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BACK TO THE STEPPES

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All right, I know you’re still glued to the news of political disaster. I agree that the signals Mr. Trump is sending by means of his initial appointments confirm many of the worst features of his campaign. Bigots and obscurantists seem to hold prominent places among them. But it’s not conducive to mental health to think of nothing else. A broad view of history can actually help produce a broader perspective. The long story of the Eurasian steppe has plenty of disasters in it, but contributed some great things to humanity at large. And the book I write about here is guaranteed to fascinate any enthusiast for history, archaeology, and/or geography.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the beautiful and fascinating book Steppes from the Denver Botanic Gardens, which provides a sweeping overview of the terrain and plant life of the world’s diverse semi-arid steppe regions, one of which turned out to be the Great Plains where I grew up. But the first region to be known by that name was the vast plain that stretches from Hungary across Eurasia as far as Mongolia without any decisive interruption to prohibit movement across it. This is a region that has lurked in the shadows in most books on ancient and medieval history—a relatively unknown place from which vast numbers of mounted warriors occasionally erupted to create havoc in the more settled, “civilized” areas of Europe and Asia.

Another recent book sheds an enormous amount of light on this obscure world: Barry Cunliffe’s By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford University Press, 2015). It represents an ambitious pulling together of geographical, archeological, and historical knowledge to provide the first reasonably coherent account I have encountered of that world. Before this book, one met its peoples fleetingly at moments when they impinged (often violently) on the Fertile Crescent or the European heartland or China—or else as the idolsyrf inmates of ancient tombs excavated over the last century, who could only be tentatively identified with one or another group known from historical references.

The story has deep roots. The horse was first domesticated in the steppes. It was also the place where wheeled vehicles came into their own, both because of the flat terrain and because its people needed to move with their herds to take advantage of the best pastures. In addition to their horses, they acquired sheep, goats, and cattle from the Fertile Crescent (which bought horses in turn from them). And they became a primary vector for the spread of metallurgy, which arose in the mountains of Turkey and the Balkans. Far from being merely a problem population on the borders of settled farming cultures, they formed a principal link of communication and exchange among the emerging centers of settled life.

The history of what we call the “Silk Road” began much earlier than supposed and those routes transported ideas and people as well as merchandise—first through the steppe, then also through the deserts to the south of them as the Bactrian camel was added to the selection of domesticated animals.

The people of the steppe disturbed surrounding, settled cultures for a variety of reasons, one being periods of drought that forced groups in one or another part of the steppe to seek new pastures, thereby displacing neighbors, who displaced other neighbors and so on. Another factor was the increasing power of China at the eastern end of the steppe. Cunliffe suggests that the Great Wall was not a purely defensive endeavor as usually supposed, but an aggressive move into the steppe itself. It was part of a long seesawing of dominance between China and the neighboring steppe peoples, which could send shock waves all the way to Europe.

Over time, the increasing importance of maritime traffic—linking the Black Sea steppe to the Mediterranean, India to the Near East, and eventually Atlantic Europe to the Far East—was the final step in creating a new global awareness. It had the incidental effect of reducing the role the steppe had held for so long.

This is a fascinating book that will no doubt become the foundation for much further questioning and investigation. It finally begins to give one of the important chapters in our human cultural history its due.

A GARDEN SHOWS ITS GRATITUDE FOR THE RAINS

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Orchid basket
Orchid basket

After twelve days of cold, stormy weather, the sun has come out again; and it’s a day to inspect the garden. I find a little damage: one basket of orchids (I don’t know what they are, but they have small purple flowers in late winter and early spring) was blown from its moorings. It’s gotten very heavy over the years, as one small plant morphed into quite a mass of foliage; and the storm winds exerted enough force on it to pull its wire hook straight and send it and its resident ant colony plummeting into the plants below.

It has a younger clone in another hanging basket, where it was protected from the winds, but not from the scrub jays,. They have ripped out almost all of the wire basket’s coconut fiber lining—I suppose for nest material. What’s left is some bedraggled little plants hanging on for dear life among the remnants and a lot of orchid bark littering the ground below—one of many things to tend to now that the weather favors getting into the garden again!

Species Tulips
Species Tulips

Of course, the weeds have also taken advantage of the weeder’s cowardly retreat during the storms. On the whole, however, the garden seems to be showing nothing but enthusiastic gratitude. The wisteria flowers are just emerging, even as the elegant blossoms of the quince tree are fading. But bulbs are providing the primary show. There are little species tulips in yellow, orange, and red. There are red freesias. There are ranunculus in reds, pinks, and yellows.

Red Ranunculus
Red Ranunculus

And one of our winter pleasures continues into spring. White cyclamens that came to us as Christmas plants over the years have found homes to their liking, a larger-flowered one in a back corner, but visible from the house, and three tiny ones in the shade of the garden bench.

Our garden’s guage this season (starting from September) has measured about 28″ of rain—a good sum even for a whole rainy season, though we still hope for more after years of drought. The surprising thing is how quickly the plants have responded. The most extreme example is the octopus agave, the last of a group that we planted here soon after we

Octopus Agave on 3/14
Octopus Agave and friend on 3/14

moved, probably in 1999. It has decided that its time has come and is throwing its all into reproducing this year. In less than five weeks, its flower stalk has reached as high as our second-floor windows. I expect it will grow a little taller before it wraps itself in a spiral of yellow flowers.

Since I am far from the really capable sort of gardener who can actually predict results, I get the benefit of experiencing every spring’s successes as a kind of marvel. “Oh, hey, it actually worked!” Although I would like to feel more competent, I’m not sure I want to give up that element of surprise.

SONNETS FOR MARY: THE MARRIAGE AT CANA (JOHN 2:1-11)

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Tintoretto, Marriage at Cana
Tintoretto, Marriage at Cana

I like this painting because Jesus and Mary are tiny figures far in the back. You would never notice them if it weren’t that they have auras around their heads. The scene is all bustle and confusion. But, as with virtually all portrayals of the story, the water jars are far too small.

Tintoretto:  Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15542127

INTRODUCING “SONNETS TO MARY”

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I’ll shortly begin adding to this blog some sonnets I’ve written for St. Mary. Advent, with Christmas quickly approaching, is a good time to reflect on her—on Mary of Nazareth, the Blessed Virgin, the God-Bearer, the Mother of God, Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven or by whatever title you know her. She has been a bone of contention, of course, between Roman Catholics and Protestants, with Anglicans caught, as often, somewhat uncomfortably in the middle. I find myself drawn to the long tradition of honoring her while also put off by many aspects of it. The problem, for me, is that her exaltation long ago seems to have passed the point where she could still seem authentically human.

The tradition certainly does recognize her human emotions of joy and sorrow. But what about our human capacity for uncertainty? Like other saints, Mary has been magnified into a paragon of dedication and commitment—one who mastered faith, hope, and love from the get-go. She had never a shadow of doubt, we are led to think—no questioning as to whether all this was really true, whether she had comprehended it correctly, whether God was really involved with her life in a way so completely unimaginable.

I took it as a gift, then, when, a few years ago, Nancy Kerr and I, in our ongoing project of reading Greek together, took up St. Romanos’s great kontakion (verse sermon) on Mary at the Cross. Romanos, a sixth-century deacon in Constantinople and a brilliant poet, was deeply devoted to Mary, but that created no difficulty to him in portraying her uncertainty and fear. In his poetry, she is the focus of the greatest mystery in all of creation, the incarnation. In her womb, God and humanity have become indissolubly united. She is a figure beyond our common humanity by virtue of this link which she was instrumental in creating. At the same, she is one with the rest of us in her inability to know the future or to enjoy a level of certainty that is in fact beyond our finite human condition.

It is this finite, even sometimes anxious Mary who is, at the same time, the sanctuary of God’s incarnate mystery that moves me mostly deeply. And I have tried to capture bits and pieces of her portrait in this series of sonnets addressed to her. They’ll be appearing at intervals on this blog over the next couple of months; and since they don’t represent quite the conventional approach to the saint, I thought this brief introduction might be useful to those interested enough to listen to them.

[For those who are interested, the kontakion I mentioned is no. 19 in the edition by Karl Maas and my teacher C. A. Trypanis. It begins To;n di j hJma'” staurwqevnta deu’te pavnte” uJmnhvswmen, “Come, let us all hymn the one crucified for us . . . ” In the Sources Chrétiennes edition, it is volume 4, number 35.]

SHOWING OFF THE BAY AREA

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Dan & Ginger dwarfed by redwoods
Dan & Ginger dwarfed by redwoods

Those of us who live in one of the world’s tourism areas commonly observe that we don’t visit the local attractions because, after all, they’re always there and we can do it some other day. Out-of-town visitors provide the principal impetus for us to break out of our rut and see more of where we live. A visit from brother Dan and his wife Ginger gave us just that opportunity this past week and provided us with the excuse for a vacation at home.

It’s not easy to narrow down the attractions of the Bay Area to six days, particularly if you don’t want to exhaust a group of people who are all over 60. So we got a list from them of their desiderata and put in a few of our own. Things started off on a Saturday afternoon with a car tour of Oakland, where we live, including Lake Merritt, of course, and one of our own favorites, Middle Harbor Park. This is a shoreline park with a great view of San Francisco wedged into the Port of Oakland. The port itself, with its huge cranes for handling container ships (said to be the inspiration for the giant walkers in Star Wars) looms at either end; but the park stretches far enough along the shore to have its own sense of open air and holiday within sight of the working world.

Jon treated our guests to a Sunday morning car tour of San Francisco, including a drive down the twisty part of Lombard Street. They also visited Bernard Maybeck’s great Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square with its “painted lady” Victorian houses, and the Presidio with its view of the Golden Gate. The afternoon we devoted to a walking tour of our neighborhood, which has several excellent restaurants and interesting shops.

On Monday, we braved the (welcome) showers to visit the two big San Francisco cathedrals that form such a contrast to each other. Both are impressive, but Grace is Episcopal and Gothic while St. Mary’s is Roman Catholic and ‘sixties modern. The architectural contrast is about more than simply design. The Gothic style is interested in detail and diversity, in out-of-the way nooks and crannies, in things that cannot quite be seen but only glimpsed and half-imagined. The modern style of the sixties is much more unitary. There is relatively little of individual interest, but rather a single centralized space dominated by its concrete canopy. Both style make an impression. My own taste votes for the quirkiness of the Gothic, at least for a sacred building. A late lunch at the Cliff House rounded out the morning. The sun had come out. There were a few surfers down below on Ocean Beach. And the food was good—in fact, a great deal better than one has any right to expect at such a spectacular location.

Tuesday was focused on Muir Woods, a place almost as impossible to describe as it is to photograph. There is hardly any way to convey the height of the ancient trees in a forest of coast redwoods. The place is damp and cool and relatively quiet, even with so many visitors. And there is no place else on earth quite like these forests, though the karri trees of Western Australia have a majesty that comes close.

Wednesday was Alcatraz day. The trip there requires advance planning, since tickets sell out quickly. A ferry takes you to the island, where you can then wander pretty much at will till the last ferry leaves for San Francisco in the late afternoon. The walk uphill to the penitentiary proper is good exercise. On the way, you pass the ruins of earlier incarnations of the place, beginning with its role as fortress defending the Golden Gate in the 1850s and prison for Confederate sympathizers in the 1860s.

Neither Jon nor I had been to Alcatraz before. I had read about the rehabilitation of the gardens, and they were indeed rewarding. Even in the quiet garden time of November, they were still interesting and attractive with their variety of succulents. And the views from the island are incomparable. Even the prison itself proved more interesting than we expected, given that neither of us is an aficionado of “true crime.”

Thursday, we all went to Napa, where my sister Wanda has a small vineyard called “Miller’s Pond” in the Coombsville AVA. The day included a drive to St. Helena and lunch at the wonderful Farmstead restaurant, where much of the food is grown onsite. We tasted wine at one winery on the way back from lunch while Dan, who prefers beer, waited patiently until that particular bit of the trip was done with. Then a visit to Whole Foods for the ingredients of a light supper at Wanda’s farm.

At that point Ginger announced that she had been able to check off everything on the list of what she had most wanted to see, which gave us Friday as a day devoted mostliy to rest and recovery—with lunch at Zachary’s Pizza, a Rockridge mainstay.

It was a vacation for us, I think, as much as for Dan and Ginger. It’s even taken us a couple of days to “re-enter” our routines, much as if we had been somewhere far away for that time.

INVISIBLE UNDER THE CLOAK OF INFALLIBILITY

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John Donne once said that the great spiritual malaise of his time was melancholy. My candidate for that distinction today would be the ease with which we assume the cloak of infallibility. It is our age’s favorite variation on the cardinal sin of pride (disguised deftly as humility) combined with a strong shot of anger and of anger’s distilled form, hatred—a very heady cocktail designed precisely to match our taste for self-righteousness

But let me be more exact about my topic. I am not writing about either papal infallibility or the infallibility (aka inerrancy) of scripture. While I do not profess either doctrine, I know faithful Christian people who do, and neither doctrine seems to pose any insuperable barrier to their genuine Christian faith. There is no occasion in these for anathemas, however much I may be tempted. (Well, I do seem to recall having come close to hurling a few such anathemas in Lovesongs and Reproaches. If so, I recant.)

My subject, rather, is the way in which all sorts of people (including those of us who don’t officially believe in infallibility of any kind) appropriate infallibility for ourselves. Not that we would admit to it. In fact, we would resist the notion mightily: It is not I who am infallible. I am merely the messenger, the reporter, the humble servant of infallibility.

What prompts these reflections at just this moment? For one thing, there is the ongoing drama of Evangelicals worldwide, hiding under the cloak of infallibility in order to attack gay and lesbian people—in some cases targeting their rights, in others their bodies and their lives as well. For another, there is a new bit of comedy playing out in the Roman Catholic Church, in which conservative voices are trying to figure out how to seize control the pope’s infallibility for themselves to ease their anxiety that the new gentleman in the chair is about to promote some things that they know infallibly to be false. It is a conundrum, of course. But it isn’t the first time that some Roman Catholics have come to the conclusion that they are more Catholic than the pope.

But the illness is much more widespread than these two examples. What are the symptoms by which one can recognize it? One is the offloading of responsibility: “I, of course, am a generous and loving person. It is not I myself who tell you that you are evil. I am just the reluctant messenger of God/truth. God/truth makes me do it.” When we adopt this stance, we usually feel that it is self-evidently right. After all, this is what my own group has long believed. Where would we have gotten it if not from God? The prospect that it might have more to do with the social norms of rural America in preceding generations (in the case of Evangelicals) or the politics of two preceding popes (in the case of conservative Roman Catholics) or academic culture (in the case of the new atheists) is not to be admitted into consciousness.

Another symptom is the avoidance of serious human engagement with the people one condemns. One claims not to know any of the sinners in question (e.g., gay folk or remarried divorced persons or women who have had an abortion) or else to know a few and perhaps even feel sorry for them (though the knowledge usually does not go beyond general acquaintance). In addressing those identified as displeasing to God, the infallible person adopts the stance of an adult lecturing a teen-ager, never that of an equal—thereby ensuring that there will be no real communication.

And if pressed on the issue of the scriptural command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, the victim of this spiritual disease will then explain that, of course, that is exactly what he or she is doing for you. Since you are doing something infallibly defined as wrong, the only loving thing to do is to prevent you from proceeding, even if it must be substantial cost to you. Really, all this misery is for your own good. Claiming love as the justification for patently unloving acts is thus a third symptom.

A fourth symptom is pervasive anger. Seldom does anyone claim infallibility in any other emotional state. Such anger lends a certain sense of exaltation to the human psyche, especially when it frees us to behave in ways we would normally consider boorish. It is really quite delicious to find oneself carried away by righteous emotion as one assaults the reprobate. The problem is that anger also clouds our perception of reality, painting everything and everyone with whom one is angry in the most livid and threatening of hues. In this way, it feeds on itself and creates new and worse caricatures of these people whom now, to tell the truth, one well and truly hates.

A fifth symptom is the way the illness communicates itself through the body. The traits of righteous anger, being visible, are particularly helpful in diagnosis: the narrowed eyes, pinched lips, jutting chin, rigidly held limbs, all approximating (as far as humanly possible) the look of an angry chicken (as my late friend M. R. Ritley pointed out to me some years ago.)

This spiritual malaise has proven so contagious that it has worked its way through all areas of modern human discourse. Atheists are as subject to it as the religious. Political theorists and economists easily become its mouthpieces. Our autocrats of taste may in fact have little else to fall back on. And it seems to be taking on increasingly ugly forms—forms that threaten us with loss of the hard-won civilization that our forebears have slowly constructed over the last four or five millennia.

Bearing the cloak of infallibility exacts a cost. Like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, it exposes us to deeply inhuman menaces that would like to sap our souls. We are in danger of becoming hollow shells held together by little more than a brittle crust compounded of self-esteem and hostility toward the enemy. The supreme indicator of spiritual health is the opposite—not infallibility but love.