Wandering and Wondering

 Wandering Around the Carolinas

Sorry to have been away for so long. I have been wandering around the Carolinas visiting family and memories. The family part has been delightful, seeing daughters, spouses and granddaughters in both Carolinas. The trip down to Greenville, SC prompts a bit of “travelers advice.” Greenville lies west and south of Raleigh. The logical route is to take I-40 to I-85, then down into Greenville. This is one of those times when logic, and your gps will risk both your life and your sanity. Mine took me west out of Raleigh via NC 64. Hmm, thought I, not what I might have chosen, but much more scenic and relatively traffic free, so I cruised along until another state route dumped be out onto I-85 headed in the right direction, well perhaps “proper direction” is a better description. I-85 is an unending stretch of concrete under construction which had apparently claimed several lives that week. Somewhat hard to understand as I don’t think I exceeded 20 mph during the entire stretch. Total travel time from Raleigh to Greenville about 5.5 hours. Upon my arrival my daughter informed me that a friend had taken even a “shorter as the crow flies route” and clocked in excess of 7 hours! Return Solution: Go North young traveler! From Greenville, SC head north to Asheville, NC and pick up I-40 straight into Raleigh. A word of caution however, from Asheville I-40 tilts straight downhill to the ocean. I often needed to concentrate on keeping my decades old 4-cylinder Yaris under 80. Between road tripping the visits with both “grand families” were wonderful. I will not go into detail least I go into stereotypical raves about how wonderful, beautiful, brilliant, and much like me are my grand babies. Their parents are also doing well. :-). But I do want to briefly explore another facet of my wandering.

My work life differed from many in that I spent 40 years teaching on the same campus, in a series of offices and classrooms no more than a half mile apart. Hence many of the milestones of my adult life took place in a geographical milieu more akin to a small town than the large state university of 30,000 students that surrounded my little world. This morning, after visiting a exquisite field of sunflowers that has been planted across from the state penitentiary - I’m not even going to go there - I ignored my gps that was set on “take me home,” and wandered back through the campus that had been my home, workplace and occasional refuge for 4 decades.

I suppose I should not have been surprised that the experience was such an emotional roller coaster. One turn would confront me with a gleaming new structure that had no business being there, another would send me to hidden vistas that forced me to pull over, catch my breath, and blink away some suspicious mistiness before moving on with a rueful smile. Again, an unsurprising reaction as I had encountered some of my most precious friends and, perhaps not strangely, disappointing acquaintances in that small town within a huge university. Logically unsurprising, but still somehow unexpected. Well, so much for wandering. Now let me head over the wondering that had followed me down from Burr Ridge.

Tapping the Matriarchal Memory

I am rather addicted to nature documentaries. To my mind David Attenborough has the best job in the world! So it should come as no surprise that this post originally began as a musing about the shared characteristics of this seemingly disparate cluster of mammals and insects: Elephants, Sperm whales, Bonobos chimps, Lemurs, Meerkats, Lions, Mole rats, Spotted  Hyenas, Orcas, termites, Honey Bees and The Temple Monkeys of Katmandu. The reflection would have been more challenging had the media not, when the post began, been paying so much attention to the herd of elephants wandering around China. A paradoxical aside grows out of that particular story as we see cadres of local Chinese actively guiding the herd, tolerating crop destruction and closing roads to avoid endangering the endearing pachyderms. Yet at the same time China provides the largest market for carvings crafted from poached elephant ivory and powdered elephant ivory for applications in traditional medicine. Twin grey-market demands that threatens the global existence of the species. Still history has never argued for human consistency. 

Nevertheless, media coverage of the wandering Chinese elephants has provided a pretty big hint as to what unifies this seemingly disparate brotherhood of life forms.  And that is a bit of a backhanded hint in its own right: The answer? Brotherhood is no big deal because all of these creatures live in groups that are largely or totally matriarchal.  Any Y chromosomes that show up take their place on the back benches when it comes to decision making, and are largely tolerated because they are necessary to make more females.

Since the Chinese elephants are getting all the press these days let's consider them first. All indications are that the elephants leading this 15 critter contingent are all mature females, which pretty well mimics what we know about wild elephants. The oldest matriarch leads the herd because she has the "herd memory" apparently passed down to her from the previous herd matriarch.  She can remember the routes to water and the foliage necessary to fulfill the normal elephant daily requirements of between 250 and 300 pounds of green stuff and 20 to 50 gallons of water. Talk about the notion that a woman’s work is never done! In the meantime, the guys mostly hang out on their own, unless they are occasionally needed to knock down trees during droughts so the rest of the herd can reach the leaves. 

Ah, but then there is the old "a guy's gotta do what a guy 'musth' do." "Musth" among elephants seems to be a lot like a really bad frat party. It is a "normal" condition in adult male elephants in which they are suddenly flooded with 10 times their normal level of testosterone, causing the dudes break up the furniture and aggressively pursue anything in the elephant equivalent of a skirt. Perhaps a rock band “after party” becomes a better analogy. But it is probably unfair to unilaterally paint the elephants as “beastie boys.” We could probably find a bunch of similar examples of “boys behaving badly” if we were to research what happens when males hopped up on testosterone encounter the rest of the matriarchal herd, pod, hive, pride, or what have you. And that was where this post was kind of headed, until I got side-tracked by, for me, a more interesting question: do matriarchal and patriarchal societies manifest the two dominant tenets of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty - differently? And if so, how so? And does it matter?

I know. A rather sudden shift of gears there. It sort of snuck up on me too, but I think it is interesting to think about. Before matriculating to Kalamazoo College as a freshman (We were all freshmen back then. 50th reunion coming up in October Hornets!) we received a book list of books we had to read before coming to campus. (Like, books on paper with pages and everything - totally rad. )  Anyhow, one of the books was If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinley Kantor. An interesting “alternative history” novel. For some reason, bumping around in the weird pathways of my mind, I began to think about alternative histories that might have evolved had the societies that influenced Harmony and Beauty and, of course Art, been matriarchal, rather than the patriarchal societies and traditions that filled those cultural niches.

Now, let me acknowledge right up front that I realize that gender studies is an incredibly hot topic these days, and I am straying far afield from my own academic training. I mean, I only learned the word “cisgender” today, and I am still not sure exactly what it means. So please read the following as the musings of a interested layperson (Can I still say layperson?) and forgive any distortion of current academic debate. It is unintentional.

It would be foolish to contest the notion that in the west we owe much of our iconic art to religious patriarchies. Kings, Pharaohs, Emperors, Pontiffs, Khans and other male nobility around the globe and throughout history decreed that  portraits, sculptures, poetry and palaces be created to glorify either themselves or their gods - which, not surprisingly - were often one and the same. And, also not surprisingly, these art works often portrayed the ruler in the role of a military hero - smiting the appropriate villain of the age and thrashing the villain’s celestial supporters.  Let me make it clear, I am not advocating that we try to designate “appropriate” art and “inappropriate or bad art.” That was/is, we need to remember, something that Hitler and the Taliban have in common. Hitler wanted to create Der Fuhrermuseum, which would house all the world’s “good art” while neglecting or destroying the art which the Nazis decided were, I guess, “not good.” The Taliban just blows up the things they do not like. Sounds like something that would be easy to avoid, right? Actually, it’s not simple at all, it is very very complicated. Down in Carolina version of my neck of the woods, folks are a bit rabid about removing all the remnants of the confederacy - statues, names of buildings, streets, etc., and replacing them with art and designation more in line with our more enlightened times. I’m not really comfortable with that kind of artistic scourged earth policy. I have some trouble working my way around a couple of concerns. First, it smacks of a head in the sand approach to history. Personally, I’m glad the South didn’t win the Civil War. But if we are to allow our nation to evolve beyond the racist beliefs that were so entwined in that conflict, we cannot simply pretend that the Civil War - the war that killed more Americans than any conflict before or since - never happened. And hence advocate a “cleansing” such that the complexity of that conflict had failed to be reflected in significant works of art.

Second I have trouble with the fact that the quality of the work, the simple chisel to stone, brush to canvas, ink to parchment,issues are rarely if ever raised. I do not share the worldview of the Roman who build the Coliseum, the Greeks who built the Parthenon, Pope Alexander III who lay the cornerstone for Notre Dame. So if somehow I became ruler of the world, should I just knock ‘em down? Off with their heads!? I hope not.

But my major thought in this post is not what the art of the past tells us about what was, rather I wonder what all was left out, and what we stand to gain if we correct that artistic editing. I am talking about the voice of the matriarchy. I don’t mean to ignore the significant works of female artists whose works are making their way into the canon. Women like Elisebeth Vigee Le Brun, Camille Claudel, Mary Cassatt, and the more modern works of Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. But, truth be told, much of the energy that these women could have put into creating art was siphoned off to avoid or leap over the barriers created by the art establishment. I wonder what art would could have seen had ALL their energy gone into their art?

OK. Back to the nature documentaries. There appears to be a fairly common difference between matriarchal and patriarchal nonhuman societies. Matriarchal societies seem to focus on caring for the group. Often the “aunts” or older sister will assist the biological mother in childcare, even if that means sacrificing their own opportunities to reproduce. To chose perhaps the worst possible example, lions invade this matriarchal model by occasionally killing cubs to bring the females back into heat, thus allowing the male to father his own cubs. To over simplify, matriarchal societies seem to favor supportive, open, group oriented behavior. Patriarchal societies favor competitive, dominant, individually dominant behavior. To make a fairly large leap from there to human behavior in the arts, I end up with this supposition:

It is obvious, even if only from the few example cited above, that artistic ability is not gender specific. As any currently practicing artist can tell you the greatest challenge is not doing the art, it is getting the art to an audience - or to a market if you will. The social and behavioral norms of matriarchal societies are more conducive to bringing art to the public than the exclusive, power centered norms of the patriarchal norms of the traditional art market.

So what? I’m not really sure. I am afraid that the pendulum of “public taste” in the art will have to swing back past “center balance” before the truly matriarchal “what brings the most and the best art to the public” will find its place. Most of the art market and gallery websites that come across my screen either feature, or solicit, “work from young artists from previously unrepresented groups.” As an old white guy, this is not a particularly welcoming environment. So the best option seems to be to wait on the pendulum - something that gets a little more difficult every year for us “Artists of a Certain Age.”