“Flayed Angel”
Jacques Gautier d’Agoty
If you’ve not yet done so, pop on over to new blog Morbid Anatomy for a tour of some beautiful vintage medical illustrations. My favorite recent post was this collection of links to the work of anatomical artist Jacques Gautier d’Agoty.
Gautier d’Agoty’s “Flayed Angel” is the inspiration for this poem, by Leslie Adrienne Miller, from her new collection, The Resurrection Trade
. I am really excited to get this book in the mail. It’s inspired by depictions of anatomy, especially female anatomy - by Gautier d’Agoty, van Rymsdyk, da Vinci, Vesalius. If the following poem is any indication, it’s good stuff.
“The Flayed Angel”
Gautier D’Agoty’s mezzotint of the muscles of the back
Because her back is turned on us
and peeled outward from the ribs,
her namesake wings of skin surprise us
into thinking Fra Angelico—who taught
us all what textures wings might take
in two dimensions, an undulating
series of overlapping lines, a borrowing
from feathers, waves in sand, nothing
like the surface epidermis marked
with random blots or breathing glands
seeking after air any way they can.
If she were photograph or simple lines,
less art or more science, what we’d miss
is the man who had to be there
in the flesh with tray of graving tools
and pair of living eyes, who had
to read her with a knife and scrape
the burr from every rib, who had to know
the permanence of every cut. D’Agoty’s
flaps of flesh are scored with etching’s
textures, places where he meant the acid bath
to eat a weave of shadows into copper plates—
after which the inks pushed out their wells
of dark on water, thighs or fields, anywhere
the light is kept from falling, places
where the eye is urged to go but never see.
So this angel’s wings have corrugations
like boxes, cups, or woven fabric,
a tidiness of purpose that belies the tease
of bundled curls caught above the collar
of her open spine in its red spindles
of gristle. The artist must have thought
the coif a kindness. Perhaps he even knew
that women in the countryside made ready
for a birth with combs and ribbons,
believed first pains meant time for curls.
So were these wings D’Agoty’s kindness too,
his offer of a way she might escape
the grave? Or should we read these artful
cuts as consequence of process,
a simple accident of God.
Hear more poems from The Resurrection Trade via Minnesota Public Radio.
June 20th, 2007
Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera
Peter Milton, 2004
For you impoverished John Crowley fans out there, there are two more days to win a free copy of volume 1 of the “smart-looking” new paperback reissue of Aegypt. To win, write a haiku and submit it by Friday:
Announcing our first ever Great Haiku Galley Give-Away, featuring John Crowley’s legendary Book One of the Aegypt Cycle THE SOLITUDES! Write a brief, witty and polished haiku about why you are worthy to receive an early reader’s edition of this beloved title. The Overlook Press is re-issuing all of the Aegypt Cycle in collectible and smart-looking paperback format. Deadline for entries is Friday 6/22! Get your 5-7-5 on! And you could be a winner. Many will enter, 5 people will win. Winning haikus shall be posted and much glory shall be had. Send to theoverlookpress at gmail dot com. (The Wingéd Elephant)
For you non-impoverished Crowley fans, check out this incunabula edition of Little, Big with illustrations by Peter Milton. We, the impoverished, can still drool on Milton’s web gallery - laptop keyboards beware! (The illustration at the top of this post is not from Little, Big - it’s a teaser of its potential surreal yumminess.)
June 20th, 2007
Bee and Echinacea
watercolor, 8.5″ square
2007
A few weeks ago, I asked a beekeeper at the Portland (Oregon) farmer’s market whether his bees were ok. “Yeah, they are,” he said, “but I get that question a lot.” On Saturday a Seattle beekeeper told me he’d “had some losses” but added soberly, “it could be a lot worse.”
Since colony collapse disorder (CCD) broke out last November, as many as a quarter of our domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) have disappeared, abandoning hives full of food and larvae. Some beekeepers have lost up to 90% of their hives. Since the adult bees don’t return to the hive to die, it’s impossible to say what killed them; the few victims left behind display a confusing variety of pathological problems, such as a digestive tract clogged with undigested food, elevated numbers of normally harmless pathogens, and discolored tissues. Weirdest of all, opportunistic scavenger species and bees from other hives won’t touch the abandoned stores of honey. What do they know that we don’t?
From a agricultural perspective, it’s a pressing question. Not all crops require bee pollination, but over 100 do, including almonds and many fruits. The bulk of a beekeeper’s own income is derived from renting his or her hives for pollination services, not from honey production - the Oregon beekeeper I interviewed said with a smile that he barely makes any money on honey. California’s almond growers have begun outbidding other industries for the services of beehives, because there are simply not enough to go around - and that was before CCD kicked in, decimating the bee supply in some regions of the US.
• View a narrated slideshow about CCD and the industrial side of beekeeping (NYT)
Depending who you ask, possible causes of CCD include GM crops; malnutrition (poor pollen quality/availability, or poor supplements provided by keepers); unusual numbers of common parasitic mites (varroa); a virus; funguses (a new, more infective strain of Nosema); poor genetic diversity in domestic bee strains; cell phones (or cordless phones - there seems to be some confusion); and pesticides (usually neonicotinoids). Whatever it is, it’s global - Canada and Europe also report losses. France, after serious hive losses several years ago, banned some neonicotinoid pesticides, but continue to lose bees anyway. Australia is largely ok; some US beekeepers have replenished their stocks with Australian bees.
• recent LA Times review of the situation (June 10, 2007)
One (somewhat) comforting hypothesis is that CCD is actually old news - a periodic disorder that has happened before, and will clear on its own. Intermittent seasonal losses have been reported since 1868, in both the US and Europe; the occurances were given names like “dwindle disease”, “disappearing disease,” and “Isle of Wight disease.” In some cases, a putative cause, like fungus or unusual weather, was blamed; in other cases the problem simply went away without any likely cause being found (Underwood and van Engelsdorp, 2007). So will CCD just go away? Hopefully, but no one’s counting on it.
Agricultural practicalities aside, there’s something gut-wrenchingly wrong about CCD. A fundamental piece of the ecosystem is being leached away, and we have no idea why. I’m reminded of the epidemic of frog deformities a decade ago. Despite frantic experimentation by ecologists and developmental biologists, it was never solved (the most likely culprits are trematode parasites; but pesticides, habitat loss, and UV radiation probably contributed to the problem). Will a similar complex of interlocking causes be found for CCD? Will we be able to cure it, or will we just have to wait for it to diminish - as we did with the frogs?
More:
MAAREC Colony Collapse Disorder homepage
CCD Working Group Preliminary Report
NYT article
June 20th, 2007