Anxious Overtones: Charles Burchfield’s “Church Bells Ringing” and Differing Attitudes Toward the East Palestine Train Derailment

 

Image at Left: "Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night" by Charles Burchfield is shown as part of the Burchfield Mural in downtown Salem, Ohio.

In July, during our visit to Youngstown, we spent an afternoon in nearby Salem so we could visit the Burchfield Homestead, a place that memorializes the life and art of the well-known water colorist Charles Burchfield. On the walls of Burchfield’s well-preserved childhood home hang prints of many of his works, especially those from his time in Ohio and from what’s known as his Golden Year of 1917 when he developed his mature style. Burchfield learned to depict the natural world in an intense and celebratory way and to show, both creatively and effectively, the harms human beings inflict on the land. But the image that held my attention that day was “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night” because it was in the very house in which we stood that Burchfield had the experiences that led him to paint what is really more a portrait of a mood than of an actual place.

As I looked at “Church Bells Ringing” I couldn’t help but wonder: What is that shape hovering in the space between those two dark houses, slippery in the oily black rain? Does it have eyes and a beak? Does it have wings? And yet I already knew the answers to those questions, that the central image was in fact the spire of Salem's Baptist Church, since destroyed by fire, which when Burchfield was a boy tormented him with its tolling bell. It sounded to him like "a dull roar... dying slowly and with a growl.” He would listen to it on stormy winter nights, and it filled young Burchfield with a sense of dread. (1) The artist added another layer of personal meaning to this work that involved a visual language of Burchfield's own making, in which certain shapes and lines are part of what he called "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts." There were also "audio-cryptograms," which were meant to make visible certain sounds, like the ringing of a church bell.  And so, unlike works such as “Coke Ovens at Night" in which Burchfield depicts harms done to the natural world, "Church Bells Ringing" contains no flames or clouds of smoke, no seared landscapes that would understandably create a sense of alarm. Just two houses, a church and a darkened sky, with the rain falling down. And yet how ominous.

If Burchfield were still alive, had he been around this year when the Norfolk Southern train derailed in nearby East Palestine and sent flames and toxic smoke into the air, he might very well have painted that scene, giving it the sense of urgency and anxiety depicted in his other images of environmental devastation. After all, he worked in Wellsville  and East Liverpool, among other small Ohio towns, so why not East Palestine? But if he had gone back there six months later, his response might have been different. He might have painted something like “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night” to show that though the flames and clouds of smoke are long gone, there is still a lot of anxiety and dread in that town, at least for some of its citizens. Only in this case, the sound he might have depicted with an audio-cryptogram would have been the long drawn-out wail of a train whistle.

The Burchfield Mural in downtown Salem

Earlier on the day on which we visited the Burchfield Homestead, we had seen a different image of “Church Bells Ringing." It’s incorporated into the Charles Burchfield Mural in downtown Salem, which commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Golden Year. Right across the street from that mural is LiBs Market, a café space and shop whose owner, Ben Ratner, was an extra in the film version of White Noise, the Don DeLillo novel in which an airborne toxic event ensues after a truck collides with a train carrying toxic chemicals. When we ordered our beverages, I asked at the counter if Ratner was around because I wanted to talk with him about the film and the derailment, but I was told he wasn’t there that day. Nonetheless, I knew, based on an interview he did with CNN, that he's very concerned about the derailment. His house is a mile from the crash site, he and his family were forced to evacuate, and he and his wife are worried about their family's health, the future value of their home and their overall financial security as a result of the derailment.

Knowing this increased the sense of dissonance I felt when, during our visit to the Burchfield Homestead, we spoke with a local woman who told us she didn’t really think there was anything to worry about in East Palestine. She implied that the response to the derailment was overblown, that the creeks (i.e., Leslie Run and Sulphur Run) “had been polluted for a long time,” and that people needed to return to normal. I thought about the things Ratner had said, and I wondered how two people who lived so near to the site of the derailment could feel could so differently about it. But the area near the derailment is in fact a divided community in which some people feel that they aren’t getting the assistance they deserve and continue to experience serious and worrying physical symptoms while others just want to get back to normal. 

Near the site of the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio
July 14, 2023; photo by G.S. Evans

I had wanted to see for myself what East Palestine was like, and so we had made a short trip to the town a few days previously. We stopped the car on  Taggart Street near the railroad tracks, and there was still a crew working on cleanup. We saw signs that said "Road Closed" and called for an identification badge check, but there were few other outward indications of what had happened there. We got out to take a few pictures, and in the one above you can see a dark van. On one side it said, "What's in your air?" and on the back was the notice: "Monitoring in progress." The unfamiliar sight of air monitoring trucks made me feel uneasy, and the fact that there were houses standing so near the place where flames had shot into the sky and a huge roiling cloud of black smoke had erupted gave me a feeling of deep empathy for anyone who had to stay there and still felt sick. I'm always the one who notices the chemicals, who gets a headache or a rash, and in fact after we had been there for a short time I felt nauseated and wanted to move on. Which of course the people who lived in those houses couldn't easily do...

On August 3, a few days after I returned to Arizona, I attended the Virtual Symposium: East Palestine 6 Months After and got to hear four community activists from the affected area talk about the derailment and its aftermath. Each of them described her experiences of the event, as well as the ongoing symptoms she and her family members continue to endure. They also described feeling diminished by the EPA and other government agencies when told there’s nothing wrong with the air and water in their communities.  All four women have worked hard to advocate for testing of air and water and have asked for monitoring of people’s homes, but they all reported that not everyone in the community thinks there are unresolved problems.

Hilary Flint, Vice President of East Palestine Unity Council, said, "We're told that it's safe, and our pushback on that is that safe is very subjective. It's not safe for everyone.” She said standards being used to determine safety are based on OSHA data which usually involves 8-12 hour exposures on men and a single chemical, not multiple chemicals. She added, “So when we're being told that it's safe -- a lot of people, especially initially, believed that, and they said, ‘Oh, OK, it's safe. We'll go home.’ But what they didn't realize was that it wasn't safe for their elderly family member. It wasn't safe for their child with asthma. It wasn't safe for someone like me, a young adult cancer survivor with autoimmune issues. We're told that it's safe, but they can't guarantee that for every single person." 

Asked to give advice to other communities faced with similar disasters, Amanda Kemmer, also of East Palestine Unity Council, said, "Right now the community is so divided between the people who say 'Everything is in your head,' versus those of us who are experiencing symptoms, and... they're really pushing hard with this PR narrative that everything is fine, everything is OK, and they're throwing a ton of money at this. Norfolk Southern is putting millions of dollars... to show that they're trying to 'make it right' but they're doing nothing to help the actual community." 

Halloween decorations in East Palestine, Ohio;
photo by Kathy Wozniak

Nearly two months later, on September 26, in a NewsNation Town Hall in East Palestine, Chris Cuomo focused extensively on the fact that many people continued to feel unwell. When he asked the roomful of attendees how many were still having symptoms, “experiencing things in a way that don't make sense to you physically and that they weren't like that before,” all but a very few raise their hands. Because Halloween is coming up, people in East Palestine were beginning to put up decorations, and Cuomo described the items that resident Shelby Walker had put up on her front lawn. The first is a scarecrow with the sign "Waiting for testing and the truth from Norfolk Southern... and the EPA," followed by a scarecrow with "Still waiting 5 months later," then a skeleton with "Still waiting 8 months later," and finally, tombstones with a sign that says "Too late..." "It's a macabre joke," Cuomo said, "but that's the mentality they have to learn to live with." 

At the town hall they showed a short video of Cuomo's visit to Walker's home, where she talked about the "sweet chemical odor" that permeates her living space and said that one of the derailed train cars was "right in my back yard." When Cuomo asked her how she felt when officials and Norfolk Southern made the decision to do the controlled burn, she said, "I just cried, because I thought... 'I may never have a home to go home to.' Now today I wish that would have been the case. I wish my house would have caught fire that day and I wish I would have lost everything." She said she still has a mortgage to pay and asked who would buy her house now. She said she is now on an inhaler, gasping for breath, and when Cuomo asked her if she and other disaffected residents are just looking for "a paycheck," she said, "Maybe some people are. Maybe they're not. Me, I'm not. I just want to be safe. I want a home that's safe for my kids and my grandkids to be at, and I want health insurance for them for the rest of their lives because we don't know what's going to happen to us in five or ten years." 

Of course, East Palestine isn't the only community where members have had divergent responses to an environmental disaster. According to sociology professor Becky Clausen, community response can vary, depending on the cause of the disaster. When it's an event that could be called a natural disaster, like a hurricane or flood, people tend to support one another and communities pull together. People consider the event to be an "act of God," with no one to blame, and in those cases support and resources often come quickly from outside sources. But in what she calls technological disasters, or "manmade" disasters, like toxic spills, communities become divided. Sociologists call this response the "corrosive community" because of the level of anger, stress, and loss of trust in institutions people experience, especially when support is slow in coming. These findings are based on sociological research on disasters like the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989. 

Clausen advises people who live in a community where a technological disaster has taken place to "... understand that the reactions you may be experiencing (and those of your friends, family and neighbors) follow similar patterns of social/psychological stress... The confusion and uncertainty about the extent of health-related and economic impacts from environmental contamination create the psychological effect of 'invisible trauma.' Support is often needed to help people move through these reactions and to avoid further social and personal disruption." And yet, as the people quoted above indicate, support has not always been forthcoming in East Palestine, and the sense of corrosive community continues to deepen. 

Clausen recommends setting up events at which people can help each other by listening to each other's stories, and the East Palestine Unity Council and other organizations have facilitated such events. She also recommends learning about similarly affected communities, and the people near the site of the derailment have benefitted from the wisdom of activists like Erin Brockovich and Marilyn Leistner, the last mayor of Times Beach. But when the EPA says the air and water contamination are "below action levels," people who don't have health symptoms may disregard the stories of those who do. And this is where things stand right now in East Palestine.

Adding to the confusion, the differences of opinion about East Palestine aren’t limited to the residents of Columbiana County and nearby Pennsylvania. There have been incidents of victim blaming in the national media, which contribute to the sense of corrosive community. (2) There have been white supremacist accusations that the government is purposefully trying to harm white conservatives in East Palestine. There have even been conspiracy theories making the rounds on TikTok. 

Taken together, all of these things help to explain how people living in the same place at the same time can experience an event and its consequences so differently. But having heard so many residents of East Palestine say they don't feel safe in their own homes and knowing that, as Hilary Flint said, "safe is very subjective," I feel great empathy for those who want continued testing and monitoring. And having been in Charles Burchfield’s childhood home and seen his “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night,” I think he might also have had great sympathy for those who don't feel safe in their own homes near the site of the derailment. Perhaps he would have found a way to depict the fear and anxiety that is provoked in the residents of a house standing near the tracks as they hear the insistent hooting of the horn of a train, barreling into town and bringing unknown dangers.
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(1) According to Nancy Weekly in her description of "Church Bells Ringing" for the exhibition, "A Dream World of Imagination: Charles E. Burchfield's Golden Year,” Burchfield himself noted the “[h]awk-like aspect” of the Baptist Church,” and he "animated the steeple to look like a ferocious bird.” 

(2) Soon after the derailment, Briahna Joy Gray devoted a segment of her show, Rising, to what she described as victim blaming. She began by calling out Joy Behar, who in a February episode of The View "seemed to imply that East Palestine residents brought the disaster on themselves because they voted for Trump." She then showed a clip of Behar, who said, "[Trump] placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA's chemical safety office," then pointed toward the viewers and added, "That's who you voted for in that district: Donald Trump, who reduces all safety…"

As a response to Joy Behar’s comment, Gray played another clip, this time of former Ohio state senator Nina Turner making a more humane assessment on CNN: “For the neoliberals who say that the residents of that area deserve what they are getting, because they voted for President Donald J. Trump, it is abhorrent. This is about poverty. It is about poor, working-class white people who are enduring some of the same things that poor, working-class black people endure whether it's in Flint, Cleveland or Jackson, Mississippi. And so I want to lay it out. That the cultish behavior in politics right now that it is a sin and a shame that when people are suffering to this magnitude that you have people who will fix their mouths, to quote my grandmother, and say that they are getting what they deserve. What they deserve is clean air, clean food, and clean water, they deserve relief both in the short term and also in the long term.”

Not only is Behar’s response not very humane, there’s also more than a hint of schadenfreude about it. Such joy in the suffering of others, especially if they are on the other side in our intensely polarized political climate, seems to be on the rise in our country. A recent article in Scientific American cited a survey experiment in which over 35 percent of liberals agreed with "the idea that those who do not believe in climate change 'get what they deserve' when natural disasters strike them" and 36 percent of conservative respondents expressed satisfaction "when those who support restrictions on how businesses operate during the pandemic lose their job because of government regulations." The authors of the article say, “Such 'joy in the suffering' of partisan others threatens to dramatically alter the U.S. political landscape,” and it also threatens to make it difficult for people to get the help they need when they are afflicted by an event, like the East Palestine derailment, over which they had no control. 

The Many Meanings of a Water Lily Pond by Claude Monet and an Untitled Abstract Vista by Al Bright

 

Water Lily Pond, 1917/19, by Claude Monet, Art Institute of Chicago, 

CCO Public Domain Designation

In a room full of paintings by Claude Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago in July, I was spoiled for choice. I turned and gazed, focusing at first on the Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge paintings in which these two structures are obscured by the fog and haze Monet loved to paint (see earlier post). In Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, for example, smoke can be seen pouring into the air in the background, and the whole urban riverscape lies beneath a hazy, blurry sky. These London paintings give credence to the thesis of the two climate scientists who argued in a recent study that air pollution "provided a creative impulse" for Monet.

After a while, because there were more than thirty people in the room and most of them seemed to want to take a picture of whichever canvas I was standing in front of, I turned away from the London paintings to look at something more serene, three water lily paintings. In 1893 Monet bought property in Giverny in France where he turned previously marshy ground into a pond, built a Japanese-style bridge over it, and brought in some water lilies. This garden became the subject of most of his later paintings, with a particular focus on the water lilies. 

Water Lily Pond 1900 depicts lush vegetation and is enlivened by the curve of a dark bridge. Swirling masses of water lilies fill the pond, and in the foreground, we can see reflections of trees and other greenery on the banks. Water Lilies 1906 is more abstract and simply shows a few graceful islands of vegetation floating in water that reflects the sky and nearby trees. According to the Art Institute website, as time went on, Monet became less concerned with "conventional pictorial space," and so there is no horizon line. The same can be said of Water Lily Pond 1917/19 in which a somewhat muddy palette of green, pink, purple, white, gray and orange gives depth to the water and allows grassy shapes and shadows to build around a central mass of reflections. Monet’s water lily paintings, according to the Art Institute’s signage, was a “significant part of the inspiration for the abstract artists who flourished later in the twentieth century.” I stood there a long time, taking in this third painting, emerging myself in its somewhat mysterious depths.

Later, at the home of our friends Kathy and Richard in Youngstown, I had a chance to see real water lilies growing in the pond that graces one edge of their garden. The garden is full of herbs, grasses and flowers and is also decorated with small outdoor sculptures, including a few by Akron-based artist Don Drumm. In addition, gazing balls and kinetic wind sculptures give the whole yard a playful and dynamic quality, and when we sat near the pond, we could see frogs hopping onto and among the water lilies. Often there were pink flowers within the masses of the large, round, glossy leaves. But one thing about the water lilies themselves was that their charm and beauty didn’t really call to mind Monet’s canvases. One difference, of course, is that they may have been of different species, but more importantly, Monet's later works were too abstract, too focused on irregular masses of vegetation and reflections in the water to give any real sense of what water lilies are like. Well and good. The master painter shows us the world as he chooses. But there may have been more to it than that. 

Water lilies in the pond in Kathy and Richard's garden

According to Dr. Michael F. Marmor, during the years in which Monet was painting in his garden at Giverny, his vision was progressively affected by cataracts. By the mid-1910s, Monet said that "…colors no longer had the same intensity for me," and he began to trust the labels on tubes of paint rather than his own vision. By the early 1920s, Monet thought he might have to stop painting altogether, and he was aware that he couldn't really discriminate color. His work at that time appeared increasingly abstract, though there was nothing in his correspondence to suggest that he was being influenced by the abstract painters of the early 20th century.

Because there is good historical documentation of Monet's progressive vision loss due to cataracts, we can assume that the changes in his painting style may have been affected by his eye problems. Speaking as an ophthalmologist and not an art critic, Dr. Marmor is careful to add that we can’t make these kinds of judgements about every work of art we see. "It would be presumptuous,” he says, “to assume that nonrepresentational painting implies poor visual acuity or that painting with strong colors (or a lack of color) implies that the artist has cataract or color vision abnormalities." Yes, of course! But it’s a documented fact that Monet's work darkened and became more abstract as his cataracts worsened, which makes it all the more intriguing that, though these late paintings were not particularly influential during Monet’s lifetime, they had a tremendous impact on future directions in the visual arts, especially here in the United States.

Writing in The Brooklyn Rail, art historian and critic Norman Kleeblatt reviewed a 2018 exhibit at l'Orangerie in Paris that purported to show the affects Monet's later work had on the American art scene in the mid-twentieth century. He says that the advocacy of the American Abstract Expressionists helped to bring attention to Monet's later painting, which is why the Paris exhibit displayed Monet's late works next to paintings by American artists who were influenced by it. Kleeblatt says that, at one and the same time, "... late Monet could be explained and exploited as foreshadowing the origins of the large-scale gestural canvases, close chromatic range, and all-over compositions of the American painters." These late Monet's were often dismissed for just these reasons -- "their narrow range of dark color, and seemingly direct depiction of the natural world" seemed "either too romantic or too Symbolist." Or worse, they were disparaged as the work of an artist who had cataracts and very blurred vision. But, Kleeblatt tells us, Monet’s influence was strong enough in the mid-twentieth century that two painter/critics began to call the work of their peers Abstract Impressionism.

The exhibit also strengthened the connection by showing a film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint on canvas “alongside a film of a white-suited Monet painting on an easel in his celebrated garden.” This was likely to be the short film available online today, which shows Monet in 1915 as an assured and masterful painter, looking relaxed in his white suit. He can be seen holding his palette, making thoughtful strokes with his brush and referring frequently to the nearby pond where there are, recognizably, water lilies growing. We can't really follow his progress on the canvas, but when the camera pulls back, we can see how lush and filled with foliage his garden was.

My untitled Al Bright painting

Now back to Ohio where we not only spent time in our friends’ garden, but also stayed again in their Mid-century Modern house, with its eclectic mix of vintage furniture and other well-chosen items. Framed posters, photos and works of art abound, but new this year was an untitled work by Youngstown artist Al Bright. I was especially excited to get to know it, because it was mine, a gift from Kathy because I really enjoy Bright’s work. During our stay, I went from time to time to gaze at it, pleased by its palette of pale honeyed beige tones, with a bit of brown, gray and white in the lower half of the canvas, and more yellow tones in the upper half. There are strong horizontal brush strokes, and nearly in the middle of that upper lighter space, there's a semi-circle that looks like a setting sun cut off by a bank of clouds. 

In a description on the website of the Butler Institute of American Art about a recent show featuring eight of Bright's works, he is described as "an artist who truly understood the handling of paint" and as a "remarkable colorist." Bright died in 2019, but there are a number of videos online in which you can watch him painting to live jazz. In each we see the work of a strongly gestural painter, an action painter. Watch him painting while Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers are playing, and you can see the spontaneity of his work and its energy. His improvised art accompanies improvised music, and Bright can be seen to respond in a heartfelt way to the music that he hears. 

Writing in the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2013, Robert Raczka says that Bright deserves to be celebrated for the forty years he spent "translating the sound and energy of jazz into visual expression," while maintaining a consistency of style, color choices, and techniques. Raczka even mentions Bright's frequent use of circles in his compositions, which is at least partially the case in my untitled painting. He also refers to Bright as a "third-generation Abstract Expressionist," saying that his work is closest to the “mellow imagery” of Sam Gilliam and Helen Frankenthaler.

About her own work, Frankenthaler once said, "My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated more with nature." And this year, writing in The New Yorker about an exhibit of Frankenthaler’s work at Gagosian, Johanna Fateman has said that the artist’s canvases present “sweeping abstract vistas that recall the roar of waterfalls and crashing waves, as well as silent deserts.” Both Frankenthaler’s and Fateman’s notions help me to express the feeling my untitled Al Bright canvas elicits from me, with its predominance of sandy tones, reliance on horizontal lines and its hemicircle central shape that calls to mind a sun. The abstract vista it implies for me is a desert heatscape, the sun's energy pouring down on some monumentally barren place, calling to mind the planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's Dune, calling to mind a future earth scorched by climate change. Not that, I think, Bright was ever a pessimistic artist, but this is something I find in this nearly monochrome work, and it gives me, as Frankenthaler says, a feeling of an order associated with nature. And that order is what happens when hot and dry are imposed by an intense and unforgiving sun as climate change proceeds apace.

Smoky skies above the Youngstown area on July 17, 2023,

caused by Canadian wildfires.

Because this has been a summer of Canadian wildfires, it wasn’t a surprise that we experienced a day of smoky skies and dangerous levels of particulates when we were in Ohio. I’m no stranger to smoky haze over the Youngstown landscape because when I was growing up there the mills were still going strong. In fact, I remember that we accepted that smog and soot because the mills brought a certain kind of prosperity, just as Monet had a positive response to the smog and smoke he saw, which gave him a sense that the world was changing in dynamic and exciting ways. But on July 17, the smoky sky implied nothing but climate devastation and rather than being a harbinger of prosperity, it was a warning that humans need to change our ways soon or something that looks a lot like Al Bright's abstract vista may come to pass.

We Looked for Kenneth Patchen in Ohio, But We Couldn’t Find Any Trace of Him Until We Got Home

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972), American poet and
novelist. Photograph by Chester Kessler, circa 1952.
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38096697

I’m a lifelong admirer of the poet Kenneth Patchen, and while I was in Youngstown last month I decided to go and look at his birthplace. He was from Niles, Ohio, after all, and I figured there should be a plaque or monument or at least a sign somewhere in Niles to show that this fearless and peace-loving poet got his start there. But though we searched online and asked at the McKinley Memorial Library (Niles' branch of the public library, which did have a few volumes of Patchen’s poetry), there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgement that Patchen was a native son. (To be accurate, he is listed on the Niles Wikipedia page under “Notable people.”) 

Near the library, a statue of another of Niles’ Notable people, President McKinley, gives the 25th president the appearance of a Greek or Roman orator, and it stands in the courtyard of a lavish neoclassical building that honors him. In that building there’s a welcoming little museum, and we also asked there about whether or not there was a memorial for Kenneth Patchen nearby, but no one knew. Why, I wondered, doesn’t Niles celebrate the poet who clamored for peace every chance he got? Wouldn’t that help to counteract in some small way the fact that McKinley's life was ended by an act of violence, by assassination?

Permanent memorial to the birthplace of President William McKinley, 25th President
of the United States in Niles, Ohio. Photo by Lilly Conforti, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when more was made of Patchen in his native state, and for a few short years, there was a Kenneth Patchen Festival in Warren. I attended the Festival in 1989, and I met Miriam Patchen and asked her to sign my copy of Patchen’s Collected Poems. But the present-day indifference to Patchen in Niles saddened me. When I got back to Tucson and had access to my books again, I organized a little Kenneth Patchen Festival of my own. I celebrated the diversity of Patchen’s work as a visual artist, a poet, and a playwright, much as the 1989 Festival did. But because this was a very small and private festival, I focused on a limited sampling of each aspect of his life’s work.

 As always, I started with the visual. I have a copy of What Shall We Do Without Us? The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen, which was published by Sierra Club Books in 1984 and contains 37 color images of Patchen's Picture Poems. In a review of the book that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Steven Ratiner gave a thorough and respectful description of Patchen as a visual artist, noting that the spinal injury that kept the poet in nearly constant pain for most of his adult life caused him to spend his last 13 years in bed. It was during this time, when he couldn't find the strength and energy to work on longer writing projects, that he began to produce his Picture Poems.

According to Ratiner, Patchen, who was not trained as a graphic artist, was influenced by William Blake's illustrated books, and art critic Alfred Frankenstein called Patchen "probably the most sophisticated primitive in the history of American art." Ratiner says the creatures in Patchen's Picture Poems affect us profoundly. "Seemingly childlike, realized with a surprising simplicity of form, they establish a powerful bond with their audience," projecting an aura that is "wise, magical, yet quite vulnerable," and he says Patchen was influenced by Klee and Miro.  In fact, Patchen’s drawings remind me more of those of Karel Appel, who helped form the CoBrA group and who was also inspired by Klee and Miro. 

I decided to choose a Picture Poem from the book and look at it carefully, the way I do when I’m writing an ekphrastic essay. I chose the one which says, “The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now.” This Picture Poem, like Patchen’s many other such works, features alert-looking creatures that remind us of animals and birds, though the one at the bottom of the page, with six legs, a tail, a head like a hillock and a long brown body has flowers sprouting from its front and back and seems to be the ground that is getting disgusted enough to walk away. Its head and body are ochre-colored, which is appropriate because ochre is a clay earth pigment, and this adds to the notion that this creature is actually meant to be the ground. Its eyes are intense and golden, and it has a bemused expression on its face, gazing at the viewer in a slightly helpless way, standing firmly on its little stubby peg-like legs, like a dog that’s just about had enough. Its tail is not wagging. 

Two other creatures nearly fill the rest of the image, outlined against a yellow background and jockeying for space amidst the hand-lettered text of the poem, the last bit of which extends along the body of the standing ground. One of the creatures is a mix of animal, vegetable, and human, wearing leaves for hair and with a small tail, human-like legs and an elephantine sort of nose. It seems to be stepping down off the ground as it looks at us with one eye, the way someone does in an ancient Egyptian image, its head and body in profile and its eye gazing forward. The other creature is birdlike with swirling feathers and a pointed beaky face. It’s doing a good job of standing its ground and seems calmly balanced. Both creatures are yellow and blue. 

But people are the subject of this Picture Poem, and none of these creatures are people. People are the ones who would be left with nothing more to stand on except for that which they have stood for, which sounds like an angry condemnation of people as a species, implying that they have stood for some terrible things. And, of course, they have. Yet when you look at the faces of all three creatures, you don’t really feel as though they or Patchen are angry at you. Instead, they seem to say that you had better be sure that you stand for something ethical and reasonable and well-thought-out, so you will have something to stand on under trying and difficult circumstances, which seems like sound advice to me.

A few books from my Kenneth Patchen collection.

For the second act of my small festival, I spent some time reading older poems from Patchen’s Selected Poems, concentrating on the ones that have the most to do with Youngstown (when it was a steel town) and on the air Patchen and I breathed there (though not concurrently). “Orange Bears” (from Kenneth Patchen: Selected Poems) is one of the most anthologized of Patchen’s poems and appears many places on the internet. It’s a poem about childhood, but it’s also very clearly about environmental and economic justice. The orange bears that played with the poet when he was ten could have been stuffed animals or imaginary friends, but what happens to them is a reflection of something very real. The orange bears have their backs “seared by hot slag,” and they also have their “soft trusting/ Bellies kicked in.” The ideas expressed in these descriptions alternate between what happens to the land in a steel town and what can happen to the people.

As the poet goes down by the “smelly crick” to read Whitman, he realizes that you have to have lived in a mill town to understand these injustices, because even Whitman, who was the quintessential poet of the American people, didn’t know much about “the National Guard coming over/ From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates/ With drawn bayonets/ Jeering at the strikers…” And at the end the poem turns again to the air and the water and the land and tells us that “…you could put daisies/ On the windowsill at night and in/ The morning they’d be so covered with soot/ You couldn’t tell what they were anymore.” In this poem the industrialists who own the mills are shown to be just about everything the orange bears are not. Which is why the bears didn’t stand a chance where Patchen grew up in the 1920s and I grew up in the 1960s. Now the mills are gone and the jobs are gone and most of the most damaging effects on the river and the air are gone, but the sadness remains.

And though you might think that “And May I Ask You a Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?” (also from Selected Poems) is going to be an even more intense poem about those same issues, it is and it isn’t. It does start out lamenting “…the yellow-brown smoke/ That blows in/ Every minute of the day. And/ Every minute of the night,” but then there’s some dialogue between people who turn to alcohol in order to survive the exploitation and the gloom. And there’s less of a clear connection to issues of environmental justice and more of a dramatic portrayal of how people try to keep themselves from despairing when work is hard and unrelenting. At the poem’s end, in spite of death and sadness and living with “the taste of tar in your mouth,” the poet announces that “[t]he day shift goes on in four minutes.” In this way Patchen comments on the routinized and standardized life of shifts and schedules that dominated people’s lives when the mills were operating 24 hours a day. Now that they are not, people must fend for themselves and the lack of the taste of tar isn’t always appreciated.

Finally, looking for a third act for my festival, I turned to Patchen as a playwright and listened to a 1942 radio play called “The City Wears a Slouch Hat,” which I found online quite by accident. It features a “sound score” by John Cage, which was commissioned by CBS’ Columbia Workshop to accompany a play written by Patchen. I was drawn to it because I encountered Cage’s avant-garde music the same year I first read Patchen, in 1970. Cage also directed the "orchestra of sound players,” consisting of five percussionists. There are gongs and chimes and bells and cymbals that fill in for the sounds of rain and ocean waves in the play, though sound effects are also used. In the play an unnamed man, referred to in the credits as "The Voice" wanders the cityscape on a rainy night, talking to people, generously giving a panhandler some money and listening patiently to a distraught woman. He also survives being mugged and harassed by street toughs, and he shows himself to have strange and more-than-human powers as, for example, when he goes up to answer a ringing phone on the sixth floor of a nearby building in order to tell the caller that a family will die in ten minutes time. We are given clearer evidence that he really has such abilities when we learn that he already has a picture of his mugger in his wallet and knows that the three men who later follow him have no bullets in their revolvers.

At one point he simply says "Let's walk up and look around in the sky a bit." The percussion score during that sequence is especially resonant, and it ends when he says, "We better get back down, I guess." But The Voice isn't the only person who has had unreal and unexpected experiences: one man tells another about a talking horse, there's a machine that laughs and a woman who claims to have had a terrible accident with broken glass that disfigured her, yet she is not scarred and won’t explain. Toward the end of the play The Voice recites some poetry ("The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlow and "Death, be not proud" by John Donne), and then he swims out to a rock in the ocean to get away from the city noise and strife, where he muses that "I'll enjoy being alone..." But he soon encounters a man who says he lives on that rock because he got "sort of tired of things onshore. Men and women doing the same stupid things over and over. And the noise of the city..." As he speaks, the sounds of percussion -- the gongs and chimes – substitute for the frenzy of the waves.

After listening to what the man on the rock has to say, The Voice turns his attention to the need for getting along with the other people around us and finding a way to accept the crowds in the city. A slouch hat, which the city is said to wear according to the play’s title, is mostly a military sort of headgear, and in the play the city is depicted as a place that can cause people to be defensive and fearful. But The Voice cautions against this in his small final soliloquy, saying: "We were not meant to be strangers to each other. We have the same fears, the same hopes, joys, and sorrows. We must not be suspicious. We must learn to love each other.” This might be a somewhat straightforward way to end such an avant-garde play, but it’s a message that seems entirely appropriate coming from Kenneth Patchen.

In this play, as in his other work, Patchen advocates harmony and compassion. In his above-mentioned Christian Science Monitor review, Steven Ratiner talks about the "powerful pacifist message" of Patchen's art, and he notes that interest in Patchen's writing was strong during the decade of the Vietnam war, which is when I discovered him. Ratiner says that the poet’s work gained attention again in the 1980s "when speculation about nuclear war and the survival of the planet [arose] in daily conversation and newspaper headlines.” Since those speculations are just as apropos today, I hope there will be a resurgence of interest in Kenneth Patchen's work, which also contained a great deal of wisdom about how human beings can learn to live together without violence.

 

An Ekphrastic Look at Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare and Our Recent Amtrak Trip

 

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). Public Domain
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 80.2 cm (23.7 × 31.6 in). Art Institute of Chicago

Our Amtrak trip from Tucson to Chicago last month was marked by a lulling rhythm-of-the-rails state of mind that allowed us to sleep even when the train whistle hooted all night long. The food is really pretty good and was made even better by the constantly changing views of the countryside that slipped by as we ate. We could see New Mexico skyscapes along the Sunset Limited portion of the trip, and later we had a chance to look over all those Texas towns we’ll never visit during the 24 hours the Texas Eagle spent in its namesake state. The transition from the West, with its calm arid landscapes, to the East with more grass and trees and population density, is always worth commenting on when you wake up 48 hours into the trip and see the Mississippi River and St. Louis’ Gateway Arch.

Of course, along the way, we experienced the frequent, low-level frustration of being kept motionless as freight trains passed our train, leaving it shuddering in the wake of one of Union Pacific’s rude giants. (Amtrak says that for more than 50 years freight railroads have, by law, had to give Amtrak "preference" to run passenger trains ahead of freight trains, but freight lines tend to ignore the law and it's hard for Amtrak to enforce it. This gives the Sunset Limited an on-time performance of only 19%.)

Amtrak in Benson, AZ https://www.flickr.com/photos/petegregoire/, CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We also had a much longer delay just outside Chicago when there was an accident at a poorly marked crossing, and I thought the day-long layover we had set up for ourselves in the Loop might evaporate altogether. That’s why when we finally made it to the Art Institute, and I was standing before “Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare” as a kind of appetizer before I made my way to the room that’s filled with Monets, I enjoyed my fellow-feeling with the artist, who also loved trains, and I felt a little bit superior to him because he loved those dirty steam engines that clouded up the sky, whereas modern diesel trains are much cleaner (and electric trains are even more so). I also now know something about Monet that I didn't know back in the 1960s and 1970s when, feeling privileged to be at the Art Institute, I would stare for hours at all the impressionist treasures I could wrap my gaze around.

Claude Monet, as it turns out, was a connoisseur of the industrial smog of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and London. According to a recent study, the thick smog of the early Industrial Revolution may have inspired Monet (and British painter JMW Turner, whose work was also included in the study) to depict the world, as the title of the ARTnews article about the study has it, as though in a "dreamlike haze." Anna Lea Albright, coauthor of the study, told CNN that, as air pollution levels increased, “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.” Not everyone agrees with this -- Sebastian Smee, art critic at the Washington Post, disagreed with the study's authors that the creation of Impressionism could be explained so simply, but even he doesn't doubt that "Monet was responding to an increasingly polluted environment." 

The painting of Gare Saint-Lazare at the Art Institute is dated 1877, and according to Jean Renoir in his biography of his father, Monet not only worked to emphasize and celebrate smog and fog in his paintings of the station, he even talked the stationmaster into stopping the trains for the best composition and stoking them up so they would produce even more smoke. In spite of the industrial intensity of the scene in this painting, however, the palette is soothing: blue, gray and white predominate, except for the greenish station floor. According to the museum label, this work is darker and less abstract than later works, giving a fairly clear view of the station, the approaching train, the glass-paneled roof and the buildings in the background. Yet there's something cool and dreamy about the scene itself, in spite of the steamy sky and the approach of a gigantic machine, maybe because there's still some space in the foreground from which we watch the train. It’s as though the excitement that Monet must have felt about the huge energy of the train as it moved so many people and barreled its way into the station was outweighed by his appreciation of its beauty. We now know that those steam engines weren’t very good for the environment, and the passengers must have experienced harmful levels of smoke if they sat in cars with open windows. But Monet considered them to be a feast for the eyes, if not for the other senses.

Our own decision to take the train on our trip east this summer had mostly been a matter of convenience, but we also wanted to be more environmentally friendly than we were on last year’s car trip. Was that the case? Greta Thunberg travels by train, which is something of an endorsement, and according to the same BBC article in which I learned about Ms. Thunberg’s travel arrangements, train travel "virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot.” Unfortunately, diesel trains' carbon emissions are as much as two times those of electric trains, and of course Amtrak trains are diesel-powered. But according to the Amtrak website, “rail travel produces up to 83% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than driving and up to 73% fewer emissions than flying, making Amtrak the best option to shrink your travel carbon footprint.” They also say, “According to the 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Data Book, Amtrak is 46% more energy efficient than traveling by car and 34% more energy efficient than domestic air travel.” 

And not only is travel by rail a greener option, it has other benefits as well. We like to read and write and daydream, and a long train trip is a good chance to do all those things. Our trip was a relaxing experience, for the most part, but I admit that I also felt some anxiety on the trip because I know sharing the track with freight trains can have hazardous consequences. Later, while visiting friends in Youngstown, Ohio, we made a brief visit to East Palestine, the site of a Norfolk Southern train derailment, where there was a “controlled” burn of five boxcars of vinyl chloride and the spread of harmful chemicals throughout the area. Six months later, the cleanup is still ongoing, and area residents are still worried about health consequences. (See this opinion piece at The Hill by E. Palestine resident Misti Allison.)

In a recent article at NPR called "After the East Palestine train derailment, are railroads any safer?" Erika Ryan reported that, though there used to be a four-person crew on a freight train, over time, crew members like flagmen were considered unnecessary. The freight industry now wants trains to have one worker on board: an engineer, in spite of the fact that there’s been a move toward longer trains, some of them three miles long and maybe more than 20,000 tons. Ryan also said that the freight industry's business model, known as PSR (precision scheduled railroading), which was meant to make the trains run more efficiently, has resulted in large numbers of layoffs, and, "Freight workers across multiple class I railroad companies have told NPR that nearly every aspect of their job has changed as a result of PSR -- including reductions in time dedicated to locomotive maintenance, inspections and training." As a result, these workers said that derailments like the one that took place in East Palestine were inevitable. And even in East Palestine, there's still lots of freight traffic. At one point when we were there, two behemoth freight trains passed each other, travelling in opposite directions, holding up traffic and making an intense amount of noise.

Railway ticket for the Texas and Pacific Railway. The trains were designated as
"Eagles"--Texas Eagle, etc. Circa 1950s. Public Domain.

The pitch and duration of a train whistle make it a mournful sound, one which we heard many times on our Amtrak trip, and stories about derailments and so-called bomb trains gave anxious overtones to those sounds. It made me even more uneasy to learn that there is only one human being on those freight trains, and that person is charged with making sure nothing goes wrong. How can a small flesh and blood person keep track of three miles of diesel-driven metal, weighing many tons? It is the hubris of the rail companies that makes it possible for them to think this is possible, and each time a huge train raced past our Amtrak train, I thought about how hard that lone engineer’s job must be. As I write this and I look again at an image of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare painting, I remember that, although the train in the painting was a steaming, roaring monster, at least there were enough human beings around to bring it to heel so Monet could paint it as he chose.

An Ekphrastic Essay About Paul Bunyan and Tree Equity in Tucson

 

Image Credit: David Bradley (b. 1954), Chippewa, Another Minnesota Folk Legend, 1987, oil on canvas. Collection of the Tucson Museum of Art. Gift of James T. Bialac.

Recently when I was listening to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, I was surprised to hear a short discourse on the legend of Paul Bunyan during an episode about a book called The Commercial Determinants of Health. Nader was interviewing one of the book’s editors, Dr. Nason Maani, who said that "…our health is largely shaped by forces outside of health care…” These forces include whether or not we breathe clean air, how well off our parents are, if we live in a polluted neighborhood or live in a house near a highway. And of course some of these forces are determined by the actions of corporations, which is why big companies spend a great deal of time and money trying to affect our perceptions of them and influence our willingness to consume their products and tolerate the health consequences they bring us. Nader gave as an example of such corporate puffery the use of the legend of Paul Bunyan to encourage people to associate the destructive process of logging with the heroic and larger-than-life adventures of an American folk legend. He said that pamphlets about Bunyan were distributed at his school when he was a child, and he called Bunyan “a fictional creature of the lumber industry.” Then he added, “And the last line of the [pamphlet]  was, ‘And Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox will continue until the last tree is down.’” 

Shortly after I heard that Nader program, I went to the Tucson Museum of Art and saw the exhibit called Enduring Legacies: The James T. Bialac Indigenous Art Collection,  which just opened in February of 2023. The exhibit features a large and extremely impressive collection of American Indian art from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and it was donated to the TMA by Bialac. The museum worked with indigenous scholars to mount this exhibition, and there’s a focus on community and nature. It includes work by a Pueblo artist I first encountered in Albuquerque -- Diego Romero, whose “Saints and Sinners” deals with Spanish colonization of Pueblo people. There's also work by Tohono O'odham artist Michael Chiago, whose “Spirit Dancer” shows off his knowledge of dance as well as his artistry. But when I saw David Bradley's “Another Minnesota Folk Legend," I couldn't help but think about what Nader had to say about the story of Bunyan and his ox, Babe. Though the painting is relatively small (25 by 20 inches), it had a powerful effect on me, and I understood why Bradley portrayed Bunyan as a monstrosity of sorts, a creature that Native people, dependent on the forest, were bound to be horrified by.

Valerie K. Verzuh, who wrote Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley, says that Bradley’s "... meticulous attention to the surface gives each area of the composition equal significance and resists focal points, inviting viewers to wander the canvas from top to bottom, following lines, shapes, colors, and concepts." But when I stood in front of "Another Minnesota Folk Legend,” I  couldn’t force myself to give equal attention to all parts of the painting. The sight of Paul Bunyan and the highly feminized ox, Babe, portrayed in the top half of the canvas lost out to the familiar-looking trees and animals and the understandable reactions of the native people portrayed in the bottom half of the canvas. Verzuh also says that Bradley acknowledges the power of iconic images and “… delights in deconstructing these images to examine how they convey meaning, and then reconstructing them, injecting each with irony for comic effect or critical comment.” The humor and irony in “Another Minnesota Folk Legend,” has helped me understand the legend of Paul Bunyan more clearly, though the painting also works to tell a very sobering story. (It is in fact included with other works in a room that is collectively labelled “Storytelling and Community.")

With the exception of the slim crescent moon in the sky, everything on the canvas that's near Bunyan and his ox is unnatural and uneasy. As folklore would have it, Bunyan and Babe tower over the landscape, but they seem more monstrous than legendary. The lumberjack’s expression is hard to read, but his head is tipped back as though he's shouting something or howling at the moon. He carries an axe in one hand and a can of Hamm’s beer in the other. (Note that Hamm’s is brewed in Minnesota, “the Land of Sky Blue Waters.”) Though Bunyan's plaid shirt and jeans are what we might expect to see a lumberjack wearing, Babe the ox is far from a normal bovine. She has human eyes and lips, and the ring in her nose matches the one in her ear. The sidelong glance she gives Bunyan is uncomfortably flirtatious, and on her blue back end she appears to be wearing lacy stockings attached to garters. Whatever Bunyan is shouting or howling, he looks as though he’s upset in a very self-involved sort of way and so he doesn’t seem to notice the stir that he and Babe are causing.

Whatever you can say about the scene taking place below the two gigantic figures, there's nothing really surprising about it. The trees are at a normal scale, showing just how easy it would be for Bunyan to take them down with one swipe of his massive axe. Animals flee as they would under such circumstances. Some Native people are in canoes, leaving their shelters in which fires are still burning. A few adults are shooting arrows at Bunyan, but the reaction of the animals and most of the people is to get out of his way. Bunyan is so grotesque that it's sensible to find a vantage point from which to observe him rather than to be squashed by his gigantic feet. The trees, which have white bark and are probably birch trees, are at the mercy of the huge lumberjack. (Note that Bradley’s mother was from the Chippewa nation, and Chippewa people covered their dwellings with birch bark and made birch bark canoes.)

The Bialac exhibit contains many memorable works of art, but I went back a couple of times to look at "Another Minnesota Folk Legend" and decided to write a blog post about it. When I asked myself what a painting about a Northwoods legend has to do with Tucson, I decided that, in addition to the fact that David Bradley attended the University of Arizona before he settled into his life as a New Mexico artist, there's the fact that Tucson has its own statue of Paul Bunyan. Tucson's Bunyan is made of fiberglass, stands 20 feet tall, and has a more pleasant expression on his face than Bradley's Bunyan. He watches traffic go by at the corner of Glenn and Stone, and the statue is a quirky thing to see in a place with more cactus than timber. 

Tucson's Paul Bunyan statue at the corner of Glenn and Stone.

But Paul Bunyan isn't entirely out of place in any corner of the United States. Stories about Bunyan originated in Maine and Canada, and he may have been based on a real French-Canadian lumberjack. But as the timber industry moved westward in order to find new forests to exploit, stories about Bunyan shifted to the Northwoods of Minnesota and Wisconsin and then to the West Coast.  And statues of Bunyan seem to have followed the stories across the country; they can be found in almost every state.  But inevitably the lumber industry saw that Paul Bunyan could be good for their public image, and in 1914 the Red River Lumber Company created pamphlets featuring Bunyan as part of an advertising campaign. A revised version of the pamphlet from 1922 was reviewed by the Kansas City Star, and Bunyan became a kind of pop culture figure and the subject of comics, books, and even an operetta. 

As Marshall Fishwick said in 1959 in "Sons of Paul: Folklore or Fakelore?"  American "folk" heroes are remarkably alike because, though their names and jobs are different, they have all been designed to encourage people to look with admiration at what Fishwick calls "the Big Build-Up." By this he means the ways that development has taken precedence over sustainability in the history of our nation. And though our so-called folk heroes are said to exert superhuman efforts to drill oil (Kent Morgan), dig tunnels (John Henry), drive cattle (Pecos Bill), or make steel (Joe Magarac), all of them are part of the project of turning natural places where American Indians once lived and ecosystems thrived into industrialized and developed spaces that makes big profits for corporations. Our sprawling city regularly participates in “the Big Build-Up,” and trees are often sacrificed to the developers’ needs. 

Though the Sonoran Desert isn't known for having large numbers of trees the way the Northwoods once did, trees are an important part of the ecosystem. People frequently plant native trees like mesquite and palo verde, and there are also many non-native trees like citrus trees and Italian cypresses. As an acknowledgement that trees can improve our wellbeing and the quality of our lives, the City of Tucson under Mayor Regina Romero has been working on its Tucson Million Trees Initiative since 2020. The Mayor has said that she can see and feel the effects of climate change here in Tucson, and she worries about how people will cope with rising temperatures and the high cost of water. She added that "...these impacts are not felt equally across our neighborhoods. Frontline communities of color and lower incomes have been battling these changes for years already. If we are to face this future together, we must address the years of injustice that have left parts of our city hotter, with fewer greenspaces and less investment."  

Planting trees in neighborhoods that need them is one way to address these injustices. There's even a metric called Tree Equity which "helps cities assess how well they are delivering equitable tree canopy cover to all residents." The tree equity score of a neighborhood takes into account how many residents are below the poverty level and other demographic and socioeconomic factors. The neighborhood I live in, Tucson Park West 1, though it's not the wealthiest in the city, gets a Tree Equity Score of 100 out of a possible 100. But many other neighborhoods in which there are a large number of poor people and people of color have some of the lowest scores.

The palo verde tree in front of our house blooms in Spring of 2022

The idea of Tree Equity represents a move toward environmental justice, but the fact that the trees in Oak Flat are in danger of being ripped out to make way for a copper mine shows that the spirit of Paul Bunyan is still present on our land.