Philip Sugg | Blog

The last few days have seen a string of mostly clear weather in the evening, just as the moon begins a new monthly cycle. One of the nice things about looking at a very young moon (~2-5 days) is that it appears low in the western sky around sunset (which occurs after 8pm right now), timed as the day is slowing down and it’s convenient to look outside for a while. I started studying this cycle’s crescent moon with binoculars when it was just over two days old.

A moon of that age is a beautiful sight: large enough to be easily seen, but still very delicate, so thin at its sharp points (lunar observers call them “horns”) that it is possible to imagine that the moon is made up of a bunch of stars clustered near each other.

A feature on the horns caught my attention through the binoculars. At the leading edge of the sunlight cast onto the moon, where the thinnest possible segment of lighted lunar surface faces the earth, the moon’s light becomes discontinuous. Through the binoculars it looks like four or five bright lines or smudged dots, with short breaks, as black as the rest of space, in between. Here is a rough diagram of the crescent moon and where the effect appears—although it’s not visible to the eye alone:

Through the binoculars, it’s not obvious what’s causing this. A little digging gets an answer. The moon’s surface near its visible southern pole is cratered and bumpy. The sun’s light, which hits the surfaces near the horn at a nearly 90-degree angle, doesn’t reach the bottom of every crater, canyon floor and plain. At the most extreme angles of illumination, the sunlight only reflects off the highest points on the lunar surface, and the shadows are so deep that huge patches of dark occur right alongside the high points that are lit. This is what creates the broken appearance at the southern horn.

In places where spring seems to be a long time coming, there is a particular melancholy that sets in when one realizes that the season is, at least for aesthetic purposes, over. After the first round of new growth–the plants that cheer everyone up with their hardy blooms when it feels too cold for vegetative life–when the weeds and the trees look leafed-out enough to pass for mid-summer, when there are a few hot days that make one lose–even for a minute–one’s reflexive gratitude for the warm weather–that’s the end of psychological spring.

There’s another part to that feeling for me. I have a few small garden plots, and I also mark the moment when the seedlings I’ve started lose their compact, orderly form–beginning to stretch this way and that out of their own principles.

What is it that’s charming about seedlings? When they first emerge, they are pretty much all well-behaved. Next they show one, two, three of their true leaves, and I imagine that they will look straight and compact like this forever, only bigger. Of course this is not right. Soon, they will become unruly, stretch out of their pots, enter into tangled warfare with their neighbors, and nag at me that if I don’t do something with them soon, they will die or be stunted and I will have wasted the season.

In the spring, gardening is a rational task. Plans, maps, calendars-plants are at least potentially faithful to the winter vision.

But at some point by around this time, in the transition to summer, I get a premonition of the chaos that is coming, that it is more powerful than me. There ought to be a word for this phenomenon, the moment when a rational order gives way to organic spontaneity. There are probably gardeners for whom the early period is the best part of the season, when they feel most confident and fulfilled by their avocation. Once the plants are in control, it’s all downhill.

From Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, on the educational program of the Black Mountain College:

Black Mountain College is famous for the number of artists and poets, later prominent, who studied or taught there, but it was not an art school. It was a college. It was launched during the Depression by a renegade Classics professor named John Andrew Rice, who had been fired from Rollins College in Florida, and for twenty-four years, it led a hand-to-mouth existence in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville. In a good year, enrollment was sixty. The college opened in the fall of 1933 with twenty-two students, fourteen of whom, along with four of the faculty, had followed Rice from Rollins. To the extent that finances permitted, and depending on who was available to teach, it offered a full liberal education. Students could take courses in science, mathematics, history, economics, psychology, languages, and literature.

What made Black Mountain different from other colleges was that the center of the curriculum was art-making. Students studied, and faculty taught, whatever they liked, but every student was expected to take a class in some kind of arts practice—painting, sculpture, pottery, weaving, poetry, architecture, design, dance, music, photography. The goal was not to produce painters, poets, and architects. It was to produce citizens. “The democratic man,” as Rice explained his philosophy, “… must be an artist.” Rice thought that people learn best by doing, rather than by reading books or listening to lectures, and he regarded art-making as a form of mental discipline. It instills a habit of making independent choices, which is important in a democracy. This was the pedagogy of progressivism, derived from the educational theories of John Dewey, who visited the college frequently and served on its advisory board.

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Tom Crewe has a delightful review of Turgenev’s body of work in the April 21st issue of the London Review of Books. Two highlights whose combination struck me:

In reading Turgenev in English we are not departing from historical precedent. The vast majority of his 19th-century readers, in company with his most distinguished European and American admirers (James, Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Howells, the authorities in Oxford who gave him an honorary doctorate in 1879), read him largely in French or English. His importance for Western literature is unavoidably a mediated one, and it is through translation that we see what made those readers praise him so highly.

And:

Turgenev’s greatest strength as a writer was his talent for detail, which had several different applications. One of his most distinctive habits is his use of similes drawn from the natural world (the result of much time spent outside, first as a child frightened of his mother and then as a devoted huntsman).

Among the examples Crewe gives is this complex metaphor from Turgenev’s novella First Love:

Indistinct streaks of lightning flickered incessantly in the sky; they did not so much flash as flutter and twitch like the wing of a dying bird.

It takes a gifted writer to manage the handoff between these two images. I, at least, find it convincing; in my mind the lightning and the bird’s wings work on something like the same underlying principle of motion.

And for a writer who has largely made his reputation through translation, it is a risky, high accomplishment to mark naturalistic detail with so much vitality that your translators have what they need to keep it alive.

“…little cat feet…looking / over harbor and city…” :)

Sources

Carl Sandburg, “Fog,” Chicago Poems. 1916.

The moon, rising in the early evening, just above the rotunda at the Museum of Science and Industry. When I took this picture it was short of a full moon by a day or two:

There’s a long-standing puzzle about the moon when it is near the horizon: why does it look bigger? This is usually just called the “moon illusion.” The problem has so far not been definitively resolved by any modern scientific explanation, leaving it open to speculation by philosophers, amateurs, and polymaths. Also, not all people perceive the illusion in the same way. For example, I have seen the moon on the horizon that looked huge, but I didn’t find this to be true when it was next to the rotunda in this picture. Subjectively, it looked “normal-sized.” I believe this comes through in the photograph. But a quick image search for apparently large moons does show many near the horizon, or a surface-level object, that do look huge (the fact that this illusion–or the lack of it–can be carried through into photographs is a property worth noting–not all illusions do).

Optical illusions involving forced perspective take one or more objects and place them near a reference object, which deceives the intuition for size and space. There is usually something deceptive about the presentation of the reference, making the original seem smaller or larger by comparison. Maybe the moon’s appearance is another example of forced perspective. This illusion has been noticed for so long that the competing paradigms to explain it are well-established:

More than halfway through April, and while it’s still cold, even Chicago can’t keep this up for much longer. Would it be strange to savor the end of winter? Maybe not the weather itself–what was interesting in December is much less so in April–but the appearance of winter?

An example: bare trees in winter have their own kind of beauty, especially in profile. Many of those trees are starting to show their buds and seeds.

Within weeks they will become entirely different objects. Bare trees are networks on the way to their vanishing point, a swirl of diminishing lines, beginning with their trunk, continuing to their largest limbs, their branches, twigs–they’re gone.

In spring they will be waving masses of color, more like solid objects, able to conceal the truth–impossible to hide in winter–that they are mostly made of air.

I discovered a large patch of Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) in Chicago’s Washington Park during the 2020 pandemic year, when I spent a lot more time walking around, both with my son and on my own.

At their peak these flowers are unmistakable; their bell-like blooms look like they were designed by a fanciful sketch artist who was going only on the plant’s name. And their particular hue of blue is, at its best, almost neon, a brightness so distinctive that it seems unnatural. Here’s a patch from another location last year, on April 18th, that gives the idea:

The patch in Washington Park is not there yet, as of two days ago. They looked like this:

Although this spot has dozens of the flower, when I went out there two days ago to look for it, I was still surprised to see it beginning to re-emerge. Many of the leaves are reddish or purplish as they come up. This is caused by a pigment, anthocyanin, whose purpose remains incompletely understood.

Its presence in high levels often corresponds with a transitional state. Most red leaves on trees in the fall are caused by the predominance of anthocyanin. It also causes the flower buds of the Virginia bluebell, which are just becoming apparent on a few of the plants, to start out pink:

What is it about seeing a plant in its early state? You have to know what it will become to appreciate it. And yet it’s there, just as alive in its ordinariness. I think of a phase like this as a reminder of all the worthwhile things in nature that happen to be invisible. At any given time, most beautiful things have either faded away, retreated into the ground, or concealed themselves in an unremarkable form.

This well-known photograph can be seen at the entrance to Chicago’s Field Museum:

It was taken by the photographer Charles Carpenter on the museum’s opening day, May 5, 1921.

What struck me the first time I saw it was not the large crowd, extending further east and west than the picture shows, or the single figure in the foreground, showing no interest in the queue at this moment, or the huge and purpose-built new building. What I saw was the denuded landscape around the new museum; bulldozed muddy dust, marked by piles of occasional leftover construction debris.

The site is a world in between acts; the swamp and wetland that were here before Chicago are gone, the same for the work sites or houses or tenements that predated this location near Grant Park (I wasn’t able to find what exactly was in this site before).

This picture also seemed like a very Chicago image: the building is a picture of optimistic strength, amidst an environment that has been wiped into an unrecognizable blank slate by the railroad. The ground has been literally carried away amidst waves of Chicago industrialization.

While I was hunting for a copy of Carpenter’s picture, I found another set from the Field Museum library archives which shows the long and awkward process of moving the museum’s artifacts from the Palace of Fine Arts Building in Jackson Park (now the Museum of Science and Industry) to the Field Museum’s current location.

I came across this plant starting to flower when I was walking through my neighborhood in Chicago over the weekend.

I believe it’s a trout lily (Erythronium albidum or americanum) They’re rare flowers to find in cultivation, because they’re very slow growers with a small ecological niche. ‘Woodland ephemerals’ sustain themselves by blooming early in the spring, before the forest canopy leafs out, and disappear into background greenery by the summer.

Their seeds are difficult to germinate (multiple years of lying dormant in a cold, wet place); they grow slowly, and they flower even slower. One plant nursery quotes William Cullina, author of the very good Guide to Growing and Propagating Wildflowers, that they might take five years or more to flower for the first time.

By electing to grow so early, these flowers distinguish themselves; when most plants still look asleep and bare, the trout lily shows its vibrant, maroon-flecked leaves.

It’s great to see someone treating a yard as a preserve, a place to build up rare and unusual plant types which usually exist in parks far from the city.

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