Blog


About


Books

 Latest Post: Flash!

Agnostic
A Spirited Manifesto
Available April 4, 2016

   Who is the AT?   Books by LH
  • Agnostic

  • The First Muslim

  • After The Prophet

  • Jezebel

  • Mary

  • More from LH

     

Windhovering

Posted October 19th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

windhoverI slow down for falcons.

Falcons, eagles, hawks, cranes, herons, kestrels, all manner of large birds.

If I’m on the road, I pull over, stop the car, get out, and allow myself to be entranced.  If I’m at home and spot one from my office window, I abandon the keyboard, step out onto the deck, and stand transfixed, silently urging it closer even as it spirals farther away.

This is one reason I’ve been stretching the muscles of my mind trying to commit Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Windhover to memory — the first eight lines, that is, since the last six go all over-the-top Christ-our-Lordy and do nothing for me.

A mere eight lines should be easy enough, no?  It should be what my Irish mother used to call a doddle.  And yet while I think I have an excellent memory, this poem defies me, and has done so for well over a year.

Try reciting it out loud, slowly, rather than reading it fast and silently:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

You see what I mean?  Wouldn’t you love to ring upon the rein of a wimpling wing?

This is one of the two most anthologized poems written by Hopkins, the closeted gay man who became a Jesuit priest and indeed kept his heart in hiding — except in his poetry.  The other is Pied Beauty, which you might know from its first line, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” but that I love for its seventh, which expands dappledness to “All things counter, original, spare, strange.”

The idea of beauty as counter, original, spare, strange is so damn beautiful, and yet it’s ‘The Windhover’ that haunts me, so much so that it comes with me everywhere I drive.  Physically comes with me, that is, nestled on page 468 of The Rattlebag, an anthology edited by Ted Hiughes and Seamus Heaney that has taken up permanent residence on the passenger seat of my car, jostling for room with the occasional human passenger.  Every time a drawbridge goes up (this being watery Seattle), I open the book to the dog-eared page and recite the lines a few times, eyes open sometimes, closed at others.  Yet no matter how I do it, nor how many times I do it, I find myself stumbling, and have to stop and look at the printed page, always discovering yet another transcendent phrase that’s escaped me.

‘The Windhover’ defies memory, at least for me, and this makes me marvel not only at the lines themselves — at each evocatively, even provocatively precise word — but at how Hopkins wrote them.  He has to have held the whole of the poem in his mind in order to write it, has to have each word following each word firmly in place.  And yet as a mere reader/reciter, I can’t keep track.  The poem seems to spiral away from me, to soar out of sight, leaving me thrillingly aware of the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: art, ecology, existence | Tagged: Tags: Gerard Manley Hopkins, mastery, memory, Pied Beauty, The Windhover | 5 Comments
  1. Rachel Cowan says:
    October 20, 2015 at 7:35 am

    I’m quite sure I did memorize it in high school! Now all go for 2 and read the rest, flying with the falcon

    Thanks for reminding me

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 21, 2015 at 9:24 am

      Wish I’d had your high-school teacher!

      • rachel Cowan says:
        October 21, 2015 at 11:14 am

        you would have loved Mr. Wilbury Crockett z”l. He would have called you Miss Hazleton and been very interested in your response to what you read.

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          October 21, 2015 at 11:25 am

          Wilbury! What a wonderfully Hopkinsy name!

  2. Tea-mahm says:
    October 23, 2015 at 7:09 pm

    Lesley, these words remind me why I like to be with you as well as read your written words. Wonderful heart-felt piece. Delicious flight.
    Warmly, Tamam

Sun Dog

Posted October 23rd, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

This happened some years ago, before the ubiquity of smartphones.  It was dawn, the midsummer sun not yet risen, as I sailed with a friend out of Neah Bay, the small native American township at the northwest tip of the United States. I stood at the helm as my companion huddled over charts down in the cabin, plotting our course across the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca where it opens up into the Pacific. The sea was cutting short and choppy as the incoming ocean swell came up against the outflow of the strait, but I was suffused with a feeling of calm. We were the only boat in sight, the only sounds the water against the hull and an occasional flap of the sail. The world, at that moment, was perfect. And then it became more so.

The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

I tried to tell him that somewhere, some time, I had read an account of just such a twinned sunrise (in a novel? a short story? I’ve searched since, but never been able to find it again). But he’d have none of it. Instead, he scrambled down to the cabin to bring up an armful of meteorology books, and with his back resolutely set to the splendor of the sky behind him, started leafing frantically through them. “See!” he said, jabbing at a page. “It can’t be a sun dog. A sun dog is a parhelion, a much smaller mock sun, and they come in pairs, at an angle to the real sun. Not this… this abomination!”

Abomination?  I’d never expected to hear that biblical word from this eminently rational intellectual – a pastor’s son turned insistent atheist. “Can’t you see?” he wailed. “Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” I’m not a hundred percent sure if he used the phrase “end of the world” — surely not, though it seems to me he did, and he trembled as though some form of apocalypse was in progress.

I admit I was no help. “Just look!” I kept saying. But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this. Not even my companion’s panic could change that.

Long after that friendship’s inevitable dissolution, I occasionally searched meteorology sites online. My companion had been right in that most sun dogs are indeed much smaller images at an angle to the sun, but I did eventually find a couple of photographs of two suns, even if not quite conjoined, and horizontal rather than vertical.  I also found explanations of how the acutely angled light of the sun is refracted when layers of ice crystals form barely visible low-lying fog in the chill early-morning air, acting as a kind of mirror.  I could now explain how come I’d seen what I saw. And yet the explanation did nothing to diminish the splendor of the memory. Or the experience of pure wonder. Or the knowledge that what had delighted me, had terrified another.

double_sun

 

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, existence, light | Tagged: Tags: awe, Neah Bay, parhelion, Strait of Juan de Fuca, sunrise, two suns | 4 Comments
  1. Mary Scriver says:
    October 23, 2014 at 12:44 pm

    I’m laughing at your silly friend that his education didn’t include the science of optics! The sky is full of magic tricks from the aurora to the light ellipses that some people think are alien spaceships. If one lives on prairie or sea, there is plenty to marvel at — the great light shows of the planet. But then I must add that once, heading into the Rockies from the prairie on a damp and very cold day, I drove through THREE rainbow arches, one after the other, and fully expected to arrive in some mystical place.

    Thanks for the image of the double dog — as in “double dog dare.”

    Prairie Mary

  2. Cory says:
    October 23, 2014 at 12:58 pm

    First, thank you for this moving description of a sight I will very likely never witness. I do find your atheist friend’s reaction odd, however. I tend to think atheists must see themselves as highly rational, free of all that religious emoting, and keen, dispassionate observers. So it was amusing to read of your friend’s railing against a phenomenon because it was against the laws of nature! I guess some atheists have an orthodoxy all their own.

  3. Nuzhat says:
    October 23, 2014 at 8:05 pm

    Hi Lesley,
    This piece is really visual poetry! I could see the sun dog live with you!
    The marvels of Nature are beyond human perception. I wish you could join me in my walks by the sea in monsoon, in mumbai. The sunsets are a treat, as each day the sky paints a different picture, with the sun charting out its colorful track into the horizon.
    A writer, composer, artist, believer….all of them can actually grasp its impact in any medium. And yes, you can reach out to equal number of rainbows too..
    Nuzhat.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 24, 2014 at 8:40 am

      That sounds like a rain date! I look forward to it. — L.

Pure Zen

Posted April 6th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

06matthiessen3-master495

 

My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard bears the marks of a well-used life, much like the photo of him in today’s New York Times. The cover is torn and tattered, the linen boards worn and faded, the pages yellowing at the edges. The end pages are full of scribbled notes to myself, the text scored and marked in the margins. This is a much-read book.

I’ve placed it high on the reading list of every writing course I’ve ever taught, tracing the intertwining of its parallel journeys: on the one hand, into the hidden inner sanctum of Dolpo on the Tibetan plateau, in search of the elusive snow leopard; on the other, into the mystical and equally elusive peacefulness of Zen Buddhism.

There were far more than two hands, of course, which is why I read the book so many times and never tired of it, entranced by the intense lyricism of its descriptions of landscape, and the sharp contrast with the pared-down writing about Zen practice.

I have most of Matthiessen’s other books too, both fiction and nonfiction, but this is the one I keep coming back to (in a way I suspect would have deeply disappointed him — no writer cares to be defined by one book above all the others).

I didn’t know much ‘about’ him other than what he revealed in his writing, which was carefully calibrated. I had no idea he worked a naively youthful two years for the CIA, for example, using the Paris Review as a cover, though I did know he’d become a Zen priest, that he was fiercely involved with environmental issues, and that he was… well, not exactly good-husband material. No matter: the writer was more important to me than the man.

Yet much as I love and admire his writing, I haven’t ordered my own copy of his last book, a novel called In Paradise. Instead, it’s waiting for me at the library as I write.  And has been waiting a few days. I delay picking it up because even though it’s Matthiessen, something in me doesn’t want to read it. It’s set at a meditation retreat at the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, and the very idea of such a retreat seems, at least to me, a horribly ironic oxymoron. Which may indeed turn out to be his point. I’ll find out soon enough.

Matthiessen died yesterday, at age 86. “I don’t want to cling too hard to life,” he’d said, and by not doing so, I suspect he arrived again at the place he described in this quote from The Tree Where Man Was Born, which serves as the ending of the extraordinarily timed piece on him in today’s NYT magazine. Here it is:

“Lying back against these ancient rocks of Africa, I am content. The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without having discovered what it was.”

What is this if not pure Zen?

 

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: art, Buddhism, ecology | Tagged: Tags: Holocaust, In Paradise, Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, The Tree Where Man Was Born, writing, Zen | 6 Comments
  1. Lisa Kane says:
    April 6, 2014 at 2:15 pm

    Beautiful post. What I want to know: why aren’t these talented, perceptive men better husband material? Any theories? Yours sincerely, Lisa Kane

    Sent from my iPhone

    >

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      April 6, 2014 at 3:55 pm

      Interesting question. I’ve always thought writing is a very strange thing to do, which is probably part of why I do it. But since I’m not good wife material, any speculation from me on good husband material might be unintentionally self-damning…

  2. willow1 says:
    April 6, 2014 at 2:34 pm

    We find what we are searching for when we gain the realization that is has always been right before us. Right here. Right now. Bows.

  3. fatmakalkan says:
    April 6, 2014 at 9:00 pm

    His time ended like many others and ours still ticking. Most valuable thing we have in this life is “time”. I feel restless after every sun set. There is a lot to be done to reach my full potential to perfect my moral character, act like a prophet Mohammad, talk like him, walk like him. We came from Allah and we will all return to Him.

  4. John Hendricks says:
    April 7, 2014 at 12:35 am

    Ms Hazleton
    I am the person who complimented you on the lovely book : The First Muslim.
    The more I read you, the more I am convinced that you are such a deep believer – in such a deep manner – and such excellent wife material for somebody who can see this !

    My “wife” moved on with her two dictionaries I. I shall still study the meaning of : agnostic, but I know DEPTH when I “see” it.
    Kindest regards
    John Hendricks

  5. Meezan says:
    April 7, 2014 at 4:55 am

    “To read books” list updated. Thank you.

Flashback (Speed and Transgression)

Posted March 30th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

I’ve just experienced a strange sense of time travel — seeing myself twenty-odd years ago and finding her familiar and yet unfamiliar.

A reader found this video online and sent me the link.  I had no idea it even existed.  I only vaguely remember doing the interview, so had no idea what I was going to say next.  Sometimes I laughed as I watched, sometimes I cringed, but for the most part, I looked at this self-possessed 1992 self in amazement, as though asking, Who is this woman?

So for the record, and because it is part of my past, of the decade I spent writing about matters automotive (and earning far more money doing it that I ever have by writing about politics or religion), here it is:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/Cf62K7PypPg]

A footnote, also for the record:  it took a few years, but I drove all the speed out of me, and now take an almost perverse delight in slowness.

And, um, I no longer wear leopard print shirts.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: absurd, ecology, existence, feminism, technology | Tagged: Tags: cars, Confessions of a Fast Woman, speed, University of Washington, Upon Reflection | 5 Comments
  1. Tea-mahm says:
    March 31, 2014 at 3:25 pm

    Wonderful interview, especially the tie between Icarus and the need to go just a bit higher. and love the leopard print – perfect for speed…..

  2. Lux Ferous says:
    April 1, 2014 at 8:31 am

    What! Why aren’t you a psychologian 🙂

    Lux

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      April 1, 2014 at 12:09 pm

      Now that you put it like that, I like it!

  3. pah says:
    April 2, 2014 at 10:37 am

    gosh, we all get shocks/surprises when we see our old selves.
    where are you, Lesley? missing your blogs

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      April 2, 2014 at 9:50 pm

      right here. just a bit preoccupied…

An Extraordinary Submergence

Posted March 18th, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

Submergence-356x535I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library.  I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later, looking at the cover — “huh?” — and asking myself if I even wanted to read it.

I still know nothing about Ledgard aside from the capsule bio on  the back cover:  Born in Scotland, lives in Africa, political and war correspondent for The Economist.  Nothing, that is, but the fact that he’s written an astonishingly ambitious, beautiful, and haunting novel.  So much so that the moment I finished it — and I mean the precise moment, with no hesitation — I turned back to the first page and began reading it again, with even greater admiration.

The ‘plot’ is simple enough:  a man and a woman meet in a French hotel, have a brief affair, and continue thinking of each other as they go on with their separate lives.  He is an intelligence agent gathering information on militant extremists in Somalia.  She is a deep-ocean scientist obsessed with the strange life forms in the deep-water fissures of the earth’s mantle.  He is captured by jihadist fighters, badly beaten, held hostage.  She dives in a submersible 3,000 meters under the north Atlantic.  Separate lives indeed, yet somehow, and with extraordinary grace, Ledgard pulls them together into a magnificent evocation of the complexity of life on earth, human and otherwise.  And of its intense fragility.

Life in the deep turns out to be extraordinarily stable.  Life on the surface, terrifyingly unstable.  The hardship of Somalia comes as alive here as the shimmering life forms (I had to look up ‘salp’ on Wikipedia) in the hadopelagic — ‘hado’ from Hades, the deepest depths.  The jihadist captors are drawn with rare understanding even as there’s no stinting on their cruelty (including an all-too-vivid scene in which a young teenage girl who has been raped is stoned to death for adultery).

Here’s an extract from toward the end:

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose… What is likely is that sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead.  You will be drowned in obliviion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory.  It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in.  It will be a submergence.  You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms.  In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead.  Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you.  You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it.  Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.  It is stable.  Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

And as an eerie footnote to this, here’s Ledgard in an interview last year on the blog of The New Yorker.  The novel “juxtaposes land with ocean and enlightenment with fanaticism,” he acknowledged. “I felt impelled to write it in this way, but it is odd, I can see that. But sometimes life is even odder. It was the strangest moment for me when Osama bin Laden was killed and buried at sea. Everything came together in the abyss. I have often thought about it since, not just bin Laden’s weighted corpse sinking down to the sea floor, but also the processes done on his body, the creatures, the crushing dark, and that’s what I am talking about — there is another world in our world.”

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: art, ecology, existence, fundamentalism, science, war | Tagged: Tags: 'Submergence', hadopelagic, J.M.Ledgard, jihadists, ocean science, Osama bin Laden, Somalia | Be the First to leave a comment

Adoring ‘Darling’

Posted October 13th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Here’s my review of Richard Rodriguez’ “Persian carpet of a book” in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, it’s a rave.

No, I’ve never met him.

Yes, I’d love to:

'darling'On rare occasion, a writer makes a reviewer’s life hard. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography has to be celebrated as one of those occasions.

The deep pleasures of such a book defy the usual capsule account. Instead you want to read sentences and whole passages aloud as I’ve been doing over cafe and dinner tables the past few weeks – “Listen to this!” You want to press “Darling” on others as a gift of friendship, judiciously picking whom to share it with lest you expose Rodriguez to pedants who can’t fathom the way his mind works.

“I did not intend to write a spiritual autobiography,” he writes in the foreword, and I’m glad to say that despite the subtitle (an editorial addition, I suspect), he hasn’t. This is something infinitely more supple – a rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book. True, it’s framed as an exploration of his own Catholicism post-9/11, when he realized that “Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light,” and began to wonder how he and the “cockpit terrorists” could worship the same Abrahamic God.

But Rodriguez’s faith is light-years away from the deadening dogma of “mitered, bearded, fringed holy men.” As he investigates “the ecologies of the holy desert” – specifically the Judean desert – what he creates instead is more like an ecology of the soul. And unlike the desert, it teems with life.

St. Francis, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Pope John Paul II, Cesar Chavez, Keats, William Randolph Hearst, Moses, Warhol, Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Day, Shelley – a short list of the roster of personalities jostling shoulders as they wander in and out of the virtual salon of Rodriguez’s mind, where San Francisco is “the mystical, witty, sourdough city,” Las Vegas is “disarmingly innocent,” and Jerusalem’s multiple archaeological layers are “vertiginously sunken – resentments and miracles parfaited.”

His writing is suffused with such little epiphanies, words and images springing to fresh life: His Mexican mother’s ojalá, “God willing,” as a Spanish borrowing from the Muslim inshallah; yellow tulips “closed and as thumpable as drumsticks” outside a Vegas hotel as a friend dies of AIDS in a nearby hospice; Picasso’s division of the female face “into competing arrondissements – one tearful, one tyrannical – like the faces of playing-card Queens.”

But at the heart of this book are women. Rodriguez – gay, Catholic Rodriguez – loves women. Not the way many men say they do, with a sexual twinkle in their eye, but deeply and gratefully. The stand-alone masterpiece of the title chapter starts with that “voluble endearment exchanged between lovers on stage and screen” (Noël Coward‘s “sequined grace notes flying up” like “starlings in a summer sky”), touches among other things on the use of habeebee among Arab men (“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues … men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality”), and builds to the central take on how much the three “desert religions” need women to survive (“Somewhere in its canny old mind, the Church knows this. Every bishop has a mother.”).

Rodriguez depends on women “to protect the Church from its impulse to cleanse itself of me.” It was women who stood against the arid maleness he sensed as a child: “Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear – fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning – crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger – a civet smell. Scripture began to smell of blood – of iron, of salt.”

He writes movingly of his schoolteachers, the Sisters of Mercy – movingly, yet with a wry, clear eye. A single sentence evokes a whole Irish immigrant world: “Most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind.” That wry eye notes their “burqa-like habits” – perfect! – which “lent them protection in the roustabout world, also a bit of romance.” These women in teaching and hospital orders, he writes, were the forerunners of feminism, “the least sequestered women imaginable.”

The specific “darling” here is a newly divorced friend, and the whole chapter is in a way a conversation with her – an extended love letter, really – leading up to this stunning conclusion: “I cannot imagine my freedom as a homosexual man without women in veils. Women in red Chanel. Women in flannel nightgowns. Women in their mirrors. Women saying, Honey-bunny. Women saying, We’ll see. Women saying, If you lay one hand on that child, I swear to God I will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters; women and girls. Without women. Without you.”

Even the most flinty-hearted reviewer could only melt at that.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: agnosticism, Christianity, ecology, existence, Islam, Judaism, light, Middle East, women | Tagged: Tags: 'Darling', Catholic, gay, literature, Mexican-American, review, Richard Rodriguez, San Francisco Chronicle, Sisters of Mercy, spiritual autobiography | Be the First to leave a comment

Against The Odds

Posted May 15th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Stubborn.  Defiant.  Flourishing where it shouldn’t be.  A little piece of the Middle East on my garden raft right here in Seattle:

olive 5-13

Sometimes I prune it a little:  take off a few slender branches, and hang them by my front door until they brown and dry up.  My peace offering to the world.  Nobody seems to notice, but that’s okay:  how could Pacific Northwesterners know what an olive branch looks like?   Lucky people, why would they even need to?

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, existence, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: olive tree, Seattle | 10 Comments
  1. Guy de la Rupelle says:
    May 16, 2013 at 6:39 am

    Nice little tree. Nobody notices, but would they even recognize what it is, or be able to explain the origin of the olive branch? Worn by young brides in ancient Greece it later not only symbolized peace but also victory and fraternity.
    Must be lovely sitting in the deck chair next to it with a good read or mug of tea…

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 16, 2013 at 9:30 am

      Yes, I’m lucky to live here. But re the olive tree, maybe I’ll stick with Noah and the dove… I once wrote some thirty pages about olives and olive oil and olive trees, part of the preliminary draft of my biography of Mary. All but a couple of sentences had to come out, of course. Those pages sit somewhere in a dust-covered box full of rejected writerly “darlings.” The tree beats words any time.

  2. pah says:
    May 16, 2013 at 9:57 am

    looks idyllic! a cuppa and a newspaper!

  3. pah says:
    May 16, 2013 at 9:58 am

    as for the olive tree, symbolic, but mis-understood….all the best

  4. Hana says:
    May 28, 2013 at 1:49 pm

    To be able to extend an Olive Branch, one must know what an olive branch actually looks like !
    I deeply admire your work, keep it up.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 28, 2013 at 5:22 pm

      Nicely put! Thank you — L.

  5. Samah says:
    June 4, 2013 at 1:38 pm

    Loved that “stubborn defiant” .. and I’d have noticed it 😉 A middle Eastern knows it’s Middle Eastern’s plants.
    Loved that you wrote “The first Muslim” btw , really interesting! and your talk on TED, you’re such an inspiring person!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 23, 2013 at 5:15 pm

      Great! That idea of stubborn defiance turns up in the new TED talk too (the one soon to be released). — L.

  6. Niloufer Gupta says:
    October 19, 2013 at 3:03 am

    Thank you Lesley for the book “the first muslim”new insights on the way of life that i was born in have once again made me understand what a human is.I am a khoja shia muslim from bangalore- bombay where i was born -kolkata ,where i spent a better part of my life.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 19, 2013 at 10:41 am

      My pleasure, my privilege, Niloufer — L.

Elephant + Waves = Joy

Posted February 16th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Forget cat and dog videos!  Elephant joy is where it’s at.

This has been making me smile all day:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/m90jeBPaBio]

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, light | Tagged: | 1 Comment
  1. Anna Johnson says:
    March 9, 2013 at 6:18 pm

    Thank you thank you for posting the elephant joy video! I have an affinity toward elephants and the video enriched my soul. Molto grazie.

Yom Kippur 2012

Posted September 27th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

My way of observing Yom Kippur.  Somewhere near Mount Rainier:

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: agnosticism, ecology, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: Lesley Hazleton, Yom Kippur | 2 Comments
  1. Talia Alvi says:
    September 27, 2012 at 3:33 pm

    the beauty and calmness of the water in the picture feels enough to wash one’s soul in

  2. Stab Greenberg says:
    October 12, 2012 at 4:11 am

    …

All That Remains

Posted July 11th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

This is a long post, but then Shi Shi beach is long.  It’s one of the wildest, most forlorn, most beautiful beaches in the world, four hours by car and ferry from Seattle, and then another hour slogging through psychedelically viscous deep mud, ending in an ohmygod slither down a steep cliff, clinging to tree roots as you go, and then…  the magnificent wilderness of the Pacific Ocean.

Usually I come here in winter, after a storm, when the water wells up so high that you swear it’s going to swamp you like a tsunami wave.  The pounding of it makes the sand beneath your feet reverberate like an ongoing earthquake (seriously:  it registers on seismic sensors.)  With the wind high and rain flying at you, there’s no telling where water ends and sky begins.  Spume lifts in huge curtains off the tops of the waves;  giant balls of foam race along the beach as though propelled by some inner force;  the roar of the water drowns out anything but shouting.  To stand on Shi Shi at such times is thrilling and humbling and terrifying all at the same time.

The ocean tosses up whatever it carries here, and some of it comes back home with me.  Buoys torn loose from crab pots;  tangled nets and long lines of rope;  even, once, a blue hardhat that belonged to someone called Beata Riggo.  I know this because the name is there, carefully marked in indelible ink on the mesh webbing inside the hat.  A Norwegian name, I think, though I’m not sure.  The hat must have gone overboard.  But it wasn’t until last week that it occurred to me that its owner might have gone overboard too.

I was at Shi Shi on a sunny summer day, for a change.  Yet there was a certain overcast to the sun, at least in my mind, because now a different kind of flotsam is coming ashore.  The ocean has carried the debris from the tsunami that ravaged the eastern coast of Japan over a year ago, and now it’s beginning to arrive on the west coast of America, ten thousand miles away.  A fishing boat washed ashore this spring on Vancouver Island;  a floating dock on the Oregon shore.  And at Shi Shi?  I kind of didn’t want to know.

But the indomitable Jen Graves, art critic of The Stranger, was braver than I.   Like me, she’d been part of an kind of ad hoc temporary collective of art and tech types convened a couple of weeks ago to explore problems they might collaborate on.  The tsunami debris was identified as one such problem:  how to contain, it, how to handle it and collect it and dispose of it.  But for me, the problem was quite the opposite.  It was how to conserve it.

What Jen and I saw washing up on the Pacific coast is what remains of people’s lives.  It’s what remains of people who died.  There was stuff on the beach that day I’d never seen there before.  Nothing as dramatic as a boat or a floating dock, but small remnants of humanity like a piece of wood that might have been part of a broomstick, but with many layers of multi-colored paint on it, which made it seem somehow ceremonial.  Or matte black spheres that looked at first like mines, but turned out to be plastic floats from Japanese fishing nets.   Or – the bane of our oceans – Styrofoam, brittle and yellowed by salt and time.

This is only the beginning.  More will come.  I can see that it’s an environmental problem, of course, but surely it’s also a cultural one, even an existential one.  This is, after all, more than mere debris.  It’s testimony.  Testimony to other people’s lives, to the power of the ocean, to the conditionality of our own existence.  To treat it as a problem that can be “solved” seems to me insufficient.  Surely a group of artists and technologists could find a more creative “solution”?

An interpretable site?  A memorial?  An installation?  I don’t know.  But another country’s tragedy as our debris?  I think we can do better than that.  And perhaps we will.  We meet again tonight, this time open to the public, and I’ll be wearing Beata Riggo’s hardhat – not because I look good in it (in fact I look idiotic), but as a reminder, at least to me, that we need to conserve not only the environment, but also memory.  That we need to respect the power of the ocean rather than try to control it.  That we need to be thrilled and humbled and terrified all at the same time.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: art, ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: Tags: debris, flotsam, Japan, Jen Graves, memory, Pacific Ocean, Shi Shi beach, tsunami | 4 Comments
  1. Annie Pardo says:
    July 11, 2012 at 11:39 am

    Beautiful, Lesley. Hope to make it this evening.

  2. Byron Au Yong says:
    July 11, 2012 at 2:35 pm

    Hi Lesley. Lovely reflections on what remains. Yesterday, I visited Ampersand in Portland. This shop contains old photographs and ephemera from the 20th century displayed in a pristine modern setting. I felt comforted while holding odd collections of other people’s once personal belongings. Will be great to hang out with you in your hard hat tonight to unravel ideas & discover more questions.

  3. Meezan says:
    July 11, 2012 at 10:13 pm

    God Lesley, you are such a romantic. I love the lingering of poetic sadness in this post. I once visited an abandoned afghan refugee camp and felt the same heart break.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      July 12, 2012 at 9:35 am

      True. There’s few things more dispiriting than a heart incapable of sadness and its corollary: joy.

Nuclear Denial

Posted April 11th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Exactly a month after the humongous 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has finally raised the severity level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant from level 5  to level 7.   That’s the highest there is.

I guess they could no longer deny reality.  Maybe we can’t either.

The decision came after another huge aftershock (6.6) today.  Which followed an identically huge one yesterday.  And another even larger one (7.1) four days ago.  Which makes me wonder what the new definition of “aftershock” might be.  The dimensions of the unfolding disaster at Fukushima seem to have had a devastating effect on, among so much else, our ability to react.

Now it’s true that a 7.1 is nothing compared to the 9.0 one on March 11 (reminder:  a 9.0 is ten times more powerful than an 8.0, which is ten times more powerful than a 7.0, and so on).  But as I write, these ‘aftershocks’ (any one of which would send Seattle into total panic) all seem to be right in the area of Fukushima.  Where things have clearly gone not from very bad to worse, but from very bad to worst.

So how come it’s no longer headline news? Have we gotten used so quickly to nuclear disaster?  Do we seriously think that because it’s “over there” in Japan it’s not quite real?

Take the word “indefinitely” in this April 6 front-page NYT story, for example.  It could mean an indefinite amount of time.  It could also mean a very, very long amount of time.

United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semi-molten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.

Buried in the very last paragraph of the story is this, from the director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists talking about the nightmarish pile-up of problems at Fukushima:

Even the best juggler in the world can get too many balls up in the air.  They’ve got a lot of nasty things to negotiate in the future, and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.

Two days later, and a 7.1 quake hits — a pretty good definition of a missed step —  and yet the story is suddenly not on the front page of the NYT, but on page 14, with the scariest part again buried at the end:

At Fukushima No. 2, extremely radioactive material continues to ooze out of the reactor pressure vessel, and the leak is likely to widen with time, a western nuclear executive asserted.

“It’s a little like pulling a thread out of your tie,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business connections in Japan. “Any breach gets bigger.”

Flashes of extremely intense radioactivity have become a serious problem, he said. Tokyo Electric’s difficulties in providing accurate information on radiation are not a result of software problems, as some Japanese officials have suggested, but stem from damage to measurement instruments caused by radiation, the executive said.

In other words, nobody knows what’s happening because there’s so much radiation — those “flashes of extremely intense radioactivity” — that it’s fried the gauges.

Meanwhile, that “extremely radioactive material” keeps oozing out.  Into the Pacific Ocean.  And into the air.   Which means that in an “indefinite” amount of time, it will reach us, wherever we are.  And that sounds pretty definite to me.

———————

If you want to see just how many earthquakes there’ve been in Japan since March 11, click here for a horribly hypnotic visual timeline of the size, frequency and depth of the ongoing tsunami of quakes (it comes courtesy of a researcher at the University of Canterbury in, no coincidence, Christchurch, New Zealand).  You can follow every one since March 11, when the 9.0 lights up the whole screen, or click on the upper right-hand corner for any date you select.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, technology | Tagged: Tags: aftershock, Christchurch, earthquake, Fukushima, Japan, level 7, nuclear power, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tsunami | 3 Comments
  1. Lynn Rosen says:
    April 12, 2011 at 12:18 am

    Jesus, is there anyone else out there besides you and KPFA Pacifica Radio who is on top of this horrific disaster? What kind of $ power does the nuclear coalition wreak over the media? Huge thanks for trying to keep this issue above the radar. Never doubt that a small group of people…..

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      April 12, 2011 at 9:10 am

      Yes — interesting how that business executive “spoke on condition of anonymity to protect business interests in Japan.” Sigh. And that today, the print edition of the New York Times runs the report on the Level-7 alert on… page 12.

      • Lynn Rosen says:
        April 12, 2011 at 3:20 pm

        On NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me a few days ago, they ran a REAL Japanese animated TV spot referencing the meltdown probs as follows:
        The young school child has a tummy problem and is farting. That’s OK but if he poops, we’re all in deep doo doo. (Complete with sound effects.) OY!

Letter from Japan

Posted March 19th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

The super-moon is clearly having its effect on me.  I’m not exactly a wide-eyed optimist, my sense of tragedy is rather well-developed, and I certainly don’t think in terms of “cosmic evolutionary steps” like the writer quoted below, yet I found her description of life right now in Sendai, Japan, very moving.

I was sent it by a friend in New York who wrote:  “There is much to be depressed about what is happening in Japan, the Middle East, and the U.S., and yet this morning, when someone forwarded me this letter from Anne Thomas about her decision to stay in Sendai, I knew I had to send it on because this is really a time for the best in human beings to come forth.  I am glad to be exploring with all of you what it is to be human:

A letter from Sendai
ANNE THOMAS  3/14/2011
published online @ Ode magazine

Things here in Sendai have been rather surreal. But I am very blessed  to have wonderful friends who are helping me a lot. Since my shack is now even more worthy of that name, I am staying at a friend’s home. We share  supplies like water, food and a kerosene heater. We sleep lined up in one  room, eat by candlelight, share stories. It is warm, friendly, and  beautiful.

During the day we help each other clean up the mess in our homes.  People sit in their cars, looking at news on their navigation screens, or  line up to get drinking water when a source is open. If someone has water  running in their home, they put out a sign so people can come to fill up  their jugs and buckets.

It’s utterly amazingly that where I  am there has been no looting, no pushing in lines. People leave their front  door open, as it is safer when an earthquake strikes. People keep saying,  “Oh, this is how it used to be in the old days when everyone helped one  another.”

Quakes keep coming. Last night they  struck about every 15 minutes. Sirens are constant and helicopters pass  overhead often.

We got water for a few hours in our  homes last night, and now it is for half a day. Electricity came on this  afternoon. Gas has not yet come on. But all of this is by area. Some people  have these things, others do not. No one has washed for several days. We  feel grubby, but there are so much more important concerns than that for us  now. I love this peeling away of non-essentials. Living fully on the level  of instinct, of intuition, of caring, of what is needed for survival, not  just of me, but of the entire group.

There are strange parallel universes  happening. Houses a mess in some places, yet then a house with futons or  laundry out drying in the sun. People lining  up for water and food, and yet  a few people out walking their dogs. All happening at the same  time.

Other unexpected touches of beauty  are first, the silence at night. No cars. No one out on the streets. And the  heavens at night are scattered with stars. I usually can see about two, but  now the whole sky is filled. The mountains are Sendai are solid and with the  crisp air we can see them silhouetted against the sky  magnificently.

And the Japanese themselves are so  wonderful. I come back to my shack to check on it each day, now to send this  e-mail since the electricity is on, and I find food and water left in my  entrance-way. I have no idea from whom, but it is  there. Old men in green  hats go from door to door checking to see if everyone is OK. People talk to  complete strangers asking if they need help. I see no signs of fear.  Resignation, yes, but fear or panic, no.

They tell us we can expect  aftershocks, and even other major quakes, for another month or more. And we  are getting constant tremors, rolls, shaking, rumbling. I am blessed in that  I live in a part of Sendai that is a bit elevated, a bit more solid than  other parts. So, so far this area is better off than others. Last night my  friend’s husband came in from the country, bringing food and water. Blessed  again.

Somehow at this time I realize from  direct experience that there is indeed an enormous cosmic  evolutionary step  that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I  experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening  very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is  happening.  I don’t. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that is much  larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet  magnificent.

Thank you again for your care and Love of me,

With Love in return, to you  all, A

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and  right doing,
there is a field.  I will meet you  there. —  Rumi

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, existence, sanity | Tagged: Tags: Anne Thomas, earthquake, Japan, Sendai, supermoon | 9 Comments
  1. Chad Tabba says:
    March 19, 2011 at 12:45 pm

    Beautiful. I think when life’s luxuries are scarce and basic needs are all we have, the fire of greed turns off and we return to our natural instinct of humanity. As you know, for some people in other parts of the world, this description of life at it’s basics is the norm, such as in Gaza. At least Japan has hope to rebuild.

  2. Ayeshah says:
    March 19, 2011 at 8:06 pm

    It’s extremely moving to know that this letter is coming from a place that has been humbled by such a catastrophic event, where you can only see devastation and no one would ever expect that there is hope or a ray of light. It is sometimes only through such deep tragedy that we can see the essence of a powerful human spirit.

  3. Lynn Rosen says:
    March 19, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    Deep thanks to this remarkable soul who shared with you the hopes we all share regarding the evolution of this human species. May it prevail and may they as well.

  4. AJ says:
    March 21, 2011 at 7:14 am

    My heart goes out to Japanese.
    They are unique nation in many respects.
    They are shy and they are not to accept help.
    Seeking help from USA means they are in very unusual conditions.
    I hope they survive this tragedy and rise again with the same grace.

  5. dany says:
    March 22, 2011 at 10:44 pm

    Anne concluded her New Agey drivel letter:

    “Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step” …..WTF??? TELL THAT TO THE 25,000 who died and their SURVIVING RELATIVES ANNE!……that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. AT THIS VERY MOMENT? O ANNE!…… “And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide.” OKAY THAT IS COOL…… “My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don’t. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself.” WHAT PRAY TELL? YOUR BLESSED ENLIGHTENMENT?

    “This wave of birthing (worldwide)” – BIRTHING? WTF? – “is hard, and yet magnificent.”

    25,000 dead is MAGNIFENT O WHITE GODDESS? Yuck again

    “Thank you again for your care and Love of me,”

    WTF? Love with a CAP L, thus sounds like a cult? Satoyama maybe?

    With Love in return, to you all

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 23, 2011 at 9:43 am

      I was talking about this just last night — the over-reaching for optimism to the extent of ignoring the awful reality, creating an uncomfortable feeling of something near smugness. I said that that super-moon may indeed have affected my thinking, or maybe I too was desperate for any kind of light. And then this morning, I found Dany’s magnificent rant on Anne’s letter.

      Anybody else get this feeling from Anne’s letter? Or do you think Dany’s over-stating it?

  6. dany says:
    March 22, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    [Extracts from Dany’s reply to criticism of him on the same issue on another blog — http://www.theidproject.org/blog/joren/2011/03/17/japan-one-step-sendai-anne-thomas#comment-5784%5D

    What i object to in her letter is this “OH I FEEL SO BLESSED BY THE
    COSMOS TO BE HERE IN DISASTER CENTRAL COSMOS AND WITNESS THE SHEER DESTRUCTION OF EARTH O I AM SO BLESSED.” Blessed? This use of the word BLESSED is what got my angry. [….]

    LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT : she is blessed to be in a disaster zone
    so she can say GRATITUDE to her NEW AGE view of the Cosmos in the
    midst of all the 25,000 people who died and their relatives who are
    surviving? Oh, typical White man’s woman’s view of life again. OH I AM
    SO LUCKY AND BLESSED TO HAVE WITNESSED FIRSTHAND THE TSUNAMI in
    THAILAND so that I can SAY THANKS to universe for my being alive and
    loving sunsets and sunrises…

    “There is nothing wrong with being hopeful enough to think that this
    noble response and communal existence is more akin to how most humans
    wish to behave towards each other.” YES YES YES. I AGREE HERE

    “There is nothing wrong with believing we can evolve towards a better
    way of treating each other”. YES YES YES

    “There is nothing wrong with having death and destruction make us
    realize that there are more important things in the world than money.”
    YES YES YES

    BUT DOES SHE HAVE TO SAY BLESSED!!!!

  7. AJ says:
    March 24, 2011 at 1:14 am

    Theres nothing wrong in expressing gratitude.
    Blessed are not chosen one.
    Many are saved from disaster some think its shear luck…good for them.
    Some prayed and saved…they acknowledged the gratitude…blessed is the best word to use.
    Blessed is not condescending unless its attached with a group.

  8. AJ says:
    March 24, 2011 at 1:28 am

    Anne must be in deep distress why she is white.
    Had she been black or brown we could have another set of argument on her blessed nature.

    its assumed we believe in God because we are chosen OR Ignorant.
    Look for a way in between…you can find many.

Super-Moon!

Posted March 18th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Somehow, with the news horrible from Japan to the Middle East, the idea that there’s going to be a “super-moon” this weekend — a huge full moon, with that sunlit pile of rock closer to the earth than it’s been in 18 years — makes me happy.

Some people are apparently seeing all kinds of weird auguries in thus lunar perigee.  Not me.  I think of it more as a blessing, a kind of consolation.

I  imagine it slowly appearing over the rim of the mountains, as though some gigantic hand were inflating an impossibly outsize balloon.  It’ll be deep golden orange, the color of California poppies, the color of spring. Then as it reaches its full size, it’ll lift off into the sky, a giant floating ball of gold.  And then slowly — but so fast, too fast — it’ll rise higher and become smaller, paler, whiter, until there it goes, just another full moon, and you walk back inside feeling as though you’ve just been graced with magic, in touch again with a sense of wonder.

This time I can only imagine it.  The forecast here is for rain.  But if the sky is clear where you are at moonrise, don’t hesitate:  go outside with someone close to you and watch, and be grateful.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology | Tagged: Tags: full moon, Japan, Middle east, periapsis, perigee | 4 Comments
  1. Rubina says:
    March 18, 2011 at 9:59 pm

    Hi Lesley,
    I agree with you, it is a full moon of blessings.
    For us, it is also the time of our new year.
    Wishing everyone peace in the midst of this world of ours.
    Rubina

  2. Lesley Hazleton says:
    March 18, 2011 at 11:05 pm

    Rubina — Happy Nowruz! — Lesley

  3. paul skillman says:
    March 19, 2011 at 9:50 am

    Dear Lesley, What a beautiful imagination you haved & I love the way you express yourself.Our planet wouldn’t be what it is today without our satalite. It has stableizes our planit. Has given us the rethyem of the tides and has thus caused the breeding habits of much of the life on this planet.
    I read some where that the moon has a molten core so that when we use it as a lunching station for the solar system & beyond we will be able to tap into that molten core and generate power up there. If you would like to know what a planit would be like without a moon just check out our sister planit Venus. It is rotateng backwords with it south pole to the sun & has no stabity at all.
    Sorry my spelling is so terrible but it is better to communicate with bad spelling then not to communicate at all.
    Take care,
    Paul Skillman

  4. AJ says:
    March 20, 2011 at 1:41 am

    It could be my hard held opinion but
    the word “Ali” in Arabic is becoming more prominant in Super Moon.

    Had Prophet not called himslef like Sun and Ali like Moon, my opinion would be unfounded.

That Colossal Wreck

Posted March 16th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Replying to an email from a friend just now, I quoted a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,’ written in response to a giant sculpture of a pharoah’s head lying on its side at Luxor, Egypt. Then as I thought of the whole poem, I began to get chills up and down my spine. So with nuclear disaster in Japan uppermost in all our minds, here it is:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far way.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: ecology, existence, technology | Tagged: Tags: Egypt, Japan, Luxor, nuclear disaster, Ozymandias, Shelley | 3 Comments
  1. Lynn Rosen says:
    March 16, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    Stunned. Thank you for sharing that.

  2. lavrans says:
    March 21, 2011 at 4:04 pm

    Not just Japan, but it also makes me think of the most recent person who took up the title “King of Kings”, now embroiled… I wonder if he’ll have as good an epitaph?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 21, 2011 at 6:21 pm

      Lovely that you got it. Thanks, L.

Warp Speed

Posted February 28th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Hey,  I know time is supposed to have speeded up recently – the Web, mass connectivity, and all that.   I know everything seems to be going faster than we can keep up with.  But this fast?  Turns out we’ve gone and created our very own geological era — entirely human-made.  Goodbye, Holocene.  Welcome to what scientists now call the Anthropocene era.

Yup, a whole new geological era created not by glaciation, mass extinction, or the impact of giant asteroids, but by us, by human impact on  the planet.  And we’ve done it in record time:  a mere two hundred years.  Which is less than a blink of an eye in geological terms.  In fact it’s a blink of an eye within a blink of an eye.

The latest issue of the Royal Society’s journal ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (in Brit-speak, that ‘philosophical’ actually means mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, but please don’t ask why) is devoted entirely to this astonishing  development.  It calls the Anthropocene “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.”  Human activity, it reports, beginning with the start of the Industrial Revolution, has so altered the atmosphere that it has created a whole new geological period.

Howzat for achievement?  We’ve sped up geology.  In fact we’ve turned it into a dinosaur.  Forget waiting for millions or billions of years.  Who has the time?

Now, call me a nerd, but I love geology.  In fact anyone who’s spent any serious amount of time in the desert has to love geology.  The desert is the one place where you see the earth naked, stripped bare — no loam or trees or buildings to hide the bedrock of existence.  It’s the one place that reminds you how petty the human scale of time is – the one place you can see the span of time on an infinitely greater scale than the human, which has to be why the desert is so often a place of mystical experience.

I once spent a year wandering the Sinai desert, and in that year, rock — the one thing we think most solid — became fluid.  I could stand on a rise and see the bands of different layers of rock, let my eye follow the patterns they made as they pushed up, lifted, bent, tilted, even tipped over.  In the rock, I could see billions of years:  the warp of time treating solid rock as though it were fluid, weaving and bending it with immense power.   I could actually see time, that is — see the physical manifestation of vast geological forces.

I could feel it too.  I could pick up a stone and realize that I was holding hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of years in my hand.  I could climb to the top of Mount Sinai (yes, this is Mount Sinai, on the right) and realize that I was standing on a huge piece of lava that had been thrust up through red granite from deep inside the earth, with a force so great it split the granite apart.   So the mountain forced an extraordinary realignment of my whole concept of time, human and geological.  Not much distance, you might say, between the geological and the theological.

But now I have to realign my concept of time all over again.  What we’ve done is  force geological time into the inordinately briefer span of human time;  we’ve actually compressed time, forced geological magnitude into a little over two human lifespans.

Talk about playing God.

Share this post:  Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail
File under: agnosticism, ecology, existence | Tagged: Tags: Anthropocene, carbon content, desert, environment change, geology, God, Holocene, industrial revolution, Mount Sinai, mysticism, Royal Society, time | 1 Comment
  1. Lana says:
    March 4, 2011 at 1:05 am

    Thanks … it’s very painful whenever i read about or watch a movie showing how humans are affecting and changing the planet .. how whole species are being extinct …

    Lesley if you like the desert you would love WADI RUM of jordan 🙂

Order the Book

Available online from:
  • Amazon.com
  • Barnes & Noble
  • IndieBound
  • Powell's
Or from your favorite bookseller.

Tag Cloud

absurd agnosticism art atheism Christianity ecology existence feminism fundamentalism Islam Judaism light Middle East sanity technology TED TALKS ugliness US politics war women

Recent Posts

  • Flash! September 1, 2019
  • “What’s Wrong With Dying?” February 9, 2017
  • The Poem That Stopped Me Crying December 30, 2016
  • Talking About Soul at TED December 5, 2016
  • ‘Healing’? No Way. November 10, 2016
  • Psychopath, Defined August 2, 2016
  • Lovely NYT Review of ‘Agnostic’! July 14, 2016
  • Playing With Stillness June 22, 2016
  • Inside Palestine June 20, 2016
  • Virtual Unreality June 6, 2016
  • The Free-Speech Challenge May 23, 2016
  • Category-Free April 20, 2016
  • Staring At The Void April 13, 2016
  • Sherlock And Me April 3, 2016
  • Hard-Wired? Really? March 22, 2016
  • A Quantum Novel March 9, 2016
  • This Pre-Order Thing March 4, 2016
  • The Agnostic Celebration February 29, 2016
  • The First Two Pages February 23, 2016
  • Two Thumbs-Up For “Agnostic” February 10, 2016
Skip to toolbar
  • About WordPress
    • WordPress.org
    • Documentation
    • Support Forums
    • Feedback