The Texas Edition
Wildflower season is always nice here in central Texas, but this one was especially lovely. Interestingly, last fall was unusually colorful as well:
The reason in both cases is the same: cooler, wetter weather than usual in the month just preceding the emergence of color. Not something we can count on happening regularly, I’m afraid.
It’s always reassuring here, in this not-quite-arid climate, when we get rain. Just a few years ago reservoirs all over Texas were alarmingly low, and that will surely happen again, but the last three years have filled them up nicely. Whenever I lie in bed and hear rain outside I think of Auden’s poem “First Things First,” in which he imagines a thunderstorm singing a song about his beloved, but then returns to reality:
Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
— So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer —, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Two of my very favorite museums to visit — and I mean anywhere — are in Forth Worth. There’s a remarkable exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art right now featuring the work of Analia Saban, whose work is like some strange combination of sculpture, textile work, and materials science. Here’s her Copper Tapestry:
You really need to look at a larger version of the image — zoom in, please.
The other museum I love to visit is the Kimbell, which is comprised of two beautiful modern buildings and a sculpture garden. The main collection is housed in a Louis Kahn building and special exhibitions are typically shown in the Renzo Piano Pavilion, which I find a delightful space:
The main collection is not large but is astonishingly high in quality. It’s rather disconcerting to think that, living in Waco, Texas, I’m a 90-minute drive from the earliest surviving work of Michelangelo.
In one of his later poems Auden speaks of a nightmare of his in which
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do …
But don’t worry, Uncle Wystan. The cultured Texans are taking very good care of your patrimony.
I’m going to skip the Status section this time, because right now I am doing nothing but grading papers. I’m ready for a summer of writing. And tacos. So let’s exit this edition appropriately, with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood.” Easter blessings, y’all.
