Obsessed with Obsessions: A lost city, a living fossil and the art of letting go
Forest of Distraction #8
Sometimes I wish I was an expert about something, some quirky skill or knowledge or that no one else knows much about. But the truth is I am too interested in everything to become an expert in anything. My attention runs hither and yon like a puppy out for a walk, attracted by every new sight and smell but unable to focus on one thing for long before something else distracts me and I run off in another direction
Expertise requires a bit of obsession, a willingness to strap on blinders and give your full attention to the subject at hand, not just for a few hours or days but for weeks and months and years. Lifetimes, even. When I think about the time and effort invested by historians or scientists or crafters or linguists or any of the other fields of study that require extended focused attention, I feel a little guilty when I skim through an article or blog post that summarizes their discovery in a five minute digest. All that effort for me to respond, “Neat!” before moving onto the next topic. At least I can pay a little honor to their effort by sharing their work with others.
Speaking about about sharing efforts, I’m adding a new feature to the newsletter this week, a spotlight on one of the many artists and artisans I follow on social media. I think that is absolutely the best part of social media, how easy it is to find spectacular artwork online.
Also new: I will be enabling subscriber chat here on Magic & Ink! I hope to discuss what other things might take shape on this platform other than sharing my brief fascinations. Also, you’re invited to share your own fascinations (brief or otherwise) with the community. You’ll see another email kicking that off shortly. Thank you for your continued support!
The Dawn Redwood
“The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or ‘water fir,’ for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research.
“Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the ‘water fir’ as a Metasequoia.
“Here was a living fossil — a lovely ghost of evolution that had somehow survived the unsurvivable.
Across the flaming divide that placed China and Japan on opposite sides of the World War, a small group of scientists had transcended the deadly artifice of borders and the ugliness of weapons to remind the world that the human longing for truth and beauty is greater than our foibles.”
“Lost City”
“Discovered by scientists in 2000, more than 700 meters (2,300 feet) beneath the surface, the Lost City Hydrothermal Field is the longest-lived venting environment known in the ocean. Nothing else like it has ever been found.
“For at least 120,000 years and maybe longer, the upthrusting mantle in this part of the world has reacted with seawater to puff hydrogen, methane, and other dissolved gases out into the ocean.
“In the cracks and crevices of the field's vents, hydrocarbons feed novel microbial communities even without the presence of oxygen.”
Read More: There's a 'Lost City' Deep in The Ocean, And It's Unlike Anything We've Ever Seen
Living Materials
“So far we’ve seen quite destructive alteration, but here are some more benign quirks. Azurite is a copper blue that was the only mineral blue in Europe before lapis lazuli (ultramarine) arrived from the East, and it remained a more affordable alternative thereafter. It’s an incredible hue, but it really needs to be ground by hand, the reason being the more you powder it down, the paler it gets. So you need that sensitivity to grind just as much as needed, and if you’re meticulous about separating grades you can get a vast range of hues from one stone.
“Azurite has another quirk that only shows up after a few centuries: in contact with humidity in the air, it slowly transforms back into green malachite, of which it’s simply a dehydrated form. There are church frescoes where the sky was once blue but is now all green due to this. This is what I mean about living materials!
“I got all the grades below from a couple of stones, and you can see how one of them was quite contaminated with malachite. You can’t control the hue you’re going to get out of azurite, and you can’t get precisely the same hues from one batch to the other. All you can do is choose stones that are as similar as possible.”
Read More: The Art of Letting Go - Working with Living Materials