A Thing of Beauty

     As the spring rains (and snow) continue, I remain puzzled by the number of lawn mowers I hear, my neighbors already out putting down spring fertilizer, their unnaturally-green lawns almost an oddity, their lawn "marks" crisscrossing as neatly as baseball fields.  This is not to say that I haven't been out there as well, clearing up the leftover leaf cover and stray clumps of pine needles that have, I hope, sheltered a few wintering bugs and bulbs.  But it did bring to mind the comment that author John Green wrote, that an alien species coming down to visit would wonder what is that "god" we revere, this green expanse we water and fertilize and mow but yet rarely use, this Kentucky bluegrass lawn, a seed which is neither from Kentucky nor is blue.

    Then again, a beautiful lawn is captivating, be it those royal Tudor-like lawns of monarchy or pristine golf courses.  One could almost say that such sights are beautiful, but at what cost?  Author Green added: ...more land and water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.  There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater that the size of Ohio, or the entire nation of Italy.  Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S. --clean, drinkable water-- is dedicated to lawns...Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turf grass than is used in corn or wheat fields...Grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills.  If those numbers sound a bit outlandish, my own state --which our governor will again soon declare to be in a state of severe drought-- uses 38 million gallons of water per day to keep its golf courses green (and that does not include any private golf courses).  But again, what's missing here?  

     The keeping-up-appearances attitude (once labeled "keeping up with the Jones") is apparently for only a few.  Statistically, golf is limited to a largely Caucasian and older male clientele  (said Golf Digest: Despite being the age groups most at risk during the pandemic, older players still played the most golf. Those aged 60-69 logged an average of 29 rounds in 2020, while those golfers 70 and over played an average of 40 times last year.)  And despite that magazine's optimistic view of an increase in players, other statistics show a steady decline...the number of golf courses in the U.S. has dropped by nearly 6000 in the last 20 years (to under 10,000).  And while numbers differ depending on the study, the percentage of black golf players (or Hispanic) continues to be well under 5%.  Part of this could be the Caucasian-only clause that existed in the PGA from 1934 to 1961.  Sandy Cross, the Chief People Officer for the PGA of America who oversees diversity, told Golf Week: Because we had this Caucasian-only clause, we have lost a generation --or generations, plural-- of Black Americans electing the PGA member career path.  Okay, not meaning to pick on this "sport" but honestly, how many black or Hispanic players have you seen on a public or private golf course (much less a championship)?  And all that water and manicured exclusivity for just a few? 

    This sort of statistic never really bothered me because I don't play golf even though many of my friends do (all are Caucasian).  But a letter in The London Review of Books noted that the same issues were facing people of color (or of a different faith) trying to flee the fighting in Ukraine said TIME and NPR...Ukrainian and Polish guards were found to not be allowing non-white Ukrainaians to have the same privileges as so many others; or in some cases, not letting them out of Ukraine at all.  When you next watch a popular news segment scan through the refugee lines at train and bus stations and see how many black or brown people are in those lines?  Mahdis Keshavarz, a board member with the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, pointed out to NPR that Poland was: ...accepting Ukrainian refugees when not that long ago, the country was telling scores of Afghans, Syrians and Iraqis, no, the country's full...So as journalists, I think it's really critical that we look at that duality, and we question why that is.

     Some years ago I bought the lithograph you see on the right for my wife; it was a painting by the late Steve Hanks, an artist known for his flowing lines and drawings of women and children.  In the piece, I admired the lines of the form,* all of which were overshadowed by the framer I often used.  He had an "eye" for bringing out a work of art, his choice of colors and mattes selectively picked to match the frame (note the brushed softness of the matte and the filigree lines of the frame, countered with the additional piece he inlayed to highlight the print itself).  But all of these questions now popping up about race and choices made me question my own view of "beauty."  Would I have chosen this piece if it were a painting of a person of a different race; or if I did would I have considered it equally beautiful?  In my case, the answer would likely have been yes, the majority of my purchased prints being those of animals, from swans to hawks to tigers emerging from the bush.

     But Steve Hanks did seem to limit his work to Caucasian females which brought to mind an interview on The Daily with award-wiinning actress, Viola Davis.  In talking about her early days while at Julliard, she spoke of how she had to change her looks, her hair, her voice; when the interviewer asked her who she was trying to erase before stepping out onto that stage she replied...herself.  She felt that the audience had an image of what they wanted to see and at the time, it certainly wasn't how she really looked.  She talked of people wanting to change themselves, to get Angelina Jolie's nose and Scarlett Johansen's lips and soon becoming (as she put it) Mr. Potato Head, a caricature of everyone BUT themselves (I should note here that plastic surgeons on average make over 30% more than doctors or other surgeons, wrote Discover).  In a recent broadcast of The Moth  Adrienne Lotson spoke of her worries about not being cut out to be a chaplain, that even when she tried to introduce new music and programming to residents at the nursing home she was at, she watched as one by one they began to walk out.  The senior chaplain at the time told her this piece of advice: before you can make people what you want them to be, you first need to find out who they are (that segment is followed by an excellent presentation by author Elizabeth Gilbert on the fight to live despite overwhelming odds).  

     There's an mathematical equation called the golden ratio, a search for perfection found throughout the natural world in flowers and shells, pinecones and galaxies...but almost never in the human face (it is found in our skulls, wrote a study by John Hopkins).   View a few computer-generated "perfect" faces and you may find them a bit disturbing (you can try this yourself by holding a mirror vertically over half your face and try to "match" it with the remaining half).  But even here, the AI-generated models are based on Caucasian faces.  Many Christian and Jewish texts write that God created man (and lately meant to include all humans) in His image, but again such texts generally depict a Caucasian humanoid figure.  Wrote Wikipedia: Research on ancient skeletons in Palestine suggests that Judeans of the time were biologically closer to Iraqi Jews than to any other contemporary population, and thus in terms of physical appearance the average Judean of the time would have likely had dark brown to black hair, olive skin, and brown eyes...A wide range of depictions have appeared over the two millennia since Jesus's death, often influenced by cultural settings, political circumstances and theological contexts.

     This is not to be taken as a rant on race or biases but rather on how each of us determines what we feel is normal or beautiful.  Try as we might, who isn't impressed when stumbling onto a wild and forested valley, nature mixing a seemingly endless variety of greens and browns and other colors into a palette of beauty we seem unable to match no matter how many pesticides we apply or how much we try to mow and shape our own "landscapes" into something beautiful.  It is life on display, plants and trees, animals and insects all working harmoniously without concern for what is or isn't beautiful.  One episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone featured a group of plastic surgeons delicately staring over a patient as they remove her bandages, all in the hope that their final effort to make her look "normal" has been successful.  But their idea of normal and ours is quite different.  Rod Serling's closing words: Now there're questions that come to mind.  Where is this place, and when is it?  What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm?  You want an answer?  The answer is, it doesn't make any difference.  Because the old saying happens to be true.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence.  On this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Lesson to be learned...in The Twilight Zone.

    In the book A Dog's World, authors Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff write that our efforts to reshape dogs to our liking may be reaching a breaking point: Over time, breeders have been pushing certain dogs towards progressively shorter faces and wider skulls, to achieve the desired, smushed-face appearance.  These "smushed-faced" breeds include French bulldogs, pugs, and boxers (and we) may have pushed these dogs very close to the physiological limit, because their lives are now seriously compromised.  Brachycephaly squeezes the brain, makes breathing difficult, and is associated with higher than normal levels of disease, especially obstructive airway disease, and early death...Without human-directed breeding, extreme brachycephaly in dogs will likely disappear.  The subtitle of the book is: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans.  

    Our quest for beauty and perfection has caused us to poison our faces and our food, to poison our farms and our lawns.  The movie National Champions noted that each year 12,000 college athletes become eligible for the NFL professional football draft; of that number 11,700 will not make it.  Should those athletes be injured while in college, they are left without insurance, medical care for the future, and often their scholarship.  Blemished fruit and blemished bodies.  In viewing the perceived faults, we may miss the actual beauty.  As Rebekkah Taussag wrote when looking at someone in such a manner, the question to ask may not be "how can I help," but rather "do you want any help?"   

                                      

     In her book Sentient, author Jackie Higgins quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman: Our brains are tuned to a small fraction of the surrounding reality.  The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its Umwelt to be the entire objective reality "out there."  Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense?  There is beauty everywhere, from the blooms popping up through the snow and soil, to the bubbles of ideas that come from a simple conversation with a friend.  Who knows what talent and futures, what languages and cultures we are turning away at borders simply because of what we consider to be "unacceptable."    Author John Green summed up that thought in this manner: I have only been here a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining numbers of many other kinds*...What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA?  I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.  Sometimes, I wonder how I can survive in this world where, as Mary Oliver put it, "everything/Sooner or later/Is part of everything else."  Other times, I must remember that I won't survive, of course.  I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else.  But until then: What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet.  What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.   

    In closing, I want to clarify again that our house is not full of black velvet paintings but rather images that seem to celebrate the diversity of life in their form and their beauty.   One of my favorite prints is Seaworthy, a rendering by Lee Kromschroeder of orcas in the wild, free in their world, a world that almost frightens me with its cold and unbridled power but one which comforts the orcas.  It is their world, as much as it is not mine.  Water is necessary for all living organisms, wrote a piece in Discover. Whether it’s to stay hydrated, break down food, generate energy, regulate metabolism or help things grow, life as we know it couldn’t exist without water.  Believed to be more than 4.6 billion years old, the water on Earth has shaped the planet and its history...There are an estimated 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth. Approximately 98 percent is from the oceans —­­ and undrinkable because of the salt content.  That means that less than 3 percent of our planet’s water is fresh, found in ice caps, glaciers, wells, aquifers, rivers and lakes....Our bodies are more than half water.  Water is involved in many functions and needed for most bodily systems, including removing waste, regulating body temperature, lubricating/cushioning joints and protecting the spinal cord.  The percentage of water varies among organs, with the brain and kidneys containing the highest, at 80-85 percent.  The heart and lungs contain 75-80 percent water while skin, muscles and liver contain 70-75 percent.  Even our blood, bones and teeth are comprised partially of water.  Pollute and waste our water and we pollute and waste ourselves.  That would not be a beautiful thing.  But that's only our perspective...

Seaworthy by Lee Kromschroeder

*On a side note, National Geographic reported that in 2021 the USDA's Wildlife Services purposely destroyed 1.76 million animals --including 3000 "accidental" kills of dogs, cats, foxes, turtles, otters and others-- in order to preserve farms and ranches.  Said part of the article: For the most part, state and local authorities call on Wildlife Services to trap or remove animals that might kill livestock, eat crops, or cause other damage.  The agency uses a variety of traps, such as neck snares, foothold traps, and body grips designed to crush the animal caught inside.  Critics say the traps are not only inhumane and deadly but also indiscriminate.  The magazine's newest article writes of the new surge to make hunting a "game" with prizes for the largest wildlife kill.  Said part of the piece: The United States is the only country in the world where wild animals are killed by the tens of thousands strictly for prizes and entertainment, according to the Humane Society of the United States.  It estimates that before the coronavirus pandemic, there were more than 400 contests annually, accounting for an estimated 60,000 dead animals each year.  Texas alone holds at least 60 contests annually.