Maybe May After All

            The photos from a year ago in May look, by comparison, like a rain forest. By comparison, that is, to the retrograde status of the green and any other color showing in this year's perennial flower garden.

            It has been hard to find much to cheer about this spring until the last week or so. I've been more aware of what isn't there -- a bleeding heart that's been with us for about five or six years; the remains of the purplish-leaved Aceana groundcover, a New Zealand native that I've been nursing through the last five declining seasons (just utterly gonzo). All four butterfly bushes, reduced at present to mere collections of sticks, a few leaves struggling out of mostly bare branches. Great bare spots in backyard beds that to the best of my recollection were all pretty full of foliage this time last year.

            Happily, after last weekend, and a lot of hands-on attention, I can go back to celebrating life once again when I walk through the gardens. At least I have some views to look at now, something to see, so I don't dwell on whats been lost.

            I'm pretty much focusing on the return of the little guys these days.

            One of the expanding floral nations of the back garden, those portions given over largely to groundcovers, is the Ajuga shown in flower in the top left photo. Both the foliage and the flowers have more of a purple tint than this image captures. You can also see the tiny white flowers of the Sweet Woodruff. That's a plant that once dominated this area but is now in retreat. Expansion, and collapse: Waves of succession in the free-for-all of a garden habitat where plantations are allowed to roam, with some interference from me, as they do in nature. I think I like the waves of purple more than the unified field of white.

            Vinca Minor is the strongest of them all. It's everywhere and I will have to take steps to corral it. Here (in the second photo) you see it, in flower, pushing out to the brick walk and shoving up against the yellow two-toned leaves of a low Euonymus.

            You can see some of the blue blossoms of the Speedwell in the third photo. Speedwell is another happy May bloomer. Its flowers range from a beautiful sky blue to pale blue, maybe depending on the mineral content of the soil. In the back you can see Sweet Woodruff filling into this area, but I won't let it take over.

            The fourth photo is "Spring Vetch." I think it's in the pea family (it's also called "Spring Pea"); the genus is Vicia. It only flowers for a couple of weeks, but its little pink-purple blossoms are charming.

            The fifth photo shows a patch of common violets, they're all over the property this year. This is my favorite blossom variety, a blue so pale it's almost white, with darker spots in the petals. The bright light in this photos appears to have overwhelmed the dark spots.

            The sixth is a gathering of pale violets, contrasted with the darker foliage of the Labrador violet, some spikes of a star-flower that hasn't blossomed yet and the background of dusty-gray Artemisia.

            The last photo here shows the return of the Mazus. I was afraid for a while they weren't coming back; it took a few warm days to induce the blossoms. This is what I wrote about them last year:

            "The Mazus probably give us more brightly flowering color per unit measure than any other groundcover we have planted, but their colonies consist of completely separate very small plants with remarkably thin and shallow roots. You can pull up individual Mazus plants, especially when you don't want to, just by looking at them. Their roots are mere threads. So when you pull up the intruders in their midst-- violets,for instance, and any number of those nameless of 'weed' varieties whose appearance and MO I am all too familiar with -- you're more than likely to get a few of the Mazus as well, no matter how carefully and surgically you manage these removals. Then you mutter to yourself, displeased with your effort, over the waste of pretty flowers."

            Can't say fairer than that.

Syrian refugees reach out to us

The Boston Globe posted my opinion piece on Syrian refugees on its 'Podium' online page.... About a million Syrian refugees -- civilians fleeing the fighting -- are seeking refuge in neighboring Lebanon, a small country with limited resources, while the rest of the world continues to ignore the humanitarian crisis brought by a conflict in which the government routinely bombs civilian areas.... 

 Please take a look at the piece and pass it on to anyone you think would be interested.

Here's the link to the Globe online page:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/07/syrian-refugees-are-reaching-out/WE9w5HzxPzQ3kSkhmQWCJM/story.html


            Posted on 5/10/14:

            After reading the piece on the Globe site, some people have asked me (naturally enough) what I think should be done to end the fighting and make it possible for the refugees to go home.

            Also not surprisingly, I will admit I can't offer a simple, practical solution. Any international approach to ending the violence would have been much easier to attempt three years ago at the start of the armed conflict. As someone who opposed invading Iraq and questioned the extent and length our military intervention in Afghanistan, I am likewise opposed to sending ground troops, ours or anyone else's, to fight a war in Syria. I do, however, believe we should have taken the stance we did in Libya, using air power to ground and destroy a dictator's air force once it became clear the dictator intended to bomb cities held by the rebels. Our stated reason for acting in Libya was that the hated ruler of a police state attacked peaceful demonstrators and dropped bombs on people's homes. The same situation obtained in Syria, and still does.

            We put together a coalition then and I don't know why we can't do that again. The UN is useless in these crises since its rules allow a member of the Security Council -- a group of privileged big power governments some of which are perfectly willing to murder dissenters and commit genocide in their own country -- to veto any international action. In the Security Council the very governments that have used killing force without restraint on their own citizens are the ones preventing the UN to take action against a totalitarian regime, Assad's Syria, for seeking to exterminate any citizens who express opposition to its rule. These opponents are branded with the Orwellian libel of "terrorists," a term that is repeated daily by news media. Many media accounts routinely fail to explain that what the Syrian government calls terrorists are actually freedom-fighters. King George III had as much right to call the American rebels "terrorists," though his advisers failed to think up this term.

            We need an international body of democratic governments whose express mission is to combat state terror and prevent genocides. Russia, China, Iran and Sudan need not apply.

            After using air power to ground the Syrian air force and break up concentrations of tanks and heavy weapons wherever possible, the alliance of democratic governments should demand a ceasefire and establish humanitarian corridors, areas where aid, food and medicine can safely enter the country and reach those in need. One corridor from Turkey on one side of the country and another probably from Lebanon on the other side. International troops will be needed here to establish the supply routes and protect them.

            The coalition should also demand that foreign governments stop sending arms and munitions to fuel the killing. They should stop and board a few Russian ships to make the point. What are the Russians going to do? Invade Ukraine? They can do that whenever they want anyway. We should demand Israel's assistance in this border control effort (they owe us for all that aid), since Israel has shown it's good at boarding ships.

            In the end some sort of power-sharing arrangement must be worked out, with international forces remaining to protect religious minorities so that Alawites and Christians feel safe in a Sunni-dominated state. We cannot of course "impose" a peace on Syria or any other country. People have to work out their own fate. But we can significantly lower the level of violence and deny a terrorist state the means to enact a piece-by-piece, city-by-city Rwanda-level genocide. 

          Syria may end up looking like some version of Iraq, though the country will have been spared the trauma of a foreign power's invasion and  occupation. We do have a chance to create conditions that will allow the refugees to go home and take part in rebuilding their country.

            Or we can wait for some deus ex machine to fly onto the stage, snap his fingers and make everything better. Or do nothing until the government turns the majority of of Syrians into refugees, forced to live on international aid outside the borders of their homeland. They can ask the Palestinians to show them the ropes.

The Garden of Song: 'Silver Dagger'

            "It's never old and it was never young... and it's a folk song."

            That was the definition of "folk music" offered by a coffeehouse performer at the start of the Coen Brothers' movie "Inside Llewyn Davis."

             The use of a particularly moving folk song on a TV detective program set in the middle sixties recently brought the question up for me again. It wasn't really the question of what do we mean by folk music that got to me, frankly. It was more like, 'why can't I get this song out of my head for the last three days?'

            The song went through me with a startling intensity -- like a "silver dagger" -- which, not coincidentally, is the song's name, or at least the name it went by when people recorded it in the sixties. Coming across it without warning in the course of a murder mystery (a BBC crime series titled "George Gently") set in the north of England during that time of change felt like a voice calling out of the past, a fever dream in the memory.

            It was easy enough to find "Silver Dagger" on line. The actress who sang it on the show in what looked like classic "coffeehouse concert" -- the locals sitting in a big circle in a pub; nodding, smiling -- looked and sounded a little like Joan Baez. Her character in the show stood for change, hope, freedom, a new beginning.  

            Sure enough the song is "associated," as one source put it, with Joan Baez. As far as I can make out, "Silver Dagger" is the first cut on her first album. Baez sings it in her pure soprano with her famously "sad" interpretation of the haunting ballads that record some of humanity's collective traumas. Maybe these ballads, this powerful current in the stream of the folk repertoire -- songs of unhappy love, lost love, undeserved death, human disaster -- particularly called out to her.

            My theory is they call out to all of us. They are our repressed memories of what people went through to get us this far.

            And that's why certain songs stay with us forever. I could not have told you that this one was rattling around in my brain. I couldn't have "accessed" it. When I played it online, my memory said 'oh yes, of course.' I recognized a whole lot of other songs, and recalled Baez's treatment of them, on this debut album.

            It's an interesting paradox that stories of loss, disappointment, tragic fate, and crimes of passion call out to youthful, hopeful minds -- as they did in the early to mid-sixties. Maybe (more speculation on my part) acknowledging the bitter truths that are part of life is a necessary step in personal growth. In the sixties, a sudden flare-up in the desire to grow -- as opposed, say, to simply surviving, getting by, starting a career, putting a nest egg by -- manifested itself both in the US and worldwide.

            It was the fruit perhaps of a period of unusual prosperity. Hope, change, optimism, personal and social freedom were the new cultural currency.

            But ah, says "folk music," not so fast. Remember who we are and where we come from.

            In the "George Gently" story, the young folk singer stands for new possibilities. She encourages others to take the steps she's taken, but -- the world being what it is -- she doesn't make it out of the episode alive. In the abbreviated version of "Silver Dagger" she sings on screen, the first verse goes:

           

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand is a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.
            The speaker is a young woman; that silver dagger is a warning: keep away. Her mother has told her that men are false, that her own father betrayed countless women to their sorrow, and that she's determined to protect her innocent daughter from a similar fate. In the last verse the singer accepts her mother's advice: "I've been warned, and I've decided/ To sleep alone all through my life."

            It's a song in which the tragedy of a loveless fate is the direct result of the faithlessness of men.

            But the show changes the emphasis. The singer who stands for change and possibility sings it to the poor little rich boy in the show who is being suffocated by his aristocratic mother's unrealistic demands. She wants him to become some sort of traditional "great man." Among the problems he has with this idea is that he's gay. The singer tells him to leave his mother, go to London and be himself. His mother's "dagger" in this version doesn't protect her young, but threatens his identity.

            That is just so sixties.

            When the son chickens out on the London plan, she stand beneath the window of his mansion and sings, "Your mother has a silver dagger." Things go downhill from there.

            However it happened, the pessimistic TV story -- crime shows tend to be pessimistic; we watch them anyway -- sent me back to revisit a peculiarly haunting strain of folk wisdom. As the Coen Brothers movie's fictional Llewyn Davis says, these songs are forever. It may be that Baez's beautiful intensity in performing them is also forever. When you're cut by the silver dagger, the mark remains.

Singing the Day Away: The Cappella Clausura Chants the Hours

            The voices in the chapel were beautiful and resonant. We followed their sound. Angels' voices. The voices came from a place far different from the secular city whose streets we enjoyed walking in the spring evening -- the "world" these voices had given up.

            In the Gothic chapel cloistered women were singing the hours.

            Well, the singers would have been cloistered in the time and place when the music book they were singing from was written, the middle of 16th century (1554), when nuns who spent their lives in closed convents chanted the liturgical hours.

            The women we found when we followed the voices into Lindsay Chapel of Emmanuel Church in Boston were the Cappella Clausura, a Brandeis-based ensemble founded by Amelia LeClair and dedicated to "the research and performance of music by women composers."

            They were wearing traditional habits. As the concert invite put it, "Please don't speak to the nuns. They are, after all, in another century."

            We had missed the beginning. Voices are singing when we enter. The Gothic ceilings of the narrow chapel amplify the sound. The sound of their voices is almost impossibly full. It's as if the space itself -- the enormous steeply pitched mountain of upward-thrusting space, squeezed in at the sides -- a space like a balloon blown up by the breath of centuries -- is itself an instrument that these women know how to play.

            I have been dimly aware of the practice of "chanting the hours," excerpts of the traditional practice flashing before us in TV shows and films, always to an instantly attention-getting effect. I thought it would be beautiful to hear the chants sung all the way through, but I never knew that much about the practice. This singing of Matins, of Vespers -- is it long? Do they do it every day?

            I knew these appointed "hours" were sung at certain times each day and I wanted the experience of hearing the canonical hours sung without the necessity of spending a full day inside a cloistered religious community. If that's not a contradiction in terms. Did no one else ever hear these beautifully sung offerings but the singers? Is it just another form of prayer?

            I wanted the musical highlights of a day spent (amid so many others) in contemplation. Getting it this way, through the "concert and installation" by the Cappella Clausura was a kind of cheat. But it was a sweet cheat.

            The evening's format was some five minutes of singing, a little more sometimes, representing the canonical hours: matins (3 a.m.), prime (6 a.m.), terce (9), sext (noon), nones (3 p.m.), vespers (6 p.m.) and compline (9 p.m.).

            The women would enter the hall, sit in chairs on each side of the hall, while short rows of audience seating filled the room's narrow middle, and sing from their books. We found seats, not many left, before I knew who was singing. Where did the voices come from? Must be a hidden choir somewhere. But no. I counted four seated, cloaked women on one side, three on the other. The four were mezzo voices -- plus a fifth I spied a few minutes later, their leader: she raised her finger upward at points: at the 'amens' for instance. The three were sopranos.

            The hall's acoustics, and the music itself, added numbers, centuries.

            Then the leader would ring a handbell and the singers would either withdraw or stay in their chairs and pick up their needlework or their missals. The break would last about 10 minutes before they came back to sing the next ordained hour on the daily routine.

            We were encouraged to explore the installation between the "hours." Illustrative pages of the calligraphy of the muscial score themselve -- some few notes on a cleft, some Latin letters unreadable in their stylized form -- hung above us. Others were mounted on stands. Some folio pages from illuminated manuscripts were displayed.A calligrapher displayed hand-ground paints on the mussel shells used to hold them.

            Large, poster-size pages of the illuminated manuscript from which this version of the hours was discovered were also displayed (in high resolution repros). And the curator -- happily there in our own century for the purpose of talking to us -- kindly explained the story of this manuscript's discovery. Art historian Judith Dietz found what is called the Salzinnes Antiphonal in the library of St. Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada. It had been sent there from France during the French Revolution when religious institutions were under attack. In a highly rare practice, the large colorful illustrations depict all the nuns who were part of the Salzinnes community when the antiphonal (the music you sing; the word means something like "in front of the altar"). She found their names as well.

            Women dressed in habits also offered samples of the beer, bread and cheese the nuns of Salzinnes would make.

            According the program and the group's website (www.clausura.org) Cappella Clausura’s name honors the body of music written by cloistered nuns of 17th century Italy. "In clausura" means covered or hidden from public life. By name the group cites Raffaella Aleotti, Chiara Cozzolani, Bianca Maria Meda, Caterina Assandra and Sulpitia Cesis -- the West's first school of women composers. We picked up the group's latest recording, Aleotti's madrigals here titled "Love Songs of a Renaissance Teenager."

            These are not liturgial chants, but they make wonderful listening on their own.