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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Arms and the poet (cont’d)

For the first part of this chain of quotes, see here.

The Eskimo song duel is famous for its disputative function in a cultural context where normally the airing of grievances was forbidden….

The song duel owes much of its effectiveness to the ambiguity created by the fact that the single event can at all times be interpreted in two ways: it is at once an artistic festive event and an airing of grievances. An opponent can at any time be said to be doing two things: composing humorous songs and hurling accusations and insults. It should be emphasized that the singer is in fact doing both things at once; it is not a case of pretending to have artistic fun while making veiled attacks. Both aspects of the performance are important, real and inter-connected. The ambiguity of the event itself is compounded by the humorous key: participants are constrained at all times to behave as if all statements in the duel are ironic. At the most essential level, the duality of the event allows the community to continue to function after the duel, since the loser of the duel (if there is one) has not been publicly declared guilty of any serious transgressions. The loser is guilty simply of having performed less well than his opponent in a song contest, and any accusations leveled against him were only ironic.

Songs were of great importance to the Eskimo, and the duelling song was just one of a wide genre. Orpingalik, a Netsilik shaman, expressed the significance of song as an integral part of his culture in a reply to [Knud] Rasmussen’s question regarding the number of songs he had composed:

How many songs I have I cannot tell you. I keep no count of such things. There are so many occasions in one’s life when a sorrow is felt in such a way that the desire comes to sing; and so I know that I have many songs. All my being is song, and I sing as I draw breath.

Good dueling songs – and in fact entire duels – were immortalized. While Rasmussen gathered some of his songs first hand, many of them were sung to him by people who had learned them from their elders. These immortalized songs were occasionally sung in other contexts, providing entertainment and amused reminiscence on informal occasion. A performance in a song duel, therefore, was a contribution to an important and extensive art form.

– Penelope Eckert and Russell Newmark, “Central Eskimo Song Duels: A Contextual Analysis of Ritual Ambiguity,” Ethnology vol. xix, no. 2

By far the most important social context in which zamil poetry is composed [by Yemenis] is in the dispute mediation. When a serious conflict breaks out between two or more villages or tribes or two different tribal sections – a conflict that might involve a dispute over land (private property or tribal boundaries), women (abductions, runaways, adulteries), or water rights – warfare among the contending parties often results…. The fighting at first is often a kind of symbolic violence in which the offended party tries to restore its honor by a show of force, and almost immediately after the first shots have rung out, intermediaries arrive to try and persuade the parties to agree to a truce…

The intermediaries may arrive chanting a zamil poem…announcing their intention of mediating the dispute and offering up cows or sheep for sacrifice in token of their sincerity and good faith. If…the plaintiff…agrees to a truce, it sets the conditions in numbers of cows, sheep, guns, and, in the most serious conflicts, even hostages… These demands are put forward by the intermediaries in the form of zamil poetry….

It is practically impossible to delimit a class of occasions on which someone might use zamil poetry for his own personal ends…. Once I was riding a bus on which more boarding tickets had been sold than there were seats available for passengers, with the result that a luckless passenger who happened to be an old tribesman had to sit on the floor of the vehicle. Resenting the injustice of not having been given a seat like everyone else when he had paid for one, he composed a zamil on the spot voicing his complaint. It had its intended effect: everyone on the bus started to laugh when they heard the poem and taunted the ticket seller, who in turn relinquished his seat to the now greatly mollified old man.

– Stephen C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe

Egil Skallagrimson received word that there was a new king in Norway and that Arinbjorn had returned to his lands there and was held in high esteem. The Egil composed a poem in Arinbjorn’s praise and sent it to him in Norway, and this is the beginning of it:

I am quick to sing
a noble man’s praises,
but stumble for words
about misers;
freely I speak
of a king’s deeds,
but stay silent
about the people’s lies.

Replete with taunts
for the bearer of lies,
I sing the favours
of my friends;
I have visited many
seats of mild kings,
with the ingenuous
intent of a poet.

Once I had
incurred the wrath
of a mighty king
of Yngling’s line;
I drew a bold hat
over my black hair,
paid a visit
to the war-lord

where that mighty
maker of men
ruled the land from beneath
his helmet of terror.
In York
the king reigned,
rigid of mind,
over rainy shores.

The shining glare
from Eirik’s brow
was not safe to behold
nor free from terror;
when the moons
of that tyrant’s face
shone, serpent-like,
with their awesome glow.

Yet I ventured
my poem to the king,
the bed-prize that Odin
had slithered to claim,
his frothing horn
passed around
to quench
all men’s ears.

No one praised
the beauty of the prize
my poetry earned
in that lavish house
when I accepted from the king
in reward for my verse
my own sable head
to stand my hat on.

My head I won
and with it the two
dark jewels
of my beetling brows,
and the mouth
that had delivered
my head’s ransom
at the king’s knee.

A field of teeth
and my tongue I took back,
and my flapping ears
endowed with sound;
such a gift
was prized higher
than earning gold
from a famous king.

By my side, better
than every other
spreader of treasure,
stood my loyal friend
whom I truly trusted,
growing in stature
with his every deed.

Arinbjorn,
paragon of men . . .

– Bernard Scudder, trans., Egil’s Saga, attributed to Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)
__________

For more on Inuit poetics, see Qarrtsiluni and Building Dwelling Eating. For more on Egil Skallagrimson and Norse poetics – including a description of the origin myth of poetry, alluded to in Egil’s sixth stanza above – see Poetry or vomit?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fish puke, bread grunts and other signs of culture

O.K., “Free Willy” fans! Time for another heart-warming story of a captive killer whale who is really just like us. We could call this one “Free Lunch”:

First, the young whale spit regurgitated fish onto the surface of the water, then sank below the water and waited.

If a hungry gull landed on the water, the whale would surge up to the surface, sometimes catching a free meal of his own.

Noonan watched as the same whale set the same trap again and again.

Within a few months, the whale’s younger half brother adopted the practice. Eventually the behavior spread and now five Marineland whales supplement their diet with fresh fowl, the scientist said.

“It looked liked one was watching while the other tried,” Noonan said of the whale’s initial behavior.

The capacity to come up with the gull-baiting strategy and then share the technique with others — known as cultural learning in the scientific world — was once believed to be one of those abilities that separated humans from other animals.

But biologists have since proven certain animals, including dolphins and chimps, do this.

“This is an example in which a new behavior spread through a population,” Noonan said. “We had the opportunity to see a tradition form and spread in exactly the way that cultures do in humans.”

A more sober article in New Scientist summarizes this and several other recent examples of cultural learning, including a new study on chimps:

Chimpanzees appear to be capable of communicating using sounds that refer to specific objects, according to a study of sounds made in response to different foods. It is the first time this ability has been demonstrated in chimps.

Primatologist Katie Slocombe of the University of St Andrews, UK, recorded the grunts made by chimps at nearby Edinburgh Zoo as they collected food at two feeders. One dispensed bread, considered a high-quality treat, and the other doled out apples, a much less sought-after snack.

Slocombe then played back the recordings and watched the reactions of a 6-year-old male named Liberius. The results were striking. After hearing a bread grunt, Liberius spent far more time searching around the bread feeder, while an apple grunt would send him hunting under the apple feeder. Slocombe presented the work at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah, this month.

This is the first convincing evidence of “referential communication” in chimps, says primatologist Amy Pollick of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Earlier research with a close cousin of the chimpanzee – a male pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, named Kanzi – showed that he made specific sounds for four different things: bananas, grapes, juice and yes. But the researchers did not test if the sounds conveyed any meaning to other bonobos, and the same experiments have never been done in chimpanzees.

Liberius, on the other hand, was able to take cues from apple and bread grunts made by at least three different chimpanzees.

This follows closely on the heels of another report of cultural learning among captive chimpanzees. I imagine that in a few years there will be dozens of other examples from many different species of mammals and birds, now that the taboo against studying animal cultures seems finally to have been lifted.

But here’s what I wonder. Suppose the “Free Willy” crowd organizes for the release of the Marineland orcas back into the wild, and they then transmit their new-found bait-and-snatch lore to other killer whales. What will this do to wild populations of seabirds? Will they all prove equally, um, gullible? Take fulmars, for instance. Their diet is described as “oily offal and refuse, fish and cuttles.” Seems as if they might be at high risk here – except that nature (or culture?) may have left them well equipped to retaliate. “Fulmar” means “foul gull” in Icelandic. When disturbed, fulmars hurl a stream of bright-orange, foul-smelling projectile vomit with great accuracy into the eye or other orifice of their attackers. Things could get interesting out on the high seas.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Remembering New Orleans

What is there to say about the destruction of New Orleans that hasn’t already been said elsewhere? As with the 9/11 attacks, I feel somewhat disconnected from what the rest of the country is experiencing, due to my inability to view video images of the tragedy (no T.V., only a dial-up connection to the Internet). I thought that Cornelia Dean and Andrew C. Revkin, writing for The New York Times, did an excellent job of encapsulating the environmental context. Among the blogs I read regularly, Whiskey Bar did the best job of summing things up (see also the comprehensive links list of organizations involved in hurricane relief), and Creature of the Shade offered the invaluable perspective of an urban geographer on the question of whether the city will survive. Creek Running North has had a couple of good posts on the looting – or is it salvage? – to which I can only add that, with 28 percent of its population below poverty level and one of the most brutal police forces in the country, the storm of looting was almost as inevitable as the hurricane itself.

On a more wistful note, a New Orleans reminiscence in 3rd House Journal takes the prize for most lyrical image. “After 10 days in New Orleans, I flew directly to Colorado Springs for a work conference,” Leslee writes, “and when I opened my suitcase steam came out. New Orleans travels with you.”

I have only been to New Orleans once, and most of that time was spent sleeping, so I have no real reminiscences to share. But I think it’s worth reflecting for a few moments on how much we collectively owe this city. Jazz has been called, rightly, America’s greatest gift to the world, and I think it embodies our ideals of freedom, adaptability and individual self-expression better than any other native art-form. That the birthplace of jazz has been dealt this kind of blow at the very same time that America’s other great contribution to world civilization – our national parks system, the first in the world – is under attack, makes me sad beyond words.

One often sees New Orleans described as “America’s most unique city.” This is a polite way of saying that it was one of the few cities in America where, I gather, it was possible to have fun. Street culture was actively encouraged, and the annual party known as Mardi Gras drew hedonists and misfits from all over the country. Why? Because outside of Louisiana, the idea of a high old time in virtually every town and city in this law-and-order-obsessed country is to reproduce the entire civic order in a slow procession through the streets: a parade. Woo-hoo. New Orleans offered a valuable counter-example, as well as a link to pre-Christian religious traditions of both African and European provenance. In vernacular religions the world over, annual, week-long festivals offer a ritualized vision of the world turned upside-down – an age-old image for the spirit world and a valuable reminder of the distance between that world and our own. But the United States was founded upon a different sort of idealism, one that sought to actualize heaven in the here-and-now – that whole, utopian, shining-city-on-a-hill bullshit. The inevitable result has been severe hubris and hypocrisy, social repression and a relentless war against wild nature.

It’s tempting to try and imagine how things might have been different if, instead of putting all its efforts into keeping the Mississippi in a straightjacket, the Army Corps had instead tried to apply a kind of Mardi Gras philosophy. Annual, controlled flooding of the Mississippi – on a much bigger scale than the freshwater diversions currently permitted – might still be able to restore coastal wetlands and reduce the storm surge from future hurricanes. In place of our traditional view in which order – meaning top-down control – is all-good, and chaos – bottom-up insurrection – is all-bad, we need to learn how to value an interplay between the two. If we continue to resist achieving some kind of equilibrium, in the form of social, economic and environmental sustainability, nature will do it for us, and the results will not be pretty.

O.K., I do remember this: a slow, night-time drive through a wide-awake city, and the immense civic pride shown by the African American taxi driver. He swung past one of the cemeteries, explaining why all the coffins were stored in above-ground crypts. When he found out I was a writer, he enthused about local author Anne Rice and her publicity stunt to promote her latest vampire novel: she had herself borne through the streets in an open coffin. They say that jazz originally sprang from the famous New Orleans funeral, in which the slow march to the cemetery switches to an up-tempo dance tune to accompany the mourners back home. Here’s hoping New Orleans can dance back from the crypt once again.

UPDATE: Before you pooh-pooh my conclusion, read this (found here). It very much fits what Jarrett wrote in the comments: “New Orleans — with its ability to produce wonderful stories like this one without having anything like a coherent local economy — may be more performance than place, which is cause for hope. Performances are easier to put back together than places are.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What remains

This entry is part 14 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the third poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

I must say that the longer I continue with this project, the more difficult it becomes to bring my full attention to each poem without some calculation entering into it. That is to say, as my desire to write poems in response comes to feel increasingly compulsory, my reading becomes increasingly distracted and fragmentary.

Losing a Friend
by Paul Zweig

When the anger finally came
We were starting to find how much we already knew
About dead friendships . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

Lament

How many friends have I neglected
because I was too busy waiting for
the long shadows of January
or watching clouds cross some ephemeral
forest pool, dark with tannins?
How many friendships have withered
while I stalked a slug along an oak log
orange with fungi, agog at its ability
to glide on an instant carpet
& retract the stilts of its eyes
all the way into its head?
I’ve lost friends & learned how to be
merciless with myself – I mean,
how to edit.
Living in this mountain hollow,
I tell myself I could never take
the same walk twice.
I have planted myself here like
a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump
that rots away even as the birch encircles it
with an apron of roots, & a hundred
years later it still preserves, unseen,
the hollow shape of the corpse
that gave it life.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Arms and the poet

The political dimensions of warfare are rarely alluded to in [Aztec] poetry; instead, warfare is seen as an artistic act, and the warrior becomes a poet. There are, in fact, two ways to be reborn on earth: in poetry, and in warfare. It is in battle that nobles can achieve their true stature, and their greatest fame, by becoming “eagles and jaguars,” the names for orders of seasoned warriors:

Nobles and kings are sprouting as eagles, ripening as jaguars, in Mexico: Lord Ahuitzotl is singing arrows, singing shields.
Giver of life, let your flower not be gathered! …
You’ve adorned them in blaze flowers, shield flowers.

In these lines, as in many of the war poems, images of natural fertility and harmony are linked to the beauty of art, with shields adorning the warrior in the same way that poems adorn the poet. By this means, the battlefield itself, seemingly a place of death and destruction, is represented as a place of beauty, growth, and fertility. … Singers in the imperial period seem to have vied with each other to create ever more striking images to link beauty and terror…

– David Damrosch, “The Aesthetics of Conquest: Aztec Poetry Before and After Cortez,” Representations Vol. 0, No. 33

If history, as it comes through the historian, retains, analyzes, and connects significant events, in contrast, what poets insist on is the history of “unimportant” events. In place of historian’s “distance,” I want to experience the vulnerability of those participating in tragic events. In other words, Sappho rather than Homer as model. His sacred times, the time of myth, versus her time, which is the moment, forever irreversible. Beginning with Sappho’s insomnia, there’s a tradition of the poem which says “I exist” in the face of all abstractions and cosmos and history, a poem of a passionate desire for accuracy for the here and now in its miraculous presence. I am not talking about confession. The best poetry of this kind is conspicuous by the absence of ego. The most reliable “histories” are told by first-person pronouns who remain subordinate, even anonymous. History teaches humility. My own physical and spiritual discomfort is nothing in comparison to that of those being imprisoned and tortured tonight all over the world.

– Charles Simic, “Notes on Poetry and History”

I came out first as a political poet, even before The Dream of a Common Language, under the taboo against so-called political poetry in the US, which was comparable to the taboo against homosexuality. In other words, it wasn’t done. And this is, of course, the only country in the world where that has been true. Go to Latin America, to the Middle East, to Asia, to Africa, to Europe, and you find the political poet and a poetry that addresses public affairs and public discourse, conflict, oppression, and resistance. That poetry is seen as normal. And it is honored. …

I keep on not wanting to know what I know — Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr., the schoolyard massacres. There keep being things I absolutely don’t want to know, and must know — and we as a society must know. I explore the whole idea in a poem in Midnight Salvage called “Camino Real,” while driving this road to Los Angeles, thinking about [accounts of] abuses that I had been reading by people who actually went back to where they had their human rights violated. And how that coexists in the poem with what is for me a journey of happiness. …

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative — that we’re now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different — [that] this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do. …

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected — pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. …

One of the things I have to say about this demon of the personal — and I have to take responsibility for my part in helping create this demon, as part of a women’s movement in which we celebrated personal experience and personal feelings — is that it has become a horribly commoditized version of humanity. It’s almost as though the personal life has been taken hostage in some way, and I’m shying away more and more from anything that would contribute to that.

– Adrienne Rich, 1999 interview with Michael Klein

The larva of the tortoise beetle has the neat habit of collecting its droppings and exfoliated skin into a little packet that it carries over its back when it is out in the open. If it were not for this fecal shield, it would lie naked before its enemies.

– Stanley Kunitz, “Three Small Parables for My Poet Friends” (#2)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How else?

This entry is part 13 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the second (and title) poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

The Dark Side of the Earth
by Paul Zweig

We don’t talk about the war anymore,
Living on the dark side of the earth,
The winter side . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

The News at Four A.M.

I wake to a slow dripping
outside my window,
click on the news,
then remember
the recycling has to go out.

My feet find
the path without
a flashlight. I wade
through faintly visible fog,
a soundproof room
inhabited by the automatic
lusts of insects.

Halfway to the road,
I come to a halt.
There in the darkness
at my feet,
from glowworm
to glowworm

something is passing, it seems,
fading out at one spot
only to come back on
a few feet ahead:

a faint, cool signal
making its way over
the hidden face
of the earth.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bear blogs

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You wouldn’t think bears would have much to blog about, but they do. I rarely find living trees – or even dead snags in the woods – marked up this way. Bears seem to have grasped the link between telephone poles and communication. This is the pole on top of our Sapsucker Ridge.

The pole on top of Laurel Ridge has served as a group blog for bears for a number of years now. Scratches range from one to seven feet off the ground. After making the scratches, the bear will turn and rub his or her hair and scent glands against them; unlike us apes, bears are more olfactory than visual. Most of the information conveyed here is invisible to us.

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Among the other things that caught my eye this morning was this bull thistle. The field is just beginning to come into its own as a repository of autumn color, with most of the goldenrod species yet to flower. Since the non-native bull thistle is a biennial rather than a perennial, the native goldenrods are in no danger of being out-competed by it, despite the hysteria of the weed-control crowd. And despite the name, cattle, including bulls, won’t eat it. Funny all the things we blame the bulls for.

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In the woods, late summer flowers such as pinesap (too small for my camera to be able to capture effectively) and the intriguingly named smooth false foxglove (shown here) offer a bit of color. Pinesap, a close relative of Indian pipe, is a saprophyte, producing no chlorophyll but relying instead upon a mutualistic relationship with a species of fungus in order to extract nutrients from dead and decaying organic matter. The fungus also serves as a nutrient bridge between pinesap or Indian pipe roots and the roots of various species of trees; botanists argue whether the saprophyte-tree relationship is mainly parasitic or symbiotic in nature. Nature usually isn’t as neatly dichotomous as the Western mind would like, and we have trouble categorizing many forms of plant and animal behavior as a result. (Are the markings of black bears territorial, for example? Probably not – at least, not in a way we’d understand.) Smooth false foxglove is classed as “partially parasitic” on the roots of oak trees.

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When I was a kid, I used to collect wild turkey tail feathers to make pens. My brothers and I had a mimeographed nature ‘zine called The Screech Owl, which we illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. We typed the text on an old Smith-Corona typewriter, except for the titles and the masthead, which I drew by hand. The Screech Owl had 35 subscribers and ran for three years; Via Negativa has 45-50 subscribers, plus a few dozen additional regular readers, and I’m on my second year. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve come full circle here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Advancing into sleepless woods

This entry is part 12 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

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I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the first poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Getting Older
by Paul Zweig

Advancing into sleepless woods,
Each year the ice getting thinner,
And the trapped waters darker . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-05-05]

* * * *

Getting Heavier
    for SB

Prematurely grave –
sentences delivered with a note of finality,
syllogisms grasped & held in the mind
the way excess skin from a facelift
vanishes into a crack beside the ears –
I stretch myself over the same
mattress of bone, morning & evening.
I go on as if nothing happened,
as if I were free on my own recognizance
& this growing heaviness simply means
I need more sleep.
I’ve become adept at ignoring
the jagged piece of sky pressing down
on the back of my neck.
Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation.
Ask me anything.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
& pretend it’s morning: shower, drink coffee
& look for poems in the ready-made phrases
I think of as inspired, because breath belongs
to everyone & no one
& I am trying not to give undue weight
to the new reports that claim
it is oxygen, stripping the electrons
from other molecules, that slowly
reduces this body to a swamp of light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

To greet the quietness

This entry is part 11 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eleventh poem of the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. (I’m planning to skip the twelfth and last poem in that section, and move on the second section from here.) See this post for details.

Self and Soul
by Paul Zweig

The dwarf tears at his clothes
To greet the quietness.
He nudges me to show him what I write . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-05-05]

* * * *

Scarecrow & Farmer

Right at dusk, as always,
I overhear myself: a drone note
audible in the lull
between shifts of crickets.

Darkness rises from the ground
between the corn stalks,
which are anything but still.
I step deliberately, one season

on each foot. Today left a crust
of salt around my collar,
lifted now by a passing breath
of wings. I don’t look up.

Four quick cries & a pause,
then two more: Estiquirí­n.
The hoe handle digs
a furrow in my shoulder

while above me, outlined against the stars,
the one wearing my old clothes
shivers under his straw,
his cross of sticks.
__________

“Estiquirí­n   Great Horned Owl; a spirit in the form of a Great Horned Owl (onomatopoeic)” – Glossary, Seven Names for the Bellbird: Conservation Geography in Honduras, by Mark Bonta

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Meditation on the via positiva

Space and time can bend into a vanishing point: we know this, or think we do. Light disappears like water down a drain; from this inverse star, no visions come. We have only the words, black hole, and the idea of suction, the horror of no-place and its irresistible gravity. But doubt still clouds the imagination, and we clutch at whatever flotsam our worldy experience can provide. Surely it is a portal, we say – the same kind of logic that leads us to become entranced by the orifices of the beautiful. How could such a perfect mouth do more than sip or nibble? None but the thinnest of ties can bind its owner to the earth. Surely this is no gaping maw, no staring eye, no ravenous sex. The gaze is hidden behind sunglasses, the flat belly flaunts its false window and our eager glances cluster, like the flies that crowd the eyes and mouths of starving children, walking in and out with impunity. But no, it isn’t like that. The blank at the end of space and time refuses nothing, like a bull’s-eye that’s impossible to miss. If it were a doorway, it would have just one side, and if it were a mouth, one word: Yes.