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I got a letter from my friend Chris in Africa last week. He retired, sold his house in D.C. at the end of December and moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with his girlfriend, who started work with a major NGO there in January. Her work takes her all over the continent and Chris gets to tag along, lucky dog!

Chris spends most of his time drinking beer and visiting breweries, but his excuse is it’s all research for a book – the same justification Tom Montag at The Middlewesterner has been using for his peregrinations. Chris’s book will explain How Microbrewing Will Save the Earth by fostering local economies, creating “public space,” encouraging attention to high-quality, organic ingredients, and the like. He refers to this as “fermenting revolution.”

So in January he was in Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, just in time for the biannual Pan-African Film Festival. In addition to a thriving film industry, Burkina apparently has “a solid brewing tradition,” Chris writes. As luck would have it, one of his girlfriend’s colleagues there was “well connected to one of Ouga’s biggest traditional brewsters. I spent a couple days in her ‘factory’ observing, taking notes and digital photos. The beer itself was, when fresh, quite drinkable of course. The only ingredient was red sorghum, plus yeast cakes to get it all fermenting.” (I’m not sure just what a beer would have to taste like NOT to be drinkable in Chris’ view, however.)

Then in Mali the next week he ran into an old acquaintance from D.C. More serendipity: the guy was working on his anthropology PhD in a nearby village, where he was able to set up a demonstration of local millet beer production for Chris to “research.” In a subsequent e-mail to family and friends Chris included a snapshot: “A little village in Mali called Kaniko. The woman in the background is a brewer, feeding her baby some nutritious beer.” (An excellent source of B vitamins and amino acids, I trust.)

But indigenous flavors weren’t the only option; Bamako (Mali’s capital), for example, boasts a Belgian beer bar. I’ve never managed to develop a taste for it, but I gather that, for serious beer afficionados like Chris, the Belgians make the dopest brew on the planet.

Meanwhile, back in Addis, Chris is – as I post this – drinking for free in honor of my recent birthday. Or so he just e-mailed to say. I had told him he’d have to drink for both of us; I fell out of the habit when I started this blog.

I’ve been encouraging him to start a travelblogue if he can. But on the other hand, I also advised him to enjoy his early retirement (he’s around 33, I think) and save all his energies for drinking.

I think it was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who described his work as “deep hanging out.” That might be an apt description for the sort of research Tom and Chris are engaged in, as well. And why not? After all, most minor and many serious medical conditions are linked to an excess of tension. Ambition kills! Goofing off is more than a just a lifestyle choice – for many of us, it is a way of life.

If the evidence of modern ethnography is any guide, our hunter-gatherer ancestors “worked” an average of only four hours a day. Be that as it may, subsistence-related activities in most societies are not approached with the kind of grim, Protestant, no-pain-no-gain determination that all too many Anglo- (or German-) Americans seem to feel is a direct index of moral virtue.

So Happy Friday, y’all. Be sure to goof off as creatively as possible this afternoon. And this evening, drink a toast to my friend Chris over there in Africa. For the health of the planet!

what spells raccoon to me
spells more than just his
bandit’s eyes
squinting as his furry woman
hunkers down among the fists
of berries.
oh coon
which gave my grandfather a name
and fed his wife on more than one
occasion
i can no more change my references
than they can theirs.
Lucille Clifton, Next (BOA, 1987)

“D nt d uttrth spch; nght nt nght shwth knwldg.” Wht ds t mn tht th Hbrw Bbl ws wrttn sll wth cnsnnts? Wrld wtht vwls – r wrld ncmmnsrbl wth th txt? “Hr, Srl!” Mr thn mr pzzl. Th lgnc f t. Th (nvtbl wrd!) grc.

Hv th vwls trl gn mssng, r wr th cnscsl xcldd? Nd f xcldd, cld t b bcs th prtk f th thr-ntr f wmn? Mss t Sn: “B rd gnst th thrd d: cm nt t yr wvs.” Bcs th dvn prsns – th Shkhnh – cnnt tlrt cmpttn? Fr th Wrd tslf s rrdmbl fml.

T prnnc s t sprt; t sprt s t nsprt nd t dsprt. Yhwh tslf prhs rgnll nmtp: tk dp brth, Yh. Nw lt t t – slwl. Wh. Wht th dctr ss, cl nstrmnt prssd gnst r rbs.

“Day unto day uttereth speech; night unto night showeth knowledge.” What does it mean that the Hebrew Bible was written solely with consonants? World without vowels – or world incommensurable with the text? “Hear, O Israel!” More than mere puzzle. The elegance of it. The (inevitable word!) grace.

Have the vowels truly gone missing, or were they consciously excluded? And if excluded, could it be because they partake in some way of the other-nature of women? Moses at Sinai: “Be ready against the third day: come not at your wives.” Because the divine presence – the Shekhinah – cannot tolerate competition? For the Word itself is irredeemably female.

To pronounce is to aspirate; to aspirate is to inspirit and to dispirit. Yahweh itself originally onomatopoeia: take a deep breath, Yah. Now let it out – slowly. Weh. What the doctor says, cool instrument pressed against the ribs.

***

[from the vault]

Heeding the Call
. . . And after the fire a still small voice.
1 Kings 19:11-12

Sure–the ordinarily pious,
perhaps even the faint of heart
could’ve withstood the windstorm
& the earthquake & fire but
a voice of such utter thinness?
Like a circle of knives
unsheathed with
the barest
hiss–ah
what a dodge to call it conscience
as if a smoothly functioning
digestive system were the whole
aim of religion (thus spoke
Nietzsche for example).
And as if such peptic talk would’ve
been proof against that great
movement of liquid vowels
that made the old partisan
of flint & brimstone
bury his face in his cloak.
__________

Note: In the popular homiletic tradition of mainstream Protestantism, the “still, small voice” of Yahweh is attributed, instead, to Jimminy Cricket. (Awkward question: where was that voice of the modern conscience when, in the previous chapter of I Kings, Elijah directed the public slaughter of “450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah” with God’s blessing?)

***
“Faith is not a product of our will. It occurs without intention, without will. Words expire when uttered, and faith is like the silence that draws lovers near, like a breath that shares in the wind. . . .

“Polytheists are blind to the unity that transcends a world of multiplicity, while monists overlook the multiplicity of a world, the abundance and discord of which encounter us wherever we turn. Monism is a loom for weaving an illusion. Life is tangled, fierce, fickle. We cannot remain in agreement with all goals. We are constantly compelled to make a choice, and the choice of one goal means the forsaking of another. . . . God is one, but one is not God. . . . God means: Togetherness of all beings in holy otherness.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (Noonday Press/FSG, 1951)

I have always resented serious personality tests and laughed off the not-so-serious ones. Why would anyone want to put themselves in a box like that? And in the same vein I have been extremely intolerant of astrology.

So you can imagine my consternation upon discovering this description of my birth sign, which comes closer to describing my inner motivations and temptations than anything I’ve ever seen. Joe at The Soulful Blogger writes,

“Pisces is linked to the archetypes of the mystic, the poet, and the dreamer. It is the sign most closely connected with all that dissolves the ego’s false sense of being ‘real.’ Its goal is the realization that what is most real is not the self or the world that we usually take to be real, but reality is inextricably linked to consciousness itself. Pisces aims for the realization of a universal oneness.

“The shadows of Pisces are numerous, for the higher that consciousness climbs, the greater the potential for destruction. Pisces aims to dissolve the ego through transcendental awareness, yet if the individual is not ready for these lessons of awareness, then the self may be dissolved through other means. Pisces is connected with escapism and all manner of destructive addictions. Pisces is also linked to delusion, flights of fantasy, pointless daydreaming, self-sacrificing martyrdom, and a tendency to become unhealthily unmeshed in drama and chaos.”

Yep, that’s me. Sheesh.

All these female helpers: not only fetch and dis but muse, angel on the shoulder, the better half. Williams’ “beautiful thing.” I don’t believe a word of it, much as I might want to. Because the whole time the real women have been stitching together their own versions of events. These days, scores and scores of women poets are saying things that are truer (or at least more interesting) than the old and shopworn Truths of the Great Thinkers. What might they have to say about the Well of Urd? Here’s Lucille Clifton, who composed poems in her head for fifteen years before she ever sought publication:

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
from my own hands. i did not.
the past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

(quilting: poems 1987-1990, BOA EditionsLtd., 1991)

And here is the white working-class poet Mary Fell, in her very first book:

THE PRACTICE

We lived on Winter Street. Bricks escaped from factory walls, distraught. Ours was a building with too many corners. Families got lost and were never heard from again, small names gathering dust or pinned to the wallpaper like religious medals, their blue ribbons fading.

Every step shook plaster from the ceilings. We carried it into the street on our shoulders. Whole rooms blew away by morning. Old aunts went on shopping trips and never returned. Dishes vanished as we ate breakfast. My own mother disappeared into her bedclothes one day, thinking she was better off.

All my life it’s been like this. I tell you, there’s no sense believing what you see. I learned early to practice not being fooled.

(The Persistence of Memory, Random House, 1975)

And the gifted storyteller Naomi Shihab Nye, in “Telling the Story,” reports:

I answered a telephone
on a California street.
Hello? It was possible.
A voice said, “There is no scientific proof
that God is a man.”
“Thank you.” I was standing there.
Was this meant for me?
It was not exactly the question
I had been asking, but it kept me busy awhile,
telling the story.

Some start out
with a big story
that shrinks.

Some stories accumulate power
like a sky gathering clouds,
quietly, quietly,
till the story rains around you.

Some get tired of the same story
and quit speaking;
a farmer leaning into
his row of potatoes,
a mother walking the same child
to school.
What will we learn today?
There should be an answer,
and it should
change.

(Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Eighth Mountain Press, 1995)

Kurt at Coffee Sutras ruminates on the Daoist image of the uncarved block in the context of a quote from William James: “The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone,” etc. It’s true that Laozi, in particular, returns again and again to the uncarved block as a symbol of nameless, uncreated perfection. Power is most concentrated when it is whole, undifferentiated, when it dwells in wu-wei, which means something like “without self-conscious intent.”

In the annals of comparative religion one does encounter such a thing as an aniconic image. These differ from the power objects of animism (which may include uncarved blocks and other natural or naturalistic objects) chiefly in the way they are viewed: through the mirror of iconic or iconoclastic worship. The Kaaba stone at Mecca is one such: an aniconic focus of worship for a religion that is officially iconoclastic.

The foregoing represents my own reflections (take with requisite lump of rock salt). Anthropologist C. J. Fuller, in his masterful treatment of village religion in India, The Camphor Flame (Princeton U.P., 1992), gives a couple more examples. Some of the lingas in Shaivite temples are uncarved rocks, he says, and various natural objects are considered images of divinity among Vishnu worshippers as well. “In the category of aniconic images,” Fuller writes, “we can also place the unhewn or perhaps roughly etched stones, sometimes painted red, that serve as little village deities’ images throughout India; they are housed in crude shrines or left standing under a tree or in open air. These stones serve exactly the same function as the sculpted images and lingas found in larger temples, even though they do not fit the classical iconographic rules. The same applies to other representations . . . Pots in particular, when filled with water in which a deity’s power has been installed, are often used as the functional equivalents of sculptured mobile images at little deities’ temples.”

Fuller goes on to discuss the relationship between deity and image, but I’ll save that for another time. I was struck by this passage because I came across something rather similar in popular Japanese religion. Throughout Japan, one sees simple roadside shrines where the stone images are often so worn down by the elements they appear to be nothing more than uncarved, oblong rocks. Popular religion in Japan is – or was – a highly syncretic blend of native animist, Chinese, and Hindu/Buddhist beliefs. The roadside shrines are part of an attempt to placate or ward off the wandering spirits of those who die far from home, and are thus deprived of the usual 49 years of memorial services by their descendents. Such services are a prerequisite to an individual soul’s ultimate dissolution in the ancestral collective unconscious – a kind of uncarved block.

With Japanese roadside shrines, the superficial mythos is Buddhist. These are shrines to a boddhisattva (Jizô) whose duties include the rescuing of lost spirits and the harrowing of Hell. A related myth (I think Chinese in origin, but possibly Hindu and almost certainly augmented by native beliefs) is the fear of hungry ghosts – spirits which are not fed and therefore turn malevolent, quite regardless of the personality of the deceased. Thus the roadside shrines are generally kept well supplied with ripe reaches, pomegranates and the like. In practice, these shrines become a reliable source of provender for an especially dangerous, unpredictable wight whom the Japanese strive to placate whenever possible, and otherwise ward off through a variety of means: the gaijin, or foreigner.

Being quite besotted with Daoism at the time I was in Japan (1985-86), it occurred to me that the stone boddhisattvas were attaining a perfection of sorts as the paint wore off and the features wore away. This is not, however, as whimsical as it might seem. The Zen-inspired rock gardens of Kyoto are justly famous as outstanding exemplars of an aesthetic that strongly favors the aniconic image. And they point to a praxis which intends, as Kurt suggests, the recovery of an original simplicity.

After eons of practice in sitting,
having long cut
their ties with the parent rock
the local stones lose
all protrusions, their mass
shifts outward, toward rumps
& bulbous crowns. No one
believes in reincarnation here.
Eternity means: bodhisattvas
aren’t born, they’re made.
What stone wouldn’t trade
the bliss of final extinction for
a red cloth bib,
three walls & a roof,
a begging bowl that holds
one whole peach?

(From “Footprints of the Buddha,” which is included in my unpublished manuscript Spoil. Click here for the .pdf.)

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but probably the most important parallel here is with the traditional Japanese Daruma doll. This is a legless, armless figure with a bald head and a big, shit-eating grin. The doll is so designed that it always returns to an upright position now matter how hard you push it over. I believe this is supposed to inculcate cultural values of persistence in the face of adversity, or something. At any rate, Daruma is none other then Bodhidharma, the Buddhist saint who introduced Buddhism to China, subject of countless Zen koans. According to the hagiography, Bodhidharma meditated in a cave for years until he achieved enlightenment. In folk belief, Daruma sat so long his arms and legs atrophied. Popular religion is always so much more interesting than the official kind!

UPDATE
Lots of great essays on rocks and stones this month at the Ecotone wiki.

Here’s another example of an article from the popular press that uses the potential for apocalypse (“huge tsunamis, runaway global warming, and extinctions”) as the hook. But it turns out that many researchers are skeptical about the most drastic claims, feeling that the potential of massive, microbial belches to alter the earth’s atmosphere may be completely overblown. In my view, just as with the recent Science Times article on cosmology, the “gee whiz” aspect of this story is way more compelling. One third of all life on earth, measured by biomass, may occur beneath the seafloor, in the so-called deep biosphere. This life consists of archaea and primitive forms of bacteria: microbes for which oxygen is poison, because they evolved before the existence of green plants. The final paragraphs of this article are worth quoting in full. From the cover story of the March issue of Discover magazine, “20,000 Microbes Under the Sea,” by Robert Kunzig:

“The researchers found microbes in all the sediments they examined. There were more under the coastal waters of Peru than in the open Pacific; more near the seafloor than 1,400 feet below it. But there were intact microbes everywhere. In the upper layers, typically, they were reducing sulfate; in the lower ones they were making methane; and in between they were oxidizing methane.

“The existence of the deep biosphere is established – but it remains an astonishing paradox. ‘From all we understand about the energy requirements just to stay alive, it’s much higher than the energy they have,’ says Barker Jørgensen. If the deep microbes spend as much on maintenance as the surface microbes do, he says – repairing radiation damage to their DNA, keeping their membranes intact – they should have nothing left for the microbial prime directive: divide and multiply. Barker Jørgensen’s expedition looked for some new energy source in the sediment, some exotic new combination of fuel and oxidant, and found none.

“[John] Parkes thinks the microbes’ secret is their slowness: ‘These things are dividing every thousand, every ten thousand, every hundred thousand years. There’s nothing to eat them; bacteria near the surface have to grow fast because they get eaten by protozoa and ciliates, but we’ve not detected those kinds of organisms in the subsurface. So bacteria there can concentrate on maintenance, rather than wasting energy on division.’ And they must have lived long enough and divided often enough and mutated often enough to evolve through natural selection, because they are well adapted to their environment. Parkes has found microbes in deep sediments that grow best at precisely the pressure at which he found them. ‘They are responding at geological timescales,’ he says. ‘That’s the fascinating thing.’

“Microbes living under the seafloor today, Parkes speculates, may have survived the growth and splintering of continents, the opening and closing of oceans; they may have been buried, subducted, frozen in hydrate, and spat out of a mud volcano, only to be buried, subducted, and spat out again. While we were waiting for our evolutionary fast lane to be paved, racing through all of human prehistory and history in the time it takes one of them to divide once, they have been living in time with the planet’s deepest, slowest rhythms. They have been living almost like rock, which is precisely what made them so easy to miss. They have always been there, from our deepest past, but only now have they fully penetrated into our awareness. Given their collective influence, it’s about time.”

This morning my thoughts are itching to break from their places in the procession, to spin off, to dance, to swim, to soar, to climb walls, to descend into subterranean passages. Paradigmatic thinking is too little, narrative thinking too much. That’s why I keep coming back to poetry: at its best, it’s a way of letting thoughts be, loosening the heart and the tongue. Implicit in the neat division of thinking into rational and non-rational is the notion of order as something necessary to understanding. Cogito, ergo sum. But how does the dream of self-consistency play out? We wake up, sticky with fluids. Or the happily-ever-after: we wake up in the arms of the Beloved.

We confuse categories when we talk about natural laws. What does it mean to have a law that cannot be broken? Anything that doesn’t fit this fundamental paradigm is “supernatural,” “paranormal.” Two equally tautological choices present themselves: either we simply lack the appropriate hermeneutic key by which to explain away all apparently supernatural phenomena, or else there is some parallel order – existing in our minds and/or another dimension, perhaps – of which the supernatural is a part. Neither alternative admits the possibility that Nature is inherently recondite.

Paradigms are nets: something will always slip though. Narratives are maps: endlessly inventive, selective by design. Our minds dictate, suppress, deny, impose themselves on a world that continually rebels because it has its own ideas. In the prayer, in the poem, in the unforced performance of all necessary and superfluous work things try to speak themselves through us. The so-called creator is both medium and mediator. Cultivating awareness of this role involves us in a game whose rules, often of our own apparent invention, are constantly changing (think “Calvinball,” from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes). We are mapmakers; we are weavers of nets and matrices. Logic and narrative go together like bitter and sweet – they flavor the game. Among other things . . .

A “doomsday” that is billions of years away has little or no meaning for members of a species less than a million years old. (We’ll be lucky to survive the next hundred years!) So my initial reaction to a story on current cosmological hypotheses entitled “From Space, a New View of Doomsday,” is a snort of derision. Apart from the framing, however, this story (by Dennis Overbye in today’s New York Times) is full of interest, as the following excerpts demonstrate:

“That number, known as w, is the ratio between the pressure and density of dark energy. Knowing this number and how it changes with time – if it does – might help scientists pick through different explanations of dark energy and thus the future of the universe . . .

“One possible explanation for dark energy, perhaps the sentimental favorite among astronomers, is a force known as the cosmological constant, caused by the energy residing in empty space. It was first postulated back by Einstein in 1917. A universe under its influence would accelerate forever.

“While the density of energy in space would remain the same over the eons, as the universe grows there would be more space and thus more repulsion. Within a few billion years, most galaxies would be moving away from our own faster than the speed of light and so would disappear from the sky; the edge of the observable universe would shrink around our descendants like a black hole. . . .

“Another possibility comes from string theory, the putative theory of everything, which allows that space could be laced with other energy fields, associated with particles or forces as yet undiscovered. Those fields, collectively called quintessence, could have an antigravity effect. Quintessence could change with time – for example, getting weaker and eventually disappearing as the universe expanded and diluted the field – or could even change from a repulsive force to an attractive one, which could set off a big crunch. . . .

“But the strangest notion is what Dr. [Robert] Caldwell has called phantom energy, the dark energy that could lead to the Big Rip. . . .

“While the density of the energy in Einstein’s cosmological constant stays the same as the universe expands, the density of phantom energy would go up and up, eventually becoming infinite. Such would be the case if the parameter w turned out to be less than minus 1, say physicists, who admit they are stunned by the possibility and until recently simply refused to consider it.

“‘It crosses a boundary of good taste,’ Dr. Caldwell said, calling phantom energy ‘bad news stuff.’ Phantom energy violates physicists’ intuitions about how the universe should behave. A chunk of it could be used to prop open wormholes in space and time – and thus create time machines, for example.

“‘It could lead to such bizarre effects as negative kinetic energy,’ Dr. [Lawrence M.] Krauss said. As a result, objects like atoms would be able to lose energy by speeding up. . . .

“Dr. [Robert] Kirshner said phantom energy had been dismissed as ‘too strange’ when his group was doing calculations of dark energy back in 1998. In retrospect, he said, that was not the right thing to do.

“‘It sounds wacky,’ he said, referring to phantom energy, ‘but I think we’re in a situation where we’re going to need a really new idea. We’re in trouble; the way out is going to be new imaginative things. It might be our ideas are not wild enough, they don’t question fundamentals enough.'”

O indigence at the heart of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!
– Osip Mandelstam (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans.)

Via Negativa is two months old today. Calloo, callay!

I started out expecting to write mostly short entries, but they’ve gotten longer and longer. I set myself the goal of going nowhere, proving nothing and avoiding relevancy at all costs, but I think I may have slipped up once or twice. I have written probably more about religion than is healthy, less about science and nature than I’d like and as much about philosophy as I can get away with without betraying my abysmal ignorance. Via Negativa has at least six regular readers and perhaps another dozen who check in from time to time. I continue to discover new blogs worth adding to my list of favorites. The writing is still its own reward. I hope to continue for at least another ten months.

UPDATE: Now we are green – for no better reason than that Change is Good. We have an Atom RSS feed . . . and no, I don’t have the slightest idea why that matters. There’s a new a la carte list of high points in the sidebar, ’cause I always like it when other bloggers do that. Please e-mail me if you think I overlooked something that should be on the list – or if I listed something that doesn’t belong there.