Lines fine as spider silk
that craze a surface once
adored for sleekness,
ripples where a frog jumped in,
oh flesh that sags, corners
that wander off true: with
these very claws fumbling
for the keys I have found
a way to go on without regret.
My love, oh world, I give you
pearly everlasting. Let happiness
spread like the spot in this
November sky where the sun
used to make a blazon of
your virtues. Let outlines grow
fuzzy, liberated from their shadows.
Play all the fractional notes
between white & black, hemidemi-
semiquavers in milkweed pods,
seed-clouds of goldenrod, bare
branches. Their ordnance spent,
freed of primary obligations,
the empty casings have room
for more world – rain wind snow
wakefulness sleep – & thereby,
my dear sir or madam, more
resonance. More give. More play.
Holding without having, we learn
at last how to keep.
Words on the street
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 18, 1998
For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting almost entirely of thoughts germinated and observations made while sitting on my front porch. It ran from November 1 through November 19, 1998.
I woke early, grabbed a shower & took my coffee up into the field to watch the Leonids. Between 5:20 and 6:00 I counted thirty-three streaks of light. I found myself slowly revolving in place with my head back, sometimes stomping my feet to keep warm: an Indian kind of dance, perhaps, accompanied by a vague though prayerful longing. All the while, a pair of great-horned owls were calling back and forth between the ridges and Venus shone bright as a searchlight. Even as the stain of light from the east spread across the sky, even as the earth’s atmosphere grew visible, meteors continued to flash in its inverted pan. Thirty-three: one for each year of my life. These are all the stars I wished upon, I said to myself, knowing full well they were nothing but grains of dust.
Out on the porch at 8:12. It has turned into a glorious morning. I crane around to admire the rosemary blooming on the other side of the window glass: two pale blue, almost orchid-shaped flowers at the end of the longest branch, which bends like a lazy N or half an infinity symbol.
1:15 p.m. Forty-five degrees now and still cloudless, but the stench of cow manure freshly spread on some field down in Sinking Valley makes it tough to sit outside. I count myself fortunate, though, that the pulp mill in Tyrone went out of operation back in 1970, and that none of those massive hog farms one reads about elsewhere have been built here yet.
All afternoon the butternut gets a thorough grooming from nuthatches, chickadees, even a downy woodpecker – sometimes all in the tree at once. Between 2:45 and 3:30 there’s a steady procession of squirrels back and forth between the woods and the walnut tree on the slope behind the house. For whatever reason they have abandoned their usual caution about crossing open ground today. At 3:20 I watch one squirrel pause for a drink in the stream. It crouches to sip in a very feline manner, takes its time. Then it climbs the butternut as high as the Thinker’s usual post and takes time out for a thorough scratch.
By 3:30 the sky has gone white. It’s very still. Much to my surprise, the smell of manure has already completely dissipated – guess I complained too soon. The downy is working over the smallest dead branches – there are quite a few – and I’m enjoying the range of tones he manages to extract along with whatever grubs or insects he’s after.
Around the same time, a small flock of chickadees demonstrates their species’ versatility. Some ride weed stalks and cattail heads halfway to the ground, dangling head-down like a dried plant’s dream of heaven in a huge winged seed. Others fly up to the tops of the walnuts and black cherries at the woods’ edge to raid old webworm nests, while still others hop around in the butternut, poking and peering under every loose piece of bark. They could just stay at the birdfeeders all day, but what would be the fun in that?
At 4:30 the Thinker crosses the road about fifteen feet off the ground and follows his usual arboreal highway down the splay of butternut limbs to his favorite spot. All’s not right with the world, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be.
God says
A couple weeks ago, Languagehat quoted historian Solomon Volkov on the great literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin:
Bakhtin was particularly interested in the use of “reported speech” [chuzháya rech’]–that is, citation–in medieval literature, where “the borders between another’s and one’s own speech were fragile, ambivalent, and frequently convoluted and confused.”
Last week I came across a particularly striking example of this, in an anthology of German Mystical Writings (ed. by Karen J. Campbell for The German Library, Continuum, 1991). Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207-1282) stands out for her daring use of Brautmystik, “bridal mysticism,” in which the contemplative’s journey ends in ardent longing. What the body might experience as the torments of hell, Mechthild says, the soul perceives as the “high delight” of union with the Godhead. She began her major treatise as follows:
THE FLOWING LIGHT OF THE GODHEAD
This Is the First Part of the Book
This book is to be joyfully welcomed for God Himself speaks in it
This book I now send forth as a messenger to all spiritual people both good and bad – for if the pillars fall, the building cannot stand. The book proclaims Me alone and shows forth My holiness with praise. All who would understand this book should read it nine times.
This Book is called The Flowing Light of the Godhead
Ah! Lord God! Who has written this book? I in my weakness have written it, because I dared not hide the gift that is in it. Ah! Lord! What shall this book be called to Thy Glory? It shall be called The Flowing Light of the Godhead into all hearts which dwell therein without falseness.
This prologue is followed by a poetic dialogue between Love and the Soul, modeled after the courtly love poems of the Minnesingers.
Obviously, the blurring of borders between author and Author here helps advance the mystical argument. Notice, however, that the divine Word is spoken; only human words are written. The emphasis on calling and proclaiming, the thrice-repeated title, and the injunction to read the book nine times, remind us of the extent to which spellcraft influenced (and continues to influence) the language of prayer.
Incidentally, if you think “flowing light” sounds a little sexual, I don’t think you’re mistaken. Mechthild’s revelation mixes allegory with bodily imagery in a manner that can hardly fail to strike the modern reader as bizarre. For example, from Part 1:
19. God caresses the soul in six things
Thou art My resting place, My love, My secret peace, My deepest longing, My highest honor. Thou art a delight of My Godhead, a comfort of My manhood, a cooling stream for My ardor.
And you thought the via negativa was weird! Actually, what this most reminds me of was something I read in Rolling Stone a few years back. Some popular hip-hop guy was being interviewed about his Christian beliefs. He said, “I’m on God’s dick!”
Further musings on the divine phallus will have to wait for another time.
Words on the street
Shall we dance?
Natalie suggested that each participating blogger follow our comma-free, one-sentence posts with additional sentences, continuing the same story line, so I did. But this is one of those stories where you, dear reader, must do all the work, supplying plot, character and motive along with the commas. You can star in this one yourself, if you like. Someone has to take the initiative around here!
Shall we play Twenty Questions the way we used to when we were small and crammed together into the back seat with almost the whole vacation behind us now & spotting license plates had begun to wear thin (though some of us had hated that game from the moment it got started) & we added a fourth category to the traditional three so Ideas were included which often of course made it impossible to solve in just 20 questions because how in the hell do you decide whether or not Democracy is bigger than a breadbox?
Or should we instead aspire to levity as on the evening of an alcohol-free family get-together on New Year’s Eve & take the questions dealt for us from decks not of our own imagining but focus our attention instead on the progress of plastic surrogates around a racetrack where the outcome seems heavily weighted in favor of those with the best memories for all the momentous events in the life of this particular colony of yeast?
And if we ever settle on a medium then shall we decide who asks whom the way one might volley for a serve or choose first move in a chess match based on the color of pawns held tight in a pick of fists?
Words on the street
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 16, 1998
For those who just tuned in, I’m transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. It ran from November 1 through November 19, 1998.
I’ll also submit this as a late entry for the Ecotone wiki topic Cats and Place.
If I were a good ecological citizen, I’d be reaching for the .22 right now. And I might yet. But I have such a hard time pulling the trigger any more.
A cold wind has kept me off the porch for much of the day. I’m beginning to think I might have picked the wrong time of year to start this record. It was still 34 with a stiff breeze when I came out at 2:00, and I don’t last for more than ten minutes. But the wind did allow me to sneak out without disturbing the black and white cat hunting in the overgrown front yard below me. Out of habit, I grabbed the rifle from its usual spot behind the door, setting it down on the wicker sofa beside me.
Though completely feral, this cat’s relative lack of wariness by daylight distinguishes it from, say, a red fox – another non-native that occupies a similar ecological niche. Actually, given that we have both red and gray foxes on the mountain, with coyotes moving in, the few wild-living housecats may only survive because they are able to switch to a more diurnal pattern than they might otherwise prefer. Thus are new niches pioneered.
Not that this ecosystem needs another prolifically fertile mid-sized predator. In the absence of top carnivores, and with the highly fragmented landscape offering lots of access to formerly inaccessible deep-forest spots, omnivores such as raccoons, skunks and opossums are devastating populations of songbirds through nest predation. Seen in this context, feral housecats are just one minor piece of the puzzle. It’s the unnatural proliferation and consumption patterns of human beings that are at the root of all this, of course.
This cat is, I suspect, a regular resident of an old barn down in the valley, less than a mile to the east. I have tracked it up over Laurel Ridge in winters past. An all-black cat sometimes shows up as well. They both seem to specialize in rodents – mainly chipmunks and meadow voles – but I’m sure neither would hesitate to raid a song sparrow or ovenbird nest in season, if they happened across it.
After a few minutes of fruitless stalking of the semi-subterranean voles, the cat goes out to the driveway and pads down to the big log that lies at a right angle to the road. Using the log as cover it sneaks back toward the stream. At the base of the butternut it surprises a chipmunk, attempts to pounce. But the chipmunk easily dodges and disappears in the dense weeds.
The last couple days it’s been warm enough for the birds to bathe in the stream below the butternut tree, but not today. I wonder whether the cat’s interest in this spot stems from familiarity with its frequent use by birds? Quite possibly so. I picture the cat crouched low among the sedges, waiting for its chance as an unsuspecting junco whips up an instant fountain with its wings . . . As much time as I spend out here, I still miss so much of what goes on!
The cat climbs the bank and works its way over to the corner of the house. Some new movement in the weeds prompts it to freeze once again – more voles, no doubt. Finally it heads up the slope and out of sight. I suspect it may be headed for an old woodchuck hole that gives access to the crawlspace underneath the kitchen, which is fine with me. Plenty of white-footed mice there. I’m getting as tired of setting traps as I am of taking potshots at feral housecats.
The whole time I tracked the cat with my eyes, I was remembering a story that the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told on himself. He was trespassing in a fenced game preserve when a strange-looking magpie startled him, brushing his face with its wings on its way to a nearby branch. He raised his crossbow to take aim at it, but just as he did so,
He noticed a cicada, which had just found a beautiful patch of shade and had forgotten what could happen to it. A mantis hiding behind the leaves grabbed at it, forgetting at the sight of gain that it had a body of its own. The strange magpie in its turn was taking advantage of that, at the sight of profit forgetful of its truest prompting.
‘Hmm!’ said Chuang Chou uneasily. ‘It is inherent in things that they are tied to each other, that one kind calls up another.’
As he threw down his crossbow and ran out of the grove, the gamekeeper came running behind shouting curses at him.
(A. C. Graham translation, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Hackett, 2001)
To be a part of the food chain does involve one in a sort of infinite regression. But what Zhuangzi is critiquing here, I believe, is the way the focused awareness of the hunter can be so easily spoiled by thoughts of gain. The instant one thinks “I have forgotten myself!” all is lost. As soon as Zhuangzi loses his mental equilibrium, the game warden is after him. There are so many ways to participate in the lives of others – and the majority of them seem to involve some sort of ego-projection. I wonder if my squeamishness about killing doesn’t derive primarily from my own fear of death.
Laundry
There’s getting to be a serious backlog of thoughts and observations around here. Is there such a thing as mental retentiveness?
*
Last Tuesday, in Penn State’s main library, I’m browsing the new books shelf in the Arts and Humanities section when a peculiar sense of deja vu washes over me. I have been coming here for over 30 years, and the library has gone through quite a few changes during that time. But suddenly I am remembering how I used to think as a kid whenever I browsed the spines of abstruse academic books: Professors know all this cool stuff! I will never be that knowledgeable. I’ll never even be able to grasp simple things like how income tax works.
It makes me sort of sad, now, to realize that in fact very few professors know much of anything outside the boundaries of their disciplines. It further occurs to me that one of the rare exceptions to this rule may be my own brother Steve – not yet a professor, but a PhD and master of many foreign languages and diverse areas of expertise, from entomology to physics to economics to British and American horror fiction. And even for people like him, I have a very good idea of the pivotal role that intellectual confidence and the fluent use of big words play in shaping other people’s perceptions of unlimited expertise.
It’s not at all a comforting thought, the realization that, fundamentally, humanity knows nothing. I’d much rather be that naive little kid again. (And in fact, I never have figured out the federal tax structure. But neither has anyone else, I don’t believe.)
*
All last week I was looking at faces and seeing the skull beneath the skin. In one or two cases, I had to look away to avoid imagining earthworms tumbling out of eye sockets. Where the hell did this come from? I am rapidly losing interest in the kind of speculative writing (and reading) that has formed much of the content of this weblog. I didn’t start out to be a “blogger of place,” but now I think I could happily abandon everything else and just focus on the daily news: I mean the real news, the minutiae of otherwise unchronicled events that don’t directly involve human beings thinking up new reasons to slaughter each other.
*
The most original idea I had last week (well, original to me, anyway) was this: Via Negativa ought to have its own blog, a place to put housekeeping notes, maintain searchable categories of archives, report on new incoming links, post complementary and critical e-mails, and blogroll all sites that link to V.N. I could include occasional reflections on how well or poorly different writing experiments at V.N. seem to turn out, and even post ideas for alternate posts that never made the cut.
I know there’s such a thing as metablogging, which means simply blogging about blogging in general. (My favorite metablog is Mandarin Design.) What I have in mind is something even more reflexive: a hyperblog, perhaps?
I’m not sure I can handle the upkeep for another blog, though I did play around a bit with title ideas – Penumbra, Caveat, Via Parasita – and mottoes: Made in the shade. Vanity of vanities. My blog has fleas.
*
Yard signs, garden signifies, I decide a week after the election.
*
Late Thursday morning, I went for a brief ramble around the field, entranced by the shape and color of the goldenrod seed heads. The weak sunlight gives an air of mystery to the puffy, gray-white heads of tall goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), making them appear to glow from within. The 40-acre field is dominated by goldenrod, but tall goldenrod is just one of four or five different species, and one of only two to go to seed in such an impressive manner. It’s Veterans Day, and I can’t help seeing platoons of soldiers standing stiffly at attention.
All the leaves on all the goldenrods turned black and shriveled with the first frost, which makes it much easier to see the ground around their stalks. Since the field hasn’t been tilled in at least 33 years, a thick carpet of moss has grown up in many areas. I can pick out three distinct species of moss without hardly trying; I am sure there are many more than that. British soldiers’ and reindeer lichens can be found in the drier areas. Ebony spleenwort ferns, still green, show up quite easily now, sprouting here and there among the moss. I am surprised to find a cutleaf grape fern (Botrychium dissectum), though. This is a species we didn’t used to see that much of, but now, every year we find more of it. It’s difficult to decide whether that’s because it is truly on the increase, or simply because, until we first identified it some five or six years ago, we didn’t know what we were seeing. It’s not an especially rare species. Maybe it’s been here all along.
True to its name, this cutleaf grape fern’s triply pinnate leaf has turned a deep wine red. In pausing to admire it, I knock against the six-inch-tall sporangiophore with the toe of my boot, and it releases a little brown puff of sporangia. Holy smoke! I tap it some more, like a lazy Johnny Fernseed. Billyuns and billyuns, I think. Meanwhile, the clouds overhead have thinned, and now the sun begins shining strongly enough to cast shadows. The tall goldenrod seems to shrink a bit. Now it’s just another hayfield gone to seed.
*
Yesterday was cloudless and very, very quiet from mid-morning on, when our weekend visitors departed. I felt rather disoriented all weekend because of the disruption of my early morning rituals: these were people who get up as early as I do. I still sat outside both mornings with my coffee, but my cherished communion with the darkness was destroyed. About all I could do was enjoy the way the two bright pin-pricks of Venus and Jupiter were enough to give the entire rest of the sky a depth and purity it otherwise would have lacked.
Hospitality is as close to a sacred duty as any I know. One can’t very well ask one’s guests to please sit in the dark for twenty minutes just so one’s own, hidebound rituals won’t be altered for a day or two. Nor were these the kind of people I could’ve invited to join me out there. With the temperature around 25 degrees on Saturday morning, my uncle made it clear he thought I was crazy – just like the black guys in his north Jersey neighborhood who stand around outside shooting the bull in all kinds of weather. (To his credit, he didn’t imply that they were all drug dealers, merely that they were incomprehensibly Other.)
I throw in a load of laundry right after they leave, and hang it outside. My usual hiking buddy has other commitments today, so I decide reluctantly to spend the rest of the morning on a long-overdue redesign of the blog. This eats up half the afternoon, as well. When I go out to take the clothes down around 3:00, I hear what sounds at first like a large waterfall or distant applause coming from the other side of Sapsucker Ridge, toward the west. High-pitched overtones like rusty door hinges reveal its true origin: a mammoth flock of red-winged blackbirds. After a few minutes, the flock takes wing, which is impressive both aurally and visually. A moment of silence gives way to the sound of wings, like a thousand decks of cards being shuffled at once. Just as the flock comes into view over the ridge, it performs a complex roll-and-split maneuver, a kind of mitosis. Within this enormous cloud of birds, some individuals begin flying in unison toward the southeast, over the field, while an equal number begin flying equally in unison toward the northeast, along the ridge. How is this decided?
The southeast-bound section of the flock heads out over Laurel Ridge toward Sinking Valley, then swings around northwestward and rejoins the other half of the flock in less than a minute. They all settle in the trees just beyond the corner of the field and resume the rusty waterfall impersonation. But after only a few seconds another hush, another card-shuffle of wings. This time, with the low sun full on them and the blue sky above, the effect is spectacular. I stand open-mouthed as the flock spirals, rising like a cobra from a snakecharmer’s basket, splits in the middle, rejoins, undulates like a flag in the breeze. As they wheel about, thousands of red wing patches simultaneously catch the sun.
Then I realize that One of These Things is Not Like the Other, as we used to sing back in grade school. A small hawk, probably a Coopers, is making tight circles in the middle of the flock. Suddenly I can see what this whole aerial ballet is all about. I’m reminded of the way certain Java applets respond to the slightest motion of the cursor as the flock swirls and curls around its would-be predator. After about a minute the hawk gives up, turns and glides off down the ridge, heading south for the winter. The blackbirds fly west, and in a few seconds things are absolutely quiet once again.
*
A little while later I’m sitting out on the porch, enjoying the stillness and the play of random thoughts swirling around in my head. One that I write down concerns the phrase “too much information.” I guess what strikes me is the way that the very concept of “information” – still basically alien to me, despite having been all my life the son of a librarian – includes connotations of too-muchness. Information can be catalogued, it can be communicated, but can it ever really be absorbed in the way that (say) knowledge or understanding can? Information evokes sleek and sexless modernity, pure quantity without affect.
Quite apart from what is usually meant by economic considerations, how you attain something, I’m thinking, determines its real value. How you get somewhere shapes your ability to perceive, to absorb and assimilate. The cliche that says that life is a journey is too vague, it seems to me, because life is really more like a pilgrimage, even for people who are not especially religious. “Journey” implies a mere change in position of an essentially static subject, whereas “pilgrimage” recognizes and celebrates the reality that the perceiver changes along with the perceived, that road and traveler make and unmake each other in an intricate pas de deux. Trying to describe such motions using calculus would involve an unpredictable number of returns to the starting point to change the terms of the original equation. I remember my high school calculus teacher Mr. Bloom, and how he used to sometimes “solve” an impossibly difficult equation in just this manner. I wonder now if his habit of talking out loud to God as he went along was always as facetious as I had assumed at the time.
While I’ve been sitting here taking notes on myself, the sun has slid off my pant legs, across the yard and up into the woods. Yes, this is all a distraction from what’s really important. Yes, it’s time to go for a walk.
Up on Laurel Ridge Trail I stop to admire the messed-up bark of a chestnut oak tree that must have some kind of disease or genetic mutation. Deeply furrowed like all chestnut oaks, this one’s bark forms collars or rings every six inches or so. The result is a highly complex micro-topography. So often in nature, it’s the disease, the predator, the apparently tragic error that produces the most spectacular effects.
*
If I didn’t write it down, I write in my pocket notebook, would any of it matter? In other words, is meaning something I discover through writing – or something I merely invent? And is this discovery/invention mainly an unveiling, or does it more closely resemble embroidery, even weaving? If the latter, how do we describe the results? With a dip in the dye vat, a veil for a bride can become a widow’s weed . . .
Enough of this. I have to go up and take the bread out of the oven now. I’m making Swedish rye this morning, with orange juice, mashed potatoes and anise seed. Temperamental stuff – I don’t think it rose nearly as well as it did the last time I made it. I could stick with the tried-and-true whole wheat-multigrain recipe, but what would be the fun in that? Fresh rye bread with garlic butter and a bowl of cabbage soup: the search for meaning seems trivial by comparison.
Words on the street
