Mona Lisa Smiles for Science

Today's Washington Post has an article titled "In Europe, science collides with the bottom line," with the front-page summary as shown at right.

Would you expect the article to focus on some sort of analysis of Mona Lisa? Of course not. The article is almost entirely about funding the research into "questions of the universe, working to re-create the cosmic soup served up by the Big Bang." Funding is in jeopardy at CERN, concerning particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider, and elsewhere a telescope on a mountaintop in Chile and other technology.

Oh yes, one little mention of "X-ray fluorescence [used] to illuminate the genius of Leonardo da Vinci's brush strokes and to study the skulls of ancient hominids" -- not even necessarily the Mona Lisa.

BUT what gets people's attention? That mysterious smile. Even when the main topic is money for particle research and exploring the Big Bang.

Mona at the Torpedo Factory

We found an artist making Mona Lisa collages at a beautiful art space in the old torpedo factory. No joking, they used to manufacture torpedos for military use there. It's a wonderful place like an art fair with studios -- and photos on the walls of what it was like as a manufacturing plant. I think manufacturing can be beautiful, and always loved Rouge Tool & Die when I worked at Ford; I wonder if it will ever become an artists paradise.

At Oakview

Saturday afternoon at the Oakview Playground Alice and Miriam were playing a game with acorns and playing on the slides and climbing equipment. Yesterday we drove home via a new route, highway 68 across Maryland and West Virginia, a beautiful and mountainous highway.



Alice calls these two the "pair trees."

Alice and Yoga

Alice can do some amazing yoga poses! For more about our trip to Fairfax see "The School Open House" and "Aragog" on my story blog.

Miriam and Alice at the Pool

Inspired

Inspired by 100 Whistler prints at the University Art Museum, I tried to imitate the composition in a photo of the old RR bridge over the Huron River. Whistler himself was inspired by Japanese print makers.

Indian Pottery

A bunch of cool guys with sunglasses? Nope, it's a pot from the Nazca people who lived in Peru between 200 BCE until 600 of our era. The Field Museum in Chicago has so many artifacts it's overwhelming, which is why I loved it.

Chicago

Oval Beach, Saugatuck MI

One of the world's most beautiful beaches? I would vote yes. To get to Oval Beach you drive over the dune, and there's convenient parking, a concession stand, dressing rooms, and world-class views along the shore of Lake Michigan.

Delia at the Playground

This playground has zillions of dollars worth of high-end climbing toys, but the kids prefer to climb the trees by the fence. One of Delia's co-climbers went up where he said "no one can reach me." His grandmother said "I'm going to call the policeman if you don't come right down." I didn't think it was ok to threaten that way. I thought it had been several generations since it was ok. Like not even when I was a kid. Never mind.

Pittsburgh Zoo

Polar Bears playing with a ball


Sea Dragons -- a relative of Sea Horses

Delia and Elaine

Point Betsie Lighhouse

Happy July 4th!!!

I bet this has nothing to do with the painting

Just another example of Mona Lisa Overuse. I wouldn't want to read enough to find out the pretext. Well, ok, I peeked at a review. It's from a whole series [barf] -- more than I wanted to know in this sentence: "Not only is Mona Lisa now demon-tainted but she's also engaged to Lord Halcyon, the Demon Prince of Hell."

But here's something better:


We recycled these bottles when we cleaned the basement recently -- just kept the photo. See her in the upper right-hand corner of the rightmost bottle?

Flamingos in Ann Arbor

Dolphins

Dolphins love to chase after fast boats and play in the wake or in the bow wave ahead of the boat. I saw them twice while we were in the Galapagos. The above dolphin was not close to the boat -- he was participating in a feeding frenzy that we saw from the Islander.

On an earlier day cruise on the very fast and smaller boat Luna Azul, I saw dolphins playing in the wake. I've seen them doing this in Florida, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Also, I've seen them indirectly in the Mediterranean: that is, depicted on Greek vases in museums. In Hawaii I've even been snorkeling with dolphins all around me. In most of these experiences, I've heard their squeaky voices calling to each other or maybe to us.

Dolphins even seem willing and amused when they are captives and made to act in dolphin shows such as the one at the Baltimore Aquarium we saw last winter. But I suspect they'd rather be free to choose their playmates and jump or spin as they like (depending on which kind of dolphins they are).

Imps of Darkness

I'm fascinated by the description of marine iguanas as "imps of darkness," a term first used in the Voyage of H. M. S. Blonde to the Sandwich Islands, in the years 1824-1825 by Captain the Right Hon. Lord Byron, Commander. During his voyage to Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) he stopped in Galapagos, where he saw these unique creatures that are found only here.

The term was adopted by Darwin, who mentions having read it somewhere, and then uses it. We saw them on almost every beach, on rock, sand, and concrete jetties. I find the choice of words completely vivid, as they reminded me of medieval demons or the imps in Grimm's Fairy Tales or the imp shown, from Celtic fairy tales.

Here is the passage that describes these creatures and their environment:

Our party to Narborough Island landed among an innumberable host of sea-guanas, the ugliest living creatures we ever beheld.

They are like the alligator, but with a more hideous head, and of a dirty sooty black colour, and sat on the black lava rocks like so many imps of darkness. As far as the eye could reach we saw nothing but rough fields of lava, that seemed to have hardened while the force of the wind had been rippling its liquid surface. In some places we could fancy the fiery sea had been only gently agitated; in others, it seemed as if it had been swept into huge waves. Here and there it was rent into deep crevices coated with iron rust, and filled up with salt water. Far inland too, the pools are salt; and not a vegetable, but the cactus here and there, is seen to root in the rock. Seaward, however, the eye is relieved by a few patches of mangrove, which have begun to fringe the desolate place with green. [Reproduced here.]

I also found this interesting use of the term: "Trolls were always imps of darkness. They are descended from the Jotuns, or Frost-Giants of Northern paganism, and they correspond to the Panis, or night-demons of the Veda. In many Norse tales they are said to burst when they see the risen sun. They eat human flesh, are ignorant of the simplest arts, and live in the deepest recesses of the forest or in caverns on the hillside, where the sunlight never penetrates." [From Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology by John Fiske, 1872]

Moby Dick

As we toured in the Galapagos, we often thought about whales. One day, we watched a small pod of whales as they were spouting and flipping their tails some distance from the ship. Another day we saw these bones.

After I came back, I decided for several reasons that I would read Moby Dick. One reason was that Melville, on one of his voyages, had been in the Galapagos. Another reason was that simply being in the Galapagos makes one think about what the world might have been like before human alteration of the environment -- seeing mile-long sand beaches inhabited only by sea lions, as I've said, is thought-provoking. (This despite the fact that the Galapagos have been altered substantially, and great effort is going into reversing the damage.)

The ocean used to be infinite -- but the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico brings home how vulnerable the vast seas now have become. Moby Dick is about the vastness of the sea -- yet another impetus that led me to read it.

I don't read Moby Dick as a simple ecological allegory (like Dr.Seuss's The Lorax). I enjoyed the opposition between the physical demands of whaling and the obsession of Ahab. I enjoyed the encyclopedic depiction of whales as whales, as illustrated in my yellowing Modern Library edition by Rockwell Kent. I think it flattens the complex novel to see it as making a political point.

Today's New York Times includes an article that explores what connections can be made between Moby Dick and the Gulf oil spill. The article states: "The novel has served over the years as a remarkably resilient metaphor for everything from atomic power to the invasion of Iraq to the decline of the white race ... . Now, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit are as telling as ever."

Randy Kennedy, author of the article, suggests how sometimes the connections are anachronistic or exaggerated. However, he elaborates quite a few of them. BP, suggests Kennedy, plays the role of Ahab. He notes an "analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours." He also cites many past authors who have tried to use Melville's work to advance what they have to say about various environmental issues. It's an interesting article, but I think the application of Moby Dick diminishes Melville's accomplishment.

The Enchanted Islands

Before modern mapmaking, the Galapagos Islands were also known as The Encantadas, or Enchanted Islands. In looking a little further for information and history of the islands, I read several sketches published by Herman Melville in 1854 and reprinted here.

Melville explained the enchantment in several ways:

Indeed, there are seasons when currents quite unaccountable prevail for a great distance round about the total group, and are so strong and irregular as to change a vessel's course against the helm, though sailing at the rate of four or five miles the hour. The difference in the reckonings of navigators produced by these causes, along with the light and variable winds, long nourished a persuasion that there existed two distinct clusters of isles in the parallel of the Encantadas, about a hundred leagues apart. Such was the idea of their earlier visitors, the Buccaneers; and as late as 1750 the charts of that part of the Pacific accorded with the strange delusion. And this apparent fleetingness and unreality of the locality of the isles was most probably one reason for the Spaniards calling them the Encantada, or Enchanted Group.

But ... the modern voyager will be inclined to fancy that the bestowal of this name might have in part originated in that air of spellbound desertness which so significantly invests the isles. Nothing can better suggest the aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes. Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

However wavering their place may seem by reason of the currents, they themselves, at least to one upon the shore, appear invariably the same: fixed, cast, glued into the very body of cadaverous death.

Nor would the appellation “enchanted” seem misapplied in still another sense. For concerning the peculiar reptile inhabitant of these wilds—whose presence gives the group its second Spanish name, Gallipagos—concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a superstition not more frightful than grotesque. They earnestly believe that all wicked sea officers, more especially commodores and captains, are at death (and in some cases before death) transformed into tortoises, thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.

Melville's sketches are fascinating. Above all, he conveys the highly negative view that the voyagers of his time mainly held. He refers to various islands with words like these: "woebegone landscape," "a dead desert rock," "grim cliffs," and "one of the most northerly of the group, so solitary, remote, and blank, it looks like No-Man's Land seen off our northern shore."

During our tours of the various islands, I was constantly attempting to grasp and imagine the vast difference in point of view between us modern tourists (on our luxury cruise boat) and the early mariners, often searching for fresh food and water, or a place to repair a storm-damaged ship. Melville creates vivid images for my poor imagination.

I plan to explore more of the words of early observers, attempting to comprehend the differences between their views and mine. I've found a website of reference material here, especially with a compilation of early texts (including Melville's).