Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Thanks to everyone who took part in the discussion about love, sex and Brokeback Mountain in the comment thread to Monday’s post, which in many ways has turned out to be more interesting than the post that spawned it.
Now one of the participants, Zhoen, has fleshed out her thoughts about love and the body in a brief essay called, simply, Body. Hers is a very embodied kind of thinking, moving from story to story and avoiding didacticism – a model of the blogging art. Do stop by.
This morning was so clear, so blue. The bluebirds began singing long before the sun came up, when Venus was still ablaze over the eastern horizon. I sat watching her inch sideways through the trees, fading into the dawn sky.
I didn’t write anything substantial this morning, but I knew I could’ve – and sometimes just that knowledge, that feeling of the writing spirit close at hand, is sufficient. It was too hard to stay indoors. All the melancholy pictures that I’d taken yesterday afternoon, under a flat, gray sky, had to be taken over again! But before I did that, I’d need some fuel.
Going into the kitchen for breakfast, I felt an odd impulse to listen to a few songs by Ali Farka Toure while I ate. Sure, he’s one of my favorite musicians and singers, but I almost never listen to anything during breakfast – no radio, no music. I don’t want to derail my own train of thoughts. But this morning, I wanted to hear his evocation of the grass snake, “Sega,” on the one-string West African fiddle (njarka). The next song on the Talking Timbuktu CD, the Tuareg blues song Amandrai, also complemented my mood. But it was the conjuring sound of the njarka I had most wanted to hear.
Ali Farka Toure’s music has deep spiritual roots, born of a classic shamanic initiation type of crisis – this despite his Sunni Muslim beliefs. (Islam in Mali tends to be very tolerant and syncretic.) Years ago, when I was reading a translation of a French anthropological text on the Gimbala spirit possession cult of the bend of the Niger, I was surprised to find Ali Farka Toure included as an informant. In some album liner notes I just discovered online, he describes his entry into the world of spirits and music:
I knew the spirit who gave me the gift very well. And I remember that night in Niafunke [Toure’s home village]. A night I’ll never forget. I was about thirteen years old. I was chatting with some friends. I had a monochord [single string guitar] in my hand. I was wandering playing ordinary songs, just like that. It was about 2.00 am. I got to a place where l saw three girls standing like steps of stairs, one higher than the other. I lifted my right foot. The left one wouldn’t move. I stood like that until 4.00 am. Next day l walked to the edge of the fields. I didn’t have my instrument with me. I saw a snake with a strange mark on its head. Only one snake. I still remember the colour. Black and white. No yellow, no other colour, just black and white. And it wrapped itself around my head. I brushed it off, it fell and went into a hole and I fled. Since then l started to have attacks.
I entered a new world. It’s different from when you’re in a normal state; you’re not the same person you know. You don’t feel anything anymore, whether it’s fire, water or if you are beaten. I was sent to the village of Hombori to be cured and I stayed there for a year. When l felt better, I returned home to my family. There I began playing again and I was very well received by the spirits. I have all the spirits. I possess all the spirits and I work with them. I was born among them and grew up among them.
Ali Farka Toure became adept at crossing between worlds, mastering many languages and translating traditional music into modern idioms. He adapted to the international concert scene with great ease. At the same time, however, he remained firmly rooted in his home ground, and considered himself first and foremost a farmer.
He pioneered the adaptation of Sonrhaí¯, Peuhl and Tamascheq styles to the guitar. Even today, few have followed his path. His charismatic person, his fine voice and intricate flowing guitar technique, his good looks and enigmatic character, have all contributed to give him prestige. He remains uncompromisingly wedded to his traditional music, refusing to “go commercial”. His songs celebrate love, friendship, peace, the land, the spirits, the river and Mali; all expressed in dense metaphors.
What was it that made me decide to listen to Ali Farka Toure this morning, on the very day of his death? Something in the air, perhaps, something in the sky. When my brother Steve emailed the news a few hours later, my other brother, Mark, replied with some amazement that Ali Farka’s name had come up in class the night before – a mere couple of hours after his death. “That sort of thing is always happening to me,” he said. Maybe this was a worldwide phenomenon: fans of the great Malian bluesman suddenly feeling odd compulsions to listen to his music as they breathed in the atoms from his dying breath, like particles of dust from the ever-shrinking Sahel blown high into the jet stream, encircling the globe, adding a faint blush to the dawn sky.
In the Bible, “forty” is a stereotypical way of measuring time: not sacred time, exactly, but the amount of time necessary for a complete revolution of some celestial wheel. David, Solomon, Jehuash and Joash are all said to have reigned for forty years, and the “judge” Eli died in the fortieth year of his leadership. Under Caleb’s younger brother Othniel, “the land had rest” – i.e. from war – “for forty years” (Judges 3:11). A little later (Judges 8:28), “The country was in quietness forty years in the days of Gideon.” This “peaceful forty” clearly differs from a sabbatical kind of rest, such as Leviticus prescribes for the land every seventh year and for the country as a whole in the Jubilee, or 50th year.
Forty can equally measure a time of peace or a time of pain and trial. Jewish tradition makes much of the fact that pregnancy among humans lasts approximately forty weeks; this was often cited to explain the importance accorded the number forty in the Bible. Under Mosaic law, the period of purification after birth is forty days. Moses fasted on the mountain for forty days, communing with God. Elijah survived for forty days on a single meal, traveling to Mount Horeb for his famous encounter with the “still, small voice,” and Jesus after him undertook a forty-day fast in the wilderness, wrestling with temptation. In the Noah story, the rain falls for forty days and nights to cleanse and reshape the world. A similarly harsh cleansing takes place during the forty years in the wilderness, when everyone with living memory of Egypt, except for the faithful Caleb and Joshua, must die, and a new generation, born in the desert, must come to maturity. In Judges 13:1, “the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.”
Moses was forty years old at the time of his revelation on Sinai, according to the Christian Book of Acts. At the age of forty, Isaac married his cousin Rebecca; Esau married a Hittite woman named Judith; and Caleb was sent to spy on the inhabitants of Canaan – an adventure that lasted forty days. Saul was forty at the start of his ill-fated reign.
The Rabbis of the Talmud, like the ancient Greeks, believed that forty was the age of reason and maturity. Kabbalists traditionally felt that a man wouldn’t be ready to begin studying any esoteric teachings until the age of forty – or some say 42. Mohammed was forty years old when an angel first appeared to him and revealed his divine selection as the Messenger of God. Huike, the Second Patriarch of Chan (Zen) Buddhism – and thus the first East Asian Zen master – was forty when he received the transmission from Bodhidharma. Legend records that he had cut off his own arm in a desperate attempt to still the chaos in his mind during the crisis leading up to his enlightenment. He then went into hiding for forty years to escape an anti-Buddhist purge, and only began to teach at the age of eighty.
Judges in the Spanish Inquisition had to be at least forty years of age. Perhaps in reaction to this sobering fact, the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground rails against his attainment of the same age:
I am forty now, and, mind you, forty years is a whole lifetime. It is extreme old age. It is positively immoral, indecent, and vulgar to live longer than forty years. Who lives longer than forty? Answer that me that – sincerely and honestly. I’ll tell you who – fools and blackguards – they do! I don’t mind telling all old men to their face – all those worthy old men, all those silver-haired andambrosial old men! I’ll tell it to the whole world, damned if I won’t! I have a right to say so, for I shall live to the age of sixty myself. I’ll live to be seventy! I’ll live to be eighty!
(David Magarshack tr.)
I guess I don’t need to dwell on what it means to be forty in American popular culture. It symbolizes the end of youth and the prime age for the mid-life crisis, a rite of passage for American males. A movie called “Forty Year-Old Virgin” was one of this past year’s surprise hits. The general societal expectation is that one should be well on the road to success by the age of forty. By the time George W. Bush was forty, for example, he had earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale, an MBA from Harvard, and had run two independent oil companies into the ground. By contrast, his fellow Texans the Austin Lounge Lizards extoll the Gen-X slacker ideal:
She wants me to act like some middle-aged man
I used to think she knew me, but she can’t understand
That it’s hard to make a living doing watercolor and collage
That’s why I’m forty years old and I’m living in my Mom’s garage
So today I turned forty. Things should start getting interesting any moment now.
Nursing a head cold, I brood over books and email, unable to write. Outside the sky is overcast, but shortly after 8:00 a rift appears in the east and the sun pours through. I hurry outside with the camera, thinking to try and get a few landscape shots. But when I look at them later, they’re as blurry as the thoughts running through my head these past couple of days (see yesterday’s post).
Then I focus on the frenetically active birds, and my hands grow steadier. An American goldfinch in the wild apple tree, an eastern bluebird above it on the wire: they each pause. I pause. Two, tinny sneezes of the camera and the sun goes in. The clouds slowly lighten, the transformer box darkens, and soon they are the same dull white.
So I go to a planning meeting for an environmental group I’m active in. At one point, someone says, “What if, by some miracle, a piece of legislation is introduced which,” etc.
“Part of the planning process is writing out the miracles,” the chair responds.
An old railroad trestle from an abandoned spur line crosses the Little Juniata River right where our access road joins the highway on the other side of County Bridge 45.
I had to meet a ride down there yesterday morning around sunrise, so I brought my camera along.
It was the coldest morning of the year so far – 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a bit of a shock, coming right after several days of unseasonable warmth. But it meant that the air was as clear as it gets, and the river had a thin layer of freshly-knit ice along the shore.
When the sun rose, the surface of the water came alive with swirls and streamers of rising mist.
I took dozens of pictures, most of which completely failed to capture the beauty all around me. In the same way that writing poetry forces one to confront the limits of language, taking pictures makes one appreciate the gulf between icon and vision.
Last summer, some of the local kids turned the river below the trestle into a swimming hole. They climbed all over the trestle, too, and fought boredom by vandalizing the railings of “our” bridge. During the colder months, the area around the bridge becomes much quieter – a good, out-of-the-way place for a variety of illicit transactions, most of which occur after dark. People seek transcendence in all kinds of ways, most of them as fruitless as my attempts to cling to ephemera through words or pixels. As for the trestle, it ends abruptly at the far side of the river, the victim of a highway widening project some fifteen years ago. Not even a ghost train could cross it now.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Pablo Neruda, Walking Around, Residencia en la Tierra, II – translation here
It’s a little disconcerting to me how, lately, the moment I step outside, something happens. Tuesday late morning, for example, two squadrons of geese came honking low over the trees just as I started out on a walk, and mid-morning yesterday, a pair of A-10 Warthogs thundered overhead seconds after I walked out on the porch to pitch an apple core. This morning at 5:05, no sooner had I sat down outside with my coffee when the resident feral cat, whom I call Coyote Bait (C. B. for short), trotted up the driveway in the moonlight like a detachable shadow. It was so still, I could hear her paws on the gravel: a soft rattle, like the sound the stream makes during a prolonged drought.
Why should this surprise me? Only because I sit inside gazing at the computer monitor like a shaman peering into a crystal, where the merest flicker might foreshadow some fundamental shift in the heart’s climate. Everything seems significant at first, but after a while, it all blends into a gray sea of information, and I begin to tire of the whole human race – our never-ending chatter and busyness, our genius for exploitation.
Outside, meanwhile, the unseasonable warmth returns to melt the snow from last weekend’s storm. Late in the morning, when I finally go out with the camera, a bluebird is singing up by the barn, and a black-capped chickadee fresh from its bath is drying itself out in the lilac bush, puffing out its breast feathers and shaking its wings.
The black-capped chickadee, Parus atricapillus L., is in the tit family (Paridae). Tits are “small, plump, small-billed birds; acrobatic when feeding. Often roam in little bands. Sexes alike,” says Peterson. Though they may appear comical to us, I think chickadees probably take themselves fairly seriously: witness the strict hierarchy maintained within their winter-long foraging flocks. Witness also their tendency to act as scouts in larger, mixed-species flocks and around bird feeders. When they sound the tocsin, all the other birds freeze, and when they issue an all-clear signal, everyone goes back to feeding. They’re like the boy scouts of the bird world. I remember once when I was burning trash, three or four chickadees flying in as close as they could to scold the leaping flames.
Black-capped chickadees are among the brainiest of songbirds. Their social structure is complex; non-breeding chickadees can have memberships in several different foraging flocks at the same time, with different positions in the dominance hierarchies of each. Their simple-sounding songs contain much more complexity than unaided human ears can detect, enabling the communication of quite detailed information. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, are their memories. Chickadees have been known to hoard a thousand seeds and dead insects each day, tucking them into knotholes, under loose pieces of bark, even up inside clusters of pine needles. And researchers have found that they can remember which item is stored where for at least a month. Think of it: 30,000 or more distinct caches within a home range of twenty to fifty acres in size. Not even the most obsessed of human geographers can ever hope to know a landscape in such intimate detail.
What of their ecological niche? Chickadees are foragers and scavengers par excellance. They can digest carrion from a gut pile as easily as goldenrod seeds, spiders, or wild grapes. Specialized leg muscles permit the acrobatics for which they are justly famous, and these contortions enable the gleaning of food that other birds can’t get at. I also can’t help supposing that their year-round, life-long residence in an area, following juvenile dispersal, contributes to their ability to exploit all available resources. With much denser plumage than other species of a comparable size, they are well suited to the vagaries of a northern climate. Each fall, they grow a fresh set of feathers, and portions of their unusually large hippocampus – key to their prodigious memories – also regrow.
Large brains; organization into small bands; physiological adaptations to permit scavenging in an array of habitats: we could almost be talking about Homo sapiens here. But a vanishingly small percentage of the human race retains any experience of what it might mean to become so local as to begin to resemble the very spirit of a place.
Con mi mano rodeo la nueva sombra del ala que crece:
la raíz y la pluma que mañana formarán la espesura.
Neruda, Naciendo en los Bosques, Tercera Residencia – translation here
elsewhere
Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in.
*
So his front end leaps over curbs, and his back end stumbles, and he falls in the street. If he walked, he would be fine. He just doesn’t know how.
*
He gave us the look that he always gives when he has just found himself on the floor: Why did you guys put me here?
*
(Thought: [if] otter hell is the life of a three-toed sloth, then sloth hell must be the life of an otter?)
*
What if we can’t stop the suffering? How do we practice from that point?
*
Blogging is a strange affair. On the one hand, in my experience it can be an effective aspect of practice; on the other hand, it can easily slip into what the Pali texts call papanca: the proliferation of thoughts, spreading out in all directions, without any prospect of finding a limit. The trouble with papanca is that it begets further papanca, and this can go on forever.
*
It was a fifteen mile drive to the graveyard, and I was still in the thick of a torrential acid trip and an escalating storm. I took it slow. Driving while tripping on acid requires incredible concentration. You really have to squelch all distortions of your perceptions and see what is really there. Do or die. You have to focus on your motor skills and reactions, and also, there’s the fear. THE FEAR. Just the routine underlying fear that’s always there when you’re tripping on acid. You are in an alternative state of mind where you really can’t be sure whether every atom in your body will suddenly unravel and fly apart sending electrons spinning off into space with the release of such intense energy that your brain can’t even comprehend what the end is like . . . but . . . I made it out there. I stood there in an ice storm looking down at the graves of my mom and my brother. I was completely wasted.
*
Who knew there were such mysteries inherent in taking out the garbage? Who knew that a lemon peel was so central not only to my sense of self, but also in the binding of a contract that delimits myself in relation to others? Who knew that taking out the garbage was a form of reassurance that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself”?
*
Snow all the way into the distance: I feel like a man losing his sight. The world dims with snow.
*
Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?
