Paula Panich

Archeology at Home

We are restoring the remnants of a 1921 chimney and fireplace here in Los Angeles, near Larchmont.

The process is opposite of virtual — real bricks and mortar, hard-working skilled craftsmen and their hard-earned labor. We are looking at one of the most ancient workings of man — building a chimney to contain fire; restoring a hearth to its rightful place as the heart of a home.

No short-cuts, no plastic, no Blackberrys, and no one Twitters. It is the skilled labor of the human being inhabiting body and mind.

(Photo: Bill Linsman)

Cultivating the fire of imagination

On Saturday, February 14, my piece, “Remodeling fireplace habits in Southern California” (http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-fireplace14-2009feb14,0,872738.story) ran in the Home Section of the L.A. Times. New regulations regarding open-hearth wood-burning fireplaces are for coming up for Southern California homeowners, but I want to add a few thoughts about seeing those dancing flames. Here’s how I originally began the piece — telling the story to myself.

In the attic and basement of the house of humanity, ancient beliefs, tribal history, our affinity for the natural world, still exist, though not easily recalled as we barrel across U.S. 10 or sit on the 405.

And when it comes to fire, most of us still want to see that flame.

Fire sparked our earliest storytellers to spin around it mythology, art, and religion — building blocks of human culture.

“It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart . . . “ writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. “[I]t . . . offers itself with the warmth of love.”

Lightening strikes most likely brought fire to early man, and once captured, it had to be tended with a hawk’s eye. “Women were keepers of fire when humans were new,” says Kathryn Coe, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Arizona. “Live coals had to be carried from place to place. Fire is something ancient and deep within us. For thousands of years, fire was crucial for survival. It kept wild animals away; it kept people warm; and of course cooked their food.”

(No fire in the grate this chilly and wet holiday Monday. The chimney was swept last week in anticipation of an upcoming move; I hesitate to sully it.)

The first writer reached down to the ground to harvest a chunk of charcoal; she then made that first mark on stone.

And writers thereafter, once human survival eased a bit, could see a parallel between tending fire in the hearth and cultivating the fire of imagination.

That’s what I imagine, anyway.

Camillia japonica ‘shiro chan’

In January 2002, during a trip to Kyoto to visit Zen Buddhist temple gardens, I fell in love with the shy-blooming (at least in that very cold winter month) lipstick-red camellia. I was stunned by a the sight of a single flower on a simple stone, placed by way of reverence.

I had never lived in a camellia climate until coming to Los Angeles, three years after Kyoto. Our rented 1928 bungalow’s small, shallow porch is hedged with four camellia bushes, two pink-blooming, two red. I would guess them to be 40-50 years old. The hedge is an embarrassment of riches all winter — and there is a Southern Californian winter, though I wouldn’t have believed it.

So at the Huntington Botanical garden’s moment of camellia celebration (Feb. 14 & 15), I bought a white-blooming hybrid beauty, Camellia japonica ‘shiro chan’. I was attracted to the tremulous beauty of its bloom — reminiscent of certain white-blooming peonies.

The plant originated at Nuccio’s Nursery in Altadena, growers, since 1935, of rare azaleas and camellias. Shiro chan, according to the Camellia Society web site, means “white child.”

I will be taking this pearly-blooming child to a new L.A. garden next month, less than four miles away.

The Huntington Chinese garden — one year later

Chilly, misty, and wet — a perfect Southern California winter’s day. I headed over to the Huntington Gardens, which are stunning in the rain, especially the Chinese garden, The Garden of Flowing Fragrance, which opened to the public last year on February 23. Many things have changed in the garden in 12 months — the magnificent old magnolia placed in the courtyard didn’t make it; it’s been replaced by a young one. We’ll have to be patient.

The rain makes me think we can experience this scholar’s garden as the real scholars might have in similar gardens in 16th and 17th century Suzhou and Hangzhou. That’s just my fantasy, of course.

But go if you can. This weekend is forecast to bring more rain; it is also the camellia festival. (I bought a white-blooming beauty.) Take an umbrella.

To read the piece I wrote for the L.A. Times on the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, published on Valentine’s Day last year, please see http://www.paulapanich.com/chinese-garden.htm

Lewis Hyde and The Blessed Labor of the Imagination

Two months ago an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine, delivering, on that chilly Sunday morning, a bit of a shock. Titled, “What is Art For?”, the piece, by Daniel B. Smith, is a survey of the thought and work of the poet, essayist, and thinker Lewis Hyde.It felt to me as a stripping of my most intimate covering, as if somehow a corner of my soul had been exposed in a Sunday newspaper.

Not that thousands of writers and other artists didn’t feel the same way.

Lewis Hyde published The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, in 1977, when he was still in his thirties. It was seven years in the writing. He was trying to explain to himself why he was drawn to creative work — why anyone, given the commercial nature of modern life, would labor with a full heart on anything as non-remunerative, unvalued and unloved by the world as poetry.

But this seems a ridiculous summary. The book is like a grain of sand one takes within — and by the mysterious working of nature and spirit, it becomes a pearl-in-the-making. The pearl is the layering-in of the inner life — that deep, mysterious and experienced life that almost no one can explain or even describe, unless it makes its shy, quiet voice heard through a work of art.

Hyde takes the reader through mythology, fairy tales, anthropology, linguistics, usury, the anthropology of gift-giving, and analyses of Pound and Whitman and others. But these workings are only the garments, so to speak, to give the deep well of human creativity and inner life some visiblility — those furtive, unbidden and evanescent visitors who come only when the fields of the self are well-prepared and well-watered.

In the Times piece, Daniel Smith writes: “[For] centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts. Hyde’s basic argument was hat this language must extend to the products of talent and imagination too . . .

“Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated — published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation from being, at its core, an offering.”

This book came to me from a nest of poets, 18 years ago.

It’s not, again, about what The Gift “explains.” It provides a scaffolding, framework, foundation to give hope to those who traffic in the labor of the imagination and spirit — hope that the endeavor is real, essential, and life-giving. In a culture where commodity is all, The Gift is no small package.

The walls of my writing shack are suffused with Lewis Hyde (and not only from this one book). I walk in and can feel the presence of his thought, his articulate defense of the labor of the imagination. The Gift is either on my desk or on the table beside the bed. The walls are encircled with the idea: What happens here is real, and matters.

I might read the same page, or the same chapter for months. (According to Smith, Bill Viola, Margaret Atwood, Donald Hall and Gary Snyder feel much the same. The Gift, by the way, has been rewrapped — with a new [2007] edition and new subtitle: The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World — no doubt a nod to the marketplace. But the more people the book attracts, the better.)

I’ll leave you with a couple of paragraphs from the conclusion of The Gift:

“The root of our English word “mystery” is a Greek verb, muein, which means to close the mouth. Dictionaries tend to explain the connection by pointing out that the initiates to ancient mysteries were sworn to silence, but the root may also indicate, it seems to me, that what the initiate learns at a mystery cannot be talked about. It can be shown, it can be witnessed or revealed, it cannot be explained.

“When I set out to write this book, I was drawn to speak of gifts by way of anecdotes and fairy tales because, I think, a gift — and particularly an inner gift, a talent — is a mystery. We know what giftedness is for having been gifted, or for having known a gifted man or woman. We know that art is a gift for having had the experience of art. We cannot know these things by way of economic, psychological, or aesthetic theories. Where an inner gift comes from, what obligations of reciprocity it brings with it, how and toward whom our gratitude should be discharged, to what degree we must leave our gift alone and to what degree we must discipline it, how we are to feed its spirit and preserve its vitality — these and other questions raised by a gift can only be answered by telling Just So stories.”

To read Smith’s piece on Lewis Hyde: www.nyt.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html

To visit Lewis Hyde’s site: www.lewishyde.com

The Daybooks of Edward Weston

Chance favors the prepared mind. Painters, writers, musicians, sculptors, photographers, all know this.

For writers, to be gifted by chance comes not just in the practice of craft, but also in the practice of reading. To write is also to read, and a lifetime is required to become a skilled reader.

Reading deeply isn’t easy. Even taking the time to do so isn’t easy. To be caught reading by the UPS guy through the window invites guilt and the imagined accusation of sloth and the consumption of certain chocolate confections.

No deliveries trouble me when I’m in my writing shack in Idyllwild, Calif. No person, no vehicles, save certain utility trucks from time to time. The shack is near the dead end of a dirt road. With snow, there is ice; with rain, mud; and always, gullies, bumps, sandy soil. It is not an inviting road. I’m grateful.

Reading in the writing shack allows the work of others to enter the heart, soul, mind. The creek, pine trees, live oaks, mountain, and in certain seasons, moths beating against the screened door, hurl no accusation of sloth or gluttony. They are who or what they are, without ambition except survival. Likewise the occasional mule deer family, single coyote, sleek bobcat.

The shack invites one to be — without expectation, ambition, desire.

Books read here have the resonance of those devoured in childhood and beyond, into the early twenties. The shack allows for full presence with the book in my lap — at least most of the time.

The Daybooks of Edward Weston bit into me with pleasure and pain. My used copy contains two volumes: I. Mexico II. California. The book is edited by Nancy Newhall, who died in 1974.

This particular edition was published in 1981 by Aperture. The daybooks kept by Weston span the years 1922-1924.

The photography of Edward Weston (1886-1958) changed the nature of photography. He became famous as a young man for his work; but when he felt with swing and sting of modern art and music, he turned and followed the tilt of his time. These modernist photographs of shells, sand, water, nudes, peppers are what we know of him and seem to have been part of the American iconography forever.

But they aren’t of course. Weston was also a gifted and honest writer and the Daybooks follow the course of the making of a great artist and the contours of a lively and adventurous life. (All those women; all those friendships!)

What we have of his personal notebooks was, alas, not only edited by Newhall but by a couple of friends before her, well-meaning, or not.

But there is no quibbling about what remains. The entries are deep, intense, honest.

December 29, 1929:

My last entry this year, — after hunting for my ink for half an hour, and finding it in Brett’s room. [One of his four sons, Brett Weston, who became a well-known master photographer.] That is the boy’s great problem in life. How to overcome carelessness, to create order, without which no one can reach great heights as an artist, or anything else. Brett loses everything he touches, breaks things right and left, is forever hurting himself. All symptoms of a disorderly mind. And art is based on order! The world is full of sloppy “Bohemians,” and their work betrays them.

“My press is heating up in preparation of mounting forty-five new prints all done in the last two days. This is a record, and I felt the strain yesterday, piling into bed at 8:30; but up this a.m. at 3:45, and feeling quite fit. I am blessed with great recuperative power, though I abuse myself, knowing this, by working on my nerve force.”

March 21, 1931

“My work has vitality because I have helped, done my part, in revealing to others the living world about them, showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed . . .”

Mountain Stories: Cabin in the Woods

For exactly three years I have been spending time in Idyllwild, Calif., in the San Jacinto Mountains, above Palm Springs. It is my escape from the Los Angeles overload of traffic, people, buildings, concrete, hurry, noise, daycare-next-door, hovering helicopters, hysteria. For two-and-a-half of those years, I have rented a little cabin in the woods, near Idyllwild. My landlord’s father built it in 1941, from a Sears kit. It was originally a garage. Over the years it has housed a car or two, a tinkerer’s workshop, and for one long winter, a carpenter who, in exchange for shelter, fitted more cabinetry in 400 square feet than is imaginable. There is a kitchen with a full-sized stove and refrigerator, a bathroom with the usual amenities, plus a shower. Heat comes from a cast-iron gas stove.

I actually live on 193 square feet. (I know this because I had the carpet cleaned.) On this square footage I have a double bed, small square bedside table, desk, rolling desk chair, four-foot rectangular table with two old white-painted bentwood chairs, and a small chaise from the 1940s, impeccably upholstered by its penultimate owner in two-toned striped pink silk.

It is my writing shack. In it I have written several pieces for the Home Section of the Los Angeles Times, a couple of pieces for Pacific Horticulture, a piece for Wildflower Magazine, and a talk on the early California feminist and naturalist, Mary Austin. Other things, too — many letters, innumerable notes. I’ve read books, lots of them. But mostly, when I’m in the shack, I think. And when I’m lucky, I don’t.

My landlords’ cabin is next door. A creek runs behind us. Windows open, I can hear its sweet music.

Skirball Cultural Center, Democracy, Proposition 8, & Grace

On Sunday, November 2, my husband and I visited the beautiful Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It was my first visit. It is an exquisite place, yet another jewel among many in this city’s vibrant cultural life. The mission of the Skirball is “dedicated to exploring the connections of four thousand years of Jewish heritage and the vitality of American democratic ideals.”

That the Center seeks to “inspire people of every ethnic and cultural identity” is not an empty promise. A most moving — and indeed mesmerizing — exhibit on offer now is “The Way We See It: L.A. Teens on Immigration” (until January 25). Sixty Los Angeles teenagers — movingly and beautifully photographed — tell their stories of coming to this country and forging a new life. (The show is part of a national project, Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org)

As we were walking through the permanent exhibits of the history of the Jewish people, I came upon a dark case and peered in. I was stunned to discover the documents inside are one of only two copies of the infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Hitler’s signature scrawled on them.

The first three Nuremberg Laws were the first “legal” step to the Holocaust. They were drafted by high-ranking members of the Nazi Party, signed, then ratified, unanimously, by the Reichstag the next day.

The first is called “Law for the Safeguard of German Blood of German Honor.” It has six sub-laws, essentially depriving Jewish German citizens of their civil rights. The first reads: “Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or German-related blood are forbidden. Marriages which have been performed in spite of this law, even if they have been performed in a foreign country, are void.” The second, “The Reich’s Citizen Law” declares, in part, that only a Reich’s citizen has full political rights — later defined as a person who has less than 1/32 Jewish “blood.” The third law adopts the swastika as the Reich’s flag. Later, the laws were expanded — homosexuals, the Romany people, and others were stripped of citizenship and eventually deported to their deaths along with those defined as “Jews.”

That we were face-to-face with these documents and others on a sunny autumn day in Los Angeles, 73 years after their enactment, was shocking, and sobering. Seven decades amounts to a few seconds in context of human history.

How the documents came to L. A.: They were seized by Allied Troops in 1945 at Eichstatt, Germany, and handed over to General George S. Patton, Jr. The General gave them to the Huntington Library — General Patton (Sr.) and Henry Huntington were San Marino, Calif. neighbors. When the Skirball opened in 1999, the trustees of the Huntington Library offered the documents to the new institution, a permanent loan.

I wanted to read more on the Nuremberg Laws, so I searched online. On a site about the history of the Third Reich, I was sickened to find an ad urging the passage of Proposition 8, the overturning of the California Supreme Court’s decision upholding the civil right of same-sex couples to marry. I found the placement of this ad cynical, frightening, disturbing, as I also found the signed e-mail message sent to 75,000 Jewish people in Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago. The message suggested that a vote for Barack Obama was the equivalent of the blindness of Jews in Europe — who failed to see the coming Holocaust.

As Barack Obama has said: We are a better nation than that.

Not attending to history through willful or any other kind of ignorance is folly. We are awash in history; we cling to our small patch of the present afloat in the sea of history.

Then came November 4, 2008. Barack Obama, an African-American man, was elected president of this country. Proposition 8, paradoxically, was passed by the California electorate, overturning the legality of same-sex marriage in the state.

It is only a matter of time that same-sex marriage will be accepted throughout the land — as a civil right in a country that is a republic, not a theocracy. The same country that countenanced slavery, forbade half the population from voting due to gender, enacted Jim Crow laws with impunity, and sent American citizens to concentration camps during World War II is now aglow with the audacity of hope.

Today in the New York Times, Orlando Patterson, a sociologist, writes about the election of Barack Obama not as a “radical transition” but as an “ever-evolving” process that began with the election of George Washington in 1789.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/opinion/07patterson.html)

Professor Patterson urges us to remember history:

“To view the election of Barack Obama as notable only as an example of breaking through a racial barrier is to misunderstand the greater flow of our ever-more-inclusive democracy. America has, at last, delivered, in creating the most sublime example of democratic governance since its invention in Greece 25 centuries ago.”

We do, after all, try to make a more perfect union. Visit the Skirball Cultural Center to see reflections of our “ever-more-inclusive” democracy. There’s a lovely, fragrant native-plant garden too.

(Photos by the writer)