The Danes are known for their love of Christmas, the season of light, and no wonder when light is in short supply. The pagans knew something important: celebrate what you don't have!
What are the signs of the season here in the land of Gorm?
Candles: At the grocery store there are huge displays of candles...there are always lots of candles, but now there are even more, especially white and red ones and advent candles. Candles burn in windows, on tables, and in classrooms. I walked past a nursery school the other day and noticed, on a counter, a candle lit and glowing. Otto says a candle burns every day in his classroom, and has since December 1. There are not many big displays of lights on houses and trees, even downtown is less lit up than Atlantic Avenue in Morris, but when you walk around at night you can see in every house there are candles lit.
Chocolate: This is the season of chocolate and Arne has a theory: to make up for low levels of sunlight Danes turn to the drug of chocolate. Next to the huge displays of candles are huge displays of chocolate. People in Arne's division at Risø told him, on December 1, that he needed to bring a wrapped present and that it should be chocolate. Every day at morning coffee they draw a name from a hat and the named person gets to pick one of the presents. It's chocolate! So they open the box of goodies and by afternoon coffee all the chocolate is gone. Merry Christmas!
Gløgg and æbleskiver: Mulled wine and spherical pancakes a little smaller than tennis balls are now on the menu of every cafe and restaurant, in stalls at Christmas markets, and anywhere else people gather. You can buy frozen æbleskiver in big bags if you're not up for making your own. And in displays beside the chocolate you can find a huge variety of gløgg in bottles and cartons.
Pebbernodder (pronounced pew-uh new-uh or something like that--it's the same dark sense of pronounciation humor that makes Natchitoches sound like nackotish) and brunkage (brown cakes, but not at all like cakes, instead very thin crunchy spicy cookies) are the traditional cookies. An entire wall, just behind the candles and chocolate is devoted to bags, boxes, and cartons of these cookies.
Pine: Trees of course.
The big one on
the main plaza in Copenhagen features 800 lights and lots of
traditional red & white paper woven hearts. And just yesterday I
discovered that the Danes cover graves with pine boughs...they're
arranged beautifully to cover the gravesite, like a resiny blanket.
(Here's the tree, and in a weird moment of cultural dissonance there's a small Native American band playing in the foreground.)
There are a few things that are noticeably different here: no Santas with bells standing in doorways (here everyone participates, through taxes, in taking care of the less fortunate), as I said no big light displays--ostentation is not the Danish way, nor is excessive use of electricity, no Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer played loudly in every public venue, no blow-up dolls of Santa or a Snowman, and I have not yet seen a single Santa renting out his red-clad lap to families for photographs of toddlers wishing for Wiis or cell phones.
Glædelig Jul!
Yesterday we had blue skies and sunshine...unheard of! So I indulged in
anxiously-awaited second installment of "Thar He Blows", here are a few
pictures from our new neighborhood.
There is nothing fancy about our house; in fact, there are many like
it in little developments everywhere we've been. Just beyond the car,
under the roof of the car port, is a table and chairs. Come April, the
herring will be swimming in
the aquavit outdoors!
If you are standing in the photo above just where I was, and then you turn
to your right, you'll be looking at this ancient burial mound (okay, this program
is not cooperating, the photograph is below). You don't often
see the stones of the mound exposed as they are here, which leads us to
think that this mound has been excavated.
The little meadow around the mound is not lighted, so it's pretty fantastic
to stand out there under a fat moon and call up the ancestors. Gorm!
That's Otto on top.
From the meadow we walk a few blocks to the local grocery store,
cutting through an old farmhouse.
In front of that farmhouse is a nice sculpture.
sister.
Last photo...behind our house you can get to a path that eventually leads to
this nice view of Roskilde Fjord.
Arne and I sat down for what will be the first of two interviews. He was looking especially suave in a button down cotton shirt under a stylish heavy black cotton smock, blue jeans, and well-heeled maroon slippers. He'd been reading The Poisonwood Bible, a book about a man who takes his family to a foreign country where nothing goes as they thought it would. Hmmm...
Risø (prounounced hreee' sthzhjdooou) is just north of Roskilde on the fjord and Arne has been biking there, a ride of about 20 minutes, until yesterday when a cold fast wind came out of the north like a Viking raider. He drove our French car instead.
Q Can you say something about the history of Risø?
A Risø was started as Denmark's nuclear energy research facility for peace time uses of nuclear power. They had a small nuclear reactor here that was decomissioned some time about 1970. The first director was Niels Bohr. They decided that that wasn't going to work and they've been branching out into all sorts of renewable energy research since the '70s.
Q Describe Risø, please.
A It's remote, by design, a secretive location with controlled access. It's on a peninsula that goes out into Roskilde Fjord. There's a gated controlled entrance. Inside there are 15 or 20 different buildings, in addition to the old reactor itself. Risø is broken up into departments studying wind energy, material science (looking at different kinds of matter and the ways it can be deployed--anything from figuring out what sorts of polymers to use in a wind turbine blade to hmm...I guess I just don't know!), systems analysis, and bio systems energy (studying various kinds of biomass and research into different kinds of crops and ways of harvesting the energy from them). The oldest buildings date from the late '40s or early '50s. There is a modern conference facility that may have been built in the '80s or '90s.
Q And there are buildings outside the gated part...
A They have guest housing and a visitor's center, houses and an apartment block. The housing goes mainly to foreigners who are here on contracts and are not yet integrated into Danish society. Apartments are for graduate students and post docs who are often here as singletons and don't want to mess with the Danish real estate market.
Q How many people are there at Risø?
A 400-500.
Q What would you say is the standing of Risø in the renewable energy research community?
A That's a big community! Their wind energy division is first rate. These guys are internationally renowned for the work they do. In materials science, there are technical universities everywhere you go and so there is a lot of really good science going on. Risø is one of those, on the caliber of Cal Tech or Georgia Tech or an institute of technology in Germany. They are all justly famous for the work they are doing. They are not unique at Risø, but they are one of many important research facilities.
Q How did you first hear about Risø?
A When I was in Mexico, only after six weeks, I got an invitation to travel to Risø with a delegation of Mexicans in the energy industry. My contact at the World Bank screwed up the paperwork and less than 24 hours before we were supposed to leave my name got pulled from the list. So I've been interested and have followed them from afar ever since then. Then when I got to Minnesota and got wound up on the issues of renewable electricity, I started looking for other people doing related research and I came across a few people from Risø who were doing related things to what I was thinking about.
Q In which branch at to Risø are you working?
A Energy systems analysis.
Q How many people are in the branch?
A Probably 20 people with 12-14 full-time professionals and then a handful of graduate students, post docs and visiting researchers like myself. People come and go, so it's changing.
Q What sorts of things are they working on?
A For example, there are a couple of guys working with linear programming models of the electricity industry for all of the Nordic countries as well as Germany and Poland. They are trying to figure out a whole related bunch of questions. Among them: as you incorporate greater and greater percentages of wind into the grid, what consequences does that have for other sources of energy (since wind is intermittent), and what are the consequences in terms of cost and operations. If we are smart about this and we want to reach certain goals (say 50% wind in 20 years), what would be the accompanying technologies, how would we operate them, and how expensive would that be? They're really trying to come to grips with that question in a serious way. One of the things they've figured out, one of the few answers you ever get (lots of questions), is that it doesn't matter that wind is intermittent, what matters is that it's not predictable. Yes, it's slightly more expensive to have a resource that is on and off, but it's more important and costly that you can't say 24 hours from now what the wind will be doing. So their research has led to an incredible premium on wind forecasting, how valuable that forecasting ability would be. The problem is that a lot of the generators that produce electricity have really slow start-up times. It takes a lot of time to fire up a nuclear plant. So the fact that we don't know what the wind will be like tomorrow means that we might have the wrong set of suppliers on, and then not be able to supply the required amount of power. It's not at all obvious that that is the source of costs in the system, but these guys are trying to figure it out. It's very expensive to start up say, a nuclear generator in short order. If you knew what the wind was going to do you could start up alternate systems in ways that are not wildly expensive. The guys I am working with are not trying to forecast wind, but they're working with other guys at to Risø and at Stuttgart who are doing that.
Q Can you tell us about some other things people are thinking about at to Risø?
A In Europe in general and in Denmark in particular there are carbon emmissions targets. Separately from that there are green energy targets. So what % of your electricity will come from a certifiable renewable energy source? Those two things are different political initiatives. So these guys are thinking about what happens when you mix those two things at the same time. It turns out that it is not as clear as we might have wished. You might think that by building a windmill you are displacing a certain amount of carbon, but since the windmill is running only, say, 50 % of the time you have to back it up with some kind of thermal power. Then you may not be meeting the emission targets. So they're working on how these policies interact with each other.
Q Are there implications for the US in this research?
A Oh yes. Since we haven't gotten serious about carbon emissions reducations in the US it's not an issue yet. So researchers aren't talking about how this policy might be counterproductive given this other policy. I think we'll be talking about these things in 3 or 4 years in the US, as soon as we're back on the carbon emissions bandwagon.
Q Tell us about some of the fun stuff at Risø...what makes it different from other places where you have worked?
A There is a little lunch room at the end of the hall and it has an oval table that seats about 12 people. Every day there are 12 people seated around it for breakfast (morgenmad) around 9:30, where a different person every day brings fresh bread. They sit around and drink coffee, whack off a hunk of fresh bread, and the researchers and grads and post docs and secretaries sit around, close together, and talk. Often they laugh. And sometimes they sit around in complete silence. They are alternatively very somber and very funny, and I'm not sure what they're being funny about, since it's in Danish. They do the same thing at lunch, where they unwrap their little sandwiches. The men bring open-faced sandwiches from home carefully wrapped so that their sandwiches are not ruined. Most of the women have a cooperative food arrangement where they pull fresh food from the refrigerator and assemble their open-faced sandwiches on the spot. I'm not sure what it's about but it's some kind of sharing thing going on at that end of the table. Tuesday is a fun day becuase I have 1 1/2 hour of Danish class that is paid for by the municipality of Roskilde. The teacher comes right to Risø [from a language school in Roskilde] and delivers the lesson and I sit around with a bunch of other eggheads trying to learn Danish. It's kind of fun and it's helpful that I know what Danish is supposed to sound like, unlike the Asians in the room who will never hear the distinction between the Danish vowels. On Tuesday, besides morgenmad, and lunch, and Danish class, we have choir practice from 12:30 to 1, where there's a cute little man named Jorgen who brings in a little keyboard to give us the pitch and knock out the tunes. There are about 12 or 15 of us who sing in 3- and 4-part harmony, an even mix of 19th and 20th century stuff. Right now we're singing one that has words words by Grundtvig [19th century] and a setting by Carl Nielsen [20th century]. And then I and the other young bucks from Risø play soccer from 4:30 to 6. We play 3 halves, two halves that involve a ball and a third half that involves a case of beer. We played outside until September 30 and then even though the weather was fine, the calendar told us we had to move inside. Now we play in this little gym hall that has all sorts of obstacles: climbing bars all around the outside, so when the ball hits them it goes into a bizarre ricochet, you can't analyze the angles. These guys have been doing this for years and they have an elaborate system of what you can and what you can't do. I'm only about halfway to understanding what the rules are! I think I'm also...there may be 2 or 3 guys younger than I am...but I'm definitely on the young end of the scale.
Q What about fun stuff on other days?
A They've had a couple guest speakers, they've had a couple international conferences hosted at Risø, one day they put us all on a bus to Lund [in Sweden] to meet researchers over there and drum up projects of joint interest. They had some sort of big Risø days event when I first got there that involved a bunch of hired thespians who pretended to be Viking raiders and they led us through a role-playing event where we each assumed the role of merchant or crone. It was absolutely pouring but it didn't stop the Danes who wore what you wear when it's pouring I had to duck [bad pun] out because I didn't have those clothes with me. I also didn't have any idea what was going on. Then they told anecdotes about it for several days while eating their morgenmad.
Next time...what's Arne actually doing at Risø besides eating, drinking, singing, distinguishing between the vowel sounds i, y, æ, and ø, and dribbling balls?
Out of the music of our hearts
We give thanks
For a very cool son, for three wonderful children, for Axel all those many years, for Michael and Valentina safe in South America, for teenage sons laughing with their parents, for Bob who hasn't opted for a trophy wife, for delightful children who found loves of their own and for delightful grandchildren, for parents who give us the keys, for family (how can we be so lucky?) even though they get on our nerves sometimes
For friends who help us and who we miss sometimes and who support us always and whose love and friendship surprises us and keeps us whole
Out of our breath
We give thanks
For far away friends brought closer by www magic
for music, to hear it, to play it, to carry it in our hearts
for the machines that help us breathe when we need help
for the opportunities that come our way
for bridge and The New Yorker and The Nation and sudoku
for the technologies of today and the internet that gives us the world
for language
for candlelight on a winter evening
Out of our coming and going
We give thanks
For children grown and independent enough to stay in the Cities at Thanksgiving
for any time anyone else wipes off the counter top
for bicycles
for in-laws at 90 and 91 years old still in good health and at home
for the music of his heart (and mine)
for Becketwood where it's often lonely but always a great place to be
for loneliness
for holding hands
Out of order, out of chaos
We give thanks
For the eagles on Lake Crystal who chit chat in the night
for the satisfying crunch of a fallen leaf underfoot
for
socks made for 18-degree days when you carry in from the car pine boughs and white candles and bottles of red wine for grog
for medical researchers and staff people who save preemies and bad eyes
for a time limit on the Shrub
for the paperwhites on the windowsill about to bloom
for the local sunlight
for the wonders of the natural world and what a privilege it is to spend our days exploring
for woods
for earlobes
Out of our open hands
We give thanks
For the sea that warms us and feeds us and bears us away from our little islands and then bears us back again, all salty and new
for the music of our hearts
for
you, for you, for you!
Words of thanks by Anika,
Arne, Fylla, Kathleen, Lawrence, Lise, Margaret, Nic, Otto, Pete,
Susan, Vicki, and Athena
When I was in high school and college, my dad and I created a cooperative Thanksgiving poem. We asked people, the morning of the big day, to write down what they were thankful for, and then we worked those up into a poem. I'd like to revive that tradition this year. So...
Send me, in an e-mail, what you're thankful for.
Up to four things.
Be as brief or as loquacious as you'd like,
but know that I'll be taking liberties with what you send.
Send them to me at the_ahs (at) hometownsolutions.net
Deadline: Midnight Wednesday, Central Standard Time
The poem will be ready by the time you sit down to turkey.
Here's a poem by American poet Mark Strand, found today in Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice" column.
Pot Roast
I gaze upon the roast,
that is sliced and laid out
on my plate,
and over it
I spoon the juices
of carrot and onion.
And for once I do not regret
the passage of time.
I sit by a window
that looks
on the soot-stained brick of buildings
and do not care that I see
no living thing -- not a bird,
not a branch in bloom,
not a soul moving
in the rooms
behind the dark panes.
These days when there is little
to love or to praise
one could do worse
than yield
to the power of food.
So I bend
to inhale
the steam that rises
from my plate, and I think
of the first time
I tasted a roast
like this.
It was years ago
in Seabright,
my mother leaned
over my dish and filled it
and when I finished
filled it again.
I remember the gravy,
its odor of garlic and celery,
and sopping it up
with pieces of bread.
And now
I taste it again.
The meat of memory.
The meat of no change.
I raise my fork
and I eat.
(This poem is from New Selected Poems, just out from Knopf.
On Thursday we moved from Englegaard (Angel Farm) to Børnehøjen (Children's Height) in three easy trips. No trailer, no liquor boxes filled with books, no sleeper sofas with iron workings, no garage sales, no trips to the Salvation Army, no bonfires or burials to lighten the load. Easiest move of our lives!
Why did we move, you might well ask? Finding housing in the first place was no easy task and Arne, bless him, spent many many hours scouring the internet and sending emails composed of simple sentences (kindness to non-English speakers) in the hopes of finding a place. Englegaard is, in some ways, a hotel—run for folks needing short-term housing and including bi-weekly cleaning and changing of linens—and because of that, we paid the whomping VAT in addition to the rent. If Arne had been working for, let's say, a Bush-donating big energy supplier, that VAT would have been reimbursed to us when we returned to the native land. But, he's here considering wind and no one back home is poised to reimburse that tax. Okay, so we're entitled now to the fine Danish health service. But who's hoping to get sick?
So, here in our little neighborhood of Børnehøjen, a few streets of townhouses all built of concrete and steel with postage stamp yards front and back and lovely hedges providing privacy, we're free of the VAT and so saving a chunk of change. All to the good.
Our house is at the end of one of the little streets, with the west-ish side facing a greensward surrounding a prehistoric burial mound, and the south-ish side facing a dirt revetment on the other side of which is a former gravel pit now reverting back to wilderness with lovely paths curling through it. Urban life is tolerable with a little wilderness.
We have not yet met any of our neighbors, though we did wave feebly at those immediately to our east-ish one day through the hedge. They looked up surprised from their yard chore. We've been told they're a retired couple who have lots of adventures. Directly across the street, at #60 (we're #59) are people who come and go in vehicles, but we've not set eyes on them, thanks to our hedge.
If you cross the greensward, cut through the narrow strip of trees on the other side, then through a little neighborhood of concrete, steel, and turquoise panelled townhouses, then across the street, through another narrow strip of trees, you'll find yourself at Anika's school, Himmelev Gymnasium. Her friend Juliana is a 5-minute bicycle ride away.
Otto, on the other hand, is now further from his school and friends. This morning he caught the bus. He left the house at 7:30am and arrived at Gundsølille, the village where his school is located, at 7:55 and then was at his desk when class started at 8:00-ish. When the winter comes to an end he's planning on biking to school—a trip of 35 minutes or so. One of his friends is moving here to Himmelev, but we don't know when. Maybe soon!
Arne has further to travel as well, and has been biking, as before, a trip that is now 20 minutes instead of 10.
For me, this move has opened up many more walking possibilities and that is grand.
Our house now is 106 square meters (about 1000 square feet). It's all on one floor (no basement, no attic) with a carport and a covered outdoor eating area. So that's a little smaller than what we had at Englegaard, but it feels bigger, strangely. There is no wasted space here! The children have their own rooms (Anika's decorated in a Donald Duck theme), Arne and I have a small room with a bookshelf above the bed in lieu of bedside tables, for which there is no room anyway. There are two bathrooms, one with the toilet, and the other with the shower and the washing machine. The dryer is in a closet with the heater and to run the dryer we pass an extension cord across the second bathroom to the outlet just above the washing machine. It's not convenient, but it works.
That's enough details: the prominent fact is the place is cozy, which in Danish is hyggelig, perhaps the single most desirable quality in a home here.
Cross-country roads in Denmark are not lit. If it's overcast, or if the moon is new, then you see little beyond the realm of the headlights, and that is how it was Friday evening when Arne and I drove northeast to Helsingør. We were on a major highway connecting Roskilde, a town of 46,000, with Helsingør, a town of 35,000 and a major connecting point to Sweden, via Hillerød, a town of 29,000 and so you'd expect to find well-lit businesses with substantial parking lots and billboards helping you to spend your well-earned kroner. If you were in the US, that would be true, but this is Denmark, where life is slower, less service-oriented (if you consider McD's a service), and quieter. The road wound its way between fields and woods, around glorietas, past homes and farms, and then to the edge of Helsingør, where we came to a hotel and a McDonald's (gaudy on the mellow landscape) and then into the older part of town where the sharks of capitalism were not to be seen.
We were headed for a romantic adventure (birthday present) and this meant two nights in a bed & breakfast right on the Øresund, the body of water that connects the Kattegat and beyond the North Sea to the Baltic Sea--and thus one of the major waterways in Northern Europe. Copenhagen and Malmö face one another on the southern end of the Øresund, while Helsingør and Helsingborg face off on the northern end. King Erik of Pomerania, seeing a golden opportunity, required every ship passing through the Øresund to pay a tax. The narrow sound could be a challenge when the winds turned and ships often tacked for months before breaking through. From the window of our room we imagined those days of high-masted ships with sails gleaming and crews of salt-tanned men watching the shore and dreaming of hot baths and food and women.
Our B&B was run by an older couple, Per an architect, Anne a graphic designer specializing in book design, and their dog Oscar, aka Sir Oscar Einstein. Why Einstein? Arne asked, Because of his crazy hair? No, because he has only one ball, Anne explained and then cracked up laughing. By then we'd had two lovely breakfasts with them, lively conversation, finding many points of agreement. But when we arrived Friday night, Anne was curt, showing us where everything was and what was expected. In the bathroom, she said about the floor, “It doesn't like water on it.” We laughed, in our room, about Danish reticence.
Our room, with dormer windows looking out on the Øresund, was filled with a mish-mash of furniture and the kind of stuff that people acquire if they read a lot, like art, and travel often: a small landscape painting next to a modern ink print, books of art photos next to a huge volume of medical terms and the Danish Geological Society's maps of Sjaelland from 1927 bound and a small informative book from the '60s entitled Hvem Byg Hvad (Who Built What) that featured key buildings around Denmark with b&w photos and brief descriptions of everything from 12th C churches to schools built in the 1940s. The room had the smell of well-wrought time about it.
After baths in a claw-foot tub, we went downstairs for a buffet breakfast in the big living room with a narrow table looking out on the sound. (Per and Anne were using the dining room as their office--nice big computers, stacks of books and drawings, etc.) On offer: rye toast, rye bread, and crunchy hot rolls, semi-stinky Danish cheese, blue cheese and brie, slices of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, red peppers, pears, and oranges, three kinds of thinly sliced meat (aged salted beef, rollepølse (ham rolled with liver pate) and salami), delectable currant jam, honey, and incongruously two kinds of cold cereal and milk. Arne and I sat at one end of the narrow table with a French press of coffee between us, and Anne and Per sat at the other with a pot of tea between them. Saturday and Sunday mornings the same, with conversation ranging from immigrants to art to literature to China to elections to the damnable war in Iraq to work. We could not have found two more interesting people and left feeling that we'd have to go back if only to spend more time with Anne and Per!
Saturday morning we drove south a few kilometers along the waterfront, past adorable fishing cottages with thatched roofs, model ships in upstairs windows, and rooster weather vanes, to the Louisiana, Denmark's premier modern art museum. We were the first to park in the lot, and among the first to enter, so we had it delightfully to ourselves. The Louisiana has almost no permanent collection, instead hanging several exhibits at a time.
First stop: Lucian Freud (born 1922, born in Berlin but grew up in England). I don't remember now where I first learned about Freud, but for some time now I've been a fan, though with having seen only a few of his paintings (other than in print) in Mexico City some years ago. He's the grandson of Sigmund, a fact that strikes me as being curious but not germaine. Freud is mostly a portraitist and has been compared to Goya. He works small and very, very large. The perspective in his paintings is odd--as if he's both looking down on and up at his subjects, so that you feel at once omnipotent and beggarly as a viewer. The backgrounds are always simple--maybe just walls or a corner, but the colors are rough and varied so the backgrounds look tatty and dismal. And he paints his subjects with a disarming honesty. He's not interested in the ideal form--but sometimes his subjects are posed in classic poses, giving his paintings a kind of anti-romanticism. We absolutely pored over every painting and etching in the show.
Then onto an exhibit of Islamic miniatures--paintings in books from the 13th to 17th centuries that defied Muslim strictures and depicted human forms in all sorts of acts. Some were exquisite in their details and lush colors. Many told stories (Hindu, Christian, Muslim, folk tales) or honored military expeditions. When we stepped out from this show into the main lobby the museum was suddenly packed with people. We opted for a break and went to the cafe for coffee and a light lunch.
And then on to a show of work by Richard Avedon (1923-2004), who was incredibly prolific, and so any show could barely scratch the surface of all he did, but this show did a fine job of giving us a sense of it all. We saw early photographs—a couple childhood shots—the first series he was hired to do (photos in Italy that he ended up not giving to Harper's and he returned the advance and didn't show the work for several decades), fashion shots (including the famous one of Dovima with the elephants), the series of his dying father than roused so much controversy, huge photos he took at the first New Year's Eve at the fallen Brandenburg Gate, some from his “In the American West” series, and of course, portraits upon portraits: Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, W.H. Auden, the Chicago 7, Andy Warhol and the Factory group, Isak Dinesen, and Marian Anderson, and Samuel Beckett, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bob Dylan, Lee Friedlander, Marianne Moore, Rudolf Nureyev (the photo that was in a recent New Yorker), Marilyn Monroe, and on and on. Just amazing, breathtaking, sometimes disturbing, sometimes heartbreaking.
Then we walked around outside in the sculpture garden: Moore, Arp, Calder, etc., the afternoon crisp, Sweden just across the water, leaves fallen golden around our feet.
So we essentially spent the entire day at the Louisiana.
Sunday morning we left the B&B and parked just outside the ramparts of “Elsinore”—Hamlet's castle—actually known as Kronborg Castle. Not to be confused with the little pub in Tyler, MN, the Kronborg. Here Frederik II sat at a window watching ships come through the sound, waiting for them to tip their mainsail in salute. It's big and cold and filled with tapestries and paintings by obscure Dutch painters and tiny privies with stone seats, and paintings in the ceiling of Kronos eating one of his children or women with large pale breasts floating toward the windows, and huge carved wardrobes, and fireplaces with grapes and bosoms and Christian IV's insignia over the mantel. February, 1656, the Kornborg can not have been the most appealing place to be. We waltzed in the ballroom when no one was looking.
And then back home to our two beauties who'd survived their time without us by making pasta and French toast and talking to friends at home and staying up late with friends here.
To the Elephant, who though it might be at risk, has nevertheless a secured place among the Greats
I've just discovered that old Dwight D.
(whose birthday we share with gone e.e.)
was a knight of the Order
of the Elephant.
When this happened, and by whom
(the whom who hung the paraphernalia), I wouldn't presume
to guess. A regent of the King
no doubt.
What isn't clear, now let's be firm
is just why Christian IV would honor the pachyderm
by hanging carved tusks
on stranger's necks.
It's probable that here by the Baltic Sea
the elephant symbolized wealth and power (not eccentricity,
as it seems to us
today.)
Dull old Ike needed something less dismal,
less like his Orders of Merit, of George, of the Bath, of Solomon, of Leopold, of Yun Fei, of the White Lion, of the Aztec Eagle, of St. Olav, of Victory, and from Egypt, of Ismal
to leave in a case
for posterity.
This week in the Domkirke in Roskilde it is Bach Week, and therefore they're playing Buxtehude. Really. Three hundred years ago, Buxtehude, the great Danish/German composer and organist, died, thus anniversary celebrations of his music. Bach once made a pilgrimage to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude and learn from him. It's not so very strange to play Buxtehude, then, during Bach Week.
Tuesday night Anika and I rode the bus in to Roskilde to hear Michael Radulescu give an organ recital. I'd picked up a flyer in the library the day before and all the information we had was that this fellow would play Buxtehude and that the concert was free. Fine, off we went. Now I've learned that Radulescu is one of the premier organists, particularly of Bach, in the world, that he teaches in Vienna but gives concerts around the world, that he's recorded all of Bach's music for organ, that he serves as a judge at international organ competitions, that he's a composer of some note, etc., etc. We really had no idea what we were in for.
The Raphaelis organ was built in 1554 by the Dutch organ maker, Herman Raphaelis, and is, as far as I can tell, a fairly well-known organ. It's been rehabbed, of course, most recently in the 1990s, and is a beautiful structure halfway down the nave. Behind the organ are two chapels with tombs and sepulchres of many of the kings and queens of Denmark, and in one of these is a column with markings showing the height of various rulers, including Tsar Peter the Great (one of the two tallest) and King Christian VII (the shortest, and the subject of a wonderful novel The Royal Physician's Visit by Swede Per Olov Enquist, in case you're interested in reading about this crazy and short king whose wife succumbed to the charms of the German doctor hired to “cup” the king, leading eventually to her banishment and the doctor's gruesome murder).
We joined a modest audience of no more than 50 souls who sat together, facing the sanctuary, in pews directly across the aisle from the pews below the organ. Lights above the pews were on, but otherwise, most of the cathedral was in darkness, making the space feel intimate despite the enormously high ceilings and sweeping arches of red brick and white stucco. The music began suddenly, since you can't see the organist, on a fantastic opening chord and then a falling arpeggio that filled the cathedral and reverberated right through our chest cavities. Sandwiched between the variety of Buxtehude chorales and songs was a piece that Radulescu had been commissioned to write for this organ. His music went from light to dark using extended seconds and half tones to create a mysterious and velvety tone. I've never heard anything quite like it before; alas, Anika didn't care for it. At the end of the recital we all clapped heartily and at first all we could see were Radulescu's hands, grabbing the railing of the organ box, then finally his bald head rose up and we could see his eyes. That was it.
Last night Arne and I returned for a program of chamber music by Buxtehude played by a group of local musicians called the Raphaelis Consort, presumably after the organ: a soprano and a mezzosoprano, two violinists, a viola da gambist, an organist (small electric organ), and a theorbist. They played in the transept opposite the big organ, and those of us who came last sat in pews, though the early arrivers snagged chairs facing the musicians. Buxtehude is noted for the way he takes a brief melody (of a few measures) and then plays with it, moving it from one voice to another and back again. In the music last night, the singers and the violins had most of the fun, playing as pairs, and “singing” in thirds--at times positively angelic sounding. The music filled the space with light and joy, and if they could, all those bones of kings and queens would have been dancing in their dark crypts. Those of us in the flesh sat politely but at the end we were exuberant and earned an encore for our efforts.
As I was listening I thought about an essay I'd read yesterday morning by a physician and atheist with the genteel name of Theodore Dalrymple. His essay is ostensibly a review of the spate of books by atheists in the past couple years (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, et. al.), books he finds seriously lacking for a variety of reasons. Dalrymple says, about midway, “To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy.” There we sat, in the austere (for a cathedral) but grand space, surrounded by the crypts of kings and queens, below frescoes of saints and devils and jesters. Just down the way was the wrought iron gate depicting a devilish troll―a gate that leads into the crypt for the Trolle family―a fabulous gate, both beautiful and “fabula”, as in fables and old stories. Thanks to the church, artists of all sorts were represented last night, all of them serious about their work, full of folly and wit and gravity, and all of them having left their gifts for us. And we were there, numbering among a privileged few.
Dalrymple takes
issue with the way the writers he was reviewing miss the point that
we humans need a sense of purpose, no matter its source. He says:
If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
The first composition performed last night was a setting of Psalm 98: Sing to the Lord a new song. Last night, we heard that music as if it were being sung for the first time. Indeed, every time it is the first time, it is a new song. How grand to be there to hear it!
