Hope is the thing


Watch at Vimeowatch at YouTube.

This is not the video I intended to make. When I contacted Nic S. on Tuesday to ask if she’d be willing to record a reading of Dickinson’s poem, I’d just seen the one hundredth example of someone trying to illustrate the poem with a video of a goddamn bird, for christsake. I’d just shot some good footage of a toad that afternoon, and I thought, why not use that? Then this morning, I got some further inspiration and shot a dandelion sead head (that’s “dandelion clock,” for you Brits) blowing in the wind. It was gorgeous. It had “thing with feathers” written all over it.

The problem is, when I went ahead and made a videopoem with Nic’s reading over-top a recording of a wood thrush with the toad and dandelion clips, it was just too… you know. Too pretty. Dickinson wrote the poem in 1862. 1862! Hope was in pretty short supply that year.

So I took an hour’s nap, and when I got up, the solution was clear. Fortunately, the Prelinger Archives obliged. God, I love the internet! But not as much as I love Emily Dickinson.

Patience, young grasshopper: a beginner’s insights into attention

Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
“Kung Fu” (TV series), pilot episode, 1972

A grasshopper doesn’t move when I pass her on the concrete walk through the front garden to my door. This seems unusual, and I crouch down for a closer look. I think the bright red hind legs might make it red-legged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, but it’s probably something in that genus, at any rate. I notice the end of the abdomen is swelling and contracting, and keeps pressing against the concrete like a finger probing for a weak spot. She takes a few steps forward, presses the concrete some more, then steps off the walk into the garden and immediately finds a patch of bare dirt that behaves as expected, yielding to pressure. The swelling and contracting of the abdomen, combined with steady pressure from the big hind legs, slowly forces it into the soil to the depth of about a centimeter. The grasshopper now remains immobile for the next several minutes except for a slight throbbing of the abdomen, which I presume denotes the deposition of eggs.

The more this grasshopper absorbs my attention, the more I notice of her surroundings, too: the small black ant walking in tight circles beside her, a larger red ant that crosses the walk in a more purposeful manner, the black field cricket — half the length of the grasshopper but just as fat, and twice as charismatic — who comes down the walk toward me and crosses into the moss garden. I hear a hummingbird buzzing into the spicebush above my head, then dropping down almost to my ear and hovering for a second before rising into the lilac and briefly perching. Even as I watch, others are watching me.

When the grasshopper pulls out, she climbs back up onto the sidewalk, which has evidently lost none of its attractiveness. She crosses it slowly, again “fingering” it with the end of her abdomen every inch of the way. How can any creature be so unaware as to mistake hard concrete for soil, just because it’s a similar color? Finally she stumbles off the other side of the walk and onto another suitable patch of dirt where the moss hasn’t grown in yet. Since our last rain was just two days ago, again she has no trouble penetrating the soil surface with her throbbing organ. I stand up slowly from my crouch, but clearly she is too intent on egg-laying to notice me and the threat to her existence I represent.

A nascent online community devoted to “practicing the art of attention,” This Life Lived, challenges members this week to consider the nature of attention itself:

What does “attention” mean to you? How do you define attention for yourself? What do you look like when you are paying attention, and what are you doing? What do you feel when you are at full attention: Do you feel calm and still, or do you feel wired and energized?

Try to construct a clear and personal definition of attention this week. If you struggle to get started, you could say to yourself or write in your journal, “To me, attention means that I am ______________ .” Then describe that definition in detail. Take time with your personal definition. Notice yourself throughout the coming week, and try to catch yourself in the act of paying attention. Notice what that act or moment does for you, and how it affects your day.

To me, attention means that I am going out of myself, not unlike the egg-laying grasshopper — and in the process, making myself vulnerable. Somehow, I think, the vulnerability is key to the whole experience. Although I am fortunate to live on a mountain with (at present) no man-eating carnivores or poisonous snakes, crouching down in the woods or fields at various times of the year can definitely be hazardous, exposing one to Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks. I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about that, but the point is that the vulnerability of a rapt observer is real and not theoretical. Women and girls of course experience another whole dimension of vulnerability in many seemingly remote areas. In any case, my point is that we are the products of millions of years of evolution in which we were usually prey animals as well as hunters and foragers, and I think the kinds of attention we experience today have been shaped by all three of those roles (among others). I’d go so far as to suggest that the way the attention rather quickly widens out when we focus on one thing is an adaptive behavior. We may be focusing on what’s right in front of us — some hard-to-spot wild root crop, say — but if a twig snaps the wrong way, we’ll hear it.

When I sit out on the porch drinking my coffee in the morning, much of the time I am not paying attention. But at a certain point I’ll remember that I need some interesting observation to write about for The Morning Porch, and at that point I turn into a kind of hunter-gatherer. I don’t have a clear search-image in mind, but I’m alert for anything that will make good writing fodder. Often I begin by listening, mentally naming everything I hear, which at this time of year may not be much: goldfinch chittering, the steady trill of tree crickets, the whine of an annual cicada, a passing jet, the faint sounds of traffic from the gap. Just listening like this makes me more aware of what I’m seeing, too, and it’s a good way to begin because listening is inherently more absorptive than looking, which preserves a distance between observer and observed. Sometimes then I’ll stand up and start taking a mental inventory of the plants in my front yard.

It’s funny: as I’ve probably mentioned here before, when I was a kid I was very resistant to the idea of learning names for wild things, because it seemed to me that once we associate something with a fixed name, we make it much more difficult to see that thing in a different light. Now that I’m a writer, though, I’ve bowed to necessity and put a high priority on learning the common names. It’s true, you can have some sort of relationship with something for years without knowing what it’s called. Perhaps someone more enlightened than me can experience something akin to the Zen ideal of direct seeing — good luck with that. In my experience, knowing a name is the first step toward making something’s acquaintance in a real way.

As many thousands of times as I walked up the road as a kid, coming home from school, I never knew the names of the plants whose hard, comma-shaped seeds could so easily be stripped from the stalk, or the ones with fleshy, translucent stems that snapped so easily. They were my companions in dawdling; I de-seeded and uprooted them unmercifully as an occupation for my distracted fingers. Was I really paying attention to those unnamed plants? Not really. It was only about ten years ago, on a hike sponsored by our local Audubon chapter, that I finally learned what people call them: jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum) and clearweed (Pilea pumila), a stingless nettle. These names were so right, and so delightful, I was immediately ashamed of my long-standing callousness, and I haven’t been able to see either plant since without an inward smile of recognition.

If you’re a poet, you’re probably familiar with some version of that relaxed-yet-focused, semi-trance state in which the best lines and ideas come to the surface. I’m sure other artists get into that zone as well. For me, its strongest analogy is to hypnagogia (thanks for the word, Natalie!): it is a mild kind of threshold consciousness characterized by increased receptivity and suggestibility. As with actual hypnagogia, it’s a state that often yields real insights. But it’s not so different, either, from that state of attention I found myself in this morning, watching the grasshopper probe the ground with her ovipositor, or earlier, on the porch, listening to goldfinches and watching them glean seeds from the wild thistle. I was open, I was vulnerable, I was letting things in.

What we did on our summer vacations: one-line poems

Line at the Restroom

They canoe across the lake to take a leak.

*

Seasick

He lies flat on the pitching deck among the humpbacks.

*

Unemployed Railfan

An appreciative grunt for the SD40-2s hauling Chinese shipping containers up the mountain.

*

State Forest

We drive through a small rainstorm that seems lost, too.

*

Outhouse Race

The occupant’s role is to sit still & look urgent.

*

In the Heel of Italy

Too hot to sleep, they call a friend in the U.S. & listen to him drink a cold beer.

End Times

This entry is part 46 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

Chicken Mushroom (Laetiporus Sulfureus, L. Cincinnatus)

“It is a common theme [that the United States, which]
only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world
as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal
is in decline, ominously facing the prospect
of its final decay….” ~ Giacomo Chiozza in
the Political Science Quarterly

A damp morning: then rain, a fine
mist that stops and starts like
sprinklers in the produce section
at the grocery store. Otherwise an

ordinary day, then neighbors come by
with bags of chicken mushroom;
it glows salmon and orange,
as in the depths of the hollow

from which it was freshly picked.
It looks like something nuclear,
flaunting ruffled shelves that sprout
from wounds of cherry wood, sweet

chestnut, willow, oak, or pine.
In the event of an apocalypse,
if we survive, perhaps we’ll be
reduced to foraging for sustenance

sprung from what might yet live
in rock and rot. Standard & Poor
has just announced it’s down-
graded America’s credit rating;

but at the clubhouse next door,
a group of swimsuit-clad preteens
is waving Wii wands and lollipops,
mimicking moves that would make

Zeus blush. In malls, the muzak
pours like water on an endless
looping track. The Wii party girls
drop their damp towels on the floor.

In Moscow, an “Independence Day” formation
has been spotted in the air; and a Canadian
cameraman has filmed an ominous bank of clouds,
moving across the fields with the face of a Roman god.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If there were such things as ghosts

This entry is part 15 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Walking obelisk

They would be white & watery
as boiled potatoes.

They would shimmer like the moon in a ditch.

They would have no eyebrows.

They would frequent banks & stock exchanges
instead of cemeteries.

They would step into traffic
like swimmers into a cold mountain lake.

They would be able to murmur
only a single word: Ah.

They would be afraid of the dark.

Reprieve

This entry is part 43 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

If, as Rumi once wrote, The price
of kissing is my life
: at least

this morning, let me not think
about all that there is too

much of— the weight of living
accrued in collapsible boxes,

all the kisses that have morphed
into deeds and contracts, the kisses

now overlaid with the smell of musty
evenings in old countries, those

that smack of the toil that comes
of trying to sweeten others’ days—

Surely there is room for some plain,
no-strings-attached kissing, surely

a way to modulate the hum of that one
cicada in the trees so its voice lifts,

doesn’t merely drown, in a chorus of other
insistent voices? Surely there must be a way

to lengthen the echoes of light sifting
in the leaves and through damp lattices

of neighbors’ fences; to dwell without
rancor or remorse in moments when I

might press my face against your nape
to catch that drifting note—

unnameable, unmistakable, stirring
even my sorrows into fragrance.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“We were tentative”: how to make a videopoem by accident


Watch on VimeoWatch on YouTube

I made this videopoem sort of by accident, which was good because it led me to break some of my own rules and branch out in a new direction. This is the opening poem to Nic S.’s nanopress collection Forever Will End On Thursday, and “condense[s] seemingly out of nowhere,” as Amy King has characterized Nic’s approach to storytelling. It’s a great poem, even if it isn’t what I originally had in mind.

Process notes

I spent all morning and half the afternoon under the impression that I was going to make a video haiku today, which for me typically means about 45 seconds of footage followed by the haiku in text form. I was going to use this great footage of a tiger swallowtail I’d shot around 9:00, and I even wrote the first draft of the haiku. But when I finally went to look at the footage on my computer, I discovered it wasn’t there, and the two clips I’d uploaded earlier consisted mainly of blurry, accidental shots of the ground. Clearly I had pressed the record button when I shouldn’t have, and what’s worse, had failed to press it when I should have. So there went that idea.

I’d already spent an hour locating some music I liked, though: a couple pieces from a series of electronically deconstructed studies of various instruments by a guy named César Alvarez, who uses the handle musicisfreenow on SoundCloud. I had been searching for Creative Commons-licensed clarinet tracks, but I liked what Alvarez did with the banjo even better. Then I noticed that a section of my blurry driveway footage was visually kind of compelling, and on impulse started typing the text for the second stanza of Nic’s poem overtop it. I applied a simple animation effect to each line and found I liked the result, even though I often find text-only videopoems tiresome to watch, and text-plus-voice videopoems annoyingly redundant.

I figured I’d work out the inconsistencies in my approach later, though, and concentrated on finding other clips from video I’ve shot over the past few months. Footage of a juvenile indigo bunting shot through a screen door seemed to work well for portions of the poem. I remembered a video of a London street performer, and found a four-second clip from that which seemed like a particularly good match both for the choppy music and for the edgy content of the poem. It didn’t take a whole lot more poking around to find two more clips that kind of made oblique reference to the imagery in the poem. I did the text animations and cut the video to fit.

Finally, the most laborious part: chopping up Nic’s reading to fit the video, which itself was modeled after her arrangement of lines on the page. Since her line-breaks don’t normally track with her pauses for breath, I knew this would be a challenge, but again, the choppiness of the music seemed to license it. At some point it also occurred to me that, since the text would appear on-screen, I could leave the music at normal volume, something I’ve never been able to do for a videopoem with spoken word before. The result: a strange hybrid of poem-as-text and poem-as-voice, a bit of a hippogryph.

My usual procedure, of course, is quite the opposite: I make the soundtrack first and cut the video clips to fit. I like to tell myself that this is the best way to go, and perhaps it is, but it also happens to be far easier and less time-consuming than the approach I took with this video. It doesn’t hurt to do things the hard way sometimes.

In defense of my method here, I would note that, to the silent reader, the line-breaks in unpunctuated poems like Nic’s do help create a kind of uncertainty or anxiety about meaning which is a fruitful part of the reading experience — and which a naturalistic out-loud reading does away with. Why not try and preserve some of that semantic uncertainty in the video? If I ever re-do it, though, I think I may use a more legible and somewhat smaller, narrower font. Having to break the two longest lines in the middle damaged the integrity of Nic’s poem-as-text, and rendered this experiment a little less successful than it might otherwise have been, I think.

UPDATE (August 11): Nic made me a fresh recording with ample pauses between the lines to avoid some of the abrupt cuts in the original, so I’ve re-done the soundtrack. I took the opportunity to re-do the title and credits with a more legible (filled in) version of the Courier font, but decided not to mess with the font otherwise. I think this is a keeper now.

Grief Bacon

This entry is part 14 of 20 in the series Highgate Cemetery Poems

 

Split gravestone

Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.
15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

Strip of blubber
sputtering on
high heat,
red stripe
that whispers
to the whip,
curling like
a tongue
at touch of
something bitter,
shrinking
& shriveling like
a spent cock
or drought-
struck leaf,
turning brittle
as the cover
of an old pulp
magazine,
ah bacon—
if I were to
bring you home,
it would be
as a flag
draped over
a coffin,
red & white
& red,
or some
long rash
I’d feed with
nervous nails.

What You Don’t Always See

This entry is part 37 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.” ~ Hebrews 11:1

I am the sheen of the egg after it has dropped its sun
into the heated pan. I am the cool underlining the day.
I am the dry, cracked bodhi leaf that fell from the tree

under which the sage closed his eyes and made a perfect
circle with his finger and thumb, and now lies in a frame
bought at the temple gift shop. I am the trill of a cricket

craning its body toward autumn in ninety degree heat.
I am the hunger that swerved like a bus on a switch-
back trail, so the hens and the goats being taken

to market broke out of their makeshift cages,
scrambling into the bushes to safety. I am
the tremble in the arc of the pendulum weight

as it hums from the tension in its silver wire.
I am the dream that flickers beneath the eyelids
of the child who wakes then names the events

that unfold. I am the filament that lodges
in the throat, tasting of salt and bone. And I,
I am the clock that stops just short of despair,

the zipper’s train whistling to the end of the track
and back; the shirt that fastens all the way to the top
so fingers can loosen the tiny buttons a little, or a lot.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.