Gospl of Ivan

“Would you like to know the secret to healthy rose bushes,” I asked, knowing that she would not like the answer. 

“Do tell!”

Grin. “Blood.”

The customer paused, waiting for me to say that I was kidding. But I wasn’t so it never came. She became nervous. 

And before I could explain that blood meal is a common soil fixer and fertilizer, she put her hands up, spun around and said-

“Bye.”

.

Evidently, you’re supposed to plant garlic in the same places as your roses because the garlic will repel a rose-specific aphid.

So what I’m saying is that between the romantic symbolism of the rose, the bloodmeal in the soil, and the fresh garlic all over the place-

How did I accomplish this?

But the primary reason why bloodmeal is used for rose cultivation is because roses grow best in nitrogen-rich soil. So plants that need a lot of nitrogen in their soil would benefit from blood meal. Others, who do not benefit from high nitrogen, would not fair well. So I would not use it on the entire garden. 

Bones/bone meal are used to add phosphorus to the soil, which is why its used as a fertilizer. Generally, most plants benefit from it, but that’s not guaranteed. Crushed eggshells provide the same treatment, with the added bonus of deterring ants. 

Coffee grounds will make the soil more acidic. 

Ashes of hardwood trees will fix soil if it’s been overwatered. I think it serves as another nitrogen fixer, but don’t quote me on that. 

So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.

But when I read about the Titanic, I think we can push the phrase further. Because sometimes, as you pass another ship in the night, you may hear a cry in the dark. A person in danger. A shout for help. Distress rockets and SOS signals wailing into the night. A stranger in crisis. 

And in those fleeting moments as your ship passes theirs, you get to make the choice- are you the Californian, the closest ship to the Titanic, which saw the distress rockets and saw the lights on the horizon and sat and did nothing; or are you the Carpathia, turning on a dime, pushing all steam to the engines, racing to help?

We can not say for sure what caused the Californian to not help the Titanic in that night of crisis. Whether is was apathy or incompetence or fear, we don’t know.

 But we know that every single soul who survived the Titanic survived because of the Carpathia. Because the crew and the passengers of that ship raced nearly 60 miles through ice fields above their maximum speed in the dead of night, readying life boats, readying triage, to pull them from the water. 

So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.

The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.

The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)

The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?

People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.

Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.

“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”

Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.