Kseniya Simonova, Sand Artist

Kseniya Simonova won the inaugural Ukraine’s Got Talent competition. The 24-year-old artist is a sand animator who creates dynamic narratives by manipulating sand on a light box into vivid tableaux. Simonova’s victory happened back in April, but a video clip of her winning performance, which made judges and audience members weep, went viral.

The YouTube clip is Simonova’s interpretation of the Great Patriotic War – the Ukrainian fight against the Nazis during the Second World War.

Pilgrimage to St. Guinefort’s Wood

Earlier, we wrote about Guinefort, the dog saint, the inspiration for the Welsh story of the hound, Gelert. Both dogs, having killed a serpent threatening the infant son of the lord of the castle, had been killed in anger just before said lord discovered his son safe beneath the cradle and the serpent dead.

Some of us make pilgrimages. For me, it is to Beautiful Joe Park, resting place of Marshall Saunders’ canine hero. Beautiful Joe was a real dog and he really lived in Meaford, Ontario. In addition to his cairn, the park boasts shrines to service dogs, including Sirius, the 9-11 rescue dog, and there is an annual garden party.

I’m heartened that author Erika Ritter is another pilgrim. She writes about her visit to the little town of Chatillon-sur-Charonne in France, in search of the woods and burial place of Guinefort, dog saint and children’s protector.

Here is an excerpt from her wonderful new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath, about the paradoxes of human-animal relationships.

“Not far to the northwest is … Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne. That’s the same Chalaronne River which, a few kilometres beyond the vollage, runs alongside the grove of trees where tens of generations of mothers gathered, to immerse their children in the water as part of a superstitious healing ritual.”

“Before coming here, I inured myself to the very real possibility that modern Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne might be a hideous strip of cheesy malls. Or perhaps a zone industrielle paved over the holy greyhound’s one-time burial place. At the very least, I was braced for souvenir shops hawking t-shirts declaring ‘J’ai Survecu le Bois de Guignefort.’”

“But St. Guinefort was nowhere to be seen in Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne, and nobody in town seemed to have any idea he was the heart and soul of the local tourist industry… In an overcrowded pizzeria, a kindly couple offered to share their table, and ultimately their fellowship with us. What were foreign tourists doing here in the off-season?”

“‘Nous cherchons le Bois de Guignefort,’” we answered.”

“‘Le bois de … quoi?’”

“Well, like, duh. C’est evident, n’est-ce pas? The holy greyhound?”

“For by no means the first time in my long, inglorious history of failing to locate dog-related markers, monuments and memorials, I experienced a sinking sensation. I ducked into a nearby stationer, thinking that, at this point, even to blunder upon a small souvenir greyhound would be better than nothing.”

“Inside Le Papier Rouge, a shelf of tourism books caught my eye. I went over to investigate – and came face to face with a glossy brown-and-off-white pamphlet entitled Saint Guignefort Legende, Archaeologie, Histoire.”

“Good dog, Guinefort, I thought as I carried the monograph to the cash.”

“A Nancy Drew moment is what I prefer to call my surprising stumble upon a salient clue. The worst kind of Nancy Drew moment. I went into that shop looking for some sort of kitschy little dog figurine.”

From Ritter’s book. Read it.

St. Guinefort, the Dog Saint

From De Supersticione, by inquisitor Stephen de Bourbon:

The sixth thing to say is about insulting superstitions, some of which are insulting to God, others to man. The superstitions which attribute divine honors to demons or any other creature insult God. Idolatry is one example, or when wretched women sorcerers seek salvation through the adoration of saddles (sambuca) to which they make offerings, through the condemnation of churches and relics of the saints, through carrying their children to ant-hills or other places in search of healing.

This is what they did recently in the diocese of Lyons. When preaching there against sorcery and hearing confessions, I heard many women confess that they had carried their children to St. Guinefort. I thought he was some saint. I made inquiries and at last heard that he was a certain greyhound killed in the following way. In the diocese of Lyons, close to the vill of the nuns called Villeneuve, on the land belonging to the lord of Villars-en-Dombe, there was a certain castle whose lord had a baby son from his wife. But when the lord and lady and the nurse too had left the house, leaving the child alone in his cradle, a very large snake entered the house and made for the child’s cradle. The greyhound, who had remained there, saw this, dashed swiftly under the cradle in pursuit, knocking it over, and attacked the snake with its fangs and answering bite with bite. In the end the dog killed it and threw it far away from the child’s cradle which he left all bloodied as was his mouth and head, with the snake’s blood, and stood there by the cradle all beaten about by the snake. When the nurse came back and saw this, she thought the child had been killed and eaten by the dog and so gave out an almighty scream. The child’s mother heard this, rushed in, saw and thought the same and she too screamed. Then the knight similarly once he got there believed the same, and drawing his sword killed the dog. Only then did they approach the child and find him unharmed, sleeping sweetly in fact. On further investigation, they discovered the snake torn up by the dog’s bites and dead. Now that they had learned the truth of the matter, they were embarrassed (dolentes) that they had so unjustly killed a dog so useful to them and threw his body into a well in front of the castle gate, and placing over it a very large heap of stones they planted trees nearby as a memorial of the deed.

But the castle was in due course destroyed by divine will, and the land reduced to a desert abandoned by its inhabitants. The local peasants hearing of the dog’s noble deed and innocent death, began to visit the place and honor the dog as a martyr in quest of help for their sicknesses and other needs. They were seduced and often cheated by the Devil so that he might in this way lead men into error. Women especially, with sick or poorly children, carried them to the place, and went off a league to another nearby castle where an old woman could teach them a ritual for making offerings and invocations to the demons and lead them to the right spot. When they got there, they offered salt and certain other things, hung the child’s little clothes (diapers?) on the bramble bushes around, fixing them on the thorns. They then put the naked baby through the opening between the trunks of two trees, the mother standing on one side and throwing her child nine times to the old woman on the other side, while invoking the demons to adjure the fauns in the wood of “Rimite” to take the sick and failing child which they said belonged to them (the fauns) and return to them their own child big, plump, live and healthy. Once this was done, the killer mothers took the baby and placed it naked at the foot of the tree on the straws of a cradle, lit at both ends two candles a thumbsbreadth thick with fire they had brought with them and fastened them on the trunk above. Then, while the candles were consumed, they went far enough away that they could neither hear nor see the child. In this way the burning candles burned up and killed a number of babies, as we have heard from others in the same place.

One woman told me that after she had invoked the fauns and left, she saw a wolf leaving the wood and going to the child and the wolf (or the devil in wolf’s form, so she said) would have devoured it had she not been moved by her maternal feelings and prevented it. On the other hand, if when they returned they found the child alive, they picked it up and carried it to a swiftly flowing river nearby, called the Chalaronne [tributary of the Saône], and immersed it nine times, to the point where if it escaped dying on the spot or soon after, it must have had very tough innards.

We went to the place and assembled the people and preached against the practice. We then had the dead dog dug up and the grove of trees cut down and burned along with the dog’s bones. Then we had an edict enacted by the lords of the land threatening the spoliation and fining of any people who gathered there for such a purpose in future.

Source: Paul Hansall, Internet Medieval Source Book.

More on dog saints at Dissident Editions.

Voyage to the Spirit Mountains

Author and musician, Paul Quarrington, diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, eloquently describes his plans to live each day as though it is his last, connecting with singing and the Canadian landscape.

“As we journeyed through the Torngat Mountains, I finally realized what this trip was all about, for me. First of all, let me get a little scientific on you. The Torngats-comprised of Precambrian gneisses-are amongst the oldest mountains in the world, almost four billions years old. They rise out of the water with enchanted austerity. Sitting well above the tree line, the Torngats are stark naked and make no apology about it. Torngat is an Inuktitut word meaning Place of Spirits, and it very clearly is. The mountaintops are usually shrouded in cloud, and it’s easy enough to imagine the Spirits assembling there, going through the itinerary for another year.  In short, the Torngat Mountains took what little breath I have away from me. The thought occurred that I was on another planet, and that’s when I realized, no, I’m on this planet, I’m just none too clear on what it actually looks like. I realized that what I wanted to do was spend a little time getting to know the third stone from the sun; it has been my home for 56 years, but I have spent much of it confined in the settlements. I wanted to explore and examine, I wanted to interact – yes, in the broadest, most spiritual sense.”

“So there, basically, you have the two main components of my plan for (what remains of) my future: singing and (spiritual) mountain climbing. For example, I think I’ll go fishing this week, getting to know Mother Ship Earth a bit better. I think I’ll go stand in a river just a few degrees above freezing and toss a yarn-fly into the current, over and over again, in the hopes of convincing some chromium-silver steelhead that the thing is edible. Or, I may simply go walkabout, kicking stones and major rock formations. I will build inuksuit (did you know that was the plural? I learned a lot on my voyages…) and I will try to build them across as much of the landscape as I can. In the meantime, I will be singing, all manner of songs. I will sing in Porkbelly Futures, I will sing with fiddlers and button accordionists, I will sing in Gospel choirs and Glee Clubs.”

Inuit mythology tells of the Torngait, the spirits that a Shaman or spiritual leader looks to for wisdom and power. Torngat comes from this Inuit name and the legends which hold that in this region the spirit world overlaps our own. White people have called this area the Ghost Coast and have commented how the sounds of the winds whistling through the rugged mountains bring forth the feeling that one is in another realm. If the earth is home to ancient spirits they would seek out this land where the rocks are among the oldest on the planet and the landforms hold an otherworldly appearance. Perhaps this truly is a place of spirits.

The Torngat Mountains National Park Reserve is the new name for this ancient place. It is the northern portion of the Inuit homeland of Nunatsiavut, located in northern Labrador. (Nunatsiavut means “Our beautiful land” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit.) The park reserve encompasses roughly 10,000 km2 and extends from the deep waters of Saglek Fjord in the south, to the very northern tip of Labrador; and from the boundary with Quebec in the west, to the waters of the Labrador Sea in the east.

The human history of the park is rich and ancient. Within the park there are hundreds of archaeological sites including tent rings, stone caribou fences, caches, and ancient graves, all of which tell the story of the peoples and cultures, particularly the Inuit, who have made this special landscape their home.

South of Nachvak Fjord is Ramah Bay, home to a unique translucent stone called Ramah chert. This mineral holds an edge that is sharper than surgical steel. It was so prized by the ancient peoples of Labrador that prior to contact with the Europeans, some used this mineral almost exclusively in their arrows and blades.

Paul Quarrington: Each Day Like It’s My Last at National Post.

More at Wanderbird Expedition Cruises.

Ramah Chert.

For Sydney, and for Linda Gordon who loves the landscape.

Hachiko Meets Richard Gere

Earlier we recounted the tale of Hachiko, the Japanese akita, revered for his fierce loyalty to his master, Professor Ueno. A Japanese Greyfriars Bobby… The children’s book, written by Lesléa Newman and illustrated by Machiyo Kodaira, won the ASPCA Children’s Book Honor in 2004.

A joyously tearful 1987 Japanese movie, Hachiko Monogatari, followed. Hachiko’s legend featured in David Wroblewski’s , first book, The Sawtelle Dogs.

Now, Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale, is being released in American theatres on December 18, 2009. It stars Richard Gere as the professor, Forest as Hachiko, and a couple of shiba inu puppies as the young Hachiko. It is set in Bristol, Rhode Island, and everyone speaks American.

According to one of the movie’s producers: “Something about this dog’s simple act of unwavering loyalty, of waiting, is so profoundly moving…People seem to identify with Hachiko. He symbolizes so many different things to different people. Hachiko represents innocence, fear, hope, joy, loss and loneliness.”

In May 1994, Japan’s Culture Broadcasting Network played a recording of Hachiko barking which had been made from a broken record repaired with laser surgery. Millions of people tuned in to listen to Hachiko barking, 59 years after his death. Each April, tens of thousands visit the dog’s statue at the Shibuya train station, during a festival in which food offerings are left at the base of the dog’s statue, in hopes that his loyal spirit will visit all humans.

Go see the movie, and take lots of Kleenex. But please don’t hit the pet shop after and buy an akita or shiba inu. As Harry Haller noted, these steppenwolves are magic theatre and not for everyone…

For more on the akita and its recovery from near-extinction during World War II, read The Man Who Saved Akitas.

Image: Hachiko, stuffed, at the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo.

Utopias

At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.

But a century later, Francis Bacon decisively transformed the Utopian tradition. He raised the possibility that, given sufficient technological power over nature, the hope of a democratic abundance might not be unrealistic. Bacon’s New Atlantis holds its place as the first scientific Utopia, a bold prediction of good things to come based on unlimited proliferation of material goods. That vision has hovered in the background of the entire industrial process as one justification for the privation, harsh discipline, wrenching dislocation, grime and soot that this great adventure has cost. The concept of plenitude went into eclipse; the foundation of our contemporary ecological crisis was laid.

It was not until the waste, drudgery and filth of industrialism were vividly imprinted on the historical landscape that the plenitude formerly sought became a timely topic once again.

William Morris, the Victorian poet, painter and political philosopher, was among the first to take up the discussion in his Utopian novel, News From Nowhere.

Morris, a bitter critic of both the ugliness and injustice of the industrial system, laid his hopes for a balanced economic order upon a reformation of taste.

In Morris’ land of Nowhere, aesthetics is the context of economic life. The sensibilities of people have been schooled to value the quality, not the quantity of goods. For Morris, this meant a handicraft standard of excellence, as exemplified by his Arts and Crafts Movement, which he took to be of benefit for the soul as well as the body.

One need not endorse Morris’ doctrinaire anti-industrial stance in order to see great practical sense in his proposal. As a matter of environmental sanity, there may be a point at which industrial societies will have to revive the handicraft standard, emphasizing the value of fine design and durability as an alternative to disposability or wasteful turnover.

In her ecological Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy proposes another approach to plenitude. In the environmentally intelligent future she envisions – a worldwide society of well-kept rural communes – there exists a globe lending library of luxuries, from which jewels, objects d’art, fashionable clothes may be borrowed and examined by the entire population. It is an idea worth pondering.

In one of the mostly highly developed ecological Utopias, Ernest Callenbach deals with problems of necessity and luxury by imagining an economy that redirects the gratifications of high consumption toward a variety of cheap, non-material pleasures. The citizens of Ecotopia own little, but it is elegantly handmade; beyond that, the prevailing style of housing and dress is dropped-out funky. The workweek has been pared back to twenty hours; leisure becomes a value in its own right, used for the arts and crafts, for play, for recreational sports, espeically in the fiercely defended wilderness, which has come to be respected as Ecotopia’s principal public asset.

An economy of modest means makes possible a simplicity that allows other needs to be gratified. The goal is not cathartic suffering, but pleasure of a superior order.

~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth
Image: Dubai Lagoon

Home: Yann Arthus-Bertrand

On June 5, 2009, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, film-maker, aerial photographer and champion of ecology, released Home, a movie about the dangers human activities create for our Earth.

On the night of the release, many theaters offered screenings for free and a giant open-air screening on Paris’ Champ-de-Mars drew 20,000 spectators. The simultaneous TV broadcast of the movie on France 2 TV channel drew more than 8 million people. The following Sunday, the ecologists had an unexpectedly high score in the European elections and just fell short of becoming France’s second political party.

Watch Home.

The Matrix Redux: Food, Inc.

Earlier we blogged about the state of our food system as prophesied in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We described Vandana Shiva’s grassroots efforts in India to battle corporate greed, monocultures and genetic engineering. Is it already too late for North America?

That is why Food, Inc., just released, is so important.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on America’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from consumers with the consent of government regulatory agencies.

The US (and Canadian) food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

What happened to nutrient-dense food that leaves us satisfied, healthy and safe?

Featuring Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become and where we are going from here.*

The Stone Gardener

On a sultry morning in early August, sculptor Andy Goldsworthy stood in a quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut, watching the heart being burned out of a ten-ton granite boulder. Eighteen of these tawny-gray brutes, varying between three and fifteen tons, are to be scattered around a space measuring a hundred and twenty feet by thirty-five on the second-story roof terrace of the new extension of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park City. The hollowed rocks will then be filled with soil, and, on September 16th, Holocaust survivors will plant a dwarf chestnut-oak sapling in each one, creating a memorial Garden of Stones.

The rock surrenders to the fire, Goldsworthy said, because fire created it in the first place. But fire cleans as well as sculpts. Shooting flames at granite not only re-enacts primordial geology but converts the incinerations of genocide into the flames of sanctification.

During a break from the burning, we peered into the opened belly of the rock. The interior was speckled gray, with shreds of stone flaking away from the walls or pulverized into a granular silica, like sand on a beach, some of the grains glassily fused. John Ruskin’s feverishly beautiful passages on “Compact Crystallines,” in “Modern Painters,” came to mind, in which he describes the glitter of granite as looking “somewhat like that of a coarse piece of freshly broken loaf sugar.”

The cavity is conical, a form that much preoccupies Goldsworthy, who often declares a debt to Brancusi. Monti was working from the opened base and down the narrowing funnel. Once hollowed, the rocks are inverted, so that the saplings can sit at the neck of the boulder, atop their bed of earth. The disproportion between the hefty stones and the tiny, six-inch plants may risk looking absurd, but it will at least preclude any possibility of the stones’ resembling the oversized planters commonplace in corporate atriums. Instead, a mysterious hatching will be inaugurated: the sprig from the rock.

The growth process of the sprouting menhirs, standing between the Hudson and Ground Zero, will not, however, be risk-free. Tom Whitlow, a Cornell plant ecologist whom Goldsworthy consulted, warned that if the growing tree should press against its unyielding stone girdle it could crush the living cambium immediately beneath the bark. In that case, the root system would atrophy and die. But unlike many contemporary artists, fretful about their posterity, Goldsworthy incorporates the indeterminate outcomes of natural processes into most of his work. Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

Goldsworthy relishes the embattled growth of his dwarf chestnut oaks, contending with the jackhammer shaking of downtown construction, the judder of helicopter rotors on the riverbank, sudden gusts of estuarine winds, and the murky air of lower Manhattan. The plants’ fight for survival against the odds is meant as an emblem of the Jewish experience they memorialize. “The trees I wanted couldn’t be decorative,” he says. “They needed to be tough little S.O.B.s.”

On August 22nd, three weeks before the inauguration of the Garden of Stones, the last boulders were hoisted into their positions on the museum roof, and it was already apparent that Goldsworthy’s sculpture would be one of the most powerful monuments in a city still struggling to find visual expressions for the tug between the perishable and the imperishable.

Full story at The New Yorker

Les Chevaliers Cathares

Stone knights for Linda Gordon, who taught me that there are too many haiku about cherry blossoms and too few about stone.

Les chevaliers Cathares
Pleurent doucement,
Au bord de l’autoroute
Quand le soir descend,
Comme une dernière insulte,
Comme un dernier tourment,
Au milieu du tumulte,
En robe de ciment.

From the A61 motorway at the Pech Loubat rest stop in France, you can see three giant stone Cathar knights brooding over their long lost homeland. Pulling into their often deserted, large last home, you may relax and explore this wild area, and stop off for a quiet pique-nique. You can even climb right up in the hollowed out bodies and look out through the helmets of the lonely giants, east over the vast valleys as they sweep down towards the Mediterranean.

The site seems almost as unloved as the Cathars were by the Church of Rome. But it allows the wildlife to flourish and provides an experience of quiet and the open skies from the rise above the everlasting tarmac ribbon.

“Christianity, without chapels, without statues, Christianity which always refused to encompass anything sacred within visible matter….the heart of man is the true church of God.”
~ Anne Brenon

The word Cathar comes from the Greek word Katheroi meaning pure ones. Cathars believed in a theological dualism with two divine principles, a good one who made all good, unmaterial, things (like the human soul) and a bad one who made the bad, material, things (like the human body). They also believed that the mainstream Catholicism had strayed away from, and had corrupted, the very early Christianist teachings.

The Cathars believed that their soul became trapped in the world, reincarnating over and over until they were once again free from identification with this dimension and could return home to pure Spirit. They saw how our attention becomes easily trapped in this dualistic universe. Snared by the temptations of the outer life, the mind creates an inner thought-based world to match, and by these very thoughts, reinforces the outer world of matter and the senses. Seeing how thoughts and matter became intertwined, creating a net nearly impossible to break, the Cathar Perfects labored to save themselves.

Catharism was a “heresy” that was introduced to the Languedoc in about 1150 and was widespread in this region of France for several centuries. Catharism was so popular that even priests were leaving the Catholic orthodoxy to follow it. The popularity of the Cathars reached it height at the beginning of the 14th century.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars, when the Catholic Church came down extremely heavily on the heretics, aided by the King of France, keen to grab more land for his idle, spare knights. The eradication of Catharism included the complete slaughter of the town of Toulouse. In all, about half a million people of all ages and rank were killed.

The crusade against Catharism eventually led to the dramatic last stand at the Cathar castle on Montsegur. Here, after an as yet to be explained surrender and terms, the remaining Perfects were burned, ending an era and starting a legend. Stories still abound of the last night of this final siege, and the supposed escape of four Cathars with a treasure, reputed to be anything from gold, to the Holy Grail itself.

The Cathars left us with not just another story of strength in the face of persecution, but also an inspiring call to our intuition that things might not be as they seem. They struggled to escape the bonds of earthly existence and find Heaven and God within.

Lyrics:  Francis Cabrel