +> I remember this + +> -- <cite>Michael Stipe </cite> + +Winter in southern California is hardly deserving of the word. There is only a slight dip in temperature, a change in wind direction, a quiet that falls across the beaches after the tourist hordes depart. If you spend enough time here though you begin to feel the subtle changes. The way the light loses intensity, gathers itself up and pulls back out over the ocean somewhere, as if blown back byt the arrival of the Santa Ana winds in November. By the Solstice the sand and water both are shades of gray, swirling and merging like a child's watercolor. The sunset paints the blue green ocean red for a moment, a river of red running out of the wester horizon, spilling onto the shore, kissing our feet for a moment until it retreats as fast as it came, swallows by the gray green winter sea. We dig our toes into the sand, finding a lingering bit of warmth. + +These are the moments when I can see what southern California was like before it was paved. + +Earlier in the day we caught the bus down Pacific Coast Highway, past the tourist mecca of main beach, parades of hotels and shops, restaurants and oxygen bars mostly empty save a hardy offseason tourist or two, We continued south past the canyon where the bluffs grow higher, the hillsides behind them steeper, more choked with coastal sage scrub. The sage grows in 25-year cycles bookended by autumn's wildfires, which clear away dead or dying vegetation and leave bare ground for new growth. These canyons cutting their way into the hillsides we can see though hand-print smeared windows are some of the last remaining unpaved land in southern California. They are sanctuaries, islands of native plants that now exist nowhere else. From here was can see the yellow of still blooming goldenrod and perhaps monkey flower. + +This year produced no fires down here, the sagebrush is thick and bees still browse the stands of goldrenrod that make inroads in the vacant lots between the small, older cottages that still dot these hillsides. If you come through here with horse bliders on and look carefully you can see what this world looked like in the 1930s, the 1920s, perhaps even earlier, before the world had so many needs. Before the mega-houses, before the golf courses, before the toll roads dissecting the ruined corpse of the hills. Take off those blinders and the glimpse of the past vanishes. + +Today belies the California fantasy -- that it is always 75 and sunny -- of outsiders. Today it's not more than 50 and a stiff wind whips at the waves as they break on the shore of this small hidden cove where we lie on our backs in the sand, trying to feel the warm blanket of sunlight on our bodies. Bodies dressed in pants and long sleeves, but no shoes. Never shoes. Snatches of warmth arrive between lulls in the wind. There is a rhythm to these gusts and pauses that almost matches the rhythm of the waves, the sea and wind gathering themselves up, hurling against the land and then drawing back again, catching their breath for just long enough that we can feel the warm sun that's driving them. Always the sun. The warmth comes and then is snatched away by a gust that whips sand over us and, by evening, would have buried us had we not sat up occasionally to watch the peaks of waves peeled by the wind, long curling wisps of water blown off the top and back out to sea. + +I was born in southern California, but I left it last century. I have been back only a handful of times but never in the winter, never to the beaches and bluffs where we used to find the soft winter light licking its way across the land. Several of those bluffs have since tumbled into the sea or succumbed to cancerous growth of oversized single family dwellings that ceaseless swallows the land day after day, an insatiable beast driven by all those nearly was and almost rans. + +When I return it is only to note that the traffic is worse, the avocados better and the ocean larger than the place, far across the continent that I've been calling home for nearly two decades now. Despite twenty-six years in southern California it was never home, at best a place to return to. + +Red is the color of blood, + +entering the world. While it is ours our blood is much closer to purple, but once it leaves it enters the world as red. Leaving you, leaving me, always red. + +Ever since I was a small child and told for the first time that blood was only red when it made contact with the air, I have wanted to go in a low oxygen environment to bleed blue. Alas low oxygen environments are hard to come by. So far as I have been able to research none of the astronauts -- who spent perhaps more time than anyone else in low oxygen environments -- ever thought to prick their skin and produce a little blue blood. + +Nothing seems so alien to me, so unsettling as bleeding bluish purple blood. Traveling to other worlds, finally receiving that message SETI is waiting for in vain, even something as Hollywood-inspired as alien ships landing on the White House lawn seems to me considerably less remarkable and nowhere near so alien, so exotic, as the very simple, but deeply unsettling idea of watching not-red blood ooze out of a cut in my arm. + +Our planet is a place where blood is red. Our planet is steeped in red, like sunsets, like red rock mesas, like red taillights, like red clay, like muddy red marshes, our blood is red. To bleed anything else is to be elsewhere. + +The moniker of red planet has already been assigned to another by our culture but I propose that's a misnomer, a mistake of observation. Mars has red dirt and, so far as we know, not a lot else. From the images sent back by various rovers and probes it appears very uniform in it's red, a monochromatic world that, while red, does not celebrate and revel in the near infinite variety of red like our planet. And since it seems painfully obvious at this point that no one will ever journey to Mars, it seem high time we reclaimed that mislaid label and put back where it belongs, here on earth, The Red Planet. + +Nowhere I have been is quite so red as California. California is a red state. The color overwhelms nearly every part of it, from the red of the golden gate bridge, to the Pacific sunsets, to the alpenglow of the High Sierra, to the line serpentine red of taillights snaking up the 405 and through the Hollywood Hills. Every California red is different, inseparable by geography but also isolated from one another. The red of taillights on the 405 will not cast on the clouds above Mt Whitney with any of the grandeur that John Muir was so fond of overstating.. + +tk seque here In the evenings if you head down to the beaches of Los Angeles you can watch the setting sun sink in to the blue of the Pacific, which eventually swallows all its color, but before it disappears beyond the reach of California, the sun paints a momentary stripe of red across the water all way back from the horizon to the shore, like a red river running out of the ocean. If you follow it all the way to where you stand, and turn around and stark walking up the beaches of Santa Monica and climb into your car and head our onto the concrete emptiness of the Santa Monica freeway, you'll find the river of red keep flowing, taillights now a string of traffic leading from the beach, through the high rises of downtown out into the Raymond Carver suburbs of Los Angeles and eventually farther east, through San Bernardino and on over the coastal mountains into the high desert and, depending on your precise route, out to Phoenix or up into Death Valley, Las Vegas and onward. @@ -6,20 +81,25 @@ Los Angeles is at once familiar and abhorrent to me. I know its streets, its fre I dragged William down to watch the sunset over the beaches of Santa Monica. I once stayed with him down here, at an apartment overlooking a bilge water smelling marina of the sort where no one sails, they just store boats. A massive waste of capital and really, really wonderful boats that someone like me would be happy to sail across the horizon to anywhere. Alas writers rarely afford boats. Not the kind of boats you see from the window of an apartment near the Santa Monica harbor. Bill is a writer too, it wasn't his apartment, he just happened to have lucked into it for a while and I, on one of my three-day passthroughs, was also tolerated. -But that was years ago, decades even. Now William lives on the other side of the city (can the Los Angeles basin and surround areas really properly be called a city? There are, technically speaking, probably about one hundred cities, though the lines between them exist only for elections) and I live where I park the bus. Right now that happens to by Los Angeles, for three days. And this is one of them, here, at the Santa Monica pier where the strange confluence of corporate capitalism run amok and sand combine to produce something that I'm sure no one really likes. The banality of the Santa Monica pier is difficult to put into words. People always say Eskimos have over one hundred words for snow. You'd think Americans would have one hundred words for banality. +But that was years ago, decades even. Now William lives on the other side of the city (can the Los Angeles basin and surround areas really properly be called a city? There are, technically speaking, about eighty-eight cities, though the lines between them exist only for elections) and I live where I park the bus. Right now that happens to by Los Angeles, for three days. And this is one of them, here, at the Santa Monica pier where the strange confluence of corporate capitalism run amok and sand combine to produce something that no one outside of development boardrooms actually enjoys. The banality of the Santa Monica pier area is difficult to put into words. It can be contrasted, for example there is more life around the lonely wells of the dustiest, most remote villages in India. It's as lifeless as the moon. Whatever that means. People always say Eskimos have over one hundred words for snow. If that's really true, you'd think Americans would have one hundred words for banality. But we don't, perhaps we're too banal to even come up with new ways to describe our banality. Probably we're all too busy watching television or posting something to internet to come up with sufficient words to capture the banality of our experience. We've been overwhelmed by our banality, which, despite decades of trying, it seems can't even be medicated away. -Probably we're all too busy watching television or posting something to internet to come up with sufficient words to capture the banality of our experience. +## sketches +The red color is from the presence of iron oxides +Within the red blood cells there is a protein called hemoglobin. Each hemoglobin protein is made up subunits called hemes, which are what give blood its red color. More specifically, the hemes can bind iron molecules, and these iron molecules bind oxygen. The blood cells are red because of the interaction between iron and oxygen. (Even more specifically, it looks red because of how the chemical bonds between the iron and the oxygen reflect light.) And it's very important for blood to be able to carry oxygen because when blood flows through the lungs, the blood picks up oxygen, and the blood carries this oxygen to the rest of the body until the oxygen is all used up -- the blood then returns to the lungs to get more oxygen. the red rock country of valley of fire. The red in the roacks comes from iron, the same as the red in blood, i think. the desert sandstone, the desert bighorn, las vegas, the air conditioned nightmare. +Our blood is not blue. It is always red.1Even when it's deoxygenated. Even in the absence of oxygen in a vacuum. (Remember, when you get blood drawn at your doctor's office, they use a vacutainer, which is essentially a vacuum in a tube. The tube is attached to the needle in your arm, exposing the inside of the vein to the vacuum and drawing the blood out.) + +How red it is varies. ## Images of others @@ -43,42 +123,25 @@ In 1941 Henry Miller returned from Europe and drove across the United Staates -- > A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but to-day it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. -Nearly 70 years later I purchased a motorhome originally constructed not long after Miller's trip. It was all fiberglass, wonderfully rounded and sleek, the perfect shade of the 1960s aquamarine blue, like a California swimming pool had been pored into a fiberglass mold, given a nice white stripe down the side and set loose on the American highway. The motorhome was made by company called Travco and it was once *the* motorhome. Johnny Cash toured in the Travco, John Wayne owned several and Charles Kerault used to Dodge Travcos for nearly the entire run of his traveling news broadcast. Playboy called it the coolest vehicle on the road and now, just under sixty years later, it still is. +Nearly 70 years later I purchased a motorhome originally constructed in 1969. It was all fiberglass, wonderfully rounded and sleek, the perfect shade of the 1960s aquamarine blue, like a California swimming pool had been pored into a fiberglass mold, given a nice white stripe down the side and set loose on the American highway. The motorhome was made by company called Travco and it was once *the* motorhome. Johnny Cash toured in the Travco, John Wayne owned several and Charles Kerault used two Dodge Travcos for nearly the entire run of his traveling news broadcast. Playboy called it the coolest vehicle on the road and now, just under sixty years later, it still is. Of course the years take their toll on even the finest of things. Before it became our home I spent eighteen months tearing it apart, insulating, re-wiring, re-plumbing and re-propaning it. Then I put it back together with new versions of the old. Where possible I left things as they had been. I refinished the wood of cabinets, and put in new paneling on the walls, but otherwise I tried to stay with the look, feel and personality of the old. -Where possible I also tried to stick with technology of the era. Technology that strikes me as one of the last sane moments our culture had. I tore off the ugly rooftop air conditioning that had been added at some point. Instead I put in vents with fans. I got rid of the refrigerator and put in an icebox. It struck me at the time that these things were not though necessary to some of the wealthiest, most famous people of the 1960s -- people who could have had anything they wanted, but did not consider things like air conditioning necessary. The idea of being hot was not yet considered a hardship, it was still just part of existence on this planet. - -I also wanted to make it livable space for myself, my wife and our three children. In fact my wife refused to move in without air conditioning, so I did put in a small air conditioner, but we ended up using it only a few days over the course of the two years we lived in "the bus" as my children christened our Travco. - - +Where possible I also tried to stick with technology of the era. Technology that strikes me as one of the last sane moments our culture had. Miller of course would disagree. he very clearly felt technology was already our problem back in 1941: +> Our world is a world of *things*. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. +It sounds a bit like one of the countless essays you read on your digital devices about how our digital devices are ruining us. Never fear, we were already ruined. Digital devices just happen to be our particular ruin, Miller's assessment feels as accurate as ever and any kind of solution feels further away than it ever did. There probably is no solution. We just play out the hand were dealt. Some us may eschew this religion of things -- which is really a religion of progress, the things are just the talismans and alter pieces -- but our culture will never turn away from this religion. How could it? This religion is thing upon which the America culture was founded -- that things will always progress. You can not pull out the cornerstone and expect the structure to stand. We will fall when the cornerstone is discovered to be rotten, and we will be replaced by another culture one day, but the ship itself will never change course this late in the voyage. +Still, many of us are with Miller these days. More than ever suspected before I began restoring the motorhome -- which, it's worth noting is a thing that Miller would no doubt have scorned. The internet is full of people turning their back on technologies of various kinds -- examples here of forums and discussions (white gas in boats instead of propane (moisture is a byproduct of buring propane, but not white gas), the anti-refridgeration crowd -- most the anti technology movement comes from boaters, RVers are very much looking for comfort. +I tore off the ugly rooftop air conditioning that had been added at some point. Instead I put in vents with fans. I got rid of the refrigerator and put in an icebox. It struck me at the time that these things were not though necessary to some of the wealthiest, most famous people of the 1960s -- people who could have had anything they wanted, but did not consider things like air conditioning necessary. The idea of being hot was not yet considered a hardship, it was still just part of existence on this planet. -## I Remember California - -> I remember redwood trees, bumper cars and wolverines -> The ocean's Trident submarines -> Lemons, limes and tangerines -> I remember this -> -> I remember traffic jams -> Motor boys and girls with tans -> Nearly was and almost rans -> I remember this - -> -- <cite>Michael Stipe </cite> +I also wanted to make it livable space for myself, my wife and our three children. In fact my wife refused to move in without air conditioning, so I did put in a small air conditioner, but we ended up using it only a few days over the course of the two years we lived in "the bus" as my children christened our Travco. -Red is the color of blood entering the world. Our blood is blue while it is ours, but once it leaves it returns to the world red, not blue. Leaving you, leaving me, always red. Ever since I was a small child and told for the first time that blood was only red when it made contact with the air, I have wanted to go in a pure oxygen environment to bleed blue. Alas pure oxygen environments are hard to come by. So far as I have been able to research none of the astronauts -- who spent perhaps more time than anyone else in pure oxygen environments -- ever thought to prick their skin and produce a little blue blood. -Nothing seems so alien to me, so unsettling as bleeding blue blood. Traveling to other worlds, finally receiving that message SETI is waiting for in vain, even something as Hollywood-inspired as alien ships landing on the White House lawn seems to me considerably less remarkable and nowhere near so alien, so exotic, as the very simple, but deeply unsettling idea of watching blue blood ooze out of a cut in my arm. -Our planet is a place where blood is red. Like sunsets, like red rock mesas, like red clay, like red taillights, like muddy red marshes, our blood is red. To bleed anything else is to be elsewhere. -Our planet entire planet steeped in red. The moniker of red planet has already been assigned to another by our culture but I propose that's a misnomer, a mistake of observation. Mars has red dirt and, so far as we know, not a lot else. From the images sent back by various rovers and probes it appears very uniform in it's red, a monochromatic world that, while red, does not celebrate and revel in the near infinite variety of red like our planet. And since it seems painfully obvious at this point that no one will ever journey to Mars, it seem high time we reclaimed that mislaid label and put back where it belongs, here on earth, The Red Planet. -Nowhere I have been is quite so red as California. California is a red state. The color overwhelms nearly every part of it, from the red of the golden gate bridge, to the Pacific sunsets, to the alpenglow of the High Sierra, to the line serpentine red of taillights snaking up the 405 and through the Hollywood Hills. Every California red is different, inseparable by geography but also isolated from one another. The red of taillights on the 405 will not cast on the clouds above Mt Whitney with any of the grandeur that John Muir was so fond of overstating.. |