Category: Greatest Hits

The best posts, based mostly on author preference but influenced also by reader reaction.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Heart’s Content

My second maxim was to follow resolutely even doubtful opinions when sure opinions were not available, just as the traveller, lost in some forest, had better walk straight forward, though in a chance direction; for thus he will arrive, if not precisely where he desires to be, at least at a better place than the middle of a forest.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

The buzzy songs of half a dozen species of wood warblers accompany my surfacing from the shallow waters of an uneasy night’s sleep. What in the world could possess an otherwise fairly sane human being to spend ten dollars a night for the privilege of sleeping on the ground? It’s 5:30 on an overcast Sunday morning in the Heart’s Content campground of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest, “Land of Many Uses.”

I fire up my backpacker’s stove, boil water and, with the help of a cloth filter, turn myself into a percolator machine: drip, drip, drip at about the same speed the coffee will exit my body an hour later. The trees still drip from yesterday afternoon’s soaking rain.

The mostly full campground is quiet. I can’t get over being amazed at how many people, some of them not even active outdoor recreationists, will go to such trouble to get out in the woods on a rainy weekend. I admit that this is a pretty nice spot, as campgrounds go. Though bordered on three sides by a 45-year-old red pine plantation, the campsites themselves are tucked into a maturing deciduous forest, each with just enough vegetation around it to lend an impression of privacy and intimacy. I think about how most of the time that people spend in public lands is devoted to doing fairly simple things: eating, sleeping, tending campfires, walking or driving around, looking at stuff.

By contrast, the official management philosophy of national forests stresses Multiple Use, with a strong bias toward economically productive activities. In the Allegheny, this includes primarily logging (especially of black cherry, a fast growing, first-succession species prized by the furniture industry) and oil and natural gas drilling. The Forest Service also favors high-impact, industrial recreation, especially on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and snowmobiles. Yet statewide surveys show that most outdoors-oriented people can’t stand the noise and (in the case of ATVs) the destruction caused by these machines, which represent exactly the sorts of things that the average forest “user” goes to the woods to try and escape. Surveys also show most people are against commercial timbering on public lands, even though its cessation is currently outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

I wonder, as I drink my coffee, whether it would be possible to start a movement to counter Multiple Use that would advocate “no use, just appreciation”? I guess the way to sell people on an alternative philosophy like that would be to emphasize the extent to which wild places should be above and beyond all considerations of utility and profit. Then I remember the unofficial slogan of the Rainbow Tribe, which a few years ago held its annual gathering just about a mile from this spot: “Welcome home,” they say. Imagine if that were written at the bottom of every National Forest sign, in lieu of “Land of Many Uses”!

But the forest is a very different kind of place for humans to come home to. When we try and impose our own aesthetic values, the results can be frightening. Leaving the campground for an early morning walk, I cut through the pine plantation and am able to walk in a perfectly straight line between rows of virtually identical trunks to reach the parking lot on the other side of the road. There is almost no ground cover, only a scattering of star flowers and a couple small patches of hayscented fern. From one patch a fawn leaps to its feet and clatters awkwardly away, visible for many hundreds of feet in this unnaturally uniform, Cartesian space.

I’m surprised to see a total of eight vehicles in the parking lot, which also serves a trailhead for the Hickory Creek Wilderness Area, the only area so designated in this national forest (except for a few, tiny islands in the Allegheny River). It’s a fairly unexceptional stretch of forest; the fact that so many people are backpacking through it on a rainy weekend testifies to the magic of the word “wilderness,” with its implicit promise of ultimate escape.

For me, however, the allure was the 120-acre old-growth remnant at Heart’s Content – and the more than 4,000 acres of old growth contained in the Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Areas, where we planned to spend the rest of the day. We had botanized happily in Heart’s Content for several hours the previous afternoon; now I simply wanted to discover whether it’s possible to get lost in such a small tract of old growth. It is!

When I return to camp an hour later, refreshed by the rich sights, smells and sounds of a natural forest, I’ll be surprised to find I’ve been sapped of enthusiasm for theorizing about forest values – or much else. In fact, I’ll be uncharacteristically taciturn for much of the rest of the day. I realize I may be a little more impressionable than most people, but once disoriented, I find it difficult to re-orient, even after many hours of hiking and successful pathfinding in the Tionesta. A day later, back on my own front porch, things will still seem a little “off” to me; I’ll be struck by the oddness of the straight line of the driveway against the edge of the woods, for example.

I’ll still be puzzling over how, when I left the loop trail in Heart’s Content determined to “walk straight forward . . . in a chance direction,” I could’ve ended up back on the same section of trail I left – still inescapably “in the middle of a forest.”

But unlike Descartes, I am perfectly happy to be here. “Trees, trees, murmuring trees!” sings the black-throated green warbler. The long and endlessly supple call of the winter wren is a rare treat, and I could listen to the piping of the hermit thrush all day. So whence this nameless clutching in my chest, whence this hollow thudding, this clatter of hoofs?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Hanging gardens

What is wrong with me, that I don’t agonize about the purpose of my blogging as so many other bloggers do? A few days ago, my brother Steve asked me what I wanted to achieve with Via Negativa. I had to give it a little thought. My first reaction was, “beauty is its own excuse for being,” but that seemed awfully conceited, so instead I stressed its importance to me as a daily goad. I’m as lazy as the day is long, so, unlike more highly motivated writers for whom blogs are at best a compliment to their daily efforts and at worst a time-eating distraction from more serious stuff, for me, blogging is at the center of my writing practice right now.

Another, closely related purpose is to explore a number of concepts that interest me. Blogging forces me to do more research than I otherwise might, as well as to arrange my thoughts in at least a semi-coherent fashion – which may or may not be desirable, from a poetic point-of-view. I told Steve I like to imagine Via Negativa as a kind of garden (employing the age-old image from Arabic literature), while remaining fully conscious of the difference between the world of Nature and the world of the text – or the Internet. I also mentioned the importance of establishing connections with other writers and readers through comments, responses in other blogs, and e-mail. The sense of kinship this creates must be a bit like how it feels to live in an artists’ colony. Finally, I said something about the ephemerality of all artistic expression. I simply don’t believe there is such a thing as literary universality or immortality, and even if there were, I don’t see how it could possibly be good for the soul to pursue it.

This morning another thought occurred to me. Once a blog achieves a certain, probably fairly minimal threshold in readership, the chances become pretty good for multiple preservation of its best moments. Occasionally one receives hints that this is happening, as over-enthusiastic readers may let slip that they habitually save and/or print their favorite entries – and of course it’s rarely the entries one would have thought. So there’s a triple level of uncertainty, which I find delicious to contemplate:

1) I don’t know how many people will read any given post;

2) I don’t know how people will read a post, in terms of the level of attention or unique life experiences they may bring to it;

3) I don’t know whether or in what form (paper, hard drive, through linking or quoting elsewhere, etc.) a given post may be preserved.

Only at this third level of uncertainty does blogging differ substantially from non-electronic forms of publishing. But isn’t it really just a subset of a much larger mystery that ought to concern everyone who believes in the capacity of individuals to leave a mark and/or change the world? That is,

4) I don’t know to what extent a word or action of mine may be passed on, magnified (“the ripple effect”) or perhaps slowly transmogrified beyond all recognition (a la “whisper down the lane”). A word uttered half in jest may land who knows where and change some unknown heart – like an insect unwittingly carrying pollen between widely separated plants, facilitating an act of creation which is, if anything, more marvelous for the complete absence of any conscious intent, any knowing agents.

Have you ever looked closely at the handiwork of papermaking hornets? Someone collected a small yellow jacket nest and left it on the verandah of my parents’ house, where I noticed it a couple days ago. Lacking reading material at the time, I was bored enough to pick up the golf ball-sized nest and rotate it slowly on my finger. Not only was it shaped like a potter’s creation – a narrow-mouthed water jar with a missing bottom, perhaps – but I noticed that it had clearly been constructed following the coil method. There was a subtle modulation in shades of gray between one millimeter-wide strip and another, presumably reflecting differences in the source material.

Later, I looked in vain through my mother’s nature library for detailed descriptions of vespid papermaking techniques; all I found was the information that the founding queen abandons all building duties after the first generation of workers emerge from their final molts, and that inside layers were continually ripped away as the nest expands. Even the miniature example I had in hand contained three, tightly nested layers. I think this style of architecture has insulating and cooling effects. I vaguely remember reading something somewhere about air circulation and heat exchange in hornets’ nests.

But lacking any designer save so-called blind instinct and random chance, can one still consider this “architecture”? I am fascinated by all the beautiful and symmetrical objects so made – bird’s nests and eggs, seashells, beaver lodges – although I realize that the distinction between making and growing is fairly arbitrary. As the world’s most fully self-conscious creators, I often wonder, don’t we humans have an obligation to celebrate such manifold and wondrous creations – to intuit Creation, maybe even a Creator? Can it be that wonder and awe play some obscure yet necessary role in the moment-to-moment preservation of the universe?

Without our joyful participation, beauty would have little excuse for being, I sometimes think – then immediately chide myself for excessive anthropocentrism. We humans are no less blind than hornets. I think especially of us bloggers, walking upside-down and backwards in a circle to make our elaborate castles in the air, regurgitating half-digested matter gathered from wherever it pleases us to alight . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In the month of small flies

In the month of small flies and the sharp & bitter leaves of wild mustard, a hair fell from heaven & flipped & spun & turned by stages into the first hornbeam tree. But not right away: for a time it slipped in & out of small clearings, walking with a bit of a limp. The people at that time were living in lean-tos made from hemlock boughs & old, yellowed newpapers. Easy come, easy go, they used to whisper whenever a hard rain brought the roof down on their heads. Half-forgetful of his origins, the old man took to carrying stones from the creek, mixing grayish mud with sand. He had fallen in love with the song of a sparrow no one had ever noticed before, and had decided to devote the rest of his life to its study. Meanwhile, pink lady’s slipper orchids in mossy thickets exposed themselves to deluded bees. Black cherries bloomed with a scent as cloying as prom queens. Wherever one stepped, something hopped out of the way & looked back over its shoulder with a reproachful gaze. One heard the peepers down by the pond, the toads around the spring & up on the hill the solitary tree frogs, trilling as if it meant something.

Around this time somebody noticed that none of the calendars showed the days of the week the way they always had. It was as if a long-ago ramp festival-cum-revival meeting took off like a hundred helicopters and swept every last Monday into the forgotten corners where only children playing hide-and-seek ever go. Unless, in fact, the calendars had simply begun to look a great deal like weathered boulders, all decked out in clubmoss and rock tripe. The old man’s skinny arms grew hard as antlers, and his skin turned gray because he shunned direct sunlight. The sparrow – if that’s what it was – had taken to nesting behind his left ear, because it was warm there & out of the wind. There was an almost inaudible rhythm, a pulse that could’ve been the sound of the surf or a woodpecker thinking about his next composition.

Ultimately, the decision to put down roots is more than mere decision, said the hornbeam tree as its nondescript buds unfurled nondescript leaves. We would all do well to heed such a sense of urgency more wordless than love. A true spirit guide never says what you want to hear, & sooner or later leaves you on the lurch. That night, they say, will be a dark one. But is it too much to ask for, this feeling of intimate involvement in the unfolding of others’ destinies? You wake up from a dream in which the only two women you have ever loved have found each other, lose themselves like mirrors turned face to face with nothing, not a speck of dust to come between them: that bottomless ocean.

You wake up & it’s all true, tears of joy – if that’s the word – run down your cheeks. And you remember how every hundred years a mischievous bodhisattva brushes the side of the mountain with a fly whisk, anticipating its ultimate disintegration into the everythingness of Nevermind. We might well expect a different kind of measure to drive the mountain’s own slow symphonies.

The old man’s unfinished house should serve in the meantime – not that anyone needs very much where founding myths are concerned. A sharp digging stick & the ears of a night watchman, little else. But this day that used to be a day of rest has brought the finest weather we’ve seen in a month of Sundays. There’s no time, no time for this foolishness! The pancakes will be on in two minutes!

Submitted for the Ecotone Wiki topic, “Time and Place”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Say hello to my little friends

Somewhere or another I remember reading that the most perfect faces are simply those that are the most average: eyes just the right distance apart, cheekbones just the right height, mouth neither too big nor too small, and so forth. With certain caveats, I might be willing to accept this. But I’m also thinking, how sad if our attempts to describe beauty begin and end with such perfection. We may become so unaccustomed to real beauty that we not only overlook it, but are repelled by it. How many truly striking women only come into their own during their college years, having been largely shunned by their classmates all during high school? How many people can really feel comfortable in a wild setting without succumbing to the urge to straighten things up a bit – get rid of some of the downed limbs and rotting logs, remove an unsightly snag, eradicate that clump of rank weeds? Yet with a little bit of ecological education, such messy elements may be prized – to such an extent that a forest seems immature and incomplete without them.

*

The other day I was lured outside for a brief mid-afternoon walk by the clear sky and calls of newly arrived scarlet tanagers and indigo buntings. I slung binoculars around my neck, but found myself instead crouching for half an hour beside an ant-lion’s trap in the middle of the trail, waiting in vain for an ant to stray into it and get “stoned” to death – a drama I’ve never actually witnessed. I dropped little pieces of detritus into the trap, but only once did the larva’s head come close enough to the surface for me to catch a glimpse of it in the strong sunlight. So I started looking for ants to drop, lure or chase into it.

Again my efforts were a flop. Small ants are hard to catch, impossible to herd – and boy, do they move fast! One did bumble into the ant-lion’s trap while I watched, but it had no trouble scaling the other side – in fact, it didn’t even slow down! I began to suspect that this was the sort of thing that only worked as it was supposed to once in a very rare while. But later, when I checked on the web, I decided that maybe I just found a lazy or recently satiated ant-lion. According to The Antlion Pit: A Doodlebug Anthology, “Antlions are fascinating creatures whose behavior can easily be observed in the wild without ever touching or capturing them. An ant tossed into the pit will stir the antlion into action immediately. If direct involvement in an ant’s death presents you with moral (or other) problems, use an alternate method: a puff of air or a slender blade of grass dangled into the pit can sometimes provoke a sand-flicking response.”

Actually, my fascination with ant-lions stems from the knowledge that their adult form is an ethereal insect closely related to a lacewing. For me, the beauty of the lacewing derives as much from the contrast with its pre-adult “ugly” nature as from the grace and perfection of its adult form.

The thing that really struck me, though, once I began looking at the forest floor with a hunter’s eyes, was just how many tiny creatures were moving around. And most of them were ants, of at least three different species. That didn’t really surprise me; E.O. Wilson notes in Journey to the Ants that ants outnumber all other animals. Without them, says Wilson, “the earth would rot” and most animal species would go extinct. Still, even knowing all this, I was amazed. The earth is a goddamn ant farm!

A miniscule jumping spider added to the interest of this landscape-in-miniature. So quickly did she move from one spot to another, it was as if she had mastered the art of teleportation – an impression reinforced by the lack of any apparent mechanism for this amazing feat. I saw nothing comparable to a grasshopper’s outsized rear legs.

When people talk about creepy-crawlies, I think, they demonstrate perhaps to an exaggerated degree an unease that most of us feel about the lack of any absolute differentiation between the living, crawling surfaces of the world and the surfaces of our own bodies. This co-terminality is more than mere homology – a fact of which the inhabitants of more tick- and chigger-infested parts of the globe need little reminding. When one goes to the tropics, of course, the number of lifeforms waiting to parasitize human flesh, from exotic molds to all manner of mosquito-borne viruses, becomes truly staggering. Years ago, my mother returned from a visit to the Peruvian rainforest with a strange, red lump on her arm that weeped pus and wouldn’t go away. Then one day when she was in the shower, she let out a shriek that brought us all running. Something had just stuck its ugly little head out of a hole in the middle of the lump! A human botfly larva! Fortunately, she hadn’t seen the movie Alien, and fortunately my dad is very patient with a pair of long-nosed tweezers and managed to pull the thing out. (We learned later that the approved method of removal is to tie a slab of raw meat over the spot. Trying to evict the larva by force is chancy, because if part of it remains behind it will rot, with potentially unpleasant consequences.)

Here in the over-sanitized North, we forget what it must’ve been like for our ancestors, whose hirsute bodies (in the case of my ancestors, at any rate) would’ve been more or less constantly in motion with fleas and one or both species of human lice. Without such direct experience, who nowadays can really read as it was meant to be read Robert Burns’ poem “To A Louse”, or John Donne’s “The Flea”?

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Our gross-out reaction undoubtedly gets in the way of enjoying the bawdy humor – just as it prevents us from truly appreciating what such creepy-crawlies meant to the 18th-century haiku poet Kobayashi Issa, perhaps the most entomologically minded poet of all time.

For you fleas too
the nights must be long,
they must be lonely.

(translated by Robert Haas)

Of course, a complete consideration of human-body-as-habitat must look well beyond the assorted ecto- and endoparasites. As Lewis Thomas memorably stated in the title essay to his bestselling essay collection The Lives of a Cell (Viking, 1974), “A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. . . . We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis.”

To pick a less radical example, our intestinal flora are still more-or-less discrete organisms without which digestion would be impossible. This example in particular makes me think of Rabelais, as interpreted by Bakhtin. As I’ve written here in the past, for Rabelais – as for most premoderns – the idealized human body was in constant flux, full of grotesque hollows and protrusions, interpenetrated by – and only very imperfectly differentiated from – the world’s own, grotesque body. Bakhtin maintains that our conception of a smooth and finished body is no older than the 18th century. “The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world. All attributes of the unfinished world are carefully removed.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana U.P., 1984.)

Experimental pathologist Marc Lappé, author of The Body’s Edge: Our Cultural Obsession with Skin (Henry Holt, 1996), seems to agree that the older conception of the body was more accurate. “The view of the skin as a barrier against pathogens, pollutants and radiation is a modern one, and a wrong-headed one at that,” Lappé writes. “Many primitive [sic] cultures regarded the skin as a naturally permeable system and respected its integrity by limiting their disinfection efforts to occasional scrubbings. . . . [By contrast,] modern medical practitioners mistakenly believe that the skin must be kept ‘clean’ and germ-free as a defense against disease. Through the overzealous use of disinfectants, the skin is stripped of its naturally protective microorganisms. This unfortunate practice has led to nursery epidemics of antibiotic-resistant staph and streptococcal skin infections and overgrowth of yeast organisms.”

“Naturally protective microorganisms”? Say what?

“Our skin is host to a veritable entourage of microorganisms during its short life,” says Lappé. “As many as twenty million bacteria and fungi and numerous parasites and arthropods inhabit every square inch of our skin. We are not born so colonized, but rather acquire this ecological microcosm in stages. . . . After birth, the sterile skin is seeded constantly by individual bacteria and fungi, including various staphylococci, corynebacteria, streptococci, and occasional coliforms. These interlopers land on the skin much as invaders would colonize a vacant planet: tentatively and with many failures. But certain bacteria are ‘intended’ to thrive on the skin and are remarkably successful in expanding from their initial land sites rapidly.” (Emphasis added)

*

This brings the discussion back almost to where it started, given that the condition of our skins – especially the skin of our faces – is widely used as an index of beauty. Although human beings are uniquely expressive and uniquely attuned to the expressions on other’s faces, we ignore at our peril the role of culture and individual preference in shaping these conceptions. “Beauty is only skin-deep,” says the redneck proverb, “but ugly goes all the way to the bone.” But if beauty is understood only as a sort of golden mean, and all the individuating marks and scars and wrinkles, all the skewed and off-color points of interest must be airbrushed away, I say: make mine ugly!

I’ll let our panhandling sage have the last word on this topic today . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ten thoughts about possession

1. People don’t actually own anything.

2. Ownership of land may seem obvious to us, but it wasn’t to American Indians. They thought they were selling usufruct rights. And given that one can own surface rights without owning subsurface rights, possession of land can become effectively mooted by the conversion of soil into “overburden” to be scraped away and dumped elsewhere.

3. Possession is inherently ephemeral – and again, the law reflects this. Eminent domain provides for the use of property for the “public good,” though that concept can mutate almost beyond recognition. Most new highways, for example, will not do the land or the public any long-term good. And in some parts of the country, it’s becoming an accepted practice for local governments to condemn private property and turn it over to real estate speculators – with the justification that, for example, private residences do not constitute the “highest and best use” of land in cases where retail or industry might be more profitable and would return higher tax revenues. In times of war, virtually any private property may be seized for any reason. Finally, the existence of inheritance and estate taxes (an indirect subsidy of real estate speculators and private contractors) suggests that the privacy of property is little more than a useful fiction; everything ultimately belongs to Uncle Sam.

4. Do we own ourselves? Clearly not. There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy. The government can institute a draft at any time, which means it retains the ultimate power of life or death over its citizens, despite what the Bill of Rights may say. Even more tellingly, it’s a crime to kill yourself, and a crime to kill others unless you are in uniform and following orders from the government. (Very few murders by police are ever prosecuted. And the U.S. government goes to great lengths to ensure that its soldiers may not be prosecuted by any international court for crimes committed while in uniform.) We do not own our own freedom: we cannot engage in so-called victimless crimes, such as ingesting certain banned substances. Given that the main reason for banning these substances appears to be societal discomfort with the alteration of the consciousness, we must conclude that our minds are not free, either. And individual liberty of movement – what imprisonment robs ones of – seems intrinsic to self-ownership. (If imprisonment were recognized as a form of slavery, the United States would probably be the world’s second-largest slaveholding society, right after China.)

5. Are there any limits to possession? How you answer this question depends on whether you believe anything can truly be known. If even an idea can be copyrighted or trademarked, nothing is safe. Consider that access to drinking water is being privatized around the globe. In Texas, an entire underground aquifer is owned outright. And life forms can now be patented – a blasphemous notion if there ever was one! Probably only the fear of adverse publicity prevents someone like Monsanto or Microsoft from patenting the human genome.

6. Are there any historical precedents for reversing categories of ownership once they have been admitted? Yes. At one time, it was assumed that owners of land had full rights to everything on it. Then market hunters wiped out wildlife populations in large sections of the East. Now, game species are recognized as being held in common, by the citizens at large. Endangered species and migratory birds are subject to national and international regulation respectively. Under the Clean Water Act, the regulation of wetlands belongs to the federal government. The animal rights movement seeks to extend legal recognition to nonhuman species; the wildlands movement advocates recognition of the self-willed (“wild”) and self-owned qualities of the land itself.

7. What does it mean to own something? If legal titles can be revoked – or voided by the overthrow of governments – then surely we must look beyond the law. “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” This implies that if/when the concept of possession is universally recognized as illusory and absurd, the practice of law will wither. What will remain? Without ownership – which is to say, without unique and unequal privileges to the earth’s bounty and to products of human labor – what promises would still be so critical that people might need special protection against their violation? Murder, incest and rape would not stop being wrong; what would likely fade is the societal appetite for retributive justice, once these types of crimes were no longer seen as crimes against a form of property.

8. What does it mean to be possessed? I venture to suggest that possession inevitably entails abuse, to owner as well as to the thing owned. There may well have been one or two benevolent slaveholders in the Old South, but human nature being what it is, I doubt there were many more than that. Because, in the first place, what is possession? I maintain that, at one level, Possession is the power to do with another anything we wish. This definition strikes me as perhaps little more than one half of a tautology, however, because power and possession do seem to be two sides of the same coin. Can we understand possession apart from power, or power apart from possession? Only if the self/other distinction can be dissolved through various forms of ecstasy (including death).

9. Wouldn’t complete self-sufficiency also render the need for power over others obsolete? The need, perhaps, but not the reality. The reality is that we are all completely interdependent. This points to a second, more basic definition of possession: it is a human, cultural abstraction of bodily consumption. The violent assimilation of foreign matter into one’s own body for conversion into energy and waste products is unavoidable. As we consume, so shall we be consumed. In this light, Death appears as the ultimate owner. But paradoxically, in death we also sense the potential for self-transcendence. In rebelling against the authority of death, we determine to live in truth – whatever that means. Every culture, every language grapples with this problem a little differently. In the West, we have traditionally talked about grace and about love. Both concepts partake of the aura of the gift.

10. This, I would argue, is what lies at the root of human experience: the intuition of mortal being/becoming as a gift. Power and possession, I suggest, are much more recent abstractions. To become fully aware is to recognize one’s own incommensurability with that portion of life and time one has been granted. Without such an awareness, the relationship between self and Self will begin to resemble the relationship between two parties in an economic transaction. Priests assert ownership over gods, gods assert ownership (“possession”) over priests. This may be inevitable. But it is a mask; and behind that mask lies the leering death’s head. The unadorned truth seems to be that from the beginning everything shines with its own light. Beauty, like truth, is intrinsic – which is another way of saying that things or beings ultimately resist all forms of calculation or manipulation. Consumption in the beginning is an innocent act; only when we cling to forms – when we try to possess things – does life appear tragic.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In the American Dream

The sleep of the just is just as we’ve always been told. Picture with me, if you will, the bathroom slippers arranged neatly by the bedside, the dog in his customary spot curled up, as dogs will do, with his nose a few inches from his anus. Equally at bay are the sour smells of anxiety and the endless odor-free winter of despair.

The sleep of the just is peaceful as a cemetery, calm as the aftermath of a therapeutic airstrike necessary to conquer terror and quell unrest. The downed wires, the cratered streets permit no troublesome motors to mar this earful of silence. From time to time a cellphone might trill from somewhere under the rubble, a tasteful snatch of classical music as pleasing as a cricket on the hearth.

The sleep of the just is uncommonly deep. Deep as the color of the sky above Fat Poplar, New Mexico. Deep as the voice of the taiko drum at Itsukushima-Jinja, carried out on the tide through the iconographic red torii that stands across the inlet from Hiroshima.

The sleep of the just, we are meant to suppose, is profoundly settling: we sink incrementally into the bed of that sunless river. Like a well-built house that can withstand the removal of a thick seam of coal several hundred feet down. Some mornings, one might find a new crack or two in the windows, doors that need a bit of extra planing before they’ll shut. Right angles gradually go more and more off true.

Ah, for such a rest of the over-stimulated senses! To forget everything, including our own names! Folded away between fresh sheets, breaths still tasting of after-dinner mints, one heartbeat away from the spent flesh of all our fondest desiring . . .
__________

Still undergoing revision as of Tuesday morning.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Man doesn’t exist

Last night I went for a walk around 10:00, and kept pausing to notice how the branches of various trees seemed to stretch caressing or imploring arms toward the second-quarter moon. A very thin cloud cover meant that the moon was virtually alone in the sky – Venus was just setting behind the ridge – and there were no shadows. I stood on the little wooden bridge down at the forks and listened to the stream for a few minutes, enjoying as always the braiding together of so many watery voices.

When I got back to the house, emerging from the trees I saw for the first time the dark hoop of the moon’s halo. It was difficult to escape the impression of a monstrous celestial eye. The pupil was small and bleary-yellow; it was almost unsettling. I found myself unconsciously reaching for my fly. What do I do with this? Oh, right – time for another leak.

Female readers might find this a little hard to understand, but most of us men have a deeply instinctual response to the threatening, the awe-inspiring or the liminal: we mark territory. (Ideally while whistling, or pondering baseball statistics.) I suppose I could have mooned the moon, but that would’ve made me feel utterly ridiculous. Well, I was ridiculous, of course – but that’s simply an existential condition. I pee, therefore I am. Or am I?

***
MAN DOESN’T EXIST
translation of “No existe el hombre,” by Vicente Aleixandre

Only the moon guesses the truth.
And it’s that man doesn’t exist.

The moon gropes its way across the plains, fords the rivers,
penetrates the woods.
It fleshes out the still warm mountains,
runs into the heat from erect cities.
It forges a shadow, slays a dark corner,
drowns in shimmering roses
the mystery of caves where no scent can be found.

The moon keeps moving, seeing, singing, going on and on without a pause.
A sea is not a mattress where the body of a man can stretch out all by itself.
A sea isn’t a shroud for an otherwise shining death.
The moon keeps going; it soaks, sinks into, gullies out the beaches.
It sets the calm green murmurs to rocking crazily.
The standing carcass of a man sways for a moment, wavers,
lurches forward – green – stays put – stiff.
The moon takes note of its broken-down arms,
its disapproving glare at a couple of cuddling fish.
The moon sets fire to sunken cities where one can still hear
(how enchanting!) the clear bells,
where the last echoes of the surf still ripple over sexless breasts,
over soft breasts some octopus has worshipped.

But the moon stays forever pure and dry.
It comes from a sea that remains forever a box,
a block whose limits no one, no one can measure,
a sea that isn’t a hunk of rock glowing on top of a mountain.

The moon comes out and chases what once had been a skeleton,
what once had been the blood vessels of a human being,
once had been its resonant blood, its tuneful jail,
its distinct waist that splits life in two,
or its light head bobbing on the breeze, facing east.

But man doesn’t exist.
Never has existed, never.
But man doesn’t live, just as the day doesn’t live.
But the moon makes up his furious metals.
__________

I have always loved this poem, one of several by Aleixandre that I’ve almost memorized despite my very imperfect Spanish. However, I have always relied on the crutch of Lewis Hyde’s translation (in the bilingual A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, Harper & Row, 1979). Only this morning, when I decided to try and come up with my own version, pondering every word with the help of my trusty Spanish-English dictionary, did I discover just how inadequate Hyde’s translation really is. What seems to have happened is that Hyde assumes more randomness in choice of words and images than the poem in fact possesses – an understandable error for a translator of a surrealist poet, to be sure, but I have always felt Aleixandre to be among the most logical of surrealists. For example, Hyde’s version doesn’t really bring out what seemed to me to be fairly obvious sexual imagery in the second stanza. At one level, this is a song of sex and death, like so many poems from that brilliant generation that came of age around the time of the Spanish Civil War; the moon is like a witness or an accessory to a crime whose face we scrutinize for signs about what really happened.

There were some delightful surprises: “stiff,” which translates “inmóvil,” also of course means “corpse” or “person” (as in “working stiff”) – precisely the right nuance for an English version, I thought. The image of a block of immeasurable dimensions evokes, intentionally or not, the Daoist image of the uncarved block that symbolizes original purity. I also wonder why Hyde chose to translate “mar” as “ocean” throughout, considering that the moon has so-called seas, but not oceans.

I welcome corrections and suggestions for improvement. I’ve no great ego wrapped up in this. You can find the original Spanish on the web. Click on “escuchar la poema” to listen to a recording of Aleixandre himself reading the poem. (His reading doesn’t get very animated until the next-to-last stanza.)

I don’t want to analyze this poem any more than I’ve done already, but it does occur to me all of a sudden that my mission here at Via Negativa is to make unknowability as comprehensible as possible. Does that make any sense? I ask you!

Oops, gotta go take a leak . . .

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Remembering Jack

Up at dawn for some musical multi-tasking: listening to white-throated sparrows through the open window while playing a Leadbelly cassette and flipping through a sheaf of poems by Jack McManis.

Jack was my mentor in poetry, someone who taught largely through silence – he only ever commented on things he liked. He led writing workshops for 25 years at Penn State, but I never actually took a class from him. Instead, we met regularly in his office to exchange poems, starting with once-a-week visits in 1978 when I was in eighth grade, and continuing (with somewhat declining frequency) until Jack’s death in 1989.

Jack McManis was one of the first generation of post-war college poetry teachers. He placed poems often enough in magazines and anthologies, but – much to the distress of his numerous friends and supportive colleagues – never got around to finishing a book-length collection. This omission stemmed partly from the alcoholism that consumed the first half of his life and partly from the altruistic energy that consumed much of the second half. (I didn’t realize until well after his death just how active he had been in Alcoholics Anonymous, helping set up chapters all over the country.)

Jack grew up in southern California, fought in the Pacific in World War II, and was an excellent tennis player – at one time he was the tenth-ranked amateur player in the country. He helped found the poetry magazine Pivot, which still survives, though he was always content to remain Associate Editor. His former students include Diane Ackerman and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

Even after achieving sobriety and becoming a “born-again Anglican,” Jack was no saint in the conventional sense of the term. He office reeked of the snuff he dipped from a silver box, and he loved to try and get others hooked on the stuff. (I always refused it – I’ve never been big on the idea of nasal ingestion.) Although his satires and parodies grew a little less biting after his recovery, he never stopped writing them. Nor were bawdy subjects off-limits: a poem about his neighbor’s wife’s ass was one of his standards at poetry readings.

Jack’s favorite poet was Hart Crane; other favorites included William Carlos Williams, Melvin B. Tolson and Theodore Roethke (who also taught briefly at Penn State). He believed that a poet should be “drenched in words,” as he once wrote me, quoting Hart Crane. He was haunted by Crane’s death – he committed suicide in April 1932 by leaping off a boat in the Caribbean and feeding himself to the sharks. This more than anything seemed to symbolize the end of innocence for Jack, who grew up in the Roaring Twenties. In one satire, he imagined the Statue of Liberty being buried at sea: “slide her down / to the oil shark / republic.” Sharks seemed to possess a kind of limit-value for Jack, as in the following elegy.

MEMORIAL FIN

by the breakwater after the funeral,
Corona del Mar, California

My father, John, a gentle dusty man,
loved the country earth and what it grows.
He most loved lowly and neglected things
we glance at or gaze past but rarely see:
hawberries, snaky wildgrape, wormed crabapples,
swamp shade pools under willow oaks that home
nightsinging whippoorwills and clacking treetoads.
What reliquary for my father’s love
of earth? Wind-driven leaves and locust shells?
Earth crumbled over him, put out his stars
and hushed the cardinal’s clear water-fife
back in his boyhood Indiana woods
still whistling in the now, now lost to him.
My father’s Baptist testimony praised
all these as God’s. He praised the blind fin.

Love as your father loved, the preacher said.
I hear his hands wash now in slap and seethe
of wave on rock and wonder how to love
all this, my father, you its lover gone:
this sky of tearless blue, it’s dead-man’s-float
of the day moon and that lone firefly ghosting
hope, last night flown where in the too-bright noon?
O these feed the blind fin’s tidal appetite –
the sharkfin there by the quay carving its track
straight out, out into the afterbirth grey-green
Pacific and maybe on to infinity
shredding our mirages, love and time,
that fin’s synoptic arrow tugging sun
– to drown the sun? All worship the blind fin.

*
Like many of us, Jack hated to let a poem go. There are no definitive versions, just endless rewrites. The above poem seems to have been his last revision, although I admit I did substitute one line from an earlier version that I liked better – I don’t think Jack would have minded. Now, as I continue to leaf through my folders of his poems, I’m finding so much more that I can’t pass up! How about if I just put a few things down, assemble a brief, fairly random collection of McManis fragments, a la the Greek Anthology?

*
Tin can sacristan,
cling clang buoy!
. . .
I dream and look over
the rail at flaking
light churning,
pouring out
electric tears
as I lose self
in the jewelry
of water.

*
I was born
in a heat wave:
South Chicago.
Headfirst I popped out
crying for a drink . . .

*
And what about sweetsinging Bobby Jones gone paralytic,
Big Bill Tilden humbled in prison and Paavo Nurmi, Finn
ironman, loping off into Arctic twilight, last marathon
against a ghostly polar bear tireless as time?

(“Child of the Twenties in the Eighties”)

*
So the twenties, time of the great gestures! And whose
were greater than yours, St. Slapstick? You who spun truth
in crazy pantomime, though it’s half-past mayhem, time for me
to return to the missing persons bureau of the eighties, before
the onrushing manifest planet spill me in the whistlestop dark,
my keepsakes scattered in cinders, let me spin off the rods
not in mourning but laughing far down in my bones, tickled
by you, old holy pie thrower!

(Ibid.)

*
Let Satch blast out for you, Gabe,
that trumpet note
we’re just dying to hear.

(“Conceit for a Cloudy Halloween ’82”)

*
Finally
The Puerto Rican
counterman comes
and pries
the pair of clowns
out of that
glass coffin.

(“Daily Circus at the Automat / New York City”)

*
A long time ago
(but not so long)
when we pilgrimaged
down to Avenue C
in the cell-block
Lower East Side
to see Leadbelly,
America’s great folk
poet and musicman
(before the polio
things ate his spine),
sitting straight
in a chair in
his walk-up flat
he told us how when
he heard JS Bach
he couldn’t keep
still, but thumped
with his hands
and his feet and
from time to time
broke out into
half-chant and
half-recitativo.
“The beat and the
repeat and the
jubilee,” he said,
“shake the lyrics
out of me like
a hound dog
being gristed
and ground around
in a song mill!”

(“Kin: Remembering Leadbelly,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 1971)

*
I’ll prop the saint erect again come spring
but now his milky eyes feed on the grosbeaks.

(“Letter to a Friend Before the February Thaw”)

*
Inside the crinkled ghost-transparent tent
she’s stretched out gaunt, a green sarcophagus
suspended in seawater, head stuck out
of the bedsheet envelope and pillow-propped,
hawk nose thrust up a wedge to split the air,
to reach, to strain up to the source of it –
that dense life juice she mouths and gums and gulps.
Pinched nostrils labor hard ringed faint with blue-
fadeblue of robin eggshells on cement,
the cheeks caved in to make the forehead loom . . .
All birdmouth gaping she sucks air so hard
I listen for the wind-work hiss of lung,
but stillness hangs a curtain round her mouth
that quivers in and out and seems a stranger
to the frozen skull, the sheeted body mound –
the last sign visible of life the twist
of thin lips flexing their beseeching O.

If I woke where she is in a cloud of green,
what thoughts would consciousness, a broken wing,
flap fluttering against the swoongreen cage?
Or if eyes opened, tried to weave a way
through blear, what make of all the blurring ghosts
beyond the cave and gliding by like fish?
These the loved dead that slip my hands in dreams?

(“Life Mask”)

*
Finally, here’s a Jack McManis poem I couldn’t resist including in its entirety.

ART APPRECIATION CLASS

–Sir, some sacrilegious clown
has gone and dotted
that Tintoretto sunset
with tiny fly specks.
–Where?
–There, there, and there.
–Don’t touch the painting
you fool! Those
aren’t fly specks,
they’re birds.
Tempo giasco
with the Old Master.
The birds
on background of pink sky
are humorous.
–Yeah?
–Yes, the birds are fun.
–Fun?
–Yes, loads of fun.
–Oh, I see what you mean.
Just a minute, Sir.
Let me write that down.
The birds are fun.

***
Last fall my friend Jo, who is in the process of moving very gradually to Arizona, prevailed upon me to take what she calls the Jack McManis tree. This is a handsome, four-foot-tall Norfolk pine that used to belong to Jack. It doesn’t travel very well – the slight bruising and bending necessary to transport it home in the car caused extensive needle loss in the upper branches. But with plenty of light and water it’s growing vigorously now, and if anything has become more attractive as a result of this partial damage to its symmetry. Most of my house is too dark for plants; the only place I could put it was right at the opposite end of the table from where I write.

Thus it happens that when I look up from the screen I find myself staring absent-mindedly into the foliage of the Jack McManis tree. And sometimes then I am transported back to Jack’s “bartelby den of an office,” as he once described it, sitting companionably with sheaves of each other’s recent poems in our laps. I hear Old Main tolling the quarter hour. Then the rattle of a page, and an appreciative grunt gives way to a chuckle, the blowing of a nose. “What a great line,” he enthuses, and I crane my neck, staring with pretended comprehension at another pure accident, learning slowly and without realizing it how to value those moments when the words come mostly on their own.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Nexus: two meditations

1.
I said: No earth, no plow.
No beaten sword to sway hip-
deep in some
dark wound. Forget
the slit where the rolling
coulter rides. Surely,
she asked, you will admit
the moon’s disc?
But I was still uneasy,
thinking, only if
the values were reversed.
Shining field, breast
of smooth obsidian.
The common words
are worse than inadequate:
they’re wrong. The male parts
scatter pollen; seeds
are eggs that have been – what?
Not fertilized, but transformed.
Shining field of the body,
opaque mirror in which
both sexes preen.
If you need
a fable, I said,
try this: You are
the storm
my tree bends
against. Graceful
as a twister, moving
ladder to let the fanatic
angels down
& down. Ground
or figure, earth
or firmament?
Each yields to each,
gets stronger by giving
way: we are water, no less.
The words float at first
& then dissolve.
Voices merge,
eddy, plunge, seek
the level. All of it
a prelude to silence,
the tantalizing peaks
suspended upside-down
in – ah – this
clear lake.

2.
We are all next. — Lucille Clifton

The first word reinvents the world – and vice versa.

This never fails to astonish me, how we cannot think apart from the blossoming shadbush & the grouse exploding from cover.

The ancient analogy between word & seed still seems to hold. What happens to turn a cry into a carrier of specific import? An egg gains direction without & differentiation within. To set seed is to gain polarity, to separate up from down & one wing from the other. (You can call them cotyledons if you like.)

Thus, the very first word is next.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The automobile in the Walking Blues

Images of the holy and the damned. The police handcuffing a man who collected old copies of the New York Times and had them stuffed and mounted in flagrant violation of the Endangered Species Act. His two small children left to fend for themselves among the junker cars and the hippies with their experimental solar-powered aircraft. They were ready to go visit their daddy in jail if I would take them – but was that really the right thing to do? I was so confused! It’s never a good idea to sleep past dawn, I find.

Lethargy and impatience are conspiring against my enthusiasm for the written word. But is that all? This time of year can be unsettling for a confirmed bachelor, you know. Everything is thawing and flowing and springing up with unselfconscious abandon. (Is there any other kind?)
A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?
wrote Larry Levis, greatest among the late 20th-century prophets of the heaven of loneliness –
. . . some final city made entirely
Of light . . .

And what did T.S. Eliot know about April? More than I might care to admit. Mixing memory and desire, I am finding it increasingly difficult to disappear between the keys on the keypad. Whose cruel idea was it to make this “National Poetry Month”? Hell, I can barely stomach Earth Day anymore. All those earnest pleas to be a responsible consumer, live lightly on the earth, etc. – as if that’s enough! But I have been guilty myself of indulging in the even more egregious delusion that Poetry Can Save Us. From which monstrous windmills, oh Don Coyote?

In truth, I woke up this morning with the blues for the blues. To wit: I sure do wish I hadn’t sold all my records off years ago to buy booze! That was so wrong. I especially miss my copy of the 1941 Library of Congress field recordings of Son House, about which an anonymous British reviewer somewhere out in cyberspace writes,

This is a rough ride, but he sure can drive any song home- as does the automobile heard going past on “Walking Blues.”

“Drive.” Where did that come from? And I’m wondering: can anyone who doesn’t own a car in the U.S. of A. – especially if they live out in the sticks – really ever possess “drive”? (Be careful, now!)

Or what about, you know, drives? Maybe I could just make do with a good old-fashioned urge or two. Once again. With feeling.

Got up this morning feelin’
’round for my shoes,
you know ’bout that musta had
them walkin’ blues . . .

Son of House, you knew only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats. But they sure sounded great coming out of that steel guitar! Not to mention the bottle’s severed neck riding on your littlest finger. That afterthought, that fifth wheel. Good for nothing but trouble –

When you vanish into that one cry which means
Your body is no longer quite your own
And when your face looks like a face stricken
From this world, a saint’s face, your eyes closing
On some final city made entirely
Of light . . .

(Levis again, in a completely different context.)

Unreal City, man.