I know, right?
Should you ever meet Tony the first thing you will notice besides her charm, humor, and good sense is her keen intelligence and boundless curiosity. She doesn't conceal it. She knows a lot that a girl's got no business knowing. Worldly, traveled, educated, smart family, all the rest. She taught me how to solve crossword puzzles by pursuing and reaching for unlikely connections between seeming unrelated things. How to be happy to encounter a clue in Roman numerals to figure out some maths. And it always surprises me and tickles me to no end when really and truly smart people like Tony and like Dr. Fred, and many others, show huge gaping holes in knowledge especially about basic things.
Toni and I visited the art museum for an exhibit on the fertile crescent, some Babylonia things, and a lot of cuneiform tablets. Scores of them. I had never seen them in real life before. Interesting that they look like pillows with writing on all sides, not wasting any area. Tony said, "It always impresses me how the scribes carved this hard clay so fast to take dictation."
She didn't know the clay is wet and the scribes jab it with reed. Papyrus-looking reed again, they're using the triangular shape of its stalk. Plus a convenient and endless supply of styluses right there at hand, and clay. Then fire the tablets for storage and for posterity.
Man, was I laughing my butt off inside. That there is stew-pud and it's coming out of Toni. That's what makes it so hilarious, she, the free-ranging thinker who pulls things out of the air, the impressive puzzle solver, thought the scribes carved hard clay rapidly as jabbing wet clay.
But that's okay, I get laughed at too. I take my hits. And hard. I did not laugh out loud at Toni in the museum, only giggled a little, but that does not spare me the same shame of pointing fingers and japes and remarks about my ridiculous ignorance.
I went up to Aspen to ski and I was staying at Tom Deusterberg's house that time. He had a coffee table book of James Audubon's work, along with other interesting things to get into. I had always admired Audubon and here was a great big book showing his work. I flipped through the book and marveled all over again, my admiration reinforced with every single detail I studied, and did I ever study the details, my amazement with Audubon's brilliance built to bursting, the plants, the season of the plants, the way the birds grab the branches, the way the bird turns its head, the fine points of feather arrangements and coloration. I poured over the illustrations and was filled with awe and respect and real admiration for genius all over again. Man, that guy is good. Good as Michelangelo any day. That level of genius and ability.
I put the book down and said to Tom Deusterberg, an older gentleman, "It always totally got me how Autubon could impress the fine details so well in his memory by just looking through his binoculars catching glimpses then come home and reconstruct to perfection from memory and do it so well. The photographic memory combined with artistic talent combined with drive is truly impressive"
Tom looked straight at me and said, as if angry, "He shot them."
Observing my complete shock, "He's a taxidermist!"
I was twenty-two when I learned rather rudely that John Audubon is not quite the genius I thought that he was. And everyone there in Aspen thought that my abrupt and obvious disillusionment was soooo hilarious.
4 comments:
I learned about Cuneiform when I was a little kid and we made our own pillow shaped tablets and stylus's. I still think I have mine. Forgot the language though, however. Tablets, the precursors to papyrus, but writing is truly the most magnificent invention ever. I thought paper was the greatest invention, but I believe writing is now with paper a very close second.
So he shot them. So big deal. Only in the religion of equality is that a mark against Audubon.
Audubon was an illegal immigrant, a felon, and his father was not married to his mother. Some believe he was closeted gay but if he was, no one knows for sure. 200 years ago, there was no "coming out" for artists or anyone else in America.
From his earliest days, Audubon had an affinity for birds. "I felt an intimacy with them...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through life."
Plus, he had a way with words, providing the following description of the bird he referred to as "the gay deceiver":
See how each is enjoying the fruits of his knavery, sucking the egg which he has pilfered from the nest of some innocent Dove or harmless Partridge! Who could imagine that a form so graceful, arrayed by nature in a garb so resplendent, should harbour so much mischief;--that selfishness, duplicity, and malice should form the moral accompaniments of so much physical perfection! Yet so it is, and how like beings of a much higher order, are these gay deceivers!
He is more tyrannical than brave, and, like most boasters, domineers over the feeble, dreads the strong, and flies even from his equals. In many cases in fact, he is a downright coward... I have seen one go its round from one nest to another every day, and suck the newly laid eggs of the different birds in the neighbourhood, with as much regularity and composure as a physician would call on his patients.
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