Monthly Archives: July 2012

Turn Turn Turn to Something Else

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Folk Music, Joshua, Mythology, Peace, Pete Seeger, Religion, Seasons, The Byrds, War

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Often when I tell people that I am writing about the seasons, they mention the famous lines from Ecclesiastes, which were transcribed into a song by Pete Seeger and made famous by the Byrds. Sometimes they begin humming the tune or even singing the song. Despite these lines being just about the most well-known seasonal reference there is, at least among my generation, I have not written about them in the book, for a number of reasons.

Ecclesiastes is one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, which many believe arose from the court of King David (along with Psalms, Proverbs and Song of Solomon). By tradition, this book is attributed to Solomon; the writer introduces himself as a ‘son of King David,’ but in the ancient diction in which it is composed, that phrase could plausibly just mean ‘a descendant of King David.’ Many scholars believe there are two voices in Ecclesiastes, the narrator, who provides autobiographical material and framing narrative, and the actual teacher or preacher implied in the title. In general, the preacher discourses at length about the futility and weariness of life on earth, before reconciling all in the book’s final two verses, which insist that loving God and keeping his commandments is our sole duty.

The verses in question are of course Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, the famous ‘To everything there is a season.’ I don’t count it among seasonal references because it’s not talking about actual natural phenomena, but uses the idea of seasons metaphorically: ‘a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance’ (3:4). These are seasons only in poetic terms. I also think that Pete Seeger’s appropriation of the verses, and his changing the ending line, ‘a time for peace,’ adding ‘I swear it’s not too late,’ lends the words a hopeful meaning that is simply not consistent with the message of Ecclesiastes, or with the Old Testament in general.

One of the few seasonally-based references in the text comes in verse 3:2, ‘a time to plant and a time to uproot.’ That is the translation in the New International version of the Bible. In the King James version, upon which Seeger based his song, the words are actually ‘a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.’ This is one of the few places he changes the biblical text, rendering it as ‘a time to reap.’ I’m not sure the original text meant to reap, or to harvest, so much as to destroy what has been planted by uprooting or plucking it up. Ruining an enemy’s crops has always been an important tactic in warfare, and this could very well be what the passage is talking about. I know that sounds terrible, but consider the rest of the text.

There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time for war and a time for peace. It doesn’t say that peace is the natural and preferable state of things, while war is an unfortunate occurrence–it says that there is a time for war. Remember that the ancient Israelites were a warlike, conquering people. The Book of Joshua, for instance, is mostly about wars of conquest in which competing nations were wiped out in veritable orgies of violence. Few people realize that the reason that God made the sun stand still in perhaps the most famous passage in Joshua was so that the Israelites could have an extra long day to slaughter their enemies. King David was a warrior king, famous for slaying ‘his tens of thousands’ (I Samuel 18). War and conquest is so standard a theme in most of the Old Testament that one can grow numb with the thought of the violence being perpetrated.

To take this ethos and try to turn it into a message of hope and peace is laughable. This is especially true when the passage in question comes from a book like Ecclesiastes, which is not about hope, not about peace, but about hopelessness and vanity. Those verses near the end, ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’ (12:13), are the dictum of the jealous, wrathful, vengeful warrior God who animates the entire Old Testament. This is not a book about peace and love, despite Pete Seeger’s best intentions, or those of a whole generation of folk singers who have recorded this song. I will be turning to other texts for inspiration as I write about the seasons.

Death out of Season

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, climate, Death, Drought, Fall, Heat Wave, Meteorology, Seasons, Spring, Summer, War, Weather

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Don is this old retired guy who lives across the street from me. We’re friendly in the reserved, non-verbal way of men, but I don’t know him well. Judging from what I can tell by his activities, tending his lawn is his major passion. In green times he cuts his lawn more than once a week. He trims it with an electric weed whacker and fine tunes the job with a hand-held battery-powered unit. I have seen him sweep his yard with a broom, removing those last few blades of cut grass. The centerpiece of his front yard is a dwarf weeping cherry tree which bursts with white blossoms in spring and is a picture of green symmetry throughout the summer.

It’s hardly news that the American Midwest has been on fire this summer. Record high temperatures are being set one after another, in week after week of ceaseless heat and humidity. The heat is worsened by a persistent drought. People are watering their lawns until the fear of the water bill, or the guilt about the waste of water, or perhaps just the realization of the futility of it all finally overtakes them. What can it matter to keep a carpet of green grass growing when your world has become a desert?

On my drive to work, I see ghastly sights of things dying. Flowers at the entrances to parks, the shrubs lining someone’s driveway, trees in the lot at a grocery store, all brown and as dry as old bones. I think how autumnal it all looks, here in the middle of summer. And then I correct myself. It doesn’t look autumnal. Autumn has a beauty and a grace all its own. This is something else.

This heat is just killing plants and trees. It’s not leading them through their natural life cycles, not allowing them to live out their natural lives. As humans we are accustomed through long experience to these life cycles. We measure our own lives in cycles that mimic those of the natural world: the spring of our lives, the autumn of our lives. The thing we fear most is untimely death, which we refer to often as a death out of season.

My father died very young, just forty-two years old. At the funeral, my grandfather sat in the front pew and cried aloud that it should be him in that coffin, not his son. When he too died several weeks later, I didn’t feel like anything in the natural order had been set aright. Still, this is a common sentiment, and a poignant example of how we dislike when our lives do not synchronize with the seasons. Wartime is the most egregious time for our race, since it signifies an untimely end for so many young people. We glorify the sacrifice to cover the unnatural horror of it.

So no, things do not look autumnal around here. They look as dead as things beset by violent forces, like a wartime landscape. It’s a wonder people can keep their chins up, keep smiling, keep asking one another, ‘Can you believe this heat?’ and ‘Hot enough for ya?’ with a chuckle in their voice. It’s how we deal with it, the human communication that helps us handle almost anything life can throw at us.

Don’s weeping cherry tree is dead. His lawn is brown. I have not seen him out much lately: just once or twice, going for the mail then retreating back to the air-conditioned interior of his home. I wonder how he and his wife are taking this heat. I’d like to go over and say something to him, see how he feels. But I can’t imagine what I might say. The trees in my yard are still green, still hanging on.

Driving

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Driving, Fall, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Travel, Weather, Winter

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I recently returned from a Florida vacation. Nice time, even though Tropical Storm Debby threatened the Gulf Coast for the first few day we were there. We drove down and drove back, a total of over 24 hours driving–including a few wrong turns and detours.

Driving in summer is an interesting activity. I like to have windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. My wife despises windows down and wind blowing through the vehicle. I’ll admit it can be tiring after a while, but it still makes me feel, even at my age, like a kid setting off on some kind of adventure. Every bridge I cross feels like crossing into something, I don’t know what. I put on my sunglasses, face into the sun, and head south, or west.

I had a conversation (online) the other day with another blogger (Invisible Horse) about how one can experience nature, or the seasons, when one is surrounded by very little that is natural. Our lives are lived in air-conditioned homes, climate-controlled workplaces, heated and cooled theaters and stores and malls. We step outside only to hurry to something else inside. Sure, we can go on occasional vacations to the beach or to the mountains, but what we need is an awareness of nature in our day to day existence.

So I was thinking about driving, and how one of our most unnatural occupations can help us be in nature. This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Back in February, 1947, nature write Edwin Way Teale set out on a roadtrip from the Florida everglades, ending up some 17,000 miles later in Maine at the summer solstice. He wrote a book about this trip, North with the Spring, which was so well received that he went on to write a quartet of books, including Autumn Across America, Wandering through Winter, and Journey into Summer, each based on similar driving tours.

There are two interesting things to note about this: one is the fact that not so long ago a man writing about his experiences in nature could be a hugely popular bestselling author. The other is that Teale set out to experience nature while he drove, but his book was more about the places he stopped and explored along the way than about driving in and of itself. Today we’re always rushing somewhere: it’s not likely we will stop and climb out of the car because we see daffodils in bloom by the roadway. Most of us watch the signs that say Scenic Overlook zoom by unheeded. We blast through miles and miles of forest and prairie until a highway sign alerts us to the next upcoming convenience–more often than not a McDonald’s ‘restaurant.’

Of course driving in the different seasons offers us differing experiences: driving in winter can be treacherous, even though often it is associated with going someplace special for a holiday (over the river and through the woods); driving in summer typically calls for air-conditioning and special equipment, like windshield visors and steering wheel covers to keep down the heat, but it too is frequently necessitated by the need to get to special places–baseball games, swimming pools, picnics and barbecues. But these holidays and summer activities are all human conventions, so if driving to them is seasonally related, it is not strictly nature related.

One of the very few nature-related driving activities I know of is the autumn color tour, where we pile into our cars on a mid- to late-autumn weekend afternoon and head out to tree-lined backroads, just looking at the trees. This is nice, though with our urban environment and sprawling suburbs, we have to drive farther and farther to find the trees. It would be nice if there were other times of year that we got into the car just to go and see what nature was doing. But in the end, this is not what I’m talking about.

In driving, we do and we do not experience the world. A few years my family went to British Columbia to visit relatives. When people hear about this trip they are surprised that we didn’t fly. But I tell them driving is the only way. We traversed and climbed 5,000 miles through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and into the Canadian Rockies. We saw a lifetime’s worth of breathtaking vistas at the height of green summertime. But I have to admit we were in a hurry. We didn’t stop often. We didn’t feel the mountain air, smell the forest breezes: and this was a vacation.

It’s even worse on our day to day commutes. We find ourselves stuck in traffic, impatient, stressed, clutching at the phone to try and reach someone who cares that we might be late. We may be out in the world, this may be the only time today we will experience something aside from the inside of our home or the inside of our workplace, but are we experiencing anything but the inside of our car?

I must admit, I’m stuck on this one. I don’t know what to recommend. It’s facile to say, ‘stop once in a while and look at things along the way,’ or ‘roll down the windows and feel the wind in your hair.’ The first is dangerous, the second is unpleasant for a few reasons–one of them being that we don’t want wind to mess up our hair. Maybe it’s time to solicit suggestions: how can we make driving, which most of us do too much of, more of an activity for being in the seasons?