Manhattanhenge

Manhattanhenge is the name given to an event that occurs when the setting sun aligns with the east–west streets of the main street grid in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The term Manhattanhenge is a neologism from Stonehenge where the sun aligning with the ancient stones on the solstices is an famous event.

The New York event (also known as the Manhattan Solstice) occurs twice a year. The Manhattanhenge term was popularized in 2002 by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.

The event applies to those streets that follow a plan from 1811 which laid out the streets in a grid offset 29.0 degrees from true east–west. During Manhattanhenge, an observer on one of the gridded east-west streets will see the sun setting over New Jersey directly along the centerline of that street.

The dates of Manhattanhenge usually occur around May 28 and July 12 or July 13 being spaced evenly around the summer solstice. On two corresponding mornings, the sun rises on the center lines of the grid on (approximately) December 5 and January 8, spaced evenly around the winter solstice. As with the solstices and equinoxes, the dates vary somewhat from year to year.

This phenomenon occurs in other cities with a uniform street grid. The events would only coincide with the vernal and autumnal equinox only if the grid plan were laid out precisely north-south and east-west, and perfectly aligned with true north as opposed to magnetic north.

For North Americans who want to be Druids for a day, Baltimore comes fairly close, with its sunrises on March 25 and September 18 and sunsets on March 12 and September 29.

Chicago has the setting sun lining up with the grid system on September 25, a phenomenon known similarly as Chicagohenge.

Torontohenge has the setting sun lines up with the east–west streets on October 25 and February 16, and Montrealhenge occurs each year on July 12.

Daily Rituals

Ritual: noun – religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order;  Adjective of, relating to, or done as a religious or solemn rite.

And then there are those daily rituals we all perform that have no religious basis and might not even be what could be described as solemn.

Franz Kafka, frustrated with his job, his apartment and his life wrote in a letter that he “must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” He is one of the writers, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians that Mason Currey describes in his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

Currey started writing about these people and rituals on a blog and discovered that these artists did subtly maneuver obstacles (some of which they had created themselves) and created daily rituals to get their work done.

Some rituals are harmless, even healthy, like daily walks. But others cause some damage along with art.

Jean-Paul Sartre took Corydrane tablets (amphetamine and aspirin) at ten times the recommended dosage. But Descartes just stayed in bed and let his mind wander in and out of sleep.

A number of writers set themselves requirements. Anthony Trollope set the number at three thousand words in three hours before he went off to his day job at the postal service. That worked. He had the job for 33 years and in that time he wrote more than two dozen books. John Updike kept an office away from home so that he had to “go to work” and set a quota before he was allowed to go to lunch.

Mason Currey points out that many artists have strange work and sleep rituals. Frank Lloyd Wright spent his days doing the business side of his work but worked on his ideas and drawings between 4 and 7 am. “I go to sleep promptly when I go to bed. Then I wake up around 4 and can’t sleep,” he told a friend. “But my mind’s clear, so I get up and work for three or four hours. Then I go to bed for another nap.”

In fact, in reading Daily Rituals, about a third of the artists had a ritual of waking up early.

Of course, there were also those who worked at night and into the early morning hours . Painter Toulouse-Lautrec was one night owl who was out sketching at night in cabarets and Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Johnson, Flaubert, Proust and George Sand were ritual night writers.

Kafka started to work about 11 pm and worked for 3 or 4 hours and that ritual was about the same for Thomas Wolfe and is the same for Bob Dylan and Michael Chabon. These are not just some sleepless nights. Chabon says he writes from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m., five nights a week. It’s a job. It’s a ritual.

I find some hope that Currey’s book originally was a blog on the slate.com website and became a book.  The book still feels like a collection of posts with some bridging material between the tales. Sometimes two stories are linked but are studies in contrast rather than similar.

Still, there are some rituals that run through much of the book. For example, using stimulants is very common and, thankfully, coffee is the most common one. Daily Rituals is a good advertisement for caffeine (there are some tea drinkers in there too). Beethoven, Proust, Glenn Gould, Francis Bacon, Sartre and Mahler all drank lots of coffee to sharpen their focus and attention, beat sleepiness and power ideas.

Balzac wrote very grandly that “Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

Balzac was a binge writer working in (as described in one biography) in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure” powered by as many as 50 cups of coffee a day.

Yes, there are those who used drugs. And we all know at least one story of an artist who used a lot of alcohol. But Currey says that his research found that while many artists did drink a lot, very few mixed alcohol with their working hours.

Hemingway famously said, “Write drunk; edit sober,” because the booze made the writing come easier, but he couldn’t judge the work or edit unless he was sober. Get it on the page and clean it up later.

I have written here before that you shouldn’t need a cabin in the woods to write, but it’s a setting that leads to some writing rituals.

The composer Tchaikovsky rented a cottage in a small village away from Moscow after years of wandering Europe when he was 45. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.”

His walks – 45 minutes in the morning before working and another longer one after lunch – became absolutes to him regardless of the weather and the ritual aspect took hold. His brother wrote, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”

Composers really seem to like the walking. Beethoven walked after lunch with pencil and paper in his pocket, and Mahler did 3 or 4 hours of walking after lunch joined by his notebook and his wife.

One of my favorites – for his music and his odd life – is the French composer Erik Satie. Every morning he walked from his suburban home six miles to  Paris’ Montmartre district.

He visited friends, worked on his compositions in cafés, had  dinner, went drinking and, if he missed the last train home, he walked back again. He often went to bed at sunrise and only slept a few hours.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard got most of his best ideas during his daily walks, and would rush home and begin to write some days without even taking off his coat and while standing at his desk.

Are you a creative type? Then there is probably someone in the book who validates your own creative rituals.  Do you like a good nap? You have a good number of creative types who agree. Thomas Edison had a bed in his office for naps. Miró practiced a 5 minute post-lunch nap which he called “Mediterranean yoga.”

Writer Thomas Mann’s ritual was an hour-long nap at 4 pm.

I don’t know how caffeine-fueled Balzac pulled it off, but those “orgies of work” were broken up with a 90-minute nap.

Night owl Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had a nap after lunch and before he began painting.

Some insomniacs made up for sleepless nights with daytime naps. Franz Liszt tried to get in at least 2 hours in the afternoon, and Kafka planned for 4 hours in the late afternoon.

I’m not sure that I even consider some of these sleep breaks to be naps. Frank Lloyd Wright woke at 4 a.m., worked for three hours, then went back to bed for a “nap” even though he often took another short nap in the afternoon. He did nap on a thinly padded wooden bench or stone ledge because he believed that lack of comfort prevented him from oversleeping.

If you looking for the overall creative takeaway from all the stories of rituals, it might be this: get up early , make coffee, get to work and don’t quit until there are some results. Then have some lunch, go for a walk, take a nap and enjoy the other parts of your life.  If you are more nocturnal, you can follow the same rituals – just start at 11 pm instead of 7 am.

To Motherhood

You might guess that Mother’s Day is one of those holidays invented by greeting card companies and florists to send gifts. It certainly is promoted in those ways and generate a lot of sales. The gift-giving aspect is relatively new, but the celebrations of motherhood are more ancient.

You can credit Julia Ward Howe back in 1870 for our modern celebration of a day. Her intention was actually in that post-Civil War time to have a day for mothers could come together and protest their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

The “blame” for our more modern commercial celebration probably goes to Anna Jarvis whose own mother started Mother’s Friendship Days to reunite families separated during the war. After her death, Anna worked to have an official Mother’s Day. That first official Mother’s Day was on May 10, 1908, though it was only really celebrated in a few locations. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day.

Though I “blame” Anna for the modern incarnation of commercialized celebration, she was actually quite upset that florists and card sellers jumped on the day. Nevertheless, the commercialization continues. Anna Jarvis died in poverty and without ever becoming a mother herself.

In ancient times, motherhood, spring and fertility were all connected. Celebrations to honor Isis in ancient Egypt marked her as a loving mother-goddess. She is often shown in artwork breastfeeding Horus and that tradition continues on, perhaps most notably in the art of Mary and the baby Jesus in later Christian iconography.

In Turkey, there was the mother-goddess Cybele which carried over with variations to Greece and Rome – sometimes with more drinking, dancing, songs and debauchery than we might associate with motherhood.

As Christianity grew, the church took pagan celebrations and recast them for their own purposes. The fourth Sunday of Lent was set as a day to honor motherhood in the form of the Virgin Mary and the “mother church.” In the 1600s, England declared that day to be Mothering Day and workers were allowed a day off to visit their mothers, and the day was a one day exemption from the Lenten fasting, so that families could celebrate as a family.

The Pilgrims tried to clean up many holy days that had become holidays (secular) and did not celebrate Mothering Day. That held until the idea was revived as a non-religious holiday in the late 1800s.

 

They Have Been Waiting Seventeen Years

Photo: The Star-Ledger

It has been 17 years and now a new cohort of cicadas are ready to emerge again in Paradelle.

Why? We’re not quite sure – which is one reason I am intrigued by them.

I am reading now a book on phenology, which is the study of how we can observe seasonal change in plants and animals. I am also reading a book on the daily rituals of creative people. The two books are mixing in my brain in interesting ways.

Cicadas are chirping around in my head this month too, as are the migrating red knot birds that will be coming to New Jersey to feed on the horseshoe crab eggs as those ancient creatures perform their annual ritual that is connected to the moon and tides.

I like reading and thinking about these things that scientists haven’t quite figured out. I like wondering how those migrating birds or homing pigeons find their way.  Researchers say that it seems to have something to do with magnetic fields and maybe the sun or moon. But really, we’re not completely sure. And I like that there is still that mystery to it.

With cicadas, one theory is that the cycles were a mechanism to deal with a cooling climate during the ice ages that occurred over the past several million years. Another posits the cycles are a way of avoiding predators.

Most of you probably can recognize the male cicada’s choppy, chirp, summer mating call.  I was talking to a friend about this and she said, “How can it be a 17 year cycle when I hear and see them every year?”

Good question. These particular “periodical” cicadas are different from the annual cicadas that we hear every summer. Periodical cicadas might have been called “17-year locusts” or “13-year locusts” in your neighborhood. “Locust” always suggest some plague of insects, but cicadas are not true locusts (which are a type of grasshopper).

I am writing here about the species, Magicicada.  You can spot the adults by their black bodies and bright red eyes and orange wing veins. They have a black “W” near the tips of the forewings.

In New Jersey, we commonly have the Macicada Septendecim which, like our mosquitoes, are the largest in size and have orange bands on the abdomen.

That rather ugly mating call, which some people say sounds like they are saying “pharaoh,” can get on your nerves, but is very much a sound of the start of  summer to me since they appear mostly in May and June.  Right now, soil temperatures are still in the mid-50s across New Jersey and Rutgers University reports that the cicadas are expected around the time we head to the Jersey Shore – late May.  Soil down 8 inches warms slowly and cicadas won’t be fooled by a some 70 and 80 degrees days.

2013 is expected to be one of the largest broods recorded. That excites entomologists and probably repels most of the population. I don’t find cicadas lovely, but I do find these periodical ones to be fascinating. I am imagining them underground for 13 or 17 years waiting for some signal that it is time to emerge. We know that they won’t come out this year until the soil temperature about eight inches below the surface is a nice constant 64 degrees.

But why this year? Why wait 17 years?  We are just not sure.  There are exceptions. One swarm emerged in NJ four years ago ahead of this year’s due date. We don’t know why that happened either. Scientists didn’t get to study them because they were killed off by predators before researchers could study them. It just wasn’t their time.

After they emerge from that Rip van Winkle sleep, they go through a metamorphosis just a few hours later. They go from the flightless, slow-moving nymph stage into a large, flying insect.

They try to head for the sky before predators like dogs, cats, snakes, squirrels, deer, raccoons, mice, ants, and wasps get them. Once in the air, they still have to avoid birds.

They don’t need to worry too much about people, although some people do eat them. It is said that they have a taste that is sort of asparagus and nutty and best served when they molt and are still soft.

This post duplicates most of a post from another blog of mine called Endangered New Jersey – although periodical cicadas are not endangered  they are a rather rare occurrence.  If you want to be a citizen scientist, you can report cicada spottings at magicicada.org and your data will help map where and when the cicadas emerge this year.

Another interesting citizen scientist project comes from WNYC radio and the program Radiolab (which I wrote about earlier) who have created a place online to track cicada emergence in the northeast. If you are a DIY type, you might get into building the device they describe to predict their appearance in your backyard.  See the WNYC Cicada Tracker page.

Beltane

at the Edinburgh Fire Festival   http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/festival/edinburgh-beltane-fire-festival/

Beltane is an ancient Celtic festival which came into English from the Gaelic word bealltainn which literally means “May First.”

Traditionally large bonfires would be lit to celebrate this transition from spring to summer and the fertility of all things. Cattle were driven through the Beltane bonfires for purification and fertility.

The annual Beltane Fire Festival held in Edinburgh, Scotland is the prime modern example.

Today, the neo-pagan community, often associated with the art of fire dancing, have also embraced the Beltane festivities.

In Wales, Creiddylad was a character connected with this festival and often called the May Queen. The maypole and its dance is a remnant of these old festivities.

In Finland, May 1 was celebrated as Rowan Witch Day, a time of honoring the goddess Rauni, who was associated with the mouton ash or rowan tree. Twigs and branches of the rowan were, and still are, used as protection against evil in this part of the world.

May Day is another name often given to this day. That derives from the Greek goddess Maia, the most important of the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades) and the mother of Hermes. From her, we get the name of this month. The Romans called her Maius, goddess of Summer, and honored her during Ambarvalia.

May Day celebrations were continued by early European settlers to the American continent with May baskets filled with flowers or treats left secretly at someone’s doorstep. If the receiver catches the fleeing giver, a kiss is exchanged.

International Workers’ Day is also known as May Day and is a celebration of the international labor movement. May 1 is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many other countries.

May Day basket

 

Follow Your Bliss

Follow your bliss. That was the advice a few friends gave me the past months because I am “between opportunities” ( the term I was told is better than “between jobs” or “unemployed”).

Sounds good. Except I don’t know what bliss I am supposed to follow.

Where did this phrase come from?

It seems that we can credit Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) who was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer. His field was comparative mythology and religion.

In 1956, he made trips to India and Japan and returned feeling he had a mission to let Americans know about the world’s myths and cultures. He started writing his multi-volume The Masks of God. The book brought him much attention and he enhanced that by frequently speaking at colleges, churches, lecture halls, and appearing on radio and television.

He wasn’t the first person to come upon these topics. He drew upon the work of others who had influenced him like James Frazer (The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion), Adolf Bastian, and Otto Rank (The Myth of The Birth of The Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology).

In explaining his ideas on universal symbols and stories and their impact on people, he used the work of Sigmund Freud and even more so, Carl Jung.

I first encountered him through his book The Power of Myth which led me to other books like The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Strange things were contained in those books.

In my college literature classes, his monomyth, or hero’s journey, was taught as a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world, and I was assigned The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He took the term monomyth from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – which was a book that no one I knew had actually read but everyone talked about. It’s admirable that he wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork but it didn’t unlock the book for me.

I liked how the book showed the similarities between Eastern and Western religions, rather than pointing at the differences.

But certainly the phrase most identified with him and most often quoted (including on t-shirts, cups etc.) is “Follow your bliss.” It may also be the most misunderstood of his sayings.

He derived this idea from the Upanishads. The Upanishads are a collection of about 200 philosophical texts which form the theoretical basis for the Hindu religion. Orthodox Hindus believe they contain revealed truths about the nature of ultimate reality (brahman) and that they describe the character and form of human salvation.

Campbell said in  Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation  that he came to his understanding of bliss because in Sanskrit, the language of the Upanishads, he discovered three terms that are key to reaching the point of departure to transcendence. The three terms are Sat-Chit-Ananda. “Sat” means being, and “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture.

In his own honest self-evaluation, Campbell felt that though he wasn’t sure that his consciousness or being was the right for, he did know where his bliss was. He saw following that bliss as the path to finding his consciousness and being.

People picked up on the phrase as a kind of mantra or life path. They felt that Campbell was suggesting it as a way to guide each of us on our own hero journey.

But the simple phrase unwraps a more complicated riddle of how to follow your bliss. You will read that your bliss is a kind of path that has been waiting for you all along. The life that you should be living is the one you are living.

When Campbell began talking about this on campuses in the 1970s, it caught the mood of the times.

Shortly after Campbell’s death, The Power of Myth was aired in multiple installments on public television (1988) which brough about a revival of his writings.

Campbell was not happy that the phrase devolved into meaning a kind of do-what-you-will hedonism.

One pop culture figure who readily admitted being under Campbell’s influence is George Lucas who credits Campbell’s writing for much of the “mythology” of the Star Wars universe.

His did interviews with and about Campbell’s influence and says that  The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works were a guide for the story of Luke Skywalker. (See the Campbell biography, A Fire in the Mind)

Lucas met Campbell after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy. The Power of Myth documentary was filmed at Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch with interviews by Bill Moyers.

Campbell was very complimentary about the films saying that the trilogy (Episodes IV, V, and VI) were a reinvention of the mythology and hero journey for contemporary viewers.

Subsequent filmmakers have also acknowledged the influence of Campbell in films such series as The Matrix, Batman and Indiana Jones.

Which brings me in my journey in trying to find my bliss. I also had two friends who separately told me that they didn’t think I would find the next part of my journey but that it (work, rapture, bliss, vocation, passion?) would find me.

Maybe it’s more 1970s hedonism, but I’m coming to believe that.  And I am thinking that my life’s challenges, fears, dragons and battles, have brought me to a place where I am just about ready to return home as a changed person.

More information at Joseph Campbell Foundation

Green Creativity

Stuck in a creative rut? The best way out of it might be to get unplugged and out in the green of nature.

A study in the journal PLOS One  seems to indicate that spending four nature-filled days, away from electronic devices, is linked with 50 percent higher scores on a test for creativity.

Research seems to show a connection between green and psychological functioning, particularly in the area of creativity. In experiments, a brief glimpse of green prior to a creativity task enhanced creative performance. This “green effect” was observed with subjects that did not know the purpose of the experiment. Half  the group was shown a white rectangle instead of the green one and  those who saw green before the test came up with the more interesting, imaginative answers.

What causes the green effect, and why green?  The German researchers believe it may be that green is a signal of growth (both physical and psychological and that it might serve as a cue that evokes the creativity.

Other studies show that taking a hike in nature that was electronics-free and lasted from four to six days also scored higher on a creativity test.

Was it because they were in nature or because we were unplugged from the electronic devices?  Maybe both, but green seems to be the common connection.

I can’t vouch for the research, but I am very willing to give it my own experimentation. The green similar to a pine tree is the shade that was used in the experiment.  Science that tells me to interact with the natural world and get away from this computer screen is good science.

The Seed Moon of May

One Medieval name for tonight’s Full Moon was the Seed Moon. It’s a name that I find fitting since I have been starting seeds indoors for the past six weeks and it looks like the last frost occurred in Paradelle and some seeds can go into the ground. I wrote on another blog about a site that helps you determine when to plant seeds in your area. Of course, in earlier times when the naming of the full moons was closely linked to event in nature, planting was based on signs from nature and the heavens.

Tracking signs of the seasonal changes has been done for thousands of years. We call it phenology and I’ll write more about it in a future post. It is the study of seasonal change as reflected in plant and animal life. It is a natural science and a good pursuit for the citizen scientist.

I was taught as a child that when dandelions were in bloom, it was time to plant potatoes. We planted peas in our Garden State garden on Saint Patrick’s Day if the soil wasn’t cold or muddy, and if it was was, we waited for the first blooms of forsythia.

I’ve been doing my old phenology for about 25 years in a journal and one thing it shows is that blooms vary quite a bit over the years. Although many people are reporting budding occurring earlier the past decade and that is tied in people’s’ minds to climate change, in fact, dates vary year to year and from area to area. I live in a valley between two mountain ranges and our little microclimate tends to be a week or two behind homes that are just a half mile away.

The  Full Moons were generally the indicators for when to plant, but the fine tuning of those dates came from watching the buds of other plants and trees and insect and animal activity.

A Celtic name for this moon was the Growing Moon and in the Chinese moon sequence, this is the Peony Moon.

The Roman festival of Cerealia this month celebrated the grains goddess Ceres, which is where we get our “cereal”  name. This was the time for planting grain.

Moon and planting folklore cross paths when you decide that the time to plant root crops (carrots, radishes etc.) is during the days between the waning moon that comes after the full moon and the new moon. That means that your above-ground crops should be planted during the waxing moon phase so named because the moon “thickens”  like the wax drippings of a candle. Of course, no one would plant if there was still a chance of a frost above ground, but from the new moon until the next full moon would be the planting time according to moon planting.  This year that would be May 9 -29 and that’s the right time for my neighborhood.

If it all sounds like “old wives tales” then the  science of the past would have said that the moon not only pulls on the tides but also on all  things that contain water – including our blood and the water in plants and seeds. That’s what will make those tomatoes reach for the moon during the waxing phase, and those carrots push deeper away from the moon during its waning phase.

The Dakotah Sioux called this the Moon When Geese Return in Scattered Formation. The Choctaw called this the Wildcat Moon. The Cherokee called this the Flower Moon (Kawoni).

For Native Americans, this time of first plants was a time of new births, and new medicine from fresh plants.

The April Moon is also called the Chaste Moon, Growing Moon, Hare Moon, Maiden Moon, Grass Moon, Rain Moon, Growing Moon, Wind Moon, Seed Moon, Budding Trees Moon, Eastermonath (Eoster Month), Ostarmanoth, and Green Grass Moon.