Gyökér

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Stamp Honoring Hungarian Poet Radnóti Miklós (1909-1944)

The title of this post is the Magyar (Hungarian) word for “Roots.” Radnóti was a Jewish-Hungarian poet who was conscripted into forced labor by the Nazis and marched to the point of exhaustion. The poem below was found in his pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave.

Roots

Strength courses in the root;
It drinks the rain, it lives together with the soil,
And its dream is white as snow.

From beneath the soil to above the soil it bursts;
The root crawls, cunning,
Its arms like ropes.

On the root’s arms, worms sleep;
On the root’s legs, worms sit;
The world grows worm-ridden.

Yet the root lives on below;
The world does not concern it —
Only the branch does, full of leaves.

Marveling at the branch, it feeds it constantly;
To it it sends its savors,
Its sweet, celestial savors.

Now I too am a root;
I too now live among worms;
It is there that poetry is made.

I was once a flower; now I have become a root,
With the heavy dark soil above me;
My fate now ended,
A saw wails above my head.

Below is the first stanza of the poem in Hungarian, just to give you an idea of the severe compression possible in the Magyar language:

Gyökér

A gyökérben erő surran,
esőt iszik, földdel él
és az álma hófehér.

“The Harmonious Universe of His Soul”

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Claude Lorrain’s “Coast View with the Abduction of Europa”

Goethe perhaps said it best: “Claude Lorrain knew the real world by heart, down to the minute details. He used it as a means of expressing the harmonious universe of his soul.”

Both Lorrain (1604-1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) made a career of creating peaceful canvases that draw the viewer’s eye in and leave him or her in a meditative state. That is the case even though the subject matter of the above painting is of a violent rape:

The Abduction of Europa is a classical myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Zeus transforms himself into a white bull to abduct the Phoenician princess Europa. He lures her onto his back and carries her across the sea to the island of Crete, where they have children, including Minos, who become the first king of Crete and one of the divine judges of the underworld.

Rembrandt also painted the scene in a much more dramatic fashion, but in Lorrain’s painting, it is almost an afterthought—as if it could have been replaced by dancing Naiads or a shepherd with his flock with no loss in overall effect.

Every time I visit the Getty Center in the Santa Monica Mountains, I feel a frisson of excitement as I take a fresh look at the museum’s incredible collection.

The La Brea Tar Pits

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The Lake Pit, Largest of the La Brea Tar Pits

It’s one of those redundant names: brea in Spanish means tar, so the La Brea Tar Pits are literally the Tar Tar pits. (Similarly, Torpenhow Hill in Britain means Hillhillhill Hill.)

Martine and I haven’t visited the tar pits for almost a decade, so we drove down to Hancock Park and took a good look at what the area looked like ten thousand plus years ago. Based on the skeletons that have been fished out of the pits, there were giant sloths, mammoths, lions, camels, sabertooth tigers, and many, many dire wolves.

Skeleton of Columbian Mammoth

The archeological record shows that there were humans living in the area during the Ice Age. It couldn’t have been much fun for them to contend with their primitive weapons against so many gigantic mammals.

Visiting the pits, I am reminded of a famous line in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe points to the shore of the Thames and says: “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

The La Brea Tar Pits Museum is a fascinating place to visit. In addition to all the skeletons of giant mammals who perished by drowning in the pits, there is a lab which allows you to watch volunteers cleaning bones recently pulled from the pits. (There are a number of them on the grounds.)

Martine got into the spirit of the occasion by donning a dire wolf headdress:

Martine with Wolfish Smile

My Word!

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Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite word?
View all responses

Since I am multi-lingual, here are my favorite words in my four languages:

  • Spanish: pendejo, literally “pubic hair,” describing someone you really don’t like.
  • French: débrouillir, literally “de-fog” or “unravel,” how Inspector Maigret solves crimes.
  • Hungarian: lófasz, literally “horse’s dick,” used regularly to describe something insignificant or non-existent.
  • English: septemfluous, literally “flowing in seven streams,” a word with very limited applicability, like medioxumous, rotl, or crwth.

The Musicians’ Brawl

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“The Musicians’ Brawl” by Georges de la Tour (1593-1652)

This afternoon, I dropped in to the Getty Center to refresh my store of images. The one that stuck in my mind the most was a 17th century canvas entitled “The Musicians’ Brawl” by French painter Georges de la Tour.

There’s a lot happening in this picture. There are five figures depicted, all very nearly on the same plane. From left to right, we begin with an old woman who is appalled by the fracas. Moving rightward, we have a bearded blind musician with a knife in one hand and a hurdy-gurdy slung on his shoulder. He is being confronted by another bearded musician with a shawm (a predecessor to the oboe) in his left hand and a wedge of lemon in his right, which he is squeezing in the eyes of the hurdy-gurdy player not entirely believing he is blind.

Continuing to the right, we have two musicians who are spectators. The bearded one is barely paying attention, while his mustachioed companion stares drunkenly out at us while clutching his instrument. That rightmost figure is, to me, the most memorable one in the painting. He is clearly chuckling and looking at us with slightly glazed eyes.

I will never forget that drunken facial expression. It is the painterly version of an earworm.

Rock Schlock and Barrel

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When I was young, we didn’t have a working radio. As a result I didn’t have any fave rock groups as I was growing up. By the time I was introduced to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors, I was well into my twenties.

Even then, I never really liked the whole rock ethos, that whole thing where gaunt hippies pranced onstage while wielding electric guitars. Moreover, I never liked electric guitars. So, in effect, there never was a time when I could say that so and so was the music of my youth. I never had much music of any kind in my youth.

Then, when I was in my thirties, I discovered classical music right around the same time the compact disk (CD) came into being. A few years later, I finally learned to drive at the age of forty and discovered the classical music stations KFAC-FM and KUSC-FM. KFAC switched to Pop Music in 1989; so all I ever listen to on the radio today is KUSC.

Come to think of it, I never listen to Pop Music either. I have never yet heard any Taylor Swift songs. What floats my boat is Mahler, Sibelius, Bruckner, Dvorak, and Wagner.

I guess that makes me rather atypical for my generation. My cohort is busy listening on PBS to Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. Fortunately, I’m okay with that.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

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Soviet Writers Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012) Strugatsky

They were by far the greatest science fiction authors who ever lived. The two brothers produced a string of masterpieces (the greatest being Roadside Picnic, or Пикник на обочине) that are unlikely to be surpassed, ever!

I am currently reading two of their novels whose chapters are artfully interleaved. They wrote Ugly Swans (Гадкие лебеди) in 1972; in 1986, they wrote Lame Fate (Хромая судьба) and shuffled the chapters together. Reading it is an amazing experience. I’ve finished about 40% of the nested novels at this point. I haven’t even encountered the science fiction yet, though I feel it is lurking and waiting to pounce.

Among the brothers’ works I have read are:

  • Space Apprentice (1962)
  • Far Rainbow (1963)
  • Hard to Be a God (1964)
  • The Final Circle of Paradise (1965)
  • The Second Invasion from Mars (1967)
  • Prisoners of Power (1969)
  • The Dead Mountaineers’ Hotel (1970)
  • Roadside Picnic (1972)
  • Definitely Maybe (1977)
  • Beetle in the Anthill (1980)
  • The Time Wanderers (1986)

Many of the Strugatskys’ titles have never been translated into English. I think that, ultimately, they will all be. I can think of few Soviet writers working in any genre that have such a large and consistently excellent body of work.

There are only a handful of science fiction writers I admire. After the Strugatsky brothers, there are Stanislaw Lem from Poland and, in the United States, Philip K. Dick and Clifford D. Simak.