Reading about the appalling measures that have been taken against stray dogs in Kerala - the mass culling, the antics of local politicians - has been all the more painful given the memories I have from my one visit to the state in 2010, to see part of the shooting of Anup Kurian’s film The Blueberry Hunt. Here’s a little travel piece I did for M magazine back in the day. So much naiveté in it, I feel now - especially in that line about “shy-faced” local dogs walking about as equals with their humans. Stupid. Anyway, Vagamon was a lovely place with its meadows and dogs and cows and flowers and butterflies (and occasionally its dreadlocked Naseeruddin Shah), even if the memory has been somewhat sullied now - so here’s the piece, with a couple of photos.
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A Dilli-wallah traveling to Kerala for the first time is supposed to head for the backwaters and stay in houseboats and such – that's simply what you do. But my wife and I have a history of gravitating towards mainland terrain even though we keep talking about coastal vacations (two years ago we contrived to spend a week in Sri Lanka without getting anywhere near a major water-body). True to form, when the writer-director Anup Kurian invited me to a small Keralite hill-town named Vagamon to chronicle some of the shooting of his feature film The Hunt, we grabbed the opportunity. As an armchair film buff and reviewer who’d never been at a movie shoot before, I figured this low-budget location set would be more interesting than visiting a studio in Mumbai’s Film City. Besides, there was the prospect of spending time in conversation with Naseeruddin Shah, who was playing the lead role in the film.
And so it came to pass that on a fine February morning earlier this year, Abhilasha and I reached Vagamon, which is around 100 km from the Cochin airport – a drive of a little over two hours, the final 45 minutes uphill. Over the next five days we would experience the special pleasures of a hill-town that hadn’t yet become commercialised beyond repair.
To begin with, the shoot itself was fun. We stayed in a guesthouse with most of the cast and crew, including Shah – it was a communal, egalitarian set-up, and the evenings after the day’s work would be spent eating together in the cafeteria and talking movies and other things. Most of the filming was being done in the area around Kurian’s family home, located only 500 metres from the guesthouse as the crow flew, but a good 15 minutes away by jeep on a very bumpy road. For the first couple of days, I opted to trek up the hill: it was nice and bracing the first time around, but on the second try I was panting so hard I couldn’t hear myself think.
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses,” Marquez wrote in One Hundred Years of Solitude. “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” We were entranced by Vagamon’s pristineness. There was a running joke on the set about the belligerence of the region’s cows, but the reason for this un-bovine temperament was probably that they weren’t used to seeing so many humans around; this was their terrain, after all. The shy-faced local dogs seemed startled too, though they were much politer. Many of them are pets, but they aren't kept on leashes; dog and human walk about together, dare one suggest it, as equals. On one occasion, a man followed closely by his pet threaded his way through the film unit on a narrow path, but the dog, being alarmed by this surfeit of people, nimbly climbed up on a rock to assess the scene. His man-friend walked some way down the road before realising he was unescorted; he returned, we coerced "Jimmy" down, and they bounded off together, both of them grinning from ear to ear. Much more worldly-wise was Tipu, the dashing German Shepherd who played a key role in the film. He’s a hardcore professional, veteran of fifty movies, and he earns up to Rs 5,000 per day, but Vagamon turned him into a poet and a libertine. One of the outdoor locations was near a stream, and between shots Tipu had a jolly old time leaping from rock to water. Brightly coloured butterflies, including one painted a dazzling green, flitted about his head and he wagged his tail at them.
Most of my time was spent observing things and doing interviews, and I looked at this as a work trip, even if it was the pleasantest sort of “work” imaginable. We didn’t expect to find time for sightseeing, but this changed late one morning during a relatively dull interlude in Vagamon town. Naseeruddin Shah was doing a scene with an elephant and a nervous human actor who kept fluffing his lines, and it looked like the scene would take all day. “Let’s hire a cab for a few hours and see Vagamon!” said the ebullient Aahana Kumra, who was playing the female lead – it was her first off-day in a long time – and that’s what we did.
Our jeep-driver was Shaji Fernandes D’Souza, who must be among the most poker-faced men in Kerala. A practical joker, he caused much outrage by proclaiming at regular intervals that he would charge Rs 500 for waiting at a spot for a few minutes or Rs 200 for playing a particular radio channel. He turned out to be a fine guide, though, and it was a very well-spent afternoon. We visited a resort called Vagamon Heights, had tea and biscuits by a villa and went boating on the nearby lake. We sauntered about a large and awe-inspiring pine forest on the border of another resort, and Aahana coerced us into striking filmi poses next to the tree-trunks and generally indulging her camera in ways we wouldn’t have done if the setting hadn’t been so seductive (and if we hadn’t had a future movie star for company). We also learnt that every major tourist spot in Vagamon is called “Suicide Point” – there are possibly as many of these points as there are jeep-drivers in the vicinity, though most of them have such breathtaking views that death quickly loses its attraction once you’re standing on the precipice.
Towards late afternoon we went to a nearby Belgian monastery that doubles up as a dairy farm and supplies thousands of packets of milk to the region every day, courtesy specially bred cows that look more Swiss than Indian. It was a quiet, dignified place, its garden bedecked with flowers of every hue and shape, and drunken honeybees. However, the highlight of our excursion came when Shaji dropped us to what looked like the entrance to a large park. “Paragliding centre,” he said, quietly adding, as we walked towards the gate, “Also best suicide point. Twelve hundred rupees only!”
We walked down the path he had indicated – serendipitously, it had become cloudy and the weather was now perfect – expecting to reach another cliff-edge. Instead, we soon found ourselves at the centre of one of the loveliest, most idyllic places I’ve seen.
The Vagamon Meadows is an expanse of grassland straight out of a child's picture book, dotted with little hills and no trees, so you get a clear view for miles around. Though we saw a few people on a distant hill, there was hardly another soul in the immediate vicinity – we may as well have landed on an uninhabited planet. I also enjoyed the illusion the place created of being at sea level, even though the hillocks and the meadows were all situated atop a mountain range (we were 1500 or so metres up to begin with). Much as I love mountains, I get a little bored by “vertical” landscapes: endlessly winding roads where all you’re doing is climbing up or going back down. This was a completely different vista, and it turned us all into characters from mushy movies, murmuring softly to each other, lazily taking pictures and videos even though no camera could do justice to the place. We didn’t get any paragliding done, but that didn’t matter; our minds were in a state of ascension anyway.
Back to Delhi, back to the “real” world with its whooshing deadlines and traffic snarls and busy malls stacked end to end with human bodies. I thought Vagamon was in our past, but a few days ago I discovered that my wife was using her Twitter account to narrate a serialised story – 140 characters per instalment – about a dog named Tipu and a bright green butterfly named Mantra who live together near a little stream and set out to foil the plans of a monster who wants to drain the world of its colours.
I hope Vagamon never loses its colours. I hope it stays the way we remember it and that its dogs remain forever shy and its cows unsocial.
In Roald Dahl’s short story “The Sound Machine”, a man invents a device through which he can hear sound at frequencies previously denied to the human ear. Much to his horror, he hears – or thinks he hears – the shrieks of flowers and plants as they are being uprooted.
He bent down and took hold of a small white daisy growing on the lawn […] From the moment that he started pulling to the moment when the stem broke, he heard – he distinctly heard in the earphones – a faint, high-pitched cry, curiously inanimate […] it wasn’t pain; it was surprise. Or was it? It didn’t really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a human being […] A flower probably didn’t feel pain. It felt something else which we didn’t know about – something called toin or spurl or plinuckment, or anything you like.
Dahl, whose birth centenary is being celebrated this month, was famous for his macabre, twist-in-the-tail stories, and the “The Sound Machine” contains the very particular mix of black humour and paranoia that he did so well. Yet it also touches on a subsidiary theme of his work: how much do we know about the inner lives of the countless other creatures that share our planet, including the ones we are barely willing to impute inner lives to? Isn’t it too easy to dismiss something as improbable, even irrational, just because it lies outside the purview of human experience?
I thought of the story again when I read the following passage in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, which is a very different sort of book – a forester’s personal and professional journey of discovery that grows into a warm, accessible work of popular science:
There is research in the field that reveals more than just behavioural changes: when trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream. If you’re out in the forest, you won’t be able to hear them, because this all takes place at ultrasonic levels […] This is a purely mechanical event and it probably doesn’t mean anything. And yet? […] these vibrations could indeed be much more than just vibrations – they could be cries of thirst. The trees might be screaming out a dire warning to their colleagues that water levels are running low.
(Now back to Dahl for a moment, and a description of a tree’s response to an axe embedded in its trunk: “…a harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low pitched, screaming sound, not quick and short like the noise of the roses, but drawn out like a sob lasting for fully a minute…”) “The Sound Machine” first appeared in The New Yorker in 1949, while The Hidden Life of Trees was originally published in German last year, with the English translation (by Jane Billinghurst) just out. Those 66 years would represent a tiny span of time to the large forest trees – often living for well over a thousand years – that Wohlleben writes so affectionately and insightfully about, but you’d expect huge advances in scientific development in the human world over such a period.
And yet, as Wohlleben repeatedly reminds us in his book, the pace of our knowledge and understanding has been creepingly slow when it comes to this vast and important subject. There is still so much we don’t know about trees, their complex co-dependent survival mechanisms, how they respond to stimulus, danger and opportunity, and this is especially true for the giants in natural forests, which have – in relative seclusion – gone about the business of interacting with countless other living creatures, while helping to maintain the stability of a whole ecosystem.
Wohlleben worked for the forestry commission in Germany for two decades, and admits that for years he himself looked at trees in the dispassionate way a butcher looks at the animals he is cutting up. When he did look more closely, his eyes were opened to a new world, one that he superbly reveals in this book.
Much of his narrative centres on research results – made available only in the past two decades – that have shown the presence of the “wood wide web”: a complex underground network facilitated by fungi, which serve a function comparable to that of fibre-optic internet cables, by helping trees transmit information to each other. Using this as a starting point, Wohlleben covers a number of issues related to trees growing in natural forests (his area of specialisation), but also making universally applicable points about plant life and its wider effects on the planet.
This book skillfully explores both the major and minor keys of its subject. On one hand, it offers a majestic view of the world’s big forests as water pumps that enable rain water to penetrate deeper into land masses than it otherwise would (which is why places located hundreds of miles from the ocean are hospitable to humans and other life forms). But there are also fascinating, ground-level descriptions of things that most people who don’t live or work near forests will never get to see, such as the “all-out drinking binges” engaged in by beeches during heavy rain: “[the rainwater] runs along the branches, where the tiny streams unite into a river that rushes down the trunk. By the time it reaches the lower part of the trunk, the the water is shooting down so fast that when it hits the ground, it foams up”. Or another roaring sound, this time caused by the excrement of millions of oak leaf roller caterpillars high up on a bare oak. (“Thousands of black pellets were bouncing off my head and shoulders. Ugh!”)
Wohlleben has some fun along the way, and since he is writing for the layman, there are some cute chapter heads like “Street Kids” (for a wonderfully poignant section about the life cycles of trees that were planted as trophies in parks or on roadside kerbs, without adequate thought to their long-term needs), “Love” (for a discussion of procreation cycles), “Forest Etiquette” and “Ageing Gracefully”. Occasionally, the prose comes close to anthropomorphizing in such a way as to give the impression that a plant’s behaviour is exactly comparable to that of humans. There are sentences like “Many Central European tree species have similar ideas about the ideal place to live…”, or “The yew, the epitome of frugality and patience, has decided to make the most of these conditions.” “The oak realizes it cannot beat this stiff competition,” we read, “and will never be able to grow tall shoots to overtake the beech. Perhaps in the face of rising panic, it does something that goes against all the rules…” And: “From then on, [the spruce] will also do a better job of rationing water instead of pumping whatever is available out of the ground as soon as spring hits without giving a second thought to waste. The tree takes the lesson to heart...”
Read closely though, and the context makes it clear that Wohlleben isn’t indulging in pseudoscience by attributing human-like agency or forethought to non-human creatures: he is trying to provide a sense of their behaviourial patterns – and how the survival-of-the-fittest theme plays out in their world – in language that we homosapiens, limited as we are by our own consciousness and our own weird ways of doing things, might understand.
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When I heard the title of this book, I immediately thought of Peter Tompkins’ and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants, which developed a cult following after it was published in 1973. In his Introduction to Wohlleben’s book, Pradip Krishen warns of the dangers of such an association, pointing out that the Tompkins-Bird study verged “more on psychobotany than hard science”. Most serious students of the subject are likely to have similar reservations. Having only skimmed through the older book, I have been both intrigued and bemused by some of its descriptions of obscure experiments conducted outside the realm of mainstream science, and in some cases, discredited over time. It is full of anecdotes such as the ones about plants responding to spooky stories being told in a dark room, and the authors breathlessly drawn on a wide range of sources and histories, from Jagadis Chandra Bose’s work in the realm of plant physiology (“which was buried during his lifetime by Western science and hardly ever cited since his death”) to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conception of an “archetypal plant, a supersensible force capable of developing into myriad forms”. While this means the book is full of interesting vignettes, it doesn’t quite resolve itself into a cohesive narrative (and that may not have been the intention anyway). In comparison, Wohlleben’s book is meticulously organized, professional and focused.
And yet. Whatever you think about The Secret Life of Plants – with its seemingly outlandish claims and the goofily buoyant tone aimed at a New Age readership of the 1970s (the “superannuated hippie”, as Krishen drolly puts it) – it was rooted in a serious desire to extend the boundaries of a subject that had not been given enough attention. Wohlleben is more circumspect, and more in tune with rigorous, peer-tested science, but the starting point for his book too was a sense of wonder, a curiosity about life’s hidden mysteries. And he himself mentions that research has only just begun to skim the surface of how plant-life works. “So many questions remain unanswered,” he writes while discussing the ambiguities that still surround the movement of water from soil into a tree’s leaves, and the intriguing possibility that transpiration and capillary action aren’t as important as scientists have been thinking. “Perhaps we are poorer for having lost a possible explanation or richer for having gained a mystery.”
A running theme in The Hidden Life of Trees is that trees operate on very different time-scales from the ones we are used to, both in terms of their life-spans and in terms of how long it takes them to process information and translate it into action. Is this the main reason why we find it so difficult to recognize them as truly sentient beings with their own versions of personalities, Wohlleben wonders. (“Man merely thinks plants motionless and feelingless because he will not take the time to watch them,” the biologist Raoul Francé said once. The quote is included in The Secret Life of Plants, but it could just as easily have found space in Wohlleben’s book.) Or is it because we were cut off from these distant cousins so early in our shared evolutionary history that even the colour green – aesthetically pleasing though it is to our eyes – feels closer, as a “skin colour”, to alien beings than to a species we can identify with?
Whatever the case, Wohlleben believes that the distinctions usually made between plant and animal life are arbitrary. Among the many achievements of his book is the food for thought it provides on the staggering kinds of symbiosis in nature: from imperiled trees having to close their wounds after fungal invasions to deer using young trees (often with fatal consequences for the latter) as rubbing posts for their excess skin. There are reminders that nature is implacably cruel even while it is being jaw-droppingly beautiful, but there is equally a caution about the dangers of an increasingly anthropic world. In a moving coda, Wohlleben writes, “Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouse for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species, which is the way modern forestry currently treats them. Completely the opposite, in fact.”
His book should convince many readers of this, even if they have never read Dahl, even if they aren’t fans of Tolkien’s melancholy Ents or Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood – or, for that matter, hippies high on the idea of a universal consciousness linking all things. ----------------------------- P.S. I first developed an interest in Peter Tompkins (the Secret Life of Plants author) after reading an essay by his son Ptolemy, about his father’s unconditional love for movies, including B-horror movies, which he would take his son to watch regardless of the inappropriateness of the content. (I drew inspiration from, and mentioned, Ptolemy's piece in my horror-film essay "Monsters I Have Known".) Peter T comes across as a fascinating man in that piece, someone well and truly in touch with his own irrational side, and with the sense of otherworldly wonder and disorientation created by good horror films. This aspect of his personality is almost certainly tied to some of the more wishful/out-there claims made in The Secret Life of Plants.
In a caustic review of the 1997 film Con Air, Anthony Lane noted that the script spent so much time building up the film’s villains – by having the other characters go on and on about their unfathomable badness – that it was a letdown when we actually got to see these supposed embodiments of evil. Their personalities, and the dialogue they had been saddled with, didn’t justify all the fuss.
I had a version of the same complaint about Mudassar Aziz’s Happy Bhaag Jayegi, a goofy comedy in which a young Amritsari woman named Happy flees her wedding and accidentally ends up in Lahore. Throughout the film we are told how spirited and kooky and resourceful this heroine is – such a pathaaka, so endearing that it’s impossible not to fall in love with her. This notion is the bedrock of a frank, guy-to-guy talk between her Sad Sack boyfriend Guddu and the young Pakistani politician, Bilal, who has become smitten by her. All that’s missing in these scenes is a congregation of turbaned bards singing Happy’s praises in flowery verse in the background, while the main characters speak her praises in flat dialogue in the foreground. Unfortunately, this conceit doesn’t work when the viewer has to engage with Happy herself, as a real person rather than an abstraction. In fact, she vanishes altogether for a chunk of the film’s midsection – the professed reason is that the character has been kidnapped, but it felt more like the writers had discovered during the shoot that Diana Penty wasn’t up to the task of creating the sort of heroine that Kareena Kapoor did in Jab We Met.
In fairness to Penty, the script doesn’t do much to flesh Happy out. She has the outward trappings of personality, but it’s surprisingly easy to lose interest in her, and consequently the hosannas ring false. “Uss mein tum se aur mujh se kai zyaada taaqat hai,” one suitor solemnly says to another, a line that should warm the cockles of anyone who wants our cinema to be self-consciously progressive and feminist, but which makes little sense in this context.
One can speculate that the “Happy is missing” scenes fit the character’s symbolic function in this border-crisscrossing story: here are India and Pakistan, two countries forever at loggerheads, but the regular people in both places are exactly alike (sweet-natured, bungling imbeciles, if this film is to be believed) and they want the same thing that people everywhere do – some “happy” in their lives. But how to find it?
So, one way of looking at this film is to think of the protagonist as a cipher or, to use Hitchcock’s term, a MacGuffin – the little detail that drives a plot, but which the viewer doesn’t have to be particularly concerned with. For example, in Hitch’s Notorious, the MacGuffin was the uranium ore being hoarded by Nazi spies in wine bottles: a plot device which facilitates the playing out of the complex, intense love triangle that is the truly compelling thing about that film. The love triangle (or love pentagon, depending on how you look at it) in Happy Bhaag Jaayegi is far from compelling, but the little vignettes involving the supporting cast are: Piyush Mishra as a nervous Pakistani policeman who hates the idea of India but loves many things Indian (including Yash Chopra); the marvelous Jimmy Shergill, who is making a screen career of being ditched by women with inexplicably poor taste in men, as the irritable Bagga; Kanwaljit Singh as the patriarchal father who – in the style of John Wayne in The Searchers, bent on killing his niece because she has been “despoiled” by becoming one of the Indians – wields a gun and swears murder, but returns to being soft old daddykins in the end. Such are the engaging sideshows that surround the film’s MacGuffin-like heroine and her bland leading men.
Of course, it’s a problem when a character becomes a cipher not because it was intended that way, but because of a flaw in execution. An example was last year’s Dolly ki Doli, in which the con-woman Dolly was meant to be vibrant and lovable and draw the viewer’s sympathy, but ended up as a blank slate, thanks largely to Sonam Kapoor’s vacant performance in the lead. Something comparable happens in Happy Bhaag Jaayegi, and I think a more avant-garde (and more fun) film might have gone with this trick: don’t show Happy at all; construct the narrative in such a way that we know she is there, a flesh-and-blood person with this story moving around her, but we never see her (maybe a few ghostly glimpses of a salwar-kameez-clad figure – the film does play with that idea in a different context). Here we sit in the hall for two hours, but she eludes our eyes, much the same way that brotherly happiness and harmony have eluded India and Pakistan for seven decades. Meanwhile, the rich pageant of humanity that exists in both countries – crooks, spurned lovers, buffoons – can fumble about in a wild goose chase, never finding their happy, but doing their own thing and entertaining us in the process. That could have been a super film.
After around an hour of watching Ranveer Singh as the obscenely privileged but oddly vulnerable rich kid Kabir in Dil Dhadakne Do last year, I leaned across to my wife and said, “I think this guy might be our best lead actor since Bachchan in his prime.”
By the screening’s end, I was already feeling sheepish about this little exclamation. Not because I had changed my mind about the quality of Singh’s performance (a year on, I still think it was one of the highlights of 2015, at least as good as his much-awarded, more “respectable” turn in Bajirao Mastani) – but because, you know, if you’re a critic reaching for the nuanced argument, for a considered view of things, you’re not supposed to make such impulsive pronouncements. Even when you’re expressing a view that has been part-sanctified by time. (“Citizen Kane is the greatest film”; “Nutan is the best Hindi-film actress”.) When you’ve watched so many different sorts of films, representing every creative approach, you know it’s silly to grade them on one scale. You rally against pompous notions about something being summarily “the best”.
But here’s a counter-argument: why should anyone, even a professional critic, be measured or rational when something sneaks up on him and takes a firm grip on his emotions? For a jaded scribe who has written lakhs of words about cinema, it’s good to be reminded that one is still capable of being electrified, in a childlike way, by a film. Or by a scene. Or a gesture. A line of dialogue, a swell of music working in just the right way alongside an elegant camera movement. Once you’re back in the real world (or whatever vestiges of it may be seen in the section of the mall beyond the multiplex’s exit door), you might feel embarrassed about your hyper-dramatic reaction – but that reaction was an honest one.
Some viewers deny their gut feelings, as if the movie-hall were a confessional where one’s guilty secrets are forever to be left behind. This is especially true of genres that produce strong visceral responses, such as horror, slapstick comedy or action. I had a talk about Mad Max: Fury Road and Baahubali recently with someone who had clearly been stirred by both films – and had reacted to all the key scenes in exactly the way the filmmakers had wanted their viewers to react – but who was now saying, weeks later, “Yes, I enjoyed them at the time, but come on, they aren’t good films!” (I’ll save an extended discussion for another time, but for now I’ll just say I don’t understand that sentence.)
In my own instinct-vs-cerebra struggles, there is a personality factor at work. On the scale that has Highly Emotional Viewer at one end and Highly Analytical Viewer at the other, I am much closer to the latter extreme: rarely do I get so engrossed in a film that I stop thinking about its nuts and bolts, stop noticing things like framing or shot composition. It is often said admiringly of an actor, “He was so good that I could see only the character”, but it doesn’t work that way for me – even while enjoying a performance, I never forget who is playing the part, and in some cases my appreciation is deepened by associations with the actor’s earlier work. (As when a director uses a performer in intriguingly complementary ways over a series of films. Or when someone is cast against type: e.g., 1980s girl-next-door Supriya Pathak in sinister roles in Shanghai and Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-Leela).
Given this boring aptitude for “rationality”, I am all the more mindful of the need to be honest when there is a strong emotional reaction. And as a writer, this is tricky: you have to articulate the whys and hows of your viewing experience, even though you are writing the piece hours or days later, in a dusty room under a malfunctioning tube-light, with your dog pulling at your sleeve. I started thinking about these matters when I realized that last weekend marked the 15th death anniversary of the legendary film critic Pauline Kael. Now there’s someone who could write wonderful, analytical prose without jettisoning her deepest feelings. In her later years Kael sometimes accused younger critics of being giddy hero-worshippers – but the splendid irony is that in her own best writing she reveals her emotional life, and what excites or appalls her. As just one example, here she is on two of her personal heroines becoming sentimental figures in middle age: “In Pocketful of Miracles, when Bette Davis became lovable and said ‘God Bless’ with heartfelt emotion in her voice, I muttered an obscenity as I slumped down in my seat. I slumped again during Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because Katharine Hepburn had become sweet and lovable too […] They have become old dears […] there’s a feeling of dismay, and even of betrayal, when we watch them now.”
The thing to note is that this little rant isn’t the 1960s equivalent of a casual social-media update; it is part of a well-argued piece that serves both as film review (of The Lion in Winter) and a rumination on star personalities. There are hundreds of such moments in the Kael oeuvre, and it’s what keeps her work – the best of which marries passion with contemplation – so alive.