The butternut chronicle: Nov. 8, 1998
Thirty-five degrees on my front porch at 7:00 a.m. A gentle breeze from the west brings the traffic noise from I-99 so close, it sounds as if the trucks are coming right through the yard.
The fallen leaves also act as an amplifier of sorts. A gray squirrel on the other side of the driveway makes as much noise as a deer. And in fact an additional rustling sound leads me to spot a pair of deer a hundred feet up the hillside. One week ago, I wouldn’t have been able to see half that far, and three weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have heard anything, either. Both deer are small and antlerless, and both have fully changed from their reddish summer coats to their gray winter pelage, matching the general color of the November woods.
A single bluejay lands in a nearby oak. Now that almost all acorns have fallen, the big flocks of jays have mostly gone elsewhere. Spots of bright color become increasingly rare as the season advances.
At 7:35, some sort of inter-species dispute breaks out in a mixed flock of chickadees and titmice around the spring house, signaled by a lot of calling, scolding and agitated flying about – no actual beak-to-beak combat that I can see. Possibly this is part of the meshing of hierarchies attendant on the formation of a larger mixed-species flock for winter foraging. Such flocks are invaluable for protection against predators, such as the resident sharp-shinned hawk, because the larger the flock, the greater the chances of survival for each individual. Or so the theory goes. I suppose some similar, perhaps subconscious calculation is at work in the formation of human collectivities, too.
This morning I’m reading a translation of poems by Georg Trakl entitled Autumn Sonata.
Who are you, resting under tall trees,
Rustling with lament beneath the autumn reeds?
This is apt: as I read these lines, the breeze is rustling the dried cattails and hissing in the reeds over in the miniature wetland next the springhouse. I don’t care what the critics may say; such resonances from beyond the text are inseparable from the experience of reading, I think.
But what struck me at first as pleasantly bluesy in these poems gradually comes to seem a bit affected. Trakl could easily be Exhibit A in a catalogue of the “hopelessly literate” for whom, according to the Stephen Dunn poem I was reading yesterday, autumn presages individual dissolution and death.
A few minutes before 8:00, I watch of pair of nuthatches in the butternut tree exchanging – what? -greetings, hostilities, acknowledgements? So little of what we see in nature every day has easy reference points in human experience or language. A nature-writer friend of mine recently criticized a poem I wrote about the golden-cheeked warbler, “In the Texas Hill Country”:
Making oneself at home in
a bone-dry thorn scrub no one
else could love
& hailing all visitors:
this is the golden-
cheeked warbler’s
perilous way
I had originally written “greeting all visitors,” and my friend pointed out that that was simply too anthropomorphic, too precious. I’m not sure that “hailing” fully escapes this charge, either. But a certain amount of anthropomorphism is unavoidable in talking about the natural world. Moreover, I’m not entirely convinced it’s undesirable. Unless we’re scientists, what language should we use for the encounter with the other-than-human – especially when it, too, wears what looks like a face? (“Golden-cheeked” indeed!)
Thinking along these lines, I grow tired of Trakl, whose lines, for all their outdoor imagery, smell more of the drawing room than the open air. (I stole that description from an interview with Pablo Neruda, who was talking actually about Mallarmé. But unfortunately it’s a characterization that would fit all too many modern poets.)
The baritone blast of the factory whistle from the paper mill in Tyrone is accompanied by an energetic song sparrow duet and a flurry of rustles from the woods. Get busy, y’all!
Out again at 9:30. (If I didn’t smoke, would I spend half as much time sitting on the porch?*) The sky is now completely clear of the few, high clouds that had dotted it at 7:00. I enjoy the back-and-forth signaling of the usual two pileated woodpeckers. The one drumming from the other side of the powerline has found a snag or dead limb that’s exactly one octave lower than the other one over at Margaret’s. It’s like listening to a song in a foreign language: I may not understand exactly what’s being communicated here, but I enjoy it as much or maybe even more than I would if I did. This is call-and-response at its absolute best.
Chickadees are foraging in the trees at the woods’ edge with the sun directly behind them from my perspective: dark, round, darting figures with translucent wings. This is why I never wear sunglasses!
A quarter till twelve. I’m watching two pileated woodpeckers, presumably either a mated pair or parent and offspring. The larger one humps its way up a trunk just beyond the apple tree, while the smaller one circles the hollow oak snag across the driveway from the lilac bush. Its crimson crest is lit up by the sun, just as the wings of those chickadees had been. They come in for a mild scolding from the squirrels. The big one flaps over to a locust tree, then on to the base of the oak snag where it begins to work its way up. It has chosen the side facing the porch, so I enjoy excellent views for the next fifteeen minutes as it taps and probes for ants. Pileateds always seems like such a married of the ungainly and the magnificent, the sublime and the ridiculous! They’re finally spooked by the approach of the Resident Naturalist, and flap off through the woods with that peculiar, undulating flight.
It’s a busy afternoon on the Plummer’s Hollow Boulevard. At five after four, here comes the second walker of the day: an archery hunter, my friend T.S. A wave, a few brief words and he’s heading up into the woods along the Guest House Trail. With sunset due in less than an hour and a half, he’d better find himself a good spot soon. Given all the noise the dry leaves make, hunting should be easy as long as he stands or sits absolutely still.
Archery is the deer hunting method of choice for those who confess that their primary need is to spend some quiet time out in the woods. Though it seems a little odd to call it “hunting” when all they really do is watch and wait.
Well, O.K., that isn’t all they do. Fifteen minutes later, I start hearing a series of not-too-believable buck grunts from up near the top of the ridge. Safety regulations prevent modern hunters from following the lead of the Indians and disguising themselves with deer hides and antlers. But they do their best with artificial scents and sounds to impersonate their quarry. It makes perfect sense: a buck in rut is far more of a hunter than they are. The “buck fever” to which over-eager or inexperienced hunters can succumb is nothing compared to the testosterone-charged blindness that leads so many bucks to their undoing.
At 4:25 the Thinker slowly descends the butternut, ambles across the stream and over to the old log beside the driveway. I’m starting to see a pattern here, though I don’t have the slightest clue what it’s all about.
__________
*No, as it turns out.
Proposition
1. Wren, light at the end of my tunnel, listen: I’m tired of this hobo life. Let’s build a nest.
2. It’s a beautiful morning, crisp as the flesh of a winesap.
3. With contrails of jets & the horns of the crescent moon, I am drawing a blueprint for a house made entirely of paper.
4. We will live neither in the shadows nor under a microscope.
5. I’ll fix silverfish for supper, baked with artichokes.
6. We’ll use glowworms to read the fine print on every surface.
7. Paper is the final frontier. You can’t do this with pixels!
8. Come, it will be fun! The wind won’t blow.
United
We are united in the way we light out for the territory, waving our little flaps of foolscap. We believe in the separate good to be made from the common plunder. We serve blind growth, worship the holy tumor, the severed tit. Tempests boil over in every teapot. Drain your cups & turn them over, boys! Now wait while the invisible hand works its legerdemain. Under one dome you’ll find an entire legislature in session! And under another, I swear, that tricky little pea.
We are united in our love of private parts. We all stretch our feet toward the same fire, party of the first part and party of the second part, originally separate blossoms modified by Manifest Destiny into rays of unearthly light, spokes of a wheel, teeth on a cog. It all fits. Here comes the honeybee, my friends. And here comes the world’s distraught suitor, mumbling She loves me, she loves me not…
We are united in the way we put our sweaty palms together beneath our chins: for prayer, many of us; some for friction against the sudden chill; a few to rub in ointment or saliva. We have hundreds of channels, a thousand points of refracted light & in every one there looms the shadow of the swatter, ah, my fellow flies!
Words on the street
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 7, 1998
I slept in this morning, maybe because it’s Sunday. Or maybe not.
It’s thirty-five degrees and partly overcast (does that make sense?) at 7:30. As usual on a Sunday, it’s pretty peaceful outside – just a very slight bit of traffic noise, the sound of a jet, a distant propeller plane.
The drumming of the pileated woodpecker over at Margaret’s sounds especially resonant this morning. A crow calls. I listen to the wind in the trees as attentively as I can, mindful of the fact that I only have a week or two longer until all the remaining oak leaves have blown down. The winds of winter can be fierce, but – except when they rattle shutters and whistle through the cracks around doors and windows – they’re quiet, the quietest of the year.
The pileated drums steadily. I try counting the beats per call, but they’re just too rapid. Somewhere between five and ten is as close as I can get. At 7:35 he switches to a higher-pitched snag. This may be the most exciting thing to happen here all day.
The trunk and limbs of the butternut are flat gray. The sun has just cleared the ridge and is shining weakly through a thin screen of cloud, so there’s light without shadows, almost. I can hear chickadees down in the pines along the stream, while finches move through the trees across the road from me on their way to the bird feeder up at the main house. There’s already a considerable amount of twittering, tapping and yankyanking (nuthatch) coming from that direction.
The wind up on the ridgetop to the west is blowing steadily, drowning out all the noise from the trains except for their whistles. Here’s one at a more or less baritone pitch with an unusually rich and nasal tone cluster. It’s answered a moment later by a soprano, whistling either for the same or for an adjacent crossing. Two trains running, says the old blues song, and neither one goes my way.
But I’m not listening to records; I’m still reading Stephen Dunn.
I should mention the leaves
are changing, it’s lovely, this time of year,
when only the hopelessly literate
are reminded of death.
(“Letter to Minnesota from the East Coast”)
By 12:30 the sky is almost clear. A large shadow comes gliding through the woods: a turkey vulture circles low over the treetops, searching for a thermal to ride back up to the slipstream current along the crest of the ridge. I watch as it tilts in the strong wind, then veers around and heads back north, its shadow sliding up and down the bare tree trunks and across the shining waves of mountain laurel like an eyelid in search of a missing blink.
I’m out on the porch again at 2:00 when three chickadees drop in. Out of a slightly larger flock foraging in the top branches of the butternut, these three fly down onto the balustrades, the porch floor. One lands on the table at my right elbow while another inspects my boots, which are propped as usual on the topmost railing. They hop and flutter, never holding still for longer than half a second. Chickadees are rarely dull. Their lack of fear toward humans is a trait usually found only among species of the far north. It’s easy to romanticize swans or ravens, but of all birds I find the chickadee the most symbolic of the life of the spirit in its comic seriousness, its constant activity, its propensity to wager everything for a closer look.
Three-thirty. A titmouse – close cousin of the chickadee – lands on the rim of my ashtray. It peers down at the cigarette butts as if deciding whether they’re worth a taste, then pivots forty-five degrees, tilts its head and looks again. It holds this new position for five seconds, then flies off.
At 3:46 the Thinker slowly descends the butternut, ambles across the stream and over to the old log beside the driveway. Exactly the same as yesterday, but nineteen minutes earlier.
Power outage
Half-wild, half-cruel,
like the laughter of a solitary man.
– Paul Zweig, “Eternity’s Woods”
I’m used to waking in the dark; it isn’t that. I don’t really mind the thought that the majority of my fellow citizens may be simpletons, because I am myself exceedingly susceptible to delusions of every sort. It does bother me a bit, though, that virtually every analyst and pundit has skipped blithely over the glaring mismatch between exit poll data and election results. Exit polls, they suggest, are simply another form of opinion poll, and therefore only as good as the pollsters and the questions asked. Nonsense! I can think of only two ways the exit polls in Ohio could have been so wrong: massive voter fraud, or widespread lying by people who had just voted for George Bush.
The latter possibility deserves at least a little consideration. Willful ignorance and outright mendacity are not, after all, so very far apart. “He’s my president, so if he tells me that Saddam was poised to attack the United States, I believe him.” “Yes, I know that ‘faulty intelligence’ wasn’t to blame. We went in there for the oil – and it’s a good thing we did. We need that oil. If we have to kill a bunch of Arabs to protect our standard of living, so be it.” (I actually had someone say this to me a few months back.) “Sure, he lied. He does what he has to do. It’s all for the greater good, which most of us have no idea about. The ways of those who have access to the full truth will often seem incomprehensible to the more poorly informed masses.” (This is, of course, a neoconservative article of faith.) “Every decent, moral, Christian person has no choice but to vote for the candidate who will defend the sanctity of marriage and protect the lives of the unborn. But why should we tell the unsaved what we are doing? It’s not a sin to lie to liberal pollsters and reporters. ‘Let not the left hand know what the right hand is doing.’ It’s all part of God’s plan.”
Thank You, Jesus, For My Plastic Ears.
– headline from the Weekly World News
I woke in the dark with no power. This isn’t a metaphor. The electricity was out here from 1:10 a.m. until 6:35 a.m. yesterday, then again from 1:30 to 4:30 in the afternoon. The second time, my father finally called the power company and persisted through fifteen minutes of voice mail purgatory until he reached a human being, who informed him that we could expect to have our electricity on by 7:30 at the latest. When the power was restored only five minutes after he hung up, we felt absurdly blessed.
Our power company is a subsidiary of First Energy, the Ohio-based corporation found responsible for last year’s Great Northeastern Blackout. That was but one of six outages we had in 2003 that lasted 24 hours or longer. It doesn’t pay them to maintain their infrastructure, so they don’t. And with deregulation, they don’t have to.
This is the future, folks. Get used to it. In ten years, regular power outages will become an accepted part of life, just as they are in much of the so-called developing world where small, venal elites feel no sense of social obligation. Who needs bread and circuses when fear and repression work just as well? That’s something, after all, that both major parties believe in. Police repression in Boston leads to the death of a college student? Well, clearly there just weren’t enough cops on the street! Brutal U.S. presence in Iraq fuels an exponential growth of the insurrection? Let’s send in more troops! Flatten Fallujah! Kill ten Iraqis (or is a hundred?) for every dead American! Prisoners don’t respond to torture, or give useless or false information? Come up with better tortures!
Besides, false information is better than no information, right? As long as the empty suits on the network newscasts have something to work with.
Facts don’t matter any more – if they ever did. Remember all the public confusion surrounding the millennial year? No rational person could fail to conclude that the year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century and the 2nd Millennium. But rather than insist on the point, the mainstream news media put out the notion that it was mainly a matter of opinion. There were, after all, two sides to the argument, and all good reporters learn in journalism school not to pick and choose between warring points of view – just report them both. The same approach has allowed the Bush regime to get away with most of its outrageous claims, about everything from global warming to forest health to the War on Terror. Two fraudulent presidential elections later, it seems that our entire reality structure has become postmodern.
Out in the open,
Everywhere to go.
– Gary Snyder, “The Trail is Not a Trail”
But what does it matter, Dave, if nobody really knows what time it is? Time is, after all, an entirely human construct. And you wouldn’t get so worked up about these things if you took the long view, cultivated awareness, recognized that all is vanity, or samsara, or whatever.
Well, yes, I suppose that’s true. But it is curious how the time becomes suddenly so important to me whenever the clocks go dead. Winston Smith thought it might have been 1984, but it bothered him never to know for certain. I could just sit here and treasure the silence – I wrote yesterday afternoon, scrawling the words by hand on some old scrap paper I dug up – watch the sun through the window flirting with fast-moving clouds, stop measuring the daylight remaining until supper. This time of day it takes me so long to get the words out, I wrote, that I can watch my thoughts change course in mid-stream. For all intents and purposes, the River Lethe has only a single bank. Earlier I napped, and when I awoke I was only able to surface halfway, at first – a peculiar sensation. I tried to count to ten and kept getting off track somewhere in the vicinity of six or seven.
Before that, I transplanted some New England asters to my front garden. They had gone to seed in the most appealing manner, tousled heads of brownish gray waiting for the autumn winds to do the rest. I thought of the blogger Paula and her obsession with roadside weeds, her unflinching agnosticism. Now I sit in this unaccustomed silence and find myself wishing that I could meditate as deeply as a seed, still my internal clock and go into suspended animation. I’d come back to life only when all the conditions were just right.
Never forget:
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.
– Kobayashi Issa
It’s getting to me, I confess: the capriciousness of power, the pervasive dishonesty about its modes and motives. In my other blog, dead raccoon, I try to turn the tables, ape the Grand Inquisitor. Because every declarative statement now begins to seem fraudulent, as if made-to-order for the interrogator of the moment. One moment, please. A service representative will be with you shortly. Please hold.
One moment. That’s all they ever ask for, isn’t it? But it’s enough.
Words on the street
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 6, 1998
Last dream before waking: I am visiting a little-known reservation for an obscure sect of Messianic Jews in central Pennsylvania on land granted them by William Penn. I remember a string of white ponies approaching me one by one and thrusting their wet noses into my face. A little later, I’m walking in my stockinged feet between huge trees padded with incredibly thick moss all the way up their trunks, as high as I can see.
It fifty-three degrees on my front porch at 6:00 a.m. Thin, low clouds. A warm breeze rustles through the dry leaves at the edge of the driveway; otherwise, it’s dead quiet.
A doe ran off when I opened the door, as on nearly every other morning. But something about the way she spooked suggests she might be a newcomer, not a member of the resident herd. The latter have grown so used to me, they’ll only run a little way, and quickly return as long as I stay reasonably still. Located as I am right next to the highest year-round open water in the hollow, I see so many deer on a daily basis it’s hardly worth mentioning them in these notes.
At 6:15, my coffee finished, I go off for a brisk walk. I’m back by 8:30. One member of the resident pair of Carolina wrens lands on the old bluebird box on the butternut tree, bobbing up and down with great apparent earnestness while reciting its usual teakettleteakettleteakettle litany. Not satisfied with this display, it flies right in over my head and lands briefly on the porch railing beside me, chipping loudly. I’m not quite sure what it has in mind, but I have a feeling my presence is not required.
A flock of cedar waxwings moves through around quarter till nine. I hear them whistling to each other as they move through the treetops, but I never do catch a glimpse of them. Not that I expend much effort. I’m busy reading (or trying to read) Jorge Guillén: Sí, tu niñez, ya fábula de fuentes. “Yes, your childhood, already a legend for fountains.”
After lunch, I cart out the radio, thinking I might enjoy listening to a Penn State football game for once. They’re playing Minnesota, and it’s shaping up to be a good contest. The temperature has climbed to 60, and there are only patchy clouds. It’s a good afternoon for leaf watching: huge flocks of red and scarlet oak leaves (actually all brown now) keep swirling down from the ridgetop. It’s always fun when some of them turn out to be birds and just keep on going. I sit there open-mouthed for a second or two, like a football fan watching an interception.
It seems like excellent weather for ravens, but I’ve yet to hear one. Of course, having the radio on probably has something to do with that. It’s been so long since I’ve listened to commercial radio, I’m agog at all the ads. I’m wondering if maybe this doesn’t have something to do with the gradual ascendancy of football over baseball as the new American Pastime? There’s so much more room for ads in a football game!
I’m fascinated by the rigid division into play time, evidently measured by some sort of official clock, and irrelevant time, which is far from useless. I get the impression that this time-outside-time is integral to the game, somehow. The announcers constantly talk about which team has how much timeout remaining, for example, and it appears there are other ways to stop the clock. Considering football as ritual drama rather than mere sporting contest, it seems fairly obvious that our cultural fascination with the fight against time is at the center of things. For both teams, the clock seems to stand in for Death itself, just like the bull in a Spanish bullfight. But I don’t know enough about the rules for timeout and overtime to speculate any further.
Needless to say, the precise meaning of much of what I’m hearing escapes me. The descriptions of the plays are impossible for me to picture, but the repetitive, stylized language is undeniably poetic. Too bad my high school gym teachers always assumed everyone already knew how to play the game; I might’ve learned something. Instead, they were content to let me run back and forth as the occasion seemed to demand, and left me alone – except for that one time when M. K. made the mistake of throwing me the ball, and I proceeded to run in the wrong direction. I scored a touchdown for the opposing team! Hey, it was wide open.
Funny I still remember that. It really didn’t bother me at the time, all the ribbing and abuse I came in for. I was already the class pariah – what could they do? “It’s not my fault,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be here!” I don’t remember if anyone had an answer to that.
First down. Second down and three. Third down on their own fifteen yard line. The wingnut formation. Now they’re in motion. The quarterback drops back, he’s looking, looking . . . Now here comes Minnesota’s 41 over the line . . .
Second quarter. Pine siskins briefly enter the butternut tree, their calls blending with the (to me) indistinguishable calls of the goldfinches. Purple jerseys versus yellow. The stands go wild.
It’s more than background noise, the roar of the crowd. I’m reminded of the contemporary philosopher Alfonso Lingis’ resonant phrase, the murmur of the world. Except this ain’t no stinkin’ murmur. These people sound as if they want nothing less than triumph for their team and complete, shattering humiliation for the other side. WE ARE . . . PENN STATE! Like hell you are, I think with an alum’s smugness.
At 3:05, two Apache helicopters flying in tandem along the ridge pass low over the houses. You talk about LOUD!
At 3:10, I scribble in my palm-sized notebook my admiration of the lilac leaves, still light green when almost every other bush and tree stands bare. Beautiful the way they catch the low sun, all a-flutter in the breeze. “No more can you get a little extra – ’cause you want a lot extra!” says the radio, pimping for McDonalds.
Forty minutes later the setting sun turns the limbs of the butternut tree to gold. I’m reading Stephen Dunn with my usual astonishment at his retrograde insistence that words should have something to say. I notice a typo, its for it’s. Typos are a much better example of the sort of thing Lingis intended by “the murmur of the world,” I think. Basically, it’s all the stuff we screen out: typos, slips of the tongue, spoken ums and ahs – all of them part and parcel of the normal functioning of any organic system. Or at least, that’s how I recall his argument. It was one of those things where I was reading the book (The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common) before I gave it to someone (my brother Mark) for Christmas.
By 4:00, my notes indicate I had turned the radio off; no mention of how the game turned out. I’m marveling instead at how much more natural sound I can hear now: the nearly constant chirps and twitters of foraging birds, the wind in the crowns of the few oak trees still in leaf sounding so much like distant applause.
4:05: The Thinker slowly descends the butternut, ambles across the stream and over to the old log beside the driveway. I wonder what makes this one squirrel so placid? He acts more like a fox squirrel than a gray.
Stephen Dunn, in a poem called “The Liar”: “Facts are what I love, their insignificance,/the clay I can make of them.” I like the way he avoids the unnecessarily logical formulation here. If it had been me, I’m sure I would’ve tried to say something like, “…the unlimited number of ways I can twist their clay.”
At two minutes before 5:00, a hunter emerges from the woods, gun balanced on his shoulder. I set my harmonica aside to say hello. “Do you know any Bob Dylan?” he asks. (Jesus, I didn’t think my playing was that bad!) His blaze-orange coat and cap glow like foxfire in the gathering dusk.
Three mornings, A.D. 2004
November 3
Clear sky, bright sun, high whistles of cedar waxwings gleaning wild grapes from the treetops. With the news of the election swirling in my head I am walking, walking. Last night’s rain pools in the makeshift cups of broad, curled oak leaves that have not yet learned how to lie flat against the ground. The ridgetop gleams with a hundred thousand miniature lakes, each with its separate sun & a plan for evaporation. If there’s anything else to see, I don’t see it. When I get back to the house, my boots are soaked.
November 4
Crawling in the dirt under my house to wrap the heating ducts in fiberglass. I wear a face mask against the dust: a hundred and fifty years have passed since rain last fell on this patch of mountaintop soil. I worm my way as far up as I can, bending and twisting into positions I’d never attempt with a lover, hug pipes to stretch ribbons of duct tape around rolls of insulation. Strands of pink fiberglass worry their way through my clothes like porcupine quills, turn my eyes blood red. I’m filthy. I itch all over. When I crawl back out into the cold drizzle, I pull down my face mask and take several deep breaths, then drain my bladder. I get my dad to help me beat the dust from my clothes. Where there’s smoke, they say, there’s fire. I’m not so sure.
November 5
A dried stalk of common mullein rattles in the stiff breeze, seeds loose in their pods like teeth in the belly of a rat. This wind leaves nothing alone, scouring the field, roaring on the crest on the ridge. In every direction I can hear new squeaks and moans from snags freshly toppled into the limbs of the living, there to rub and chafe throughout the long winter. Overnight, most of the oaks lost their leaves except for the scattered clumps where squirrels had made their summer nests. Now this fine mesh of branches against the sky, this lovely empty net can’t hold a thing. Right there where the two planets – Jupiter and Venus – had been shining side by side like a cat with mismatched eyes, now there’s only a large dark cloud with a rose-colored belly. It keeps right on going. The sun comes up.