POG Talk: Part 2

As I was describ­ing in the first part of this talk, a train of thought from Kant, Goethe, and Hum­boldt, and other roman­tic Ger­mans from the past leads to a remark­able idea: maybe our sub­jec­tive impres­sions and feel­ings about a place are part of that place; are part of the descrip­tion of the phys­i­cal world, just as the rocks and plants are. So to cre­ate a com­plete pic­ture of a place, or a uni­verse, both inter­nal human data and exter­nal phys­i­cal data should be collected.

Deal­ing with the sub­jec­tive side need not be chaotic and unde­fined. There is a dif­fer­ent kind of dis­ci­pline involved with sort­ing through one’s impres­sions to craft a poem or a paint­ing, but it could be as rig­or­ous as that required to design a research project. Hum­boldt care­fully edited out much of his own role in his nar­ra­tives as observer, and he crit­i­cized other nature writ­ers, mostly French, for includ­ing too much sub­jec­tiv­ity. Hum­boldt was there on the spot, but didn’t record every­thing he did, only the essen­tials. He didn’t put down what he had for break­fast or his ran­dom thoughts or fan­tasies. He put in just enough, then kept out of the way. (Actu­ally, I’d like to see a nature poem that included what the writer had for breakfast.)

PART 2 : Explor­ing Tumamoc

In explor­ing a place, one should get to know the his­tory, what oth­ers have done there and thought about while there. The estab­lish­ment of the Desert Botan­i­cal Lab­o­ra­tory on Tumamoc in 1903 by the Carnegie Insti­tu­tion of Wash­ing­ton was a sig­na­ture event for Tumamoc. Their man­date was to learn how desert plants sur­vived with so lit­tle water. These early ecol­o­gists chose Tumamoc after a sur­vey of the SW United States and Sonora for its sig­nif­i­cant bio­di­ver­sity, fenced it to pro­tect it from inter­fer­ence, and made it an out­door laboratory.

On of my heroes among these early sci­en­tists was Vol­ney Spald­ing. This is the map he made of every saguaro on Tumamoc and A-​mountain, over 10,000 of them. The task is almost mytho­log­i­cal, but shows the energy and enthu­si­asm of these researchers in want­ing to under­stand the land­scape, and the rela­tions of plants to their environment.

Because of the work of these sci­en­tists, Tumamoc has become one of the most scru­ti­nized places in the world. That is, by sci­en­tists. They have done a lot, yet they have still left many other lay­ers of the place to be inves­ti­gated by human­i­ties explorers.

I went along with sci­en­tists this year while they sur­veyed the per­ma­nent plots on Tumamoc that Spald­ing set up to mon­i­tor long-​term veg­e­ta­tion change, a novel idea in 1906. These plots are still mapped every 10 years or so and are the old­est con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tored study plots in the world. I became very inter­ested in this work and started a photo essay on this project.

Each plant in these 10 x 10 meter quadrats is given spe­cial atten­tion. Here Ray Turner mea­sures a bar­rel cac­tus. We will remem­ber that mea­sure­ment is one of those “pri­mary qualities”.

This is one of Ray’s field sketches from the 1970s of one of the Spald­ing plots that I found in the old files at Tumamoc. Before the dig­i­tal sur­vey­ing equip­ment that is used now, they placed stakes at the 4 cor­ners, with smaller ones at 1-​metter inter­vals. Strings are tied between these stakes to make a one-​meter grid. Using a meter stick, a researcher can esti­mate pretty closely to the cen­time­ter the trunk loca­tion and canopy of each plant. Although this was not intended to have any visual or artis­tic appeal, I think it is very expres­sive as drawing.

These 10 x 10 meter squares staked out in the land­scape have always reminded me of an artist’s can­vas, though they are more dynamic and chang­ing. This is a dia­gram show­ing the rela­tion­ship of only two species in one plot as it changes over time. The col­ors are arbi­trary, but again, it has an expres­sive qual­ity as a series.

To me, this kind of work is an untapped resource for abstract expres­sion­ist paint­ing. In a sim­i­lar way that John Cage used ran­dom num­bers or toss­ing I Ching coins to cre­ate music, an artist can use eco­log­i­cal rela­tion­ships as a basis for expres­sive work, instead of rely­ing com­pletely on their own intu­ition as to where to place the brush strokes.

To explore it, one needs to know what sci­en­tists have already learned in a place. These researchers are scru­ti­niz­ing the stages of growth over a grow­ing sea­son of tiny belly flow­ers in smaller “annual plots”. These plots have been stud­ies for 30 years, that’s thirty gen­er­a­tions of annul flow­ers. I felt hum­bled to see this, as I never both­ered to learn the names of these flow­ers – they are indeed beau­ti­ful, but you have to get down on your knees to see them. Again, I’m impressed with the atten­tion given to these tiny plants. It’s like Goethe lis­ten­ing to plants like they are his friends.

When I first came to the plot, the peo­ple were all kneel­ing like mus­lims in prayer, except fac­ing all dif­fer­ent direc­tions. That’s a photo I missed.

I went out with Ray Turner to do some repeat pho­tog­ra­phy. Here we were look­ing for the exact spot where For­rest Shreve had taken a photo in 1926 to mon­i­tor how long it took a wagon road to turn back into desert. Ray had repli­cated Shreve’s shot exactly in 1985, and we found the spot again in 2012, even mea­sur­ing the height of the tri­pod, which was strangely lower than eye level. Ray explained that Shreve had had a cam­era on a strap that he held at belly level to take his pho­tos. I was impressed again with the efforts made to repeat every detail and miss nothing.

I started a repeat pho­tog­ra­phy project of my own with a saguaro that fell over dead near the build­ings in the freeze of 2011. These images were taken from a lad­der and are a mosaic of many frames. Soon, I will take a third one.

A related project of my own is imag­ing desert plants in dif­fer­ent stages of dying and decay. It is a con­tin­u­a­tion of an illus­tra­tion I did in the 1980s for a Yaqui Deer song col­lected by Felipe Molina and Larry Evers. The agave plant in the song-​poem has ended its life with a flow­er­ing stalk, now hold­ing seeds. “Still, I am beau­ti­ful…” says the plant. And it’s true of many desert plants – they dry up in beau­ti­ful pro­gres­sions of col­ors and form.

This is a com­pos­ite scan of the 3 species of rat­tlers that live on Tumamoc: Dia­mond­back, Black-​tail, and Tiger rattlesnakes.

It also brings up an inter­est­ing thing I have noted. Usu­ally sci­en­tists are less inter­ested in col­lab­o­rat­ing with artists and writ­ers than we are with them, except for tech­ni­cal sci­ence illus­tra­tions of their study species, or sci­ence jour­nal­ism about their projects. Sci­ence illus­tra­tion and sci­ence writ­ing are cre­ative expres­sions, yet are the only pos­si­bil­i­ties for art/​science com­bi­na­tions. There are many rea­sons for this reluc­tance on teh part of sci­en­tists, among them the increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion and pres­sures to pro­duce with­ing a nar­row field. There is no credit given for a researcher to become involved in an art project – it may even be detri­men­tal to their career.

This project of mine, scan­ning snakes, is a long term effort, requir­ing being on this hill at the right time, also mak­ing many scans before get­ting the per­fect images for my com­po­si­tions. It can only be done dur­ing the sum­mer field sea­son when Tumamoc her­petol­o­gists are col­lect­ing and insert­ing radio track­ing trans­mit­ters into the snakes. In addi­tion, I had to care­fully work into their time sequence after the surgery, bring­ing my com­puter and scan­ner into the snake lab for the 15 min­utes or so after surgery when the snake was still well under anes­the­sia. I was very aware of my need for sen­si­tiv­ity in my involvement.

I became fas­ci­nated with this process and the ani­mals them­selves, yet, this project ended abruptly last sum­mer as the researcher was unwill­ing to con­tinue coop­er­at­ing. Art and sci­ence don’t always jive. I also guess it was just not inter­est­ing enough for him – he was look­ing at entirely dif­fer­ent details than I was, and my work didn’t fit any cat­e­gories. I have some hopes that this can be ironed out next field season.

This is (I think) a shovel-​nosed snake. (Which needs some clean up, I notice.) I wanted to make a series of tech­ni­cal rep­tile por­traits using a scan­ner so there was as lit­tle of my inter­pre­ta­tion as pos­si­ble and the snake would speak for itself.

Know the plants. I am mak­ing a plant calendar/​field guide by scan­ning plants I col­lect as I drive or walk up the Hill. I put them into fold­ers by month. This could become an elec­tronic field guide by mak­ing it into a web appli­ca­tion acces­si­ble on smart phones.

Some day I think I’ll give up art alto­gether and just study botany, maybe just doing draw­ings to help me study the fine details that dis­tin­guish species and give them their per­son­al­ity. Being an ama­teur, I usu­ally am sat­is­fied to know only the genus of plants I pass. Some of the seem­ingly non­de­script or bor­ing plants of the desert are a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge to one’s pow­ers of obser­va­tion. For exam­ple, I made myself learn the dif­fer­ence between the two Lycium or wolf­berry bushes on Tumamoc. Unless I’m wrong, this is L. berlandieri on the left, and L. excer­tum on the right.

Of course, no sin­gle per­son can draw the whole pic­ture of Tumamoc. It needs many hands and eyes over long peri­ods of time. Each per­son will respond dif­fer­ently to a land­scape and that becomes part of that pic­ture. One impos­si­ble project would be to draw every saguaro in the Tumamoc saguaro sur­vey, over 5000. You’d have to draw it from dif­fer­ent angles, so the project would become infi­nite. Then each artist would have to do the same task because each would have their own style and viewpoint.

Each draw­ing, paint­ing or pho­to­graph, or what­ever, becomes a small piece in the infi­nite pic­ture. although it will never be com­plete, each piece adds to the grow­ing equity of cul­tural value to the place, like putting dol­lars into an invest­ment account.

These are some exam­ples of work done by vis­it­ing artists on site. Bar­bara Terkan­ian, left, is work­ing on a series of only saguaros. Mered­ith Mil­stead, stood in one spot for sev­eral hours mak­ing the pas­tel of teh saguaro fruit.

From the top of Tumamoc, one can see Babo­qui­vari Peak, the cen­ter of the world and O’odham sacred moun­tain. Work­ing for­wards from the Hohokam inhab­i­tants of the two pre­his­toric vil­lages whose remains are vis­i­ble on the sum­mit, we con­nect to the con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous cul­tures in Mex­ico as well as the his­toric and mod­ern O’odham.

As usual, I fol­low on any­thing that hap­pens on Tumamoc to see if it leads to other parts of the web. Basi­cally, pre­his­tory is a mys­tery. No one knows for sure, but we can make guesses as to who these peo­ple were and what they were think­ing. For sure they were think­ing about water.

I’ve been study­ing the rock art on the sum­mit within the old vil­lage site. The water sym­bol on the left is easy to under­stand, as are the danc­ing fig­ures of humans and ani­mals around it. Nearby the glyph on the right reminds me of the Aztec rain god images of Tlaloc.

At dawn last June 21, a few of us went up to watch the ancient sol­stice cal­en­dar stone per­form. This is a time-​lapse sequence of the event, which lasted about 10 minutes.

In pre­his­toric times from Mex­ico all the way to Cen­tral Amer­ica, the cal­en­dars remained con­sis­tent in basic struc­ture from one cul­ture to another. The Hohokam are con­sid­ered to be both related to and con­nected via trade routes to this broader Mesoamer­i­can scene that spanned many cen­turies. These cal­en­dars were not just for keep­ing track of time – they were a sacred sys­tem con­tain­ing the story of their cos­mos and con­nect­ing to the gods, some­thing like astrol­ogy, only much more com­plex. Cal­en­dar keep­ing was closely tied to tim­ing of cer­e­monies, which marked dif­fer­ent parts of the agri­cul­tural sea­son, and the records were kept by an élite class of priests.

The ancient Aztec and Mayan cal­en­dars con­tained cycles for the moon and sun as well as the longer cycles of Venus as it alter­nates between morn­ing and evening star, and the cycles of the star clus­ter, the Pleiades. It could pre­dict the sol­stices and eclipses. All its inter­lock­ing cycles met in sync every 52 and 104 years.

Another inter­est­ing con­nec­tion to the unknown peo­ple liv­ing on top of the Hill are these dancers hold­ing hands. This glyph faces a wide pre­his­toric trail that went straight up the Hill from a vil­lage site that once existed where the St. Mary’s hos­pi­tal park­ing lot is now. We know that the ancient Mex­i­can peo­ple were very fond of reli­gious processions.

Emil Haury, an emi­nent Arche­ol­o­gist of the Hohokam, once spec­u­lated that trincheras hill­tops like Tumamoc look a lot like eroded pyra­mids today. Maybe they looked that way to ancient peo­ple as well. Nat­ural hills might have served the same cer­e­mo­nial pur­poses in the north as a built temple-​pyramid in south­ern Mex­ico. Inter­est­ingly, the Aztec, or Nahu­atl, word for pyra­mid means “man-​made mountain.”

To see for myself what the view from the vil­lage would have been, I took a photo of Tumamoc’s north face from the top of the park­ing garage for St. Mary’s.

I swear this is true: Just as I was putting this part of the slides together, I heard the sound of bells and rat­tles and conch shells out­side my office. I walked out to see what was going on, and as if to con­firm my hunch, I saw a pro­ces­sion of Aztecs stop­ping to rest in the Desert Lab park­ing lot. I fol­lowed them up to the sum­mit, where they per­formed an ancient Aztec cer­e­mony. Appar­ently these Chi­canos had read some of the same books that I had and were mak­ing sim­i­lar connections.

One of the mys­ter­ies on Tumamoc is the mod­ern peo­ple who walk up and down it, esti­mated at around a thou­sand daily. It like a parade around sun­set. One count put the num­bers of women at almost twice that of male walk­ers. It also is clear that the after­noon and evening times have become a kind of Latin-​American paseo, where peo­ple largely from the bar­rio neigh­bor­hoods down­town walk to meet their friends and neigh­bors, chat, be seen, and even flirt.

Start­ing before dawn, a dif­fer­ent group of peo­ple walk to the sum­mit and back. Over­all, almost all seg­ments of the greater Tuc­son pop­u­la­tion comes to the Hill. There are many rea­sons, both spo­ken and uncon­scious and none of them are writ­ten down. The thoughts of these walk­ers, as a whole and indi­vid­u­ally, is a story more com­plex than any Russ­ian novel, but we may unravel parts of it.

I see sev­eral projects avail­able here for the recorder of oral his­to­ries and the street pho­tog­ra­pher. In this case it would be a “road” photographer.

Finally, a good Hum­boldt­ian sci­en­tist will pub­lish, even pop­u­lar­ize the work done explor­ing a place. www.TumamocSketchbook.com is an ongo­ing archive and record of art and writ­ing, inspired by sci­en­tists. Every­thing con­tained there was done specif­i­cally on site at Tumamoc Hill. From here it could take any num­ber of expres­sions, pub­lish­ing, exhi­bi­tions and slide talks being but a few.

So sci­ence and the human­i­ties share a com­mon goal of describ­ing the world. Cre­at­ing these rich pic­tures of real­ity taps the high­est lev­els of human cre­ativ­ity, whether it is a por­trait of a small place like Walden Pond or Tumamoc Hill, or an account of the whole uni­verse. The result is a com­bi­na­tion both of poetic metaphor and the objec­tive analy­sis of huge col­lec­tions of data. This idea of teh cos­mos is never com­plete or final because nature is always chang­ing and evolv­ing, and so are our views of it.

To show that there is still a cur­rent of poetry within sci­ence, I’ll end with a quote I read recently by Jonathan Cir­tain, an astro­physi­cist work­ing on Nasa’s Hi-​C space tele­scope that is tak­ing spec­tac­u­lar pic­tures of the sun’s corona.

“There’s some­thing inher­ently beau­ti­ful about under­stand­ing the nature of the universe.”

You can see a gallery of Hi-​C images here. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-suns-swirling-green-gases-of-wonder-174843451.html#ixzz2C3y5TYuD