Friday Miscellany, Nov. 12, 2021
Natural History Notes, Reflections on the First Highway of Death, and a Record of Music and Books
i. deep time & high tide
After a rather slow start thanks to intermittent warm days and long stretches of rain and cloud, autumn colors are finally at their peak here in the Maryland Piedmont, though alas we’ve not been able to enjoy them much the last few days thanks to a seasonal cold that has taken its turn in each member of our family. Last Saturday we were able to make an excursion out to the Chesapeake shore to one of our favorite beaches, where- at least until recently as it turns out!- a sizeable strand of sand, protected by a few extensions of rock rip-rap, stretches in front of the slightly stabilized Miocene bluffs. Just north of the beach is a very active span of bluff face, constantly in a state of flux, eating into the forest behind as the fossil-rich unconsolidated sediments cave down into the waters of the bay. The Calvert Cliffs, as most of the western exposure of the mid- to late-Miocene Calvert Formation exposure along the Chesapeake Bay is known, are surely one of the most geologically dynamic places in the eastern United States; processes that elsewhere take centuries can happen in days here, in quite dramatic (and dangerous if one happens to be in the immediate proximity of the geological dynamism in action!) ways.
It had been a few months since we had been out to Matoaka Beach (after the little cabin and campground outfit that owns access down to the bay there). In the meantime, as we discovered on our visit Saturday (not an especially memorable one otherwise thanks to high winds and thus cold), the beach and the bluffs behind have been transformed: where once a sizeable buffer of sandy beach stretched out into the bay at the strand’s head, over the past few months the beach has disappeared and eaten directly into the escarpment behind. We barely made it back up the beach before the rising tide swallowed up the sliver of (at low tide) dry marl sloping down from the cliff face into the water, and as it was we had to make a run for it, much to the children’s excitement. Further up we discovered many places where the bay has trimmed away much of the beach and cut into the cliffs, shoring off the brush and kudzu (near the northern limit of its North American range, incidentally) that had held the sediments in place until recently.
The results are really quite spectacular, and point to the other end of the spectrum of time and pace so beautifully visible along the Cliffs: the sedimentation of huge spans of time into condensed physical space, exposed to ready observation and tactile engagement. The Miocene strata, and in fact all sedimentary deposits on the Coastal Plain from the Mesozoic forward, tilt towards the Atlantic, which in our case means a southward tilt, and so as one walks north one can see time regressing, as it were, the more distant past rising up from the waters. In the particular member exposed at Matoaka there is one truly incredible bed, several feet in depth, composed almost entirely of fossil mollusks (with remnants of other organisms scattered in here and there) with precious little other sediment intervening; before the shifts of the last few months it was easily visible further north but a few feet up above the beach. With these new exposures, due to that southward dip, this shell bed is at beach level and easily observable, the waves having carved little grottoes into the tangle of Miocene clams and scallops and geoducks and corals, grottoes which will rapidly change shape and soon enough cease to be entirely as the water does its inexorable work.
It is a strange thing to be able to look into the past in such a place- not really the past, of course, but rather the complex traces, the time-averaged and sorted traces shaped by an array of taphonomical and geological dynamics, some of them still not entirely clear even to those whose business it is to know such things intimately (and the Calvert Cliffs, perhaps not surprisingly, have played an outsized role in the recent history of taphonomy thanks in no small part to the work of Maryland native Susan Kidwell). On the one hand to look into these archives of life on earth is to cross into a scale of time and process so vast and long in duration that it dizzies the mind. At the same time it is disorienting to see a familiar landscape transformed so rapidly, a tactile reminder that the earth is in fact a dynamic place no matter how solid beneath our feet it may feel. While many in the contemporary world upon contemplating such scales of time and process seemingly at odds with ordinary human experience find it troubling- the abyss of time and space and all that- I find it rather to be humbling, and beautiful. What is man that You think of him comes to mind- the Psalmist long before modern geology already aware of the dizzying scale of the world. We are privy to a vaster and more complex array of aids to contemplation, as it were, but the upshot of it need not diverge from that of the Psalmist. Deep time and a dynamic earth are not terrifying in the right frame.
ii. the first (maybe) Highway of Death
Along a quite different arc, and incidentally appropriate for the anniversary of the Great War’s (sort of) ending yesterday, while preparing for my lecture on the Ottomans in the First World War for the modern Islam course I am currently teaching, I did a search for film in the Imperial War Museum’s archives that might be useful in illustrating the war in the Ottoman lands. The vast majority of relevant footage illustrates the British side of things, unsurprisingly, given that no small amount of media generated by the Central Powers would be lost in the Second World War. But film was produced on the Ottoman fronts, and Ottoman troops appear, though usually as either captives or as casualties.
One of the films I came upon has the rather innocuous title ‘The Advance in Palestine,’ accurate as far as it goes- the scenes are of the final British drive in the autumn of 1918 through northern Palestine and into Syria, shortly before the final Ottoman capitulation. At the 6:01 mark footage entitled ‘Scenes on the Nablus Road after an air raid’ begins, and I should caution my readers that it is quite graphic- more so than tends to be the case, in my viewing experience, of these sorts of films, so watch with that in mind. The scene is eerily, though not coincidentally, reminiscent of the infamous ‘Highway of Death’ from the First Gulf War- the retreating Iraqi convoy that was strafed and obliterated by Coalition aircraft during the Iraqi withdraw from Kuwait. In the Nablus case, air raids of this degree were still quite novel- air power was used increasingly with each passing year of the war, but I am not aware of sorties of this devastating power elsewhere (though of course I may be wrong on that count- perhaps something comparable occurred during the contemporaneous German retreat?).
I was not familiar with this air raid, or if I had read about it passed by me as another detail in the final campaign in Palestine, a small detail in a foregone struggle by this point. So watching the footage was truly horrific- the humans and animals simply slaughtered from the air, wagons titled in every direction, the smell of death virtually palpable through the black-and-white silent footage. Even though I have been exposed to similar images from the First Gulf War until now, this footage was genuinely shocking- the feeling of seeing one of the more horrific aspects of modern warfare just having been born. It is hard to know what to say in the face of such things, really, even though we have now had over a century to grapple with the realities of industrialized warfare, including our ability to revisit the carnage and destruction via film and photography. It is in such a context that I do think it is genuinely hard to not be shaken; if the expansion of the earth and heavens under the vision of modern scientific observation is not really a cause for despair, the contemplation of human capacity, heightened and perpetuated through the tools of modern science and technology, does present a real abyss that is much more challenging to span.
iii. music
This week in music- turning back to the more sublime and beautiful potentialities of modernity now!- I am sharing with you once again a release from Baltimore-based Canary Records, this time of recordings from a corner of the global Orthodox Christian world with which I was not previously familiar but which is really quite interesting and would no doubt repay closer study on my part, the Anastenaria of Thracian Greece, on which read the ‘liner notes’ to this album:
I rather doubt claims of ‘survivals’ in ritual form from the distant past- there is a relationship, I think, we religious and ritual deep pasts but the language of survival and genealogy fails to capture it- though I do wonder if interactions with Ottoman-era sufi groups might have played a role in the relatively more recent (and significant for ritual elaboration) past. Regardless the music is wonderful, I especially love the bagpipes in the final track, sublime stuff!
iv. books
A few words on books I’ve been reading: well, I’ve been reading a lot these days, most of it in support of my modern Islam course. In support of the Halloween spirit I started working through the complete ghost stories of M.R. James (1862-1936); I’d read a selection of his tales some while back, had put his complete works on a to-read list, then forgot about them. I recently read through (most of, skipped a few) the prose works of Lovecraft, which, if I recall correctly, led me around to James. They’re very much up my alley as they say, some genuinely quite chilling but also interesting from a historical, philosophical, and religious perspective. There is a lot going on in these works (and in Lovecraft’s rather more over-stuffed tales); if nothing else, such stories and our continued appreciation of them says a great deal about the complex poly-valence of modernity.
The one non-fiction book I want to point out to my readers is a recent-ish work (new to me!) on Paleolithic art in western Eurasia, with a primary though not exclusive focus on cave art, Christine Desdemaines-Hugon’s Stepping-Stones: A Journey Through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne. The title is refreshingly modest for what is really a much more expansive exploration and meditation on the artistic production of Paleolithic people at sites across western Eurasia, with a concentration on caves in the Dordogne that are (or were at the time of writing) still accessible to the general public. I’ve read a decent degree of literature on the topic and I’ve found that an excess of speculation and extrapolation (or back-projection) easily arises, which is not the case here. Desdemaines-Hugon maintains a balance between recognizing a resonance in us in the present of these images and symbols, on the one hand, while remaining comfortable with the inevitable mystery of just what they meant and how they were embedded in the lives of the people who made them.
v. conclusion
Let me leave you with a lovely 19th century photograph found serendipitously, as such things often are: taken by Oscar Gustav Rejlander, it is entitled 'A Young Naturalist,’ and features a Victorian father instructing his progeny in natural history; there is no doubt a great deal bound up in the history of perceptions of nature, of collecting, and of the nature and construction of fatherhood, but all that aside it’s a lovely picture, don’t you think?