Reading in a Chinese Garden

Last month Kathy and I visited the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon.  It's the type of garden that one of the high officials of the Ming Dynasty might have built for himself in some remote city to remind him of the splendor of Peking.  We arrived just in time to join the one o'clock guided tour for a small group of people numbering no more than ten.

Our guide began with an imaginary orientation of where this garden might have been sited in a crowded Chinese city.  She pointed out the high walls, for privacy, and let us know that the decorative openings in the walls were not authentic.  They were necessary because of the Portland building codes.

She began to talk about ancient China, and the stages of examinations that a scholar had to pass in order to become a high court official.  Immediately she reached into a blue tote bag and withdrew a map of China.  This would be a reference point as she spoke of the geography, the distances, and the differences in population.

As we moved from one stopping point to another, the guide discussed the variety of plant forms in the garden and the symbolic importance of fish in the water.  "You may wonder why you might see a whole fish on a platter at a Chinese festivity," she said.  "Why don't they remove the head and tail before serving it?"  We all waited a few seconds before she said, "It's because the fish represents abundance, or the wish for abundance, and the head and tail symbolize the entirety of life."

We entered a variety of rooms around the garden and heard about what they symbolized to the owner and to his visitors.  One room had a small library and a writing desk with inks and brushes, the trappings of beautiful thoughts, beautiful writing, and beautiful images.

At last we came to a set of carved wooden panels.  Our guide pointed out the theme of the carvings and the presence of poems there.

And then, to end the tour, we all had a special treat.  She reached into her tote bag and withdrew a book of Chinese poems and their English translations and she asked for two volunteers to read to the group.  I thought immediately of so many museums back in Missouri, places where I had seen a Civil War loyalty oath, a telegram from General Alexander Doniphan to the Governor of Missouri in 1838 in which he refuses to carry out an order to execute Joseph Smith and a party of Mormons.  I thought of the journals and stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the stories of Mark Twain, the letters of Harry Truman, Eugene Field.  I thought of the recollections of former slaves, the diaries of German immigrants, the letters of soldiers to their parents in time of war.

There are so many opportunities to use a map or to engage visitors in reading the primary sources of history.  I saw the magic of props like that in Portland.

"Design Intelligence" and Its Enemy

A couple of years ago I visited the Sikeston Depot Cultural Center and admired the tastefulness of the exhibits in the small space that was available. I think it is true that most of us sense the features of any space we enter. Some of us sense in more detail than others, and some of us can verbalize what we sense more readily.

Probably the first thing we sense is cleanliness and the qualities of color and light, unless an ordor grabs our attention! (I won't go near scented candle shops. A museum friend is especially sensitive to mold that I can't detect. On the other hand, I like the aroma of fresh-baked bread or a good beef stew.)

In the picture above we see "design intelligence" at work in a small area that tells the story of cotton production. The lighting is beautiful. Three-dimensional objects shape the space we enter and draw us toward the two-dimensional pictures and text panels. The objects defeat what would otherwise be a "tyranny" of right angles. If the room is a box, and the pictures and text panels are flattened boxes, you have to introduce curves as well as "empty space" like the space in the branches of the cotton plant and between the legs of the table. Think of curves and empty space as the "freedom fighters" in your displays.

I see design intelligence almost everywhere I go. You don't need formal training to do a good job in a local museum. You just need a sense of cleanliness, light, space, variety, and narrative.

Here's an exceptional example by a volunteer at the Katy Depot in Sedalia.

Everything in that small case is placed to perfection. Everything contributes interest.

The Enemy of design intelligence is not a person but a feeling that impels you to add something to an excellent display because you happened to acquire it after the display was perfect. A voice inside you says something like "What's wrong with displaying another treasure?" It may also say, "If someone donates something, I have an obligation to display it immediately!" As you listen to that voice, see if you can hear the camel's backbone break. It only takes one additional thing to destroy the perfection of a sentence, a meal, or a display.

I write this in a mild sense of mourning for the museums that once had fine examples of design intelligence and ruined what they had by filling up the space with more and more "stuff." There are times, when writing a sentence or a paragraph, that the new word that comes to mind is a destroyer of what's already there. It's best to dismantle the whole thing and start over.

That's true of museum displays, too. Nothing good happens when you keep adding and adding. You don't make "bad" any better, and you quickly degrade "good." The mission is not to display things, anyway, no matter what the mission statement says. The mission is to stimulate (not numb) the intelligence of a visitor. The unique power of design intelligence is that it invites discovery and learning. The enemy of design intelligence creates only a desire to flee.

This cold season is an opportunity to look around the museum and find an area where you can take everything out and start over again. Go ahead. You have eight weeks, maybe ten. Give yourself an empty space, clean it up first, and then create a learning opportunity in that space. Create something different that suggests an idea. Juxtapose items that have never had a chance to inhabit the same space and see what happens. Play around with combinations for four or five of your eight weeks and then polish up what works best in the final three. And then invite me over!

Round Barn, Morrisville, Vermont (1980)

From 1975 until 1995 I drove the back roads of Vermont, very often with my camera. I adored my adopted landscape, of course. In the fall of 1977, San and I moved to a big new house on the edge of the village of Hyde Park, about 30 miles south of Canada and an easy 2-hour drive from Montreal. We were ten miles north of the year-round resort town of Stowe, an hour's drive northeast of Burlington and the view of Lake Champlain, and about 45 minutes in good weather from Montpelier, the state capital and home of quite a nice book store and a natural foods market that sold the home-made bread of a local humanist baker, Jules Rabin. Just east of Hyde Park lay the town of Morrisville, and just outside of town, on the road to Lake Elmore and then onward to the back entrance to Montpelier, sat this round yellow barn.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boumanm/4205141150/sizes/l/

Just beyond the barn was a small country home of a woodworker whose business was named The Wood Nebbish. The word nebbish, I have just discerned, means a "pitifully ineffectual, luckless, and timid person." Until the age of 13, I hadn't heard any Yiddish expressions, having been raised Lutheran and schooled with Lutherans.

I am not moving toward endorsements of any particular religious theme here. This passage is about how the notion of religion was formed in me as a cultural idea rather than a theological one. My father, the architect, recounted a fateful letter home from boarding school at the age of 15, when he informed his father, minister of the Lutheran church in the small German-speaking town of Hamburg, Minnesota, that he was not going to become a church minister, musician, or teacher like his 9 siblings. This declaration was not a separation from his church. Church-going was at the core of his way of life. It was the same way with Mom, who had been raised in the Catholic church and had become a Lutheran before she met Dad.

Dad and Mom were different kinds of Lutherans, but neither was given to discussion of religion. For them, a code of beliefs was a fixed point in life, an anchor. It was in a Lutheran Sunday School that I had a transformative experience that gave status to questioning and opened the door to interpretation. So I became a third kind of Lutheran, more in league with my cousin, Walt Bouman, one of several theologians in the family. I became the kind of Lutheran who could inquire into other religions, stop attending church, and one day welcome a marriage ceremony conducted by a Buddhist priest who lived in a monastery in Jemez, New Mexico. I, too, am anchored by a system of beliefs. I, too, have something one might call a theology, or a cosmology. What I might call it doesn't matter to me. That I have it at all is what links me to my parents' cosmology and to yours, Reader.

A propos of the Christmas season, I discovered the fervor of Dad's convictions when I was in 7th grade and said I wanted the Elvis Christmas Album for Christmas. I might just as well have proposed that he give me an encyclopedia of satanic practices. He exploded in rage. There is no better way to say it. He didn't break up the house or batter me. Remaining in his easy chair, he simply "went balistic" as we would learn to say a decade later. He didn't use the term "blasphemy," though it applies to his reaction.

I did acquire that LP record, though not through any act of his! He did not seize it, ruin it, confiscate the record player, or prevent my memorizing its satanic verses. To this day I do a fair imitation of Elvis's "Blue Christmas," if you're not paying much attention and have other things on your mind.

This began with "nebbish" and the exoticism of Yiddish expressions. In junior high school they buzzed around me left and right. My 9th grade girlfriend, Arlene, liked the word "meshugganah" (crazy). I never asked her to translate it and I never used it myself. I sensed these terms were "cultural property." The absurdity of violating those cultural boundaries is one of the jokes in the movie, "A Mighty Wind." Another word I heard a lot and never understood until just now was, "schlemiel," meaning a habitual bungler.

Last Saturday Kathy and I watched the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. It was a fabulously theatrical experience, true Grand opera, and one peripheral character in the third tale is named Schlemil. Nothing about his deportment suggested he was a bungler, though.

Well, enough reminiscing about how we form ideas about ourselves and others.

My photo of the round barn is the first of a series of desktop wallpaper images I'm going to post to my Flickr site for any and all to enjoy. I'm using the round barn this week as my desktop image.

Once I started growing daylilies, farm fields like that always caught my eye as potential daylily farms run by me. I imagined acres and acres of vibrant color and I went on like that for several years before it dawned on me that someone was going to have to do a tremendous amount of digging, washing, dividing, and weeding. I didn't have to ponder the scale of that labor very long before I scaled back my dream to a scope that I could possibly manage if everything went well for me and I developed the strength of Hercules.

My heart goes out to those who have lost their mothers recently. My mom died peacefully, slipped away during a surge of misplaced optimism about her imminent release from the hospital after her final COPD episode. Mom only had to endure 9 months in the nursing home. It may have seemed like an eternity to her. Until the big hurricane in 2004, Mom had been able to live independently, in a manner of speaking, with very limited eyesight and intensive visitation by my sister and brother-in-law. The stress of the hurricane or simple progression of her disease made it untenable for her to live without continuous monitoring. On Sunday evenings before her transfer to the nursing home she and I had weekly chats. I remember the sound of her voice on the other end of the line as if we just spoke last night. She had an earthy sense of humor, having been raised on a farm in New Jersey, and it served her well when there was nothing to do about various indignities except extract a laugh with a play on words. Her response to word play led me to name my big, raspberry 2010 daylily MOM'S MIRTH. The flowers are as colorful and big as her sense of humor.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boumanm/1582918607/in/set-72157602146585261/

San, too, had a laugh the night before the life ebbed out of her. I recall her last days as if I just helped her through them. My daily life seems nested in memories like those Russian wooden dolls-within-dolls. When Kathy recounted her day for me yesterday I was sure I discerned the 10-year-old who carries a bubble of joy up through the layers of memory to the adult Kathy I married in July.

The turn of another year approaches; the light of days lengthens again; our sorrows and joys disperse and blend within us and like geraniums in the window we lean toward the light.

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Imagination of Boundless Fertility

This time of year, I imagine more people are studying the music of Handel's Messiah than are listening to the 2009 remastered recordings of The Beatles. I sure am. I'm getting ready for one of the great musical treats of my life -- singing 18th century music under the direction of Nicholas McGegan. He's leading the St. Louis Symphony and Chorus in Messiah on December 11-12-13. Hot Diggety Dog is all I can say about that!

I’m completing a year of listening to 5-star recordings of Handel operas. I play them on my car stereo during many long drives through Missouri. I also play them during short drives. I play them in drives of all lengths and never use the radio.

One might think that all these arias, overtures, and tempests would be indistinguishable after a month or so. They are no more indistinguishable than 500 grandchildren would be to the doting grandparent. Each one bears the stamp of creative spark. Even the ones that have been borrowed from another opera and reworked slightly delight me none the less.

What enchants me is the play of three imaginations – Handel’s, the conductor’s, and the singer’s. Most of the pieces in Handel’s opera were written as vehicles for international stars. He had to write music that would show off the distinctive gifts of each star in his opera company. Handel’s audience, too, expected ever-new productions with ever-new music to show off some of the best singers in Europe.

Modern conductors approach Handel as a master of theatrical and dramatic effects. They sense the way that a dramatic impression can be rendered through a manner of increasing the energy of the bow on the violin or cello. They imagine themselves as Handel himself, urging his orchestra to play one aria in a different character from another, to suit the dramatic moment more closely than the musical notation by itself could indicate.

I am replaying a 2008 recording of Riccardo Primo in my car and on my office computer because I realized that it will be impossible to make a “highlights” playlist of this opera for Kathy. Almost every aria is a highlight. Paul Goodwin conducts the Kammerorchester Basel. The countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo, sings the role of Richard, the Lion-Hearted. Soprano Nuria Rial sings the part of his fiancé, Costanza. Soprano Geraldine McGreevy sings Pulcheria, daughter of the Cyprian ruler, Isacio.

It’s too bad that you can’t buy MP3 samples of this opera from iTunes or Amazon. Some of it has been posted on YouTube, though, and you can listen to a few samples of what modern Handel performances sound like.

Here is Riccardo’s Act I aria about his stormy shipwreck on Cyprus, “Agitato da fiere tempeste.”

That gives you a good idea of what expert "divisions" sound like nowadays. The same artist conjures with gorgeous tone in Riccardo’s Act II aria, “Nube che il sole adombra.”

Just a few minutes later, Riccardo and Costanza sing a ten-minute duet that makes time, and Act II, come to a stop. Here’s a performance of “T’amo, si” from a 1996 recording of the opera, with Sandrine Piau and Sara Mingardo:

Here’s the Catalan soprano, Nuria Rial (Costanza), celebrating her good fate in the Act III aria, “Il volo cosi fido” from the 2008 Paul Goodman recording.

It’s nice to see the actual singer after all these pseudo-videos, so here is Lawrence Zazza singing Coronato il crin d'alloro from a 2004 Paris production of Aggripina Ottone.

And here is Nuria Rial, singing Belinda’s first song from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

"So What? Who Cares?"

The question, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
The question is blowin’ in the wind.

The winds of change are blowing across our continent. The winds are not named Mariah this time; they are named for Baby Boomers like me and my juniors. The 1945 calendar on the wallpaper of the Schowengerdt House in Warrenton marks the beginning of "my era" on the earth. "My stuff" from childhood is in museum displays now. I'm about to be a voice from the past. My theme is a phrase from a song that Bob Dylan wrote about twelve years ago:

Walking through the leaves falling from the trees,

Feeling like a stranger nobody sees.

There is no clear demarcation between my parents’ generation and mine. The border between generations is broad and blurred. When I retire next year I won’t be on the cutting edge of the Boomers; I’ll be behind it by a couple of years. The trailing edge of “The Silent Generation” overlaps my generation. I’m made up of both. If you’re in your fifties, you’re solid Boomer.

This national wind of change will last about 15 years. People over 50 are part of it. “Empty Nesters” are past midlife now and they are reorganizing their stance in the world for greater meaning. They are entering nonprofit life with technical know-how and with attitudes about learning that represent a big step forward for museums and libraries. They want to make a difference as never before.

To give a few examples, my late wife and I were in our 50s when we made a three-year pledge to the capital campaign of our church. We were also in our 50s when we made our first thousand-dollar gift to a nonprofit other than our church.

Our involvement in the capital campaign surprised both of us. We were at dinner with two friends who had agreed to spearhead the campaign. They were not soliciting us over dinner; we were just discussing how the campaign would be broken down into levels of workers. I volunteered to be one of the workers who would solicit a set number of other parishioners. Then I started thinking in terms of what would be possible if I selected a number representing “spare cash” in the weekly flow of money through our checkbook. I picked $20 and multiplied it out over three years. I said, “Do you realize that a commitment to allocate an extra $20 a week to this cause would enable us to make a pledge of $3,000 over the three-year campaign?” Our friends were amazed at the magic of breaking down a big challenge into something doable on a weekly basis. We pledged that amount on the spot.

My point is that we had financial means in our fifties that we didn’t have before then, and we wanted to use those means for the benefit of organizations that meant the most to us. During the same period in my life I became more actively involved in developing a curriculum for a horticultural organization to which I belong, and I served as President of my garden club and as a board member of a national association of state humanities councils.

The youngest Boomers are in their fifties now, and the eldest will retire this year and next. They constitute a wind of change in the nonprofits in town. The question that’s blowing in the wind is the one we ask of the institutions our parents set up: So what? Who cares?

In the museum and library fields there is a natural tendency to think about the stewardship of objects or environments. We want to create clean, well-lit, “inviting” spaces for the public. We want to provide “access” to information of all kinds.

Ten years ago when I said to a group of library people that I supposed the inherent mission of a library was to nurture “better readers,” they recoiled. They wanted nothing to do with helping people appreciate good writing. That couldn’t be considered part of a library’s mission.

Seven years ago I said to a group of museum supporters, “How do you imagine you will use the new space you think you need to succeed? If you had twice the space, would the museum be twice as boring?” Of course, when people start to imagine a lot more space, a lot of the space is empty, so people can move around better and have a better experience. I suggested they create the space they dream about by subtracting display cases and objects in the current square footage. Pull your vision of a better future into your present; don’t wait for it. This was the beginning of my conversion to visitor-centered thinking.

Visitor-centered thinking goes well beyond creature comforts like clean carpets and a quiet, well-lit room. Those are helpful, to be sure, but they are not in the realm of “So what? Who cares?” Visitor-centered thinking is concerned with engaging and nurturing the intelligence of the visitor. That is the only source of an answer to “So what? Who cares?” That is the beating heart of an educational mission.

I see failures of stewardship everywhere I go. The maintenance problems of museums and historic homes are often crushing. People base appeals on what they suppose to be the inherent importance of the institution. Unfortunately, the mere existence of an institution does not provide an answer to “So what? Who cares?” The institution has to provide an active benefit to the population.

There is hope in that proposition. It is possible to become a community’s engine of learning even while the wallpaper peels off and the place needs better climate control. In fact, it is necessary to be an engine of learning in order to persuade the public that the institution deserves support. The most noteworthy failure of stewardship I see is the failure to stimulate the intelligence of the population. This is a failure that can be reversed much more easily than mold in the basement.

I see huge educational potential everywhere I go. Last week in Warren County I visited the historical society and led a discussion exercise in which each trustee and volunteer was asked to tell one personal story of a connection to the county’s history. Two of the trustees spoke of personal research projects using primary documents in the collection. I encouraged them to share their passion for these materials with visitors. The person telling the story of research has to be regarded these days as “part of the collection” and “part of the display.”

Two others recounted memories of growing up just after World War II. These were “Boomer” stories, but they seemed to emerge from a time warp. The town of Warrenton had been electrified in the 19th century, but one museum trustee grew up in a rural home with kerosene lanterns. Another trustee remembered that when her father expected the water in a local creek to rise, he would park his car on the opposite bank. If he needed to drive somewhere, he would disrobe at the creek, wade across with his clothes held high, and dress on the other side.

As we sat around the table comparing those memories – Boomer memories, all of them – we began to imagine that one theme of that county museum has to be about “Town and Country.” The gap between Town and Country closed in our remembered past, and “country life” became so easy that Warren County attracted new people.

The most important assets of a museum or library are the people who engage the visitor’s intelligence and help it grow. A library that does not care about more and better "reading experiences" is not in a position to answer the question that is blowing in the wind. Why should a library be less interested in promoting that than Border’s or Barnes and Noble? If you look carefully at what retailers are doing these days, you’ll see more and more “staff recommendations.” I see them on the bulletin board at Whole Foods Market, too. Retailers are “personalizing” the experience, giving big places a human face and personality. I see this as part of the new, questioning wind.

You can catch this wind. It can fill the sail of your little boat. “So what, who cares?” demands the energy of motion. It’s up to you to make that motion refreshing, not just another blast of hot air.

Grandfather of Eight

"They all got married and they didn't hesitate,

I was, whoo!, Oh, Lord, the grandfather of eight."

I am called toward retirement.

With the beginning of another school year, this lifelong teacher is feeling the rush of possibility. Every year since I began Kindergarten I have felt a surge of positive energy at the end of the Summer. That energy was intense last year. I was bursting out of the cloud of grief over San’s death in June. This year I feel it and savor it as one savors the last sip of a good bottle of wine, because this year is my last as the leader of the Missouri Humanities Council. Each opportunity to shed light, to liberate creative energy, feels like a chance to pitch for a World Series win or to write a line as good as “Fourscore and seven years ago.”

I will retire on May 15. I am not leaving because the work has grown predictable. To the contrary, in the work of discovery, nothing is predictable, nothing is done by formula. It is all done by meeting people who want to be effective, who want to work their way out of knots and pockets of discouragement, and by thinking with them about “what if?” This work is done by learning about this or that town, or this or that subject, or this or that challenge, and seeing what can be done that is uplifting, constructive of human intelligence, and constructive of relationships.

I am “called” to my retirement as I was called to music, to writing, and to teaching. I am called to create what I hope will be a happy closing section in the story of my life. San felt that death cheated her out of sharing this part of life with me. We had been thinking of how and where we might spend it, and then we were suddenly focused on negotiating for the best quality that could be wrestled away from a quickening shortage of time.

In one sense, I owe it to San to live that wished-for final chapter, and I owe that chapter to Kathy, who married me in July. Before she died, San blessed me, and whoever would become my next love and marriage. Kathy and I feel as if our departed spouses nudged us toward each other. We belong together. Our life honors the lives of Tom Wofford and Sandra Bouman, and their parents and grandparents all the way back to Adam and Eve.

I think of retirement as a lived blessing. One of life’s miracles or graces is that an imagined good is instantly transported from the future to the present, so that it is spilled liberally on our path, a libation of goodness.

My cup of goodness includes eight grandchildren. The baby girl in the picture is my youngest, Arianah Wofford. This time last year, thanks to my daughter Jennifer's marriage in 2006 to Jared Steagall, I had two teenage grandchildren. Now Kathy has brought six younger ones into our big family. Until last month, when I met Arianah and her three siblings, I had not actually held and entertained a baby in thirty-six years! It was as if no time had passed. I am called to be a grandfather! Visiting my big family is now a calling.

In my new chapter, I imagine I will join the Y, and that I will volunteer in some form of teaching capacity. I would love to be a tour guide in a fine art museum, for instance. I would love to conduct a workshop on collage and Cubism in which the song lyrics of Bob Dylan were part of the mix. I would love to lead book discussions. I would love to write a form of music criticism that I haven’t seen much of since I last wrote a bit of it 35 years ago. I think the music critic has a social function to fulfill and that the function is to expand the intelligence of the reader.

Naturally, I will sing as long as I can with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus. I will take Kathy to the opera, here, in New York, in Santa Fe, and who knows where else? She and I will develop our gardens and I will breed daylilies in the summer and dream about their beauties the rest of the time. If you want to see some of mine, just Google for Daylily Lay, and sing that name, don't just speak it.

Retirement is eight months away now. Until then, I'm going to have the time of my life in this work I love so well.

Marital Haiku #1

Your eyes enchant me

And your voice is beautiful.

So, what did you say?