Letting go

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The first frost came on Friday night as we sat around drinking. At a certain point, we had to bring the beer in from the porch to keep it from freezing. While I slept the dreamless sleep of inebriation, the air was crystallizing around every leaf and blade of grass, like frozen foam from the season’s drained cup.

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I love the way a beer with good head retention leaves a record of its passing in the white, lacy rings on the side of the glass. It’s a good argument for sipping rather than chugging. But that’s the funny thing about consumption, isn’t it? The more attached you become to the act of consuming, the less you enjoy it. To get the most out of a beer – or anything, really – you have to take it one sip at a time.

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The bark of pignut hickories forms rings, too, healing over the lines of holes drilled by yellow-bellied sapsuckers. They are slow-growing, long-lived trees, seemingly unaffected by the intensive tapping of their sap. Their nuts aren’t as sweet as those of shagbark hickories, but the squirrels still seem to catch most of them before they hit the ground.

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The red, black and scarlet oaks are the last trees on the mountain to turn color, long after the understorey black gums, sassafras, witch hazel and spicebush have shed their leaves. By holding onto their leaves so long, they risk damage from early snows or ice storms, but oaks are very good at sealing off wounds to prevent infection from spreading to the rest of the tree. And shedding leaves, it turns out, is about more than just letting go; new research suggests that trees attempt to poison the ground against competitors with the chemicals that form in their leaves as they turn color.

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Within the space of a few days last week, high winds stripped the ridges mostly bare, and now suddenly one can see for hundreds of yards through the woods. The rising sun hits my front porch an hour earlier, even as the dawn comes later. I don’t think of winter as a dark time, but a time of clearer light and more interesting shadows. While vistas are opening up, life is turning in upon itself, rediscovering the rewards of contemplation and of altered states.

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Who can blame shamans for trying to become bears, those champion sleepers and masters of retention? Right now, they’re living quite literally off the fat of the land, but when a bear enters hibernation, its large intestine forms what is called a fecal plug. Winter, in other words, is the one time of the year when a bear does not shit in the woods. You can walk along enjoying the dawn or sunset sky without a thought for where you put your feet.

Of ants and seeds

I finally got around to reading the September issue of Natural History – possibly my favorite magazine – which features a marvelous article on how ants disperse seeds: “Jaws of Life,” by Robert R. Dunn. I knew this was an important topic for Appalachian forest ecology, because many of our spring wildflowers, such as bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches and stinking Benjamin, depend on ants as the sole or primary agent of seed dispersal. This means, among other things, that once such wildflowers are eliminated from an area by several decades of overbrowsing by deer, or through large-scale clearcutting or other landscape alterations, they may take centuries to return on their own. As Dunn puts it, “Getting dispersed by ants… is like trying to get out of town on the local city bus. As often as not, you circle back to where you started. Seeds carried by ants are rarely taken more than a few feet from where they fall.”

So this obviously raises the question of why plants rely on ant dispersal in the first place: what advantage does it confer? Suggestions include protection from predators or from fire, or taking advantage of the rich nutrients available for the seeds’ growth in an ant nest’s midden. This last suggestion seems especially likely for the thin, acid soils of the Appalachians.

The plants go to the trouble of manufacturing a special ant lure, “a small, fatty appendage known as an elaiosome, from the Greek elaios, ‘oil,’ and soma, ‘body.'” The ants seem to find it more economical to carry the entire seed back to their nests so their larvae can eat the elaiosome, following which the seed gets chucked into their compost heap. “Elaiosomes… have evolved at least eighty-six and perhaps several hundred times around the globe…. In the Liliales (the group that includes the lilies) alone, ant dispersal may have evolved independently at least eight times.”

So it’s obvious that ants are highly valued partners for plants, even if we can’t determine the exact reasons yet. Nor is this rather extreme example of convergent evolution restricted to the plant kingdom, as a sidebar explains. This is worth quoting in full, I think. It accompanies an arresting photo of green and yellow, seed-like things with brown knobs on their ends.

The eggs of some stick insects, like the seeds of many plants, have nourishing appendages that encourage ants to pick them up and carry them away. The appendage of an insect egg is called a capitulum, and ants can remove it without damaging the egg. In the photograph above, for instance, eggs from the Central American stick-insect genus Bacteria are shown, magnified roughly fifteen diameters; the brown, knobby protuberances are the capitula.

The parallels between the elaiosomes of plant seeds and the capitula of insect eggs were first highlighted in 1992 by Mark Westoby and Lesley Hughes, both ecologists at MacQuarie University in Sydney, Australia. They gave seeds with elaiosomes and stick-insect eggs with capitula, along with several control items, to various ant species in southeastern Australia. The ants removed the seeds and eggs at a similar rate, treated them similarly, and threw them together into their garbage piles. The apparent advantage for the eggs is that, buried in the debris, they are less likely to be parasitized by wasps.

Perhaps it is appropriate that stick insects, which as adults mimic sticks, start out by living the lives of seeds.

Seven things that make me happy right now

1) Republican “leaders” in the House of “Representatives” giving up, at least temporarily, on their latest attempt to deface and destroy the Arctic wilderness.

2) The good people of Dover, Pennsylvania voting in a new slate of school board candidates who have promised to restore natural causation to the science curriculum – and incidentally restore religion to its rightful position as an outside counter-weight to scientific hubris. (If only Kansas voters were less credulous about arguments that denature and attempt to second-guess Creation!)

3) The impossibility of discerning what is most likely to be true apart from considerations of what appears to be the most beautiful (or, as scientists like to say, elegant). As the New Yorker’s exposé on “intelligent design” points out, “to scientists, a good theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena.” Over the past century or more since the general acceptance of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution by natural selection, some of those insights have included the astonishingly beautiful ideas of coevolution, convergent evolution, and cladistics. I.D., by contrast, “has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics.” And what could be uglier than that?

4) The fact that, thanks to evolution, one can think compassionately and synergistically, comprehending the world as numinous Creation – or givenness, as a philosopher might say. One corollary of this is that one can appreciate – and, with luck, communicate – the beauty of scientific theories without fully understanding the complex math, chemistry or physics upon which they are based, thus keeping one’s head from hurting too much.

5) The presence of readers who are co-creators, and writers who co-evolve and sometimes converge – in the blogosphere and beyond.

6) The fact that the beauty- and symmetry-obsessed Navajos, well in advance of J. B. S. Haldane, gave primacy in their creation story to the Air-Spirit People – insects. Long before anything else stirred,

Yellow beetles lived there. Hard beetles lived there. Stone-carrier beetles lived there. Black beetles lived there. Coyote-dung beetles lived there. … Whitefaced beetles made their homes there…

7) The pear tree behind my house, which this year turned a wondrous shade of orange instead of its usual dingy yellow.

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With beauty before me, I walk.
With beauty behind me, I walk.
With beauty above me, I walk.
With beauty below me, I walk.
With beauty all around me, I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.

(Navajo chantway refrain)

String theories

This entry is part 31 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the thirteenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Anything Long and Thin
by Paul Zweig

All traffickings upward out of the earth
Or sideways across it: longitudes,
Desperations; the glue of sentences . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

Living On

Consider what one might learn
by meditating on a corpse:
how the flesh can crawl, the bones
of a beautiful face break
the crust of fantasy like little moons
out of the ground, vacant snail-shells
still glistening with an off-white rheum.
Or consider swallowing two squares
of LSD & looking in the mirror:
what perfectly disintegrating visions
might be yours, & with what slight effort.

It’s exhilarating, really, to find this
blind matter – that it somehow coheres
despite its utter insensitivity to longing
or loneliness. It gives itself
only half-grudgingly to the chance
mouths of the shark or the brown bear.
True horror comes disguised
as cold necessity: learning about cells
in the fourth grade, our bodies began
to dissolve into prisons
or office towers populated by soft-
walled cubicles. Then atoms:
solar systems with pin-prick suns,
barely enclosed eternities
of inner space. The schoolroom clock
made a mockery of turning.

To know that emptiness, they suggested,
was to know ourselves. They could have said
that matter is incredibly rare,
a temporary resting state for energy.
They could have told us
about fictons, their mad spinning
that somehow keeps the lover’s caress
from encountering a null set,
bodies collapsing into a shrug
of cold fusion. What a comfort
it would’ve been, maybe,
to learn about the stubborn corpse
rippling outward for millions of years,
if only in bone shards or a line
of footprints in some fossilized beach
that come to a sudden end: indelible
record of buoyancy, & the killer wave.
__________

For more on fictons, see here. Please note, however, that I mean something different from Robert Heinlein, whose fictons inhabited a thoroughly Newtonian, narrative space. My fictons are massless and carry a negative charge.

Gleaning

Yesterday afternoon, I picked and ate a ripe cherry tomato from my garden. For those who shuddered at my report of an early snowstorm two weeks ago, the real news here is the unprecedented lateness of a frost. Those white shooting-stars that were bent down by the snow? They’ve put out new blossoms.

It’s hard what to know what to make of it all, but this much I can tell you: the tomato was delicious.

Deep in the weeds,
the wrong shade of red for autumn:
last ripe tomato.