All this useless beauty

Prague is not so much a city full of art as one expansive, living work. Cobbled streets wind through a thicket of old shops and homes with terra cotta roofs, and places of worship so ancient that they almost defy understanding- here a synagogue from the 12th century, there a basilica from the 10th. Tycho Brahe lies interred in one grand church, Wenceslas in another. Art has so long been the way of life in this city in Bohemia, that it becomes immediately obvious why the word "bohemian" has come to be affixed to creative types. It's hard to return from my week there without some remnant of that gothic and baroque drama.
A former student of astronomy and a former professional cartographer, I was most enamored of the Pražský Orloj, the Prague Astronomical Clock, in the Old Town plaza. This device measures time of day, the positions of the sun and moon, dawn and dusk, time of year, and other quantities useful to astronomy and astrology, all using clockwork and kindred technologies characteristic of the middle of the last millennium. It displays several pieces of moving sculpture that ring bells and deliver blessings on the hour. The clock embodies Pirsig's ideas of both classical and romantic beauty.
Praguers seem to appreciate all of this art and its (and their own) relationship with the natural world. So far north, the city enjoys and suffers the fickle economy of long summer days and unrelenting winter nights. Tucked so far from the sea and so close to mountains and hills, weather is even more protean. Owing to this physiography, Praguers seem to understand the value of every moment of sun and warm air; as soon as the clouds part, they are reading in public greens or having coffee or pilsner at sidewalk cafes. Conversely, clouds and rain mandate trips to museums and galleries and seem to tap the kegs that serve friends philosophizing in cellar pubs.
"What shall we do, what shall we do..."

It's not academic

I’ve heard a great deal of "so what?" about climate change, lately. Many people hear terms like "general circulation model", "albedo", and "aeronomy", and shrug their shoulders. Even as physical sciences go, these concepts can be fairly abstract. Moreover, we all remember hot days and cold days, and we’re fairly hard-pressed to remember how many of each we had last year. The reader can’t look out the window and "see" climate change.
Or can we? Climate drives a dizzying array of physical and biological processes. It’s impossible to overstate the relationship between climate, ecology, and adaptation. I’ll spare the reader my normal purple prose, and instead focus on this image.
This MODIS image published by NASA shows African dust blowing across the Atlantic Ocean, to be deposited in the Caribbean Sea. Higher temperatures yield more airborne African dust, and more energetic winds to carry it. This dust clouds the clear Caribbean waters, interferes with algae and coral, and has been linked to coral reef die-offs. The reef die-offs directly impact the livelihood of local fishermen.
I urge the reader to look past the sometimes confusing details of mathematics and science for a moment and focus on what scientists are actually concerned about: quality of life and livelihood across our human family. Is this not worth our time and consideration?

Drawing on

Monday afternoon, I skipped lunch in favor of browsing a new exhibition at the National Gallery. This collection of prints and sketches, Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travels on Paper 1450–1700, explores the ideas of landscape and time.
The collection brings to light an earlier concept of geography that predates our contemporary idea of literalism. The maps here display information synoptically (as do modern maps), but do so in a humanistic fashion that may seem strange to the reader accustomed to charts designed to display all features within x meters of their true horizontal location, with 95% confidence. In the exhibit, place, space, and time are in the mind of the beholder.
These depictions embody an aesthetic sensibility and a willingness to combine the observable and the metaphysical that have become lost. Images of pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem contain biblical imagery, recognizing that travel to these places is as much a spiritual as physical journey. Prints of folktales recognize that traveling is more about movement of the individual’s mind than of the body.
The observer is left with the realization that geography has paradoxically become increasingly collectivist in an increasingly individualistic world. We delude ourselves into believing that there is nothing left to explore, because satellites above, and geographers, anthropologists, ecologists, and geologists among us have left no blank spots on the map.

Each of us is an individual, and the atlas behind our eyes is unique. Each of us is filled with mostly blank pages. The apparent completeness of the atlases at the bookstore and the library becomes liberating in this scenario. None of us is compelled to explore a new place on behalf of everyone. Instead we are free to follow the physical paths that will expand the landscapes of mind, spirit, and relationship. Moreover, the more we open our eyes, the more we discover that the published maps are missing details, and sometimes get it all wrong.
Explore, understand, interact.

I wait and watch

Friday evening, I took my wife to see the King’s Singers for her birthday. When I bought the tickets weeks ago, I had absolutely no inkling that the program would lend insight into the train of thought I’ve been following here.
The program was titled, Landscape and Time, as is their latest album. In introducing their newly recorded work, Christopher Gabbitas remarked, “we are, all of us, a product of our time and geography”. This commentary prefaced a performance of music from Estonia, Japan, England, Finland, and Hungary, but is equally well-suited to drawing-out a nonconformity common to modern life. Though place and time shape us, we seem to be selectively blind to these influences.
We remain very much creatures of time, but increasingly lose the element of geography. In particular we forget the intimate microgeography that in ages past was part and parcel of every human’s daily life. The land was family.
In a song combining the music of English composer Richard Rodney Bennett and the words of 17th century clergyman and poet John Donne, the ensemble observed, “we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons”. For the author, this was an immutable truth taught to him, not by a book, but in the lessons learned by living with eyes open. This former plain-fact is now much diluted, and the spiritual lesson Donne intended to convey with it may also be.
The translated text of an ancient Japanese poem appears in the program notes from Friday’s performance. Here again, words from the past use a collective appreciation of the natural world to artfully speak of the human condition. The union of person and place that creates such metaphors now grows dim in the periphery of the firelight of our minds.

Alone beside the river of birds
Near the stream’s upland source
I wait and watch
Beside a bridge of stones
And in this melancholy scene
I hear the nu-e-dori night bird
Cry out unanswered in the dark,
And then at dawn the morning-bird
Fluttering and flitting to-and-fro about its nest
Like a grieving prince, wilted by the heat of lost love,
Who roams, east-to-west, like the Evening Star,
Ceaselessly going and coming
In an endless round of departure and return.

A cartographic aside

The rekindled open war between Israel and Lebanon has prompted me to spend a lot of time with my nose buried in atlases. I post these from some of my favorite sources to lend geographical context, perhaps as much for my own benefit as the reader's.
These two are produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in their World Factbook publication. They are not produced to the same scale. A few weeks ago, looking out across the landscape, you might have been hard-pressed to figure out where and why one of these countries ends and the other begins. Everywhere, it would be bright and dry, and you would run into people who spoke Arabic or Hebrew, or both. Many would probably be able to chat with you in English. Roads, though ultimately interrupted by fences, gates, and people equipped and willing to kill, connect cities in the one to cities in the other.

This is a great general map of the Middle East produced by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (back when it was still the National Imagery and Mapping Agency). I find that it draws-in the relationships of places like Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Iraq. Not far beyond the edges of this map are India, Serbia, and Dar Es Salaam.