Drawing on the teachings of a 102-year-old Hopi traditionalist high priest, a portrait of Hotevilla Village, a stronghold of the ancient Native American faith, presents a series of prophecies that warn of impending doom, unless the Elders of Hotevilla can control the world’s fate. Simultaneous. IP.
(Goodreads.com)
By Carolyn MacLeod
July 30, 2019 (pbs.org)
By the time Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock around 9 a.m. on Monday, August 18, 1969, many of the festivalgoers had already left. Those that stayed were witness to one of the most iconic performances at the Music and Art Festival: his “Star-Spangled Banner.”
“I was backstage writing up some notes,” recalled journalist Bernard Collier in Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation. “Suddenly into my head stabbed this sound. It sounded exactly like rockets, missiles and bombs bursting in air. I’d never heard anything like that in my life.”
It’s difficult today to separate this performance from the summer of 1969, and thanks to the Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary Woodstock, the performance has become emblematic of the experience of Woodstock itself. At the time, however, Hendrix’s performance came across as startling and utterly new.
“I remember people literally tearing their hair out,” said Woodstock director, Michael Wadleigh. “I looked out with one eye and I saw people grabbing their heads, so ecstatic, so stunned and moved, a lot of people holding their breath, including me. No one had ever heard that. It caught all of us by surprise.”
Hendrix wasn’t the first musician in the 20th century to surprise and disturb audiences with an artistic re-interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Before him, José Feliciano in 1968 and Igor Stravinsky in 1944 also gave audiences hitherto unheard experiences of the national anthem. Their interpretations invited controversy, but each artist saw his performance as a patriotic act. Hendrix in his performance did something further that had not been accomplished previously, not even by the original. In performing the anthem with his psychedelic take on the blues, Hendrix brought the lyrics to life and in doing so transformed the national anthem into a commentary on American ideals in a time of war.
Woodstock promised three days of peace, love and music during the turmoil of the Vietnam War and racial unrest of the civil rights movement. Through the screen of drugs and utopianism, these realities were evident, nonetheless. The political climate was reflected in music throughout the festival, from Richie Haven’s “Freedom” in the opening performance of the festival, to Joan Baez’s renditions of “Joe Hill” and “We Shall Overcome,” to Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” to Jefferson Airplane’s “Uncle Sam Blues,” to The Who’s “My Generation.”
Three days bled into four and Hendrix began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” that Monday morning, as the festival drew to a close.
“We’re at the most peaceful gathering that was probably happening on the planet at the time. And he hooked us up with Vietnam,” said Tom Law, a member of the Hog Farm commune who was present that morning. “It was the devastation and the brutality and the insanity. That was a quintessential piece of art.”
Three weeks later, on September 9, 1969, Jimi Hendrix walked onto the set of the Dick Cavett Show. Cavett soon turned the conversation to Hendrix’s Woodstock set. “What was the controversy about the national anthem and the way you played it?”
“I don’t know man,” said Hendrix. “All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it. I used to sing it in school, they made me sing it in school so — it was a flashback, you know.”
Over the audience’s laughter at Hendrix’s cool response, Cavett joked, “This man was the 101st airborne, so when you write your nasty letters in…”
A puzzled look bloomed on Hendrix’s face. “Nasty letters?”
“Well, when you mention the national anthem and talk about playing it in an unorthodox way,” Cavett explained, “you immediately get a guaranteed percentage of hate mail from people — “
“That’s not unorthodox,” Hendrix interrupted. “That’s not unorthodox.”
“It isn’t unorthodox?”
“No. No, no. I thought it was beautiful. But there you go.”
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/7eBvahaTnGB0jngkpXzRes
In January of 1944, at the height of World War II and 25 years before Woodstock, Igor Stravinsky prepared to conduct his “Star-Spangled Banner” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In his arrangement, Stravinsky hoped to address an issue that has plagued the song since its earliest days: its tonal range. The distance from the lowest to the highest pitch in “The Star Spangled Banner” is twelve notes, or an octave and a half, making it unusually challenging to sing. Compare that with other countries’ anthems: England’s “God Save the Queen” has a range of seven notes, while France’s “La Marseillaise” and Canada’s “O Canada” each span nine. When congress was debating adoption of the song as the national anthem, singability was a chief concern. As much as Stravinsky sought to solve these problems, however, his miscalculated efforts and the war-time climate surrounding his performance led to uproar.
Stravinsky’s “Star-Spangled Banner” challenges listeners’ expectations subtly. Instead of the bouncy rhythm heard at the beginning of phrases, his rhythm is regimented and metered, like “a church hymn,” as Stravinsky put it. Especially off-putting may have been Stravinsky’s use of dissonance in the closing line “O’er the land of the free…,” with a dominant seventh undercutting the triumphant final phrases. According to the Associated Press review of the concert, Stravinksy’s effort to make the national anthem easier to sing along to failed: “[T]he odd, somewhat dissonant harmonies of the sixty-one-year-old composer’s arrangement became evident. Eyebrows lifted, voices faltered, and before the close practically [everyone] gave up even trying to accompany the score.”
The negative press apparently spurred the Boston Police to confront the composer before his second performance. An obscure Massachusetts law prohibited playing the national anthem as part of a medley, with embellishment or as dance music. Stravinsky agreed to remove his arrangement of the anthem from the program.
A Russian-born immigrant to the U.S., Stravinsky defended his interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “It was my desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” He became a naturalized U.S. citizen the following year.
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/2bGqpfhpaU1zQjPGLWFiWL
Ten months before Woodstock, 23-year-old José Feliciano walked onto center field at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium to sing the national anthem at game five of the 1968 World Series. Feliciano, a Puerto Rican-born, crossover sensation, had recently won two Grammy Awards following the enormous popularity of his cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” But his interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was about to bring his career close to a screeching halt.
It was the fall of the year when American deaths in Vietnam reached their peak. Congress recently passed the Flag Protection Act of 1968, criminalizing the desecration of the American flag. On October 7, 1968, when Feliciano began to play, the tune on his guitar didn’t immediately sound like the national anthem. As he sang, listeners heard the national anthem as folk song. It sounded more like Bob Dylan than Francis Scott Key.
Amid the claps, also rose the unmistakable sound of boos. Irate calls flooded the stadium switch board and NBC, the network broadcasting the game. RCA Records released a recording of the performance as a single, which eventually peaked at number 50. Many commercial stations refused to play Feliciano’s music—this song or any other.
“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot. I was trying to be a grateful patriot,” Feliciano later recalled. “I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3lpa6fzS3rSAbRogEhWxu7
Stravinsky attempted to make the national anthem more accessible but instead alienated his audience with his modernist approach and drew an intervention by police. Feliciano’s folk interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner” repelled some fans, who were offended by what he brought to the anthem. History has been kindest to Hendrix’s interpretation, perhaps because of what he brought to the song. Hendrix put his psychedelic blues in service of a classic songwriting technique called “text painting,” sometimes known as “word painting.” This is where the music directly reflects the content of the lyrics. Hendrix brought the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to life by reflecting not just what they might have meant when they were written in 1814 but by reflecting the meaning they might take on for Hendrix and his audience in 1969.
Text painting can be heard throughout music history, from Gregorian chants that would employ rising melodies to accompany words describing Jesus’ ascension to heaven, to Johnny Cash’s chorus of “Ring of Fire” going steadily “down, down, down.” This connection between music and lyrics doesn’t exist in Key’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but does in Hendrix’s performance.
Key’s lyrics are a patriotic description of a post-battle scene, but the words have very little to do with the music underscoring them — perhaps because they were composed nearly 40 years, an ocean and multiple wars apart. The music was composed by John Stafford Smith in 1775 as the song “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Smith was a young church musician in London who was commissioned by the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s amateur music club, to compose the music for their club’s “constitutional song.” The lyrics to that version, written by Society president Ralph Tomlinson, eulogize the Greek poet Anacreon and his favorite themes: the very rock and roll topics of wine, women and music.
Francis Scott Key composed the poem following the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814. Key, a respected lawyer and amateur poet, was sent to negotiate the return of a physician captured after the British marched through Washington D.C. and burned the White House and Capitol. From the Chesapeake Bay, where he secured the physician’s release, Key watched the sun rise on September 14, over the fort and its flag still waving after British bombardment. Key’s poem was then set to Smith’s music — an existing melody that doesn’t particularly correspond with the feeling or imagery of his words.
Hendrix, on the other hand, used text painting to powerful effect. His version is entirely instrumental, but he capitalized on his audience’s knowledge of the lyrics by emphasizing their meaning through sound. Notably, Hendrix played the entirety of the vocal melody — but punctuated the phrases with ornamental improvisations.
Hendrix begins the song fairly closely to the traditional vocal melody, adding a few melismatic flourishes and sustained notes, but tracking the first four lines of the eight-line song. Meanwhile, a snare drum taps out a tight rhythm, recalling a military drum line.
When Hendrix arrives at “And the rocket’s red glare,” the song begins to tip over. Using distortion pedals, he creates chorus effects and sends notes echoing into higher octaves — the sound of rockets soaring and bombs bursting over-head. The percussion follows suit and breaks from its regimented rhythm to join the guitar voice in a jazz-like cacophony. The guitar soars from the highs to lows as a deep grumbling creeps in, courtesy of Hendrix’s fuzz pedal. The melody returns with “the bombs bursting in air” before a siren-like wail deconstructs the tune once more. Then a descending slide from high to low notes sounds like a dive-bombing plane. Just when Hendrix is at his most discordant, his guitar seems to wail with human cries of anguish, and he returns to the melody at the song’s narrative climax of “Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Before going into the song’s final couplet, Hendrix takes his version of Key’s war story and extends it to a moment outside the narrative frame of the song with a musical allusion to “Taps,” the bugle call played at military funerals and here a raw reminder of the cost of war. He completes the penultimate line, “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,” letting the last note sustain and distort and tremble before continuing. On “O’er the land of the free” in the final line — he sustains the highest note, resounding for a moment, before the song ends and the distortion returns as a soft echo of the sounds that came before.
Hendrix infused the song with an experience of war up close — not with the glory of war nor the heartbreak of those at home, but as a sonic record of the overwhelming terror of battle as it was known then in 1969. He took the 155-year-old song and made it into an expression of lived experiences in his present-day America.
With his performance of the anthem, Hendrix joined the company of a Puerto Rican pop star and an immigrant modernist composer in a patriotism that embraces national ideals while making room for diverse cultures and experiences, even in a time war.
Hendrix refracted the militaristic “Star-Spangled Banner” text through his psychedelic re-invention of the African America blues tradition. It was unorthodox, beautiful and utterly American.
Carolyn MacLeod is the Audience Engagement Editor at American Experience. Carolyn holds degrees in music education from James Madison University and Arts Administration from Boston University. In her free time, she writes about arts appreciation for a number of Boston-based online publications.
Her painstaking blends are dazzling diners and critics — and upending long-held notions about how winemaking is supposed to work.
Maggie Harrison in her vineyard.Credit…Frank Ockenfels for The New York Times
By Alex Halberstadt
I first met Maggie Harrison in 2018, when I was on vacation in Portland, Ore. I hadn’t planned to taste any wine, content to take in the city’s peculiar West Coast weirdness, but a friend who worked for a food magazine said that I had to meet this winemaker who worked like an artist. She might have used the word “genius.” I mentioned Harrison to another friend, who’s in the wine business. He echoed the recommendation, describing her ambiguously as a person who had “declared war on wine.” Everywhere I looked online, Harrison was receiving accolades for the results of an unorthodox approach to winemaking, which drew as much from painting — she has a condition known as synesthesia, in which information meant to stimulate one sense also stimulates others — as it did from traditional notions of taste and aroma. Some critics let on that her wines had the complexity, tension and narrative arc of a great artwork. So I sent Harrison an email and received a response that began unenthusiastically with, “Unfortunately it is well known that I don’t like all that many humans.” She seemed to mean it. Still, she agreed to see me.
In the directions she sent, Harrison told me to look out for “a garbage can of a warehouse of a winery.” She wasn’t being modest. Antica Terra, her winery in the Willamette Valley, is in a kind of updated Quonset hut, with two loading bays and a row of dumpsters near the entrance. For Harrison, this serves the purpose of discouraging unwanted attention. Warm, funny and observant in person, she cultivates a persona of a curmudgeon, the way an octopus might disguise itself as a rock to throw off sand sharks.
Harrison ushered me and a few friends into an industrial space filled with fluorescent lights and bland office furniture. Her manifest self-consciousness and owlish glasses made her look as if she were sketched by the cartoonist Roz Chast. We followed her to a dimly lit room where barrels and wooden cases of wine rose nearly to the ceiling. The aroma of oak hung in the air. A farm table was set with candles, a dish of caviar and an excellent grower Champagne (meaning one produced by a grower-winemaker instead of a big Champagne house; they tend to have more character). The scene was so hushed and civilized-looking, after the dinginess of the exterior, that it was like entering a chapel through the back of an airport Cinnabon. (At the time I thought we were getting the red-carpet treatment, but it turns out that this is Antica Terra’s standard group tasting — you and your friends can also have the experience for $125 a person.)
We were there to sample Harrison’s wine, but to our surprise she began the tasting by pouring for us some of the finest wines from France, which is to say some of the best wines in the world, including one I’d always wanted to try, the Gevrey-Chambertin Vielle Vigne from Jean-Marie Fourrier, a pinot noir from a talented producer in Burgundy. (It was glorious.)
“I’m having you taste these wines,” Harrison explained finally, “to create a context in which to taste my wines.”
To grasp the audacity of this statement, you have to remember that Oregon’s wine culture is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. As far as we know, the state’s first pinot noir vines were planted in 1961, whereas the first vineyards in Burgundy date to at least the first century A.D. Harrison’s declaration was akin to my kicking off a reading in a local bookstore by reading passages from Flaubert, then announcing that I’d been creating a context in which to hear my work. Was this woman kidding?
Harrison’s most distinctive wine is a pinot noir called Antikythera (named for an ancient Greek astronomical calculator that is often described as the world’s first computer). The wine comes from a strange little vineyard a short drive from the winery, a rocky hillside watched over by circling turkey vultures. The rows of spindly, stunted vines have only about a foot of soil to grow in, so their roots have to spread out over the underlying bedrock and search its surface for cracks to find nutrients and water. The rock itself is studded with bright white marine fossils from when it was a sea bottom millions of years ago, when all of Oregon was under the Pacific Ocean.
It isn’t surprising to find a vineyard in what may seem to be an unpromising spot. Wine grapes are fundamentally different from other crops. If you grow peaches, you will probably want to give them plenty of water and fertilizer, so the trees bear the most fruit. But the primary consideration in wine grapes is character, so the vines are often planted in places where they can barely survive and have to fight for nutrients. The grapes gain depth in proportion to the amount of work the vine must expend to survive. Harrison calls this process “suffering.” But even given that practice, this place was extreme. Why would someone plant anything in a foot of topsoil above solid rock?
The first taste of Antikythera brought my thinking to a halt. Red Burgundies tend to be elegant and perfumed, and the ones that Harrison poured for us smelled like roses and fallen leaves. But Antikythera hit my mouth with something primal that contained almost too many flavors and aromas, an overload of the senses. It was the same grape — virtually all red Burgundy is pinot noir — but the wines had little else in common.
I can’t tell you what Antikythera tasted or smelled like. The vines had produced an extraordinary grape, a tiny, tannic berry of intense, almost disagreeable complexity. But the lists of flavors you see in typical tasting notes amount to a kind of bragging about the acuity of the writer’s palate, and they are also banal and dishonest — far more than pencil lead, marmalade or saddle leather, wine tastes like itself. What matters are the things it makes you perceive, feel and think about and how it lives in your memory. Tasting any great wine can be as immersive as watching a film. But Antikythera took me somewhere beyond that. First, it made me see colors: the inkiest indigos and the bluest blacks, streaked with fissures of silver. Then I pictured something lurching out of a cave on a moonless night during a thunderstorm, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And I thought about Jacques Lardière, the great former winemaker at Louis Jadot in Burgundy, talking about the “unconscious of the earth.”
“So what do you think?” Harrison asked us.
Harrison makes some of the most-sought-after wines in the country, and even Michelin-starred restaurants like the French Laundry and Gramercy Tavern have to work to secure an allocation. At the moment, consumers who want to buy from Antica Terra join a two-year wait-list. (Bottles cost $150 to $250, but they can go for much more at restaurants and on the secondary market.) The wines that Harrison creates have won her celebrity fans like LeBron James and Pink, but it is top sommeliers — the curators of the wine world — who make up her most devoted audience. “I can almost taste the colors that Maggie’s trying to paint,” says Hannah Williams, beverage director at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, N.Y., who describes Harrison’s winemaking as “verging on the savant level.” Hak Soo Kim, head sommelier at Per Se in Manhattan and a former opera singer, likens Harrison to “an improviser finding a chord.”
Harrison, who is 52, grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Her father was an eye surgeon, and her mother taught cooking classes in the house. Their passion was collecting art. They had good taste. They bought art by painters whose reputations and prices have grown. The walls of their otherwise unremarkable house were crowded with canvases by David Hockney, Alex Katz and Chuck Close. A large painting of a heart by the artist Jim Dine hung in Harrison’s bedroom. “From an early age,” Harrison told me, “I learned that the finest and most exciting thing one can do is be an artist.”
Her career almost went in a very different direction. While attending Syracuse University, she spent a semester in Washington, being trained in nonviolent conflict resolution. That led to the offer of a dream job at the Carter Center in Atlanta. But something in Harrison stalled. “I had to do something else,” she says, “but I didn’t know what.” She asked for a delay in starting the job and went back to Chicago, where she waited on tables in order to finance some world travel. After her restaurant shifts, Harrison often spent her tips on wine, and she began to realize that it was her only genuine interest. Depressed and unsure about her direction, she had a clarifying psychedelic experience with the San Pedro cactus in Ecuador. One day at a bar on an island off the coast of Kenya, a man asked her what she did for a living. Harrison started to say that she was about to start a job in conflict resolution when tears welled up in her eyes, and she knew she would never move to Atlanta.
She stumbled on a way into the business in 1998, when her sister, who was living in California, told her about a winemaker she knew who was looking for an assistant. Manfred Krankl was a leonine, motorcycle-riding Austrian who ran a tiny winery called Sine Qua Non with his wife, Elaine. Neither was trained in winemaking, but they made some of the most acclaimed and expensive wines in the state, and not in a Napa or Sonoma mansion but in an old warehouse abutting a junkyard in Ventura, a backwater down the coast from Santa Barbara.
Harrison faxed the Krankls a résumé and a cover letter saying she had no experience but was interested in learning about wine. There was no response. But Harrison was undeterred. As she tells it, she called the couple at their three phone numbers and left messages several times a day for nearly a month, until on the 30th day Manfred picked up. “OK,” he said, sounding resigned, “OK.”
“At the interview Maggie wore lipstick and high heels, and that just wasn’t going to work in a winery,” Manfred Krankl recalls, laughing. “But I liked that she didn’t have prior experience in winemaking, so there was nothing harmful to unlearn.” He ran the popular La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles and often left Harrison in charge of the winery, forcing her to learn on her own. “There were so many things I didn’t know how to do,” she says, “and sometimes I called a wine lab using a fake name to ask a bunch of dumb questions.” But she admired the Krankls’ untutored, independent-minded approach, which relied not on formulas but entirely on their palates and intuition.
She had been at Sine Qua Non for eight years when a friend of the Krankls told her about an unusual vineyard in the Willamette Valley and encouraged her to check it out. But Harrison had no interest in Oregon. By 2005, she was engaged, making small quantities of her own increasingly acclaimed wines under the Lillian label and busy and content in Ventura. But the friend kept calling, and eventually she relented, flew to Portland and drove to a hillside in Amity. It looked dismal. “There were piles of black plastic and rotting hay everywhere,” Harrison recalls about the vineyard that would take the name of her winery. “The site was so beautiful, the potential so clear and the suffering equally clear. I knew that I could do the work to heal the place and make the wines this land was capable of.” Standing among the vines, Harrison called her soon-to-be husband and told him they were moving to Oregon.
In 2019, she began offering an annual seminar for wine professionals that she named Beauty School. Unlike pretty much every other type of wine seminar or educational “experience,” it sets out to train a group of wine professionals not in the finer points of tasting or oenology but in how to live an aesthetic life. To this end, she presses into use not only wines from around the world but seemingly unrelated objects: a vintage trailer, local wildflowers, Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife, Véra. If this sounds unbearably precious, it’s partly redeemed by Harrison’s seriousness. She teaches beauty in the way another person might teach natural childbirth or taekwondo.
In her pursuit of maximally beautiful wines, Harrison has devised possibly the world’s most laborious way of making them. Over the course of about 10 days, she, Mimi Adams (her associate winemaker) and her friend Nate Ready, an owner of Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Ore., sit around a table and taste as many as 150 unlabeled samples, each representing a barrel and identified by only a number, incessantly combining them, Harrison says, “like little meth addicts.” (Barrel aging changes a wine in any number of expected ways, but it also has an element of unpredictability, so even the same wine racked into two barrels will eventually taste different in each.) Harrison believes that blending blind is the only way of dispensing with bias — her grapes come from eight of the top vineyards in the Willamette Valley, including her own, and two more in California, and she told me that being aware of a wine’s origins would influence her sensory experience. The combinations result most often in failure, but they allow the tasters to gradually feel their way toward the final blends. They sit around the table with rows of tiny bottles in front of them. Adams and Ready take copious notes. Every time they add another sample, they taste and spit and discuss what they’re tasting, smelling, sensing and feeling. This goes on all day, for 10 days. It’s an improvisation. They assemble each wine in their minds like a song. This blending period is when Harrison’s wines find their identities. “Though they can be punishingly difficult,” Ready told me, “those blending sessions are about trusting yourself, believing in the process and letting go of the desire to second guess.”
Punishingly difficult seems to be Harrison’s thing. During harvest — the roughly monthlong period in the fall requiring the most physical labor and the longest hours — she often works through the night, punctuating the round-the-clock vigils with 20-minute naps and endless pots of oolong. Harrison says that harvest is her favorite time of the year. She also told me that every year, on the days leading up to harvest, she sobs in the kitchen, dreading the work and the weeks she will have to spend apart from her family and friends. “Even so,” Adams says, “I think Maggie enjoys the blood bath of it all.”
I visited Harrison again last year, at the house she shares with her husband, Michael, and their two teenage children in the hills of Southwest Portland. Michael is a soft-spoken graphic designer who works mainly on labels for wine bottles (including Harrison’s). The house is inviting and lived in, with plenty of plants, a record player and framed children’s drawings sharing space with its many odd and beautiful objects. Being around Harrison is alternately exhilarating and difficult. Her quickness and exacting taste sometimes clash with her desire to be generous and easygoing, and at these times she appears slightly at odds with herself, like a radio tuned between two stations. I’ve never seen her fully at rest, a state that Harrison would probably find wasteful and disappointing.
During my visit, I sat down with Harrison for a personal blending session. We decided to combine 10 barrel samples of her pinot noir. We chose the number purely in the interests of time and sanity, but even 10 proved too much for me. Each sample tasted and smelled startlingly different, but after blending five of them, bewilderment set in. I couldn’t figure out what percentage of a wine to add to the others, or why sometimes the blend became better and worse simultaneously, and eventually palate fatigue dulled my purple tongue to subtle differences. In the space of an hour and a half, I lost confidence in my ability to discern much of anything except a need for water. Harrison looked at ease and totally in control.
She attributes her ability to map so many flavors in her mind at the same time to her synesthesia. The causes of the condition remain poorly understood, but at least one study suggests that synesthetes may have an enhanced capacity for creativity, possibly because of increased connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex, and are more likely to enter creative professions. Nikola Tesla, David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Frank Ocean have reported having it. In “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov describes learning as a child that he shared the condition with his mother while playing with alphabet blocks: “We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine.”
Like Nabokov, Harrison has grapheme-color synesthesia, a form in which numerals and letters become associated with colors, and this turns out to be especially useful in her work. As she tastes her way around the bottled samples, her brain turns every number into a distinct, vibrant color, until the wines in front of her become a palette of umbers, oranges and Prussian blues that she combines into a final composition that aspires to what she describes as “emotional transparency” and a “perfect tension between intensity and levity.” Her synesthesia allows her to hold this overwhelming amount of sensory data in her mind as a palette of color, “keeping it in the sensory realm,” she told me, “without having to translate it into language.”
The painstaking blending process that I observed, which sets her apart from so many other producers of still wine, is also the reason Harrison makes some people irate. Her process violates one of the central tenets of her craft: terroir. A French word that can be translated loosely as “sense of place,” terroir refers to every factor affecting a vineyard: soil composition, climate, elevation, drainage, even the surrounding flora and fauna. In the wine world, this concept has evolved into a philosophy. An ideal winemaker is not a creator pursuing a personal vision but merely a steward of the land, whose job is to allow her wines to express the subtleties of their individual sites through conscientious, largely hands-off work, before passing the responsibility to the next generation. This philosophy’s influence waxes and wanes. As demand grew in the 1980s and 1990s for the intensely fruity, unctuous and highly alcoholic wines that Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic of his day, admiringly described as “fruit bombs,” terroir became a rallying cry for consumers and sommeliers searching for more complex and subtle things to drink.
Harrison’s techniques seem, on the surface, to be the antithesis of terroir. When my friend told me that Harrison had “declared war on wine,” this is what he meant. Blending so many different barrel samples, and doing it blind, is virtually unheard-of in wine production, and it appears to cast doubt on the vineyard’s sanctified place in winemaking. Harrison recalls a presentation she gave at Oregon Pinot Camp, a kind of convention for industry buyers of Oregon pinot noir held annually in the Willamette Valley, after which the scion of a famous estate in Burgundy stood up and in a thick French accent denounced her wines as “abzoord!” for obliterating terroir.
“Terroir is a myth,” Harrison told me. She considers wine, like art, to be “cultural, not natural,” and she doesn’t see herself solely as a servant of the natural world. It’s not that Harrison doesn’t recognize the importance of the land. She just doesn’t believe that great vineyards magically create great wines. For her, wine is an entirely human undertaking requiring intense effort and artistic commitment. Blending frees her from the limitations imposed by particular vineyards, grape varieties and climatic downturns, allowing her to rely instead on intuition and aesthetic vision, an approach that results in wines that are more distinctive and sometimes stranger than just about anyone else’s.
In our discussions about her work, she often brought up favorite artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Louise Nevelson and Ruth Asawa and almost never mentioned other winemakers. Fans liken her wines to the readily recognizable work of stylists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joan Didion. “If I didn’t drink Maggie’s wines for 20 years and then tasted them with a blindfold on, I’d recognize them immediately,” Mimi Casteel, the winemaker at Hope Well Wine in Hopewell, Ore., from whom Harrison has sourced grapes, told me. I heard variations on this from nearly everyone I spoke to. “In my lifetime, if I’m lucky, I’ll get 25 or 30 chances, once a year, to make something beautiful,” Harrison told me. “And I’m not going to settle for what a particular vineyard gives me if I can make something better.”
Recently I opened the 2016 Lillian Scissor Series syrah, a wine Harrison makes from grapes grown in the hills near Santa Barbara. It reminded me of one of those 1950s wide-screen film spectacles, like “Written on the Wind” or “Rear Window,” in which every visual detail bursts forth in a riot of ultrasaturated color. It had an intensity and vividness — an almost electric quality — I simply hadn’t experienced, but without any heaviness. A friend, tasting it across the table, compared it to a well-designed neon sign. These images remained in my head long after I swallowed the wine, which made me think not about syrah or California but about Harrison herself.
It turns out that like pretty much everything Harrison makes, the Scissor Series syrah involved a laughably impractical amount of labor. Harrison had wondered what would happen if instead of loading her grapes into a destemmer — a machine about the size of a golf cart that does its job almost instantaneously — she removed the stems by hand, snipping away each individual berry with a pair of scissors and leaving the berries intact. It was a patently absurd idea: Making a barrel of syrah requires about 950 pounds of grapes, and Harrison realized that in an hour, a person working by hand would be able to destem about four pounds. Even with every person at the winery snipping away, having enough grapes to fill that barrel would take a week.
Nevertheless, she drove to a nearby Walgreens, grabbed seven pairs of manicure scissors — every pair the store had — and flung them on the counter in front of the cashier. Then she asked if they had any more. The young woman behind the cash register took a hard look at Harrison — who was dressed in a juice-stained smock and yellow rubber boots, and whose eyes were wild with inspiration — and must have concluded that she was deranged. “Ma’am,” she replied in a consoling voice, “you don’t need any more.”
In December, Harrison came to New York, and she suggested that we meet at the Alex Katz retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. Katz was a painter her parents loved. Harrison wore a smoke-colored blouse under an ankle-length dark gray coat. We were both struck by Katz’s late paintings, which are transcendent — nearly abstract studies of light that appeared to be in motion. We slowed down to take them in. Earlier, Harrison had spoken about her work as trying to create “moments of illumination.” I asked about differences between her and artists working in other mediums. “People who make things for the sake of beauty speak the same language,” she said. “What I envy in visual artists is their ability to revise. When I bottle a wine, there are no more chances to rethink or change.”
It was bracing to hear Harrison speak like an artist so confidently, there inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic reinforced-concrete spiral. It occurred to me that making something that’s sensed by the nose and tongue as transporting as a work of art is no trivial matter. More than anything, what Harrison shares with other artists is a stubborn specificity. As Hannah Williams put it: “The terroir of Maggie’s wines is Maggie.”
Alex Halberstadt is the author of “Young Heroes of the Soviet Union,” which was named one of the New York Times book critics’ top picks for 2020. He teaches writing at New York University. Frank Ockenfels is a Los Angeles-based photographer, director and artist with an upcoming exhibit at Fotografiska in New York City in November.
A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2023, Page 38 of the Sunday Magazine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeREAD 365 COMMENTS
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Lust (or Strength, Fortitude, Lust for Life) is numbered eleven and is a card of spontaneity and enthusiasm. This is the card which gives us the strength and nourishment we need to get through.
We usually see a young innocent girl opening the jaws of a lion and peering in. She must be reasonably certain she can cope with the results of her actions! There is no sense of competition between the two. Here we see the literal meaning of the card – walking straight into the jaws of danger and relying upon our own experiences and quick-wittedness to see us through.
Lust tells us to joyously accept life – to trust ourselves to make the right choices and to be able to deal with whatever happens. With trust and self-belief we can grow and work towards happiness and fulfilment.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)
In the complex web of existence for people, the depths of our minds hold profound mysteries that continue to captivate and perplex us. Throughout history, countless scholars and thinkers have embarked on the relentless quest to unravel the enigma of the human psyche, delving into the realms of consciousness and unconsciousness.
Among them, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung stands as a towering figure, whose groundbreaking concept of the collective unconscious has left an indelible mark on the trajectory of modern society.
Carl Jung, a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud, embarked on a journey of intellectual exploration that transcended the confines of traditional psychoanalysis.
While Freud focused primarily on the individual’s personal unconscious and the significance of repressed desires, Jung delved into the profound depths of the collective unconscious, a concept that extended beyond individual experience and embraced the shared aspects of humanity’s psyche.
At the heart of Jung’s concept lies the notion that our individual psyches are not isolated islands, but rather intricately interconnected with a vast reservoir of universal archetypes and symbolic patterns. The collective unconscious represents the deep, ancestral wellspring of human experiences, instincts, and symbols that transcend cultural boundaries and span the entire spectrum of human history.
It encompasses a rich tapestry of mythological motifs, primordial images, and primal instincts that are ingrained in the collective human experience.
Jung proposed that these archetypes, which emerge from the collective unconscious, shape our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that frequently go beyond our conscious control. They serve as the building blocks of our dreams, fantasies, and cultural expressions, manifesting in diverse forms such as the hero, the wise old man, the mother, the trickster, and countless others.
By understanding and embracing these archetypes, Jung believed, individuals can attain profound self-awareness and tap into a wellspring of collective wisdom that transcends the boundaries of time and culture.
But how has Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious shaped modern society? The impact is both profound and multifaceted. First and foremost, Jung’s work has broadened our understanding of the human experience, challenging the reductionist view that individuals are merely products of their personal histories.
By acknowledging the existence of a shared reservoir of psychological patterns, Jung emphasized the interconnectedness of humanity, fostering a sense of collective identity and belonging.
Moreover, Jung’s concept has permeated various disciplines, influencing fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, literature, art, and even spirituality. It’s given a foundation for comprehension and interpretation and motifs that permeate our cultural narratives, highlighting the elements that are constant throughout time and space.
From Joseph Campbell’s exploration of the hero’s journey to the analysis of mythological symbolism in literary works, Jung’s concept has empowered scholars and artists to unveil profound layers of meaning that lie beneath the surface of human creativity.
Furthermore, the concept of the collective unconscious has not only enriched our understanding of individuals but has also contributed to our comprehension of collective phenomena such as mass movements, cultural shifts, and societal transformations.
By recognizing the presence of shared archetypes and symbols that shape group dynamics, Jung’s concept offers insights into the formation of collective identities, the emergence of cultural trends, and the dynamics of societal change.
In a world that is becoming more and more global and interconnected, understanding the collective unconscious becomes ever more crucial. By acknowledging the fundamental patterns and archetypes that underpin human experience, we gain a deeper appreciation of our shared humanity, fostering empathy, understanding, and a sense of unity amidst diversity.
“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
He argues that when people come together in a group and share a common emotion or purpose, the collective psyche that emerges from this group is actually beneath the level of each individual’s psyche.
Jung suggests that the group experience is less conscious because it is influenced by various factors such as the desire for conformity, the suppression of individual thoughts and emotions, and the emergence of collective attitudes and behaviors. When individuals come together, they often feel compelled to align themselves with the prevailing group sentiment, sacrificing some of their own individuality in the process. This can lead to a dilution or overshadowing of personal awareness and consciousness.
Moreover, Jung asserts that in very large groups, the collective psyche resembles that of an animal. He implies that the larger the group becomes, the more it regresses to a primitive and instinctual state, where reason and rationality give way to primal urges and emotional reactions. He suggests that this regression is the reason why the ethical attitudes and actions of large organizations are often questionable, as they are influenced by this animal-like collective psyche.
Jung also introduces the concept of mob psychology, wherein the psychology of a large crowd descends to a lower level. Mob psychology refers to the phenomenon where individuals in a group lose their sense of individuality and moral responsibility, and instead become driven by a shared emotional intensity or a herd mentality. In such a state, people are more likely to engage in impulsive and irrational behavior, often acting in ways they would not as individuals.
By contrasting group experiences with individual experiences, Jung highlights that when an individual has a so-called collective experience as part of a group, it occurs at a lower level of consciousness than if they had the same experience on their own. This suggests that in a group, the individual’s consciousness is compromised, overshadowed, or influenced by the collective psyche that emerges. In contrast, when an individual has an experience alone, they can access a higher level of consciousness, unadulterated by the collective influences of a group.
“Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
suggests that true liberation or freedom cannot be achieved by avoiding or suppressing painful emotions. Instead, he argues that one can only attain genuine liberation by fully experiencing and confronting these challenging states of feeling.
Jung’s emphasis on “glossing over or repressing” points to the common tendency of individuals to ignore or push away uncomfortable emotions. Many people have a natural inclination to avoid pain, sadness, anger, or any other negative feelings. They may resort to distractions, numbing activities, or denial as coping mechanisms to shield themselves from the discomfort associated with such emotions.
However, Jung contends that this approach ultimately hinders personal growth and prevents true liberation. By glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, individuals deny themselves the opportunity to explore and understand the underlying causes and messages of these emotions. They remain stuck in an incomplete and superficial understanding of themselves and their experiences.
On the other hand, Jung asserts that experiencing these emotions fully is the key to liberation. This means allowing oneself to fully feel and engage with the pain, sadness, or any other challenging emotions that arise. Rather than avoiding or suppressing them, Jung encourages individuals to embrace these emotions and delve deep into their depths.
By engaging with painful emotions, individuals open themselves up to a transformative process. They can gain insights into the root causes of their emotions, uncover hidden aspects of themselves, and develop a greater understanding of their own psyche. Through this process of self-exploration, individuals can achieve a sense of liberation, as they break free from the limitations imposed by their repressed emotions.
Furthermore, Jung suggests that experiencing emotions fully involves acknowledging their existence without judgment or resistance. Instead of labeling emotions as “negative” or “undesirable,” Jung encourages individuals to approach them with curiosity and acceptance. By doing so, individuals can cultivate a more compassionate and non-judgmental relationship with their own emotions, which is essential for their personal growth and healing.
“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Line 1: “Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul…”
Jung starts by metaphorically describing the soul as something that “leaps” and “twinkles.” Here, he uses imagery to portray the soul as a vibrant and lively essence within a person. The soul represents the core of one’s being, encompassing their emotions, desires, and individuality.
Line 2: “…man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
Jung introduces the concept of idleness, which he refers to as man’s greatest passion. While passion typically evokes ideas of enthusiasm and engagement, Jung suggests that indulging in idleness can lead to stagnation and decay. By using the word “rot,” he emphasizes the destructive nature of idle inactivity, implying that a person who remains idle for too long loses vitality and purpose.
In this paragraph, Jung juxtaposes the dynamic nature of the soul with the potential consequences of idleness. He highlights that the soul’s ability to leap and twinkle, metaphorically representing its energetic and expressive qualities, is essential for the sustenance of an individual. Without the liveliness and vitality brought forth by the soul, a person risks falling into a state of stagnation and decay, primarily driven by their inclination towards idleness.
This paragraph further elaborates on the detrimental effects of idleness on the human experience. Jung implies that idleness, when pursued excessively or without balance, leads to the deterioration of one’s being. It suggests that by remaining idle, a person fails to engage with life, explore their potential, and manifest their desires. This lack of meaningful engagement stifles personal growth and inhibits the individual from reaching their fullest potential.
In summary, Jung’s quote emphasizes the importance of the soul’s dynamic qualities in countering the destructive allure of idleness. The soul’s capacity to leap and twinkle represents its ability to inspire enthusiasm, curiosity, and purpose in human existence. By indulging in idleness, one risks losing this vital energy, resulting in a state of stagnation and decay. Thus, Jung encourages individuals to nurture their souls, embrace their passions, and engage with life to avoid the perils of idleness and experience a more fulfilling existence.
“The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Line 1: “The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it…”
Jung begins by referring to the mirror as a metaphor for self-reflection. Unlike human interaction, the mirror doesn’t have the capacity to distort or flatter our appearance. Instead, it reflects back to us an objective image of ourselves. In this context, the mirror represents a symbol of honesty and truth.
Line 2: “…namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.”
Jung goes on to explain that the face we see in the mirror is the one we seldom reveal to the outside world. Instead, we construct a persona, a social mask that we wear to conform to societal expectations and hide our true selves. This persona is akin to the mask of an actor who plays a role on a stage, presenting a carefully crafted image that may differ from their authentic self.
By using the term “face,” Jung is not just referring to our physical appearance, but also to the deeper aspects of our personality and identity. He suggests that behind the mask of the persona lies a more genuine, complex, and multifaceted self that we often suppress or conceal.
Jung’s insight invites us to reflect on the dichotomy between our public persona and our true selves. The mask we wear in society serves as a defense mechanism, shielding us from vulnerability and potential judgment. It allows us to navigate social situations and conform to societal norms. However, this comes at the cost of suppressing our authentic emotions, desires, and individuality.
Furthermore, Jung’s quote highlights the importance of self-awareness and introspection. The mirror, in its unflinching reflection, serves as a powerful tool for self-examination. It prompts us to confront the face we rarely show, inviting us to explore and integrate our hidden aspects. By acknowledging and embracing our true selves, we can develop a more genuine and fulfilling connection with both ourselves and others.
Overall, Jung’s quote reminds us of the complexities of human nature and the masks we wear in society. It encourages us to embark on a journey of self-discovery, peeling away the layers of the persona to uncover our authentic selves and live a more authentic and meaningful life.
“If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Line 1: “If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason…”
Jung begins by addressing the concept of metaphysics, which refers to philosophical speculation about the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and the relationships between mind and matter.
He suggests that if we accept the notion that there are no aspects of metaphysics that surpass or go beyond human reason, it means that our capacity for understanding and comprehending reality has inherent limitations. Essentially, our human reasoning abilities form a boundary beyond which we cannot easily venture into the realm of metaphysics.
Line 2: “…it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.”
Jung continues by stating that not only are our attempts to grasp metaphysics limited by our reasoning capabilities, but even empirical knowledge — the knowledge derived from observation and experience — is also constrained.
He argues that our understanding of the world is already “caught and limited” by the pre-existing structure of cognition. The term “a priori” refers to knowledge that is inherent or existing prior to experience. Here, Jung suggests that our cognitive apparatus, the way our minds are structured to process information, influences and shapes the way we perceive and interpret empirical knowledge.
Paragraph 1:
In the first paragraph, Jung contrasts metaphysics and human reason. He implies that if metaphysics exceeds human reason, it reinforces the idea that our ability to comprehend the world is inherently limited.
This acknowledgment of limitations is crucial because it highlights the boundaries of our understanding and prevents us from making grand claims or assumptions about reality beyond our capabilities.
Paragraph 2:
The second paragraph delves into the realm of empirical knowledge. Jung asserts that even our knowledge based on observation and experience is subject to limitations imposed by our cognitive structure. He suggests that our cognitive framework influences the way we perceive and interpret empirical data.
Our pre-existing cognitive biases, assumptions, and mental models shape the way we make sense of the world, possibly leading to subjective interpretations and incomplete understandings.
By connecting these ideas, Jung proposes that both metaphysical and empirical knowledge are inherently constrained by the limitations of human cognition.
He suggests that our capacity for understanding is not only restricted by the boundaries of reason but also by the pre-existing structure of our cognitive processes.
This acknowledgment calls for humility in our pursuit of knowledge and encourages us to be aware of the limitations and biases inherent in our own minds.
It invites us to approach the complexities of reality with caution, recognizing that our understanding is always influenced by the frameworks through which we perceive and interpret the world.
“When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Line 1: “When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress…”
Jung begins by setting up a specific example: an elderly professor, someone who is typically held in high regard due to their wisdom and life experience, makes the decision to leave behind his family. The professor’s choice to pursue a romantic involvement with a young red-headed actress adds an element of contrast, highlighting a significant age difference and potential for infatuation.
Line 2: “…we know that the gods have claimed another victim.”
By mentioning the gods, Jung introduces a symbolic interpretation. He suggests that the professor’s actions are not solely the result of personal choices or circumstances but are instead influenced by archetypal forces beyond his conscious control. In this sense, the gods represent powerful psychic or spiritual forces that shape human behavior, often in ways that individuals may not fully comprehend.
Jung’s use of the word “victim” implies that the professor is not entirely in control of his actions. He suggests that the professor has become ensnared in a larger pattern or narrative, driven by forces that are greater than his own personal desires or rational decision-making processes. The professor’s infatuation with the young actress, in this context, is seen as a symptom of a deeper, underlying process unfolding within his psyche.
Overall, this quote from Carl Jung illustrates his belief in the existence of powerful archetypal forces that can influence human behavior and disrupt established social norms. It suggests that individuals, even those who are highly respected or esteemed, can be “claimed” by these forces and become entangled in situations that are seemingly beyond their conscious control. Jung’s perspective invites us to consider the role of the unconscious and the interplay between personal and collective influences in shaping our lives.
“We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.”
― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Line 1: “We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay…”
Here, Jung is metaphorically referring to the traditions, values, and cultural foundations that previous generations have established. He suggests that the present generation has neglected these structures, allowing them to deteriorate. This decay implies a weakening or abandonment of the wisdom and insights accumulated by our ancestors.
Line 2: “…and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew.”
Jung continues by using the metaphor of “Oriental palaces” to represent exotic or foreign ideologies, beliefs, or systems that are different from those familiar to previous generations.
He suggests that instead of valuing and preserving the legacy of their own culture, people are seeking out these new ideas and practices that are foreign to their heritage.
Line 3: “Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror.”
Here, Jung highlights the predicament faced by individuals who have lost touch with their historical symbols and are unable to find satisfaction in substitute symbols or ideologies.
He emphasizes that such individuals are facing a challenging situation. The “void” refers to the absence of meaningful symbols or guiding principles, and the horror signifies the fear and discomfort experienced when confronted with this emptiness.
Line 4: “What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness.”
Jung concludes by suggesting that when the void left by the loss of historical symbols is not acknowledged and addressed, it becomes susceptible to being filled with hollow and nonsensical political and social ideas.
He characterizes these ideas as spiritually bleak, lacking depth, meaning, and connection to the deeper aspects of human existence.
Overall, Jung’s message in this quote is a cautionary one. He warns against the neglect and disregard for the historical symbols and cultural foundations established by previous generations.
He suggests that by abandoning or undervaluing these symbols, individuals are left grappling with a sense of emptiness and are prone to adopting ideologies that lack spiritual depth. Jung encourages a reconnection with our historical symbols as a means to find a more meaningful and fulfilling path forward.
 | Astro Butterfly Jul 3, 2023 |
On July 3rd, 2023 we have a beautiful Full Moon at 11° Capricorn.
The Full Moon in Capricorn will show us what we’re capable of. It will give us a vision of what’s possible.
And it will expose the number #1 ‘enemy’ that keeps us small and prevents us from achieving our greatest potential: the stories we tell ourselves.
Capricorn is our higher self, our greatest potential, the adult inside each one of us.
Capricorn is where we go into the big wild world to achieve our mission.
The big wild world is a difficult place. We have to develop skills. We have to deal with difficulties. We toughen up. And if we succeed, we eventually get our reward.
When we have a Full Moon in Capricorn, the Moon is in Capricorn, and the Sun in Cancer. All Full Moons in Capricorn highlight the tension of the opposites: Cancer and Capricorn.
Cancer is the familiar. Capricorn is the unfamiliar. Cancer is our comfort zone. Capricorn is our uncomfort zone.
Cancer’s role is to preserve what we already have. Capricorn’s role is to sacrifice what we have for the hope of a better tomorrow.
Too much Cancer and we never grow up. It’s so much more comfortable to do what we’ve always been doing! Too much Capricorn and we chase success for success’ stake, overcompensating for the void inside.
How do we strike a balance?
The Full Moon in Capricorn is opposite Mercury in Cancer, trine Jupiter in Taurus, and sextile Saturn in Pisces.
Full Moon opposite Mercury suggests there’s a tension between what we want to achieve (Full Moon in Capricorn) vs. our thinking patterns (Mercury) that keep us in our comfort zone (Cancer).
The opposition is a very tricky aspect because the tension of the 2 planets opposite each other seems irreconcilable. It’s not that we don’t know there’s a problem, we do – yet we are absolutely convinced we can’t do anything about it.
When there’s an opposition, it’s not the world that needs to change. It’s us who needs to change.
Thankfully, the Full Moon trine Jupiter supports us in the process – if we just believe there’s a better tomorrow, 90% of the work is done. If there’s anything that can break a looping, obsessive thinking pattern, that’s Jupiter.
Moreover, the sextile to Saturn will give us tools and support to make tangible changes.
A better tomorrow is not just a daydream! At the Full Moon in Capricorn, we really have the inspiration, faith (Jupiter), tools, and support systems (Saturn) for lasting change.
But there’s one important thing we need to address…
I’ve always told myself that I hate cold water. I’d only go swimming in the peak of summer – and only if it was super hot. I’d have a whole theory around why cold water is not for me.
A few days ago I decided to plunge into ice-cold water. I just held my breath and simply stopped listening to the “cold water is not for me” story.
When I challenged my own mind (Full Moon opposite Mercury) I discovered that being in ice-cold water is not actually unpleasant. It was a whole new sensation I’ve never experienced before; and I felt great afterwards!
After the plunge, it just didn’t make sense how I’ve been telling myself the cold water story for my entire life. The story wasn’t true – yet, I was convinced it was, just because this is what I’ve been telling myself over and over again.
Stories we tell ourselves are like advertising. They work!
If we just watch the silliest ad on TV for a sufficient number or times we end up buying the product. We are wired for the familiar. We believe we make choices – when in reality, we default to what we know best.
We all have stories we tell ourselves. Maybe someone else told us they’re true. Maybe we labeled them as “truths” early on in life and we never challenged them.
Stories keep us warm, cozy and safe. Stories make us feel good about ourselves, because with stories we can define ourselves and say, “well that’s just me”. With stories we can justify our actions. There’s a consistency about these stories that feels safe and satisfying.
Stories prevent us from growing.
We are all capable of so much more. The only constant in life is growth. It’s in nature; it’s everywhere. Growth and evolution are written in our genes.
Stories are the opposite of growth. Just because they are OUR stories, just because they’re familiar, this doesn’t make them right.
Just because someone has a history of abusive relationships this doesn’t make abusive relationships ok. Just because we’ve always done things a certain way, it doesn’t mean it’s the best way.
Changing the stories we tell ourselves might sound like hard Capricorn work.
You’ve probably heard this 1 million times “just change your thoughts” or “it’s all about mindset” … and you’ve told yourself 1 million times “yes, but” or “this doesn’t work for me”.
What if it does? What if your “truth” is just a story you’ve been telling yourself?
There’s nothing more American than disunity, the creative force that demands we break away, declare independence, and build something new, writes columnist Joe Mathews. Cropped version of “The Avenue in the Rain” by Childe Hassam. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
by JOE MATHEWS | JULY 3, 2023 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
The further I drove into Oroville, the more disappointment I felt.
I had my passport with me, but no one asked me to show it. American flags still hung from stores along Montgomery Street. Homes near the Feather River were flying our state’s banner. City Hall had not been replaced by a new national capitol. And as hard as I looked, I could find no new standing army, or presidential palace, or the Oroville Food and Drug Administration.
It was as if the city council of Oroville, 70 miles north of Sacramento in Butte County, had never made national news in 2021 by declaring itself a “constitutional republic.” And no one in this town home to close to 20,000 residents much wanted to talk about this bold move, even those who once championed the idea.
That’s too bad. Because there is no more productive spirit, and no greater creative force, than the commitment to break away, to declare independence and build something new.
That’s the spirit, that’s the force, we should celebrate on Independence Day—especially in California, which is known for going its own way. But it’s been a long time since Independence Day was about independence.
These days, we try to put on displays of national unity—a fundamental mistake at the heart of our national malaise.
Americans, amidst our divisions, foolishly long for unity, even though unity, and the national compromises it requires, have produced so many awful things in our country. We the people—or more correctly, the wealthy male and European slice of we—came together to adopt a constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy. In the name of unity, we ended Reconstruction and launched Jim Crow. In our moments of greatest national unity, we ceded terrible power to presidents, and pursued endless wars.
A state famous for producing internal secession movements—there have been more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850—lately has seen nothing but half-hearted efforts.
The United States only truly advances through division and disunion. We needed a civil war to end slavery. Every expansion of rights required social movements that divided us. The nation’s signature technological achievements were the products of people who went off on their own, in defiance of business convention and existing laws, from Kitty Hawk to Cupertino. Environmental progress, including climate change laws, has come when cities and states, including California, have broken ranks.
So, on this Independence Day, the problem is not our absence of unity, but the weakness of our efforts at disunion.
California, and especially its discontents, have displayed a decided lack of nerve. This country needs a revolution, but we aren’t supplying one. A state famous for producing internal secession movements—there have been more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850—lately has seen nothing but half-hearted efforts.
In this, Oroville is hardly the only disappointment.
Who, for example, switched all the coffee in San Bernardino County to decaf this year?
Last fall, the people of that county, the largest by area in the United States, voted to direct officials to study greater autonomy “up to and including secession from the State of California.”
That verdict portended a wholesale rethinking of the meaning of county government in California and the U.S. Some of us hoped that San Bernardino, one of the few parts of California seeing population gains, would dream bigger than just statehood, and go all the way, for nationhood. (I would have applied for citizenship.)
But eight months after the vote, there have been few public signs of progress, other than a few more pointed requests for funding San Bernardino priorities in the state budget. There is no public indication of serious work on statehood, and the study that voters demanded has not been published.
In the rural precincts of the North State, the longstanding push for a state of Jefferson, which drew heavy publicity and broad local government support in the early years of this century, seems at low ebb. It’s been eclipsed by the effort by rural counties in Oregon, some of which border California and would have been part of Jefferson, to split off from the Beaver State and become part of an expanded “Greater Idaho.”
Northern California does have some disunity, but it’s not of the constructive kind. In Shasta County, right-wing political figures have taken over, and their desire to destroy institutions and threaten people eclipses any interest in building more democratic government.
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Just this May, El Dorado County, which includes Lake Tahoe, saw the launch of a new secession effort, called the Republic of El Dorado, inspired in part by the fact that the county isn’t home to a single elected representative in the state or federal government. But again, the effort doesn’t have a clear agenda. It’s also built on the dubious claim, running contrary to law and the constitution, that the county can leave and make itself a state without any agreement or sign-off from Congress or the state legislature.
There are other local acts of defiance that could evolve into a bigger split and more change, but haven’t yet. Our state is full of sanctuary cities that have developed new ways to protect and serve unauthorized immigrants and their families. Some school boards, notably in Temecula, have limited access to books or taken conservative stands in the culture wars, thus challenging the state. The city of Huntington Beach and the state are suing each other over housing laws, though it seems unlikely that the outcome will boost housing production, much less change the nature of local government in California.
Meanwhile, other, more established ideas for independence in California remain dormant. Bay Area investor Tim Draper, who once circulated ballot measures to split California into multiple states, is devoted to cryptocurrency instead. The city of Los Angeles is in a political crisis and might benefit from the relaunch required by a breakup, but the movement for San Fernando Valley secession, which triggered a citywide vote a generation ago, is all but dead.
That’s too bad. As the historian and journalist Richard Kreitner observed in his 2020 book Break It Up, “secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,”
So, on this Independence Day, the best way for Californians to celebrate their country is by plotting to break away and build something new.
We’re disunited, and that’s what makes us great.
JOE MATHEWS writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
BY VIRGIE TOWNSEND • JULY 2023 (thesunmagazine.org)
— for Tarlie Townsend
As the new millennium drew near, Erin’s family began preparing for the apocalypse. Jesus was going to return at the stroke of midnight, appearing in the New York City skyline as the ball dropped on TV and the moon turned to blood. Locusts would descend across the land while the dead emerged from their graves to prophesy among the living. The faithful would be whisked up into Paradise, their old flesh falling away as they assumed their glorified bodies.
Erin envisioned herself gliding through the clouds in a new, shimmering form, thin and incandescent. As the daughter of a pastor, she had spent all fourteen years of her life waiting for Jesus to come back. Her mother homeschooled the children to shield them from the world’s corrupting influence. Most of Erin’s time was spent taking care of her six younger brothers and sisters.
Now all of their sacrifices would be worth it. The signs were everywhere: famines, plagues, earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, the persecution of Christians. Her father had read that computers wouldn’t be able to change their dates from 1999 to 2000, and the world would be plunged into chaos. It was the perfect opportunity for the Antichrist to seize power and begin his seven-year reign of terror.
Erin’s dad had a computer at his church office for writing sermons and responding to church members’ emails. He didn’t allow his family to use it.
“The Internet has the potential for great evil,” he said.
Erin’s cousin Stephanie was the only teenager Erin knew who had her own email address. Now Erin’s family was visiting Stephanie’s on this, the last Christmas season before the millennium. Stephanie sat Erin down in front of a plywood desk and signed her on to the World Wide Web for the first time.
“Mom and Dad say I should only use it for homework, but I mostly use it to look up music,” Stephanie said.
The computer was encased in aqua-blue-and-white plastic. Twinkling lights from the living-room Christmas tree reflected in the screen. As Stephanie logged on, the modem screeched and buzzed.
“You’ve got mail,” the computer announced.
Stephanie clicked with the mouse, then tapped a few keys, and pictures popped up on the screen. There were boy bands posing in matching white suits and rectangular sunglasses. Stephanie clicked again and showed Erin teenage pop starlets strolling red carpets in stiletto heels and metallic skirts with their midriffs exposed.
“She signed her record contract when she was fifteen,” Stephanie said about one singer. “She was just like us, and now look at her.”
The singer didn’t look like she had much in common with either of them. She had silky brown hair swept back by a wind machine. In one hand she held a microphone; with the other she reached out toward an audience of thousands.
“She’s pretty,” Erin said.
“So pretty,” Stephanie agreed, pulling her leg up onto the chair. “And she puts on an amazing show. What do you think that’s like: all those people listening to everything you say and yelling your name? It must be so crazy. I asked my mom to sign me up for singing lessons, but she said I can’t do them and ballet both.”
Last Sunday Erin had sung in front of her church for the annual Christmas pageant, her voice airy and sweet as she invoked the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. Before Erin had hit the highest note, she’d taken a deep breath and felt a rush of air and power fill her chest.
“Maybe we could start a band together someday,” Stephanie said.
“That sounds fun,” Erin admitted.
The singer wore a shiny pink tube top (“It’s pleather,” Stephanie explained), and her stomach was bare and dusted with a constellation of glitter. Erin liked looking at her, and this feeling repulsed her.
“I don’t think we should look at these anymore,” she said quietly.
“Why not?”
“She’s stirring up lust. That’s a sin.”
“Maybe they’re just enjoying the show.”
“That outfit,” Erin said, pointing to the singer’s abs, “is designed to make men feel lust.”
“OK.” Stephanie shrugged and clicked away from the photo. “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”
Erin pulled herself up from the desk feeling strangely disappointed. Her parents had warned her that living for Christ meant being misunderstood, rejected, or even martyred. They hadn’t prepared her for polite disengagement.
The cousins walked in silence to the dining room, where the two families were preparing to have dinner.
Aunt Teri was distributing soft-tipped utensils and coloring books at the children’s table for Erin’s siblings and Stephanie’s younger sister, Brooke. Erin’s mom ladled green-bean casserole and mashed potatoes onto multicolored plates and handed them to the children. Uncle Scott held a glass of wine in his left hand and an electric carving knife in his right, about to cut into the ham’s lacquered glaze. Her father shouted to Scott over the noise of the whirring knife about the best angle to slice around the bone. Erin knew the two brothers had banded together in childhood to survive their parents’ abuse. Then Tom had been born again while Scott had remained a Catholic, like their mother and father. The subject of religion remained a source of tension between them.
A runner embroidered with poinsettias was laid over the table, the star-shaped blooms studding the hem. A basket of frosted pinecones and peppermint carnations sat in the center. Scented red candles burned at either end of the table, their sharp spiciness mingling with the aromas of ham and mashed potatoes. Two more places than usual were set next to each other in the middle.
“Mom said we can sit at the grown-ups’ table this year!” Stephanie said. “What do you think?” She gestured at the display. Two plastic champagne flutes held a clear, bubbly liquid.
“Is that real champagne?” Erin asked. She would have been shocked if her aunt and uncle were serving alcohol to teenagers, but she couldn’t be sure when it came to the unsaved.
“No, it’s just sparkling grape juice, but still very sophisticated!”
Stephanie pulled out her chair and sat down with a ballerina’s lightness, a satisfied expression on her face. Erin tried to emulate her cousin’s grace but felt stiff and awkward. She was all too aware of her mother standing nearby, trying to maneuver Erin’s wriggling baby sister into a high chair.
“Look, Mom,” Erin said. “Sparkling grape juice.”
Her mother glanced at Erin’s glass, and the corner of her mouth twitched.
“Yes, I saw that,” she replied, turning back to the baby.
Erin added sparkling grape juice to her mental list of things to avoid — just another one thrown on the pile.
Uncle Scott tapped his glass with a spoon.
“We’re fortunate to have a pastor in the family, so it’s only right that he say grace before we begin,” he said, smiling at his brother. “Tom?”
Erin’s father took her uncle’s place in front of the room. Everyone closed their eyes and bowed their heads. This was a moment Erin loved — the communion of silence and shared belief.
Her father thanked the Lord for becoming a baby in a manger almost two thousand years ago so that mankind might have eternal life. He prayed that their hearts would be soft to hearing God’s word. He praised God for the many blessings He had poured over their lives. Finally he said, “Amen,” and the rest of the room echoed him. Stephanie crossed herself. Erin thought it must be soothing to lightly touch one’s chest and think about salvation.
“Try the sparkling grape juice,” Stephanie said eagerly.
“No, thanks.”
Stephanie shrugged, pinched the plastic flute between her thumb and forefinger, and took a sip.
“This is how they drink it in Paris.”
“Very fancy, ladies,” Aunt Teri said with a wink.
It occurred to Erin for the first time that elegance might be a quality a person could learn, not just something you were born with. Stephanie could transform at will into a dancer, elongating her torso, lightening her arms, and softening her hands. She could choose to move her body in ways that pleased her. Erin thought about her own body only when she shopped for loose-fitting shirts to conceal her breasts, which she prayed wouldn’t get any bigger, or when she ate little slips of white paper between meals to try to quiet her rumbling stomach. She’d never thought about how she wanted to present herself — whether bold and charismatic like the pop singer, or refined like Stephanie, or mysterious, or athletic, or funny. There was no point in even asking herself the question in a world on the brink of ending.
Tom and Scott argued about last week’s football game with dramatic boos and exclamations of “You’re kidding me!” Teri crouched down at the kids’ table, made fish lips, and moved her arms as though they were fins. The baby smacked her palms on the high-chair tray and squealed in delight. Erin’s mother told her younger siblings to eat their green beans. The happy chaos lifted Erin’s spirits.
“So, tell me more about that singer,” Erin said to Stephanie as she cut her ham into small pieces.
“Which one?”
“The one in the belly shirt.”
Stephanie described the love affair between the singer and a fellow pop star, her virginity, her small Southern hometown. Erin pushed candied yams around her plate, shaping them into a smaller-looking pile, and listened intently for clues about the kind of girl she might have been with different parents. “We can listen to her album after dinner. I’ll show you some of the choreography.”
Erin’s pulse quickened with worry that her mother had heard Stephanie’s plan, but her mother was distracted by the men arguing.
“Jesus, can we have one holiday where you don’t try to convert me?” Uncle Scott was saying.
Stephanie gave Erin a knowing look and rolled her eyes. Family gatherings often began with their fathers chatting about work and kids and home-improvement projects, but eventually the old patterns took over, and the brothers ventured into more dangerous topics: who’d received less affection from their parents in childhood; who knew more about a given subject; and, ultimately, whether Scott was going to hell.
“I’m just saying you should get your heart and your house in order for when Christ returns,” Tom replied. “I’m worried about you, Scott. You’re drinking again.”
Uncle Scott exuded calm, but Erin saw a slight tremble in the hand that held his fork. She could sense his nerves crackling under the skin. Aunt Teri placed her hand over her husband’s, and everyone waited for what was coming.
Scott smirked and took a long drink. His wineglass caught the overheard light, and its color reminded Erin of crushed-velvet dresses.
“Listen,” he began, leaning forward. “You may have convinced a couple of dozen people that you can talk to God, but I’ve known you your whole life, and you can take that bullshit out of here.”
“Jesus is coming back. All the signs are there. You’re on a path to destruction, and you’re taking the girls with you.”
“At least I don’t beat the personality out of my kids like Dad did to us.”
“He didn’t mean that, Tom,” Aunt Teri interjected.
Erin heard blood rushing in her ears. Something tight and insistent began pushing its way forward from the back of her throat, until she swallowed it down. Stephanie reached under the table to squeeze Erin’s hand, but Erin pulled it away.
Wasn’t the obedient child the best child? That’s what the Bible said parents should want from their children.
“You need to apologize, Scott,” Aunt Teri said.
“Don’t bother,” Erin’s father said, wiping his hands on his napkin and tossing it on his plate. “We’re leaving.”
Erin’s mother stood up quietly and pulled the baby from the high chair. Erin slipped out of her seat and followed her parents, ushering her small troop of younger siblings to the front door. The lump in her throat wanted to push forward. Tears threatened to come.
Her father walked out of the house without his jacket and started the car. Her mother opened the hallway closet and pulled down an armful of puffy winter coats. Aunt Teri and Stephanie followed them down the hall, their feet padding on the tile.
“Please, let’s just finish our meal,” Teri said. “The kids have been looking forward to seeing their cousins all week.”
Erin’s mother zipped the baby’s coat without looking up.
“Stephanie and Brooke are not godly influences on my children,” she said.
Erin slipped her feet into her boots, took her knit hat out of her coat sleeve, and tried to focus on the thick, scratchy fabric in her hands. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, and Stephanie pulled her into a hug.
“I’m sorry about my dad,” she whispered into Erin’s ear.
“I’m sorry, too,” Erin replied, though she wasn’t sure for what.
“We’ll listen to some music next time. I promise.”
Erin doubted there would be a next time.
On the two-hour drive home Erin tried to keep her siblings quiet while her father yelled about his brother. At home he led them all in their nightly devotions and selected the Bible passage about the fool who says in his heart that there is no God. Erin sat on the couch with her Bible in her lap and tried to take notes in her devotional notebook, but she kept thinking about the bile in her uncle’s voice, and the singer’s arm outstretched to the audience, and the sparkling filth of the world.
After everyone else had gone to bed, Erin listened for the signs that her parents would soon be asleep: the sound of her mother setting a water glass on her nightstand and her father flipping off the light switch. A few minutes later she sneaked downstairs to the radio in the living room. The skin on Erin’s neck prickled. If her parents found her listening to secular music, her father would tell her to pull her pants down to her knees, and her mother would fetch a wooden spoon from the kitchen.
She waited until the house was silent, then turned the volume to the lowest setting and pressed the power button. It clicked on like a courteous bellman she had summoned. She turned the dial away from the local Christian station, past the static, until she heard bass and drums and a singer scaling a flight of notes on a single word. Maybe it was the same singer she’d seen on Stephanie’s computer. She took her hand away from the dial.
What would happen if she wasn’t taken up in the Rapture? She might wake up on that snowy New Year’s morning to find her parents’ coffee sitting cold and black on the kitchen countertop, her younger siblings’ beds unmade, and a smear of glitter twinkling on her belly. She would pick up her family’s still-warm clothes from the floor, fold them, and put them away. She would call every number listed in the church directory, but no one would answer. Then she would dress in something thick and warm and take the keys from her mother’s purse.
What choice would she have but to go live with her cousin? The rest of her family would be up in heaven, peeking down at her from the edge of a crystalline river, thin and sexless in their glorified heavenly bodies.
She would learn ballet and how to sip champagne like they do in Paris. She would use the Internet to look at pictures of beautiful pop stars in pleather tops. She and Stephanie would start a band.
Sitting in front of the radio in the last days of the millennium, Erin took the pen from her devotional notebook, held it to her lips, and pretended to sing.
