Isadorables

"Butterfly Etude:" Emily D'Angelo, Hayley Rose, Faith Kimberling   Photo: John Link 

A flock of Monarch butterflies – stopping for the night in the Hudson Valley on their way to Mexico --- greeted early arrivals Saturday in Untermyer Park and Gardens, high above the river in Yonkers.  Their visit was unscheduled, but no more an accident than the gust of wind which an hour later lifted the silken wings of three dancers to Chopin’s “Butterfly Etude,” nor the shaft of light from the setting sun that illumined Gluck’s “Bacchanal.” Isadora planned it that way.     

Nearly a century after Isadora Duncan’s dancers performed in Samuel Untermyer’s open-air amphitheater in 1923, Lori Belilove and her Isadora Duncan Dance Company returned for an encore. And if Isadora was ahead of her time, her self-anointed successor Belilove is right on time with this revival.   

Gaga at Breezy Point

9/11 Memorial --Breezy Point 

This summer, amid the national uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long list of others, I spent a Saturday visiting a friend in the beach resort of Breezy Point, Queens. Wrapped around the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula, this is an enclave of middle-class homes on sandy pedestrian paths, festooned with American flags and sprinkled with Trump signs -- a summer haven for New York City police and firefighters, heavily Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, 100 percent white.  It was organized as a co-op in the 1960s, with rules that keep it a closed society, a gated community.  

I took a walk by the bay, watching children play in the sand and trading wary nods and glances with the adults.  It was a perfect beach day, a time to relax, but the atmosphere felt subdued and tense.  Some residents had recently been involved in a confrontation with protesting Black surfers in nearby Rockaway Beach.  Others had faced off with demonstrators in the streets. As a stranger with a beard, I was regarded with caution. The last time I visited, in 2017, one guy told me I looked like his dog.  This time there was no conversation.   

It reminded me of South Africa in 1990, in the last days of apartheid, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. All those white faces grimly trying to milk their white privilege to the last drop, knowing that the outside world was turning away from them.    

These feelings came back at me this week, watching Lady Gaga's new video, "911." 

Standing Up for Evil: The Price of Knowledge in Frost's "Mending Wall"

This is an edited version of an article published online by The Explicator, 9/11/2020. 

  --  By Tom Phillips                               

Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” contrasts two New England farmers as they meet to repair the stone wall between their properties.  While much has been said about their opposing characters, the difference between their farms has barely been noted. The speaker cultivates an apple orchard, his neighbor a pine forest.  These are two of earth’s hardiest and most common trees, ubiquitous North of Boston (as Frost titled the 1914 collection in which the poem appears) and profoundly different in their physical properties and symbolic meanings.  

The apple tree is small and shapely, a tree of the field, sun-loving, deciduous, blossoming in spring and bearing an irresistible fruit in summer and fall.  It was a golden apple that set off the Trojan war, when Paris awarded it to Venus in exchange for Helen of Troy.  In Christian tradition, the apple is a symbol of both sin and redemption. The forbidden tree from which Eve ate in the Garden of Eden becomes “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree” in an 18^th-century hymn.  

The pine is its polar opposite – tall and straight, a tree of the forests and mountains, a thousand-year survivor bearing hard and inedible cones. In the Bible a member of the pine family, the cedar, is associated with worship of God; Solomon’s temple is hewn from cedars of Lebanon (NRSV, 1 Kings 5). In folklore the pine forest is a dark and forbidding place, a scene of lethal trickery in Grimm’s tales, of murder and mystery in the American folk-song “In the Pines.”  In Frost’s own “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the forest is “lovely, dark and deep” --- a path to oblivion (224).  If the apple tree is a temptation to life, the pine forest is a temptation to death. 

Both pines and apples were part of the everyday world of Robert Frost, the New England farmer.  They were also the property of Frost the classical and biblical scholar, who saw his poems as dialogues with the whole history of literature, sacred and secular.  In “Mending Wall,” he uses the symbolism of the apple and the pine to underscore the qualities of the two farmers.  He also uses it to mimic and challenge a foundational text --- the dialogue between the serpent and Eve:  

Eve and the Serpent -- Henri Rousseau

            “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?”  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”   (Genesis 3: 1-2)

Frost begins by identifying the people with their plants.  “I am all apple orchard and you are all pine,” says the crafty narrator.  Personified as the fruit, he becomes not just the tempter but the object of temptation.  The speaker extends it further when he teases, “here there are no cows.”  No females will intrude on this encounter.

On a literal level, all he wants to do is talk – about the absurdity of keeping a wall between an apple orchard and a pine forest.  He mocks his neighbor’s fears: “My apples won’t come across and eat the cones under your pines.”