If people are determined not to believe something, then no amount of proof will change their mind. You will be called a liar for proclaiming things that call into question the way people are living. But remember, you’re just one in a long line of Cassandras and Jeremiahs — prophets who were scorned for being right. They stuck to their guns, and so should you. What’s the alternative? You can’t change the laws of nature.
If you still think you can overcome people’s aversion to the truth by uncovering better evidence, hey, go for it. Delve into the mysteries of geologic time, subatomic particles, or the outer reaches of the known universe, and bring the clearest evidence you can find — see if that makes any difference. Only those who have learned to listen will actually hear, and that depends in great measure on whatever chance circumstances shaped their upbringing; you have no control over it. Those who can’t hear are as good as dead — and therefore soon to rejoin the cosmic mystery in any case.
Some will say: How come God hasn’t sent some sort of obvious sign about this? And all you can say is, signs and miracles abound! Most people just don’t know how to read them. All creatures that move on the earth or fly through the air belong to communities equal in importance to your own. God doesn’t overlook anything, and we’re all in this together.
The foregoing is my own rough paraphrase of several verses from the Quran, 6:32-38, based primarily on the Ahmed Ali translation but with reference to several others on the Internet, especially for the crucial passage about the equal validity of non-human communities (other translations offer “societies” and even “peoples”). I even found a Sufi blog that interprets 6:38 as a call for animal rights.
Note however that in attempting to make this passage a bit more palatable for modern secular types, I have stripped out most of the poetry. The part about geologic time and subatomic particles, for example, paraphrases: “Seek out a tunnel (going deep) into the earth,/ or a ladder reaching out to the skies, and bring them a sign…” Fascinating stuff one way or the other, though, I thought. I am seriously exploring the idea of writing a modern bestiary now, and looking for inspiration. Who’d have thought the Muslim holy book would contain such a radically inclusive vision?
A conversation with Todd Davis about life and death, religion and poetry
Todd Davis stops by to read some poems from his latest book, The Least of These, as well as from his previous books, and to talk about public reading, what motivates him as an artist, growing up with Mennonites and how that shaped his own beliefs, nature poetry, travel poetry, deer and deer hunting, how to kill in a manner that honors the spirit of the slain, and more.
Unknown web searchers, I’m sorry you were led astray and ended up here. This is not a site about Amish rubber boots, heavy rain penis, existentialist haircut, tweety only poems about love, how is a turtle and a groundhog alike, or (Lord knows) poems and classy behavior. This isn’t a site about sexsexsex, what colour is cat vomit, what does a groundhog penis look like, don’t eat whatever you say, tips for surviving the apocalypse, how to make me happy, shit creek banjo, wood rat midden photo, poem about not being a dick, poems about being rescued from climbing, explanatory poems on mitosis, or 20 gauge crow hunting. Most of all, this is not a site about the via negativa. I’m sorry. Better luck elsewhere.
Rachel talks about writing poetry vs. writing liturgy, studying with David Lehman, images of motherhood and divinity, wordless prayers, and the challenges of writing while caring for an infant. Two-month-old Drew adds a few wordless prayers of his own.
I’m sitting with my back to the grove when the sound of heavy wingbeats in the tops of the spruces makes me look around, and seeing nothing, get up and edge my way in between the trees. The intricate skeletons of recently dead boughs snap loudly whenever I try to diverge from the rudimentary path. I crane my neck peering into the shadowy tops of the 40-foot trees which I helped my parents plant when I was a boy. How could they already have grown so full of secrets?
The greatest natural disaster-related humanitarian crisis in a generation, and I have written exactly nothing about it. But this is a place for personal essays and poems, and what do I know of Haiti? Everything is second-hand at best: the Haitian woman in Japan back in 1985 with whom I shared a mailbox and some confessions of homesickness; the Anglo-American friend who joined a Vodun congregation in New Jersey and was ridden by Ghede, orisha of the crossroads. A smattering of histories and ethnographies. The vague sense that if Toussaint had never been exiled, Haiti might have kept its topsoil and some of its forests. An immense sense of guilt, as an American, for my country’s share of blame in its immiseration.
A few days ago, I read Newsweek’s latest cover story, “Why Haiti Matters,” and felt my stomach turn. It did little but recycle platitudes about America as a force for good: Haiti matters, we are led to believe, because it gives us a chance to show “the character of our country.” The author is Barack Obama.
He does at least quote Qoheleth — wisest voice in the Old Testament — toward the end of the essay:
In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel. That pain and loss is so often meted out without any justice or mercy. That “time and chance” happen to us all. But it is also in these moments, when we are brought face to face with our own fragility, that we rediscover our common humanity. We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves.
O.K., Mr. President, I’ll give you that. I’ve kept my silence in part because I know all too well the moralizing impulse of my Protestant heritage. Try as I might to anathematize Pat Robertson for his ignorant, victim-blaming remarks, I recognize the temptation, even as an agnostic, to make the world make sense, to pretend that life is or could be fair — or at least redeemable. To accept that it isn’t makes us into monsters, does it not? But the view of God or gods as unpredictable and sometimes violent — that Old Testament and animist view that progressives love to decry — comports more easily with observable reality than any pablum about God as infinite goodness. Even for me to put on my secular humanist hat and declare, as I did on Identica and Twitter last week, that tectonic activity is the price we pay for life on earth seems unduly glib, offensive to the memory of the earthquake’s victims. Their deaths were were not some kind of sacrifice. Stop it! Stop trying to explain. Live with the questions. Make your peace with the unknowable as best you can.
It’s a little past 4:00 o’clock, but the January sun is low and just minutes from dropping behind the ridge. The feathery shadows seem full of possibility now, and I see a picture in every direction where before there was nothing but branches blocking my way. This is the way. I steady the camera in the dim light by holding it out in front of me so the strap is stretched taut from the back of my neck: there’s far less tremor in my trunk than in my limbs. Some kind of large owl — barred, great-horned, long-eared — is hiding in these pictures, I’m sure of it. It’s waiting for darkness so it can begin to see.
Be careful what you wish for. We had a white Christmas, all right — especially after it started to sleet and the clouds settled in. It couldn’t have gotten any whiter, or any drearier.
Late in the morning, I took the camera on a short walk across the field to check up on the American bittersweet (Celastrus scandens), of which we have just a couple vines on the property. I’ll admit I have collected a few sprigs for Christmas wreaths in past years, but since we have so little of it, I stopped. Collecting by camera will have to suffice.
Unlike the more familiar East Asian species Celastrus orbiculatus, which is invasive in some areas, American bittersweet is in decline throughout its range due to over-collecting and, I suspect, over-browsing by deer. In almost 40 years, we’ve never found a new vine on the property. Up until 15 years ago there was a vine at the Far Field, too, but when its host trees fell over, that was the end of it. The two vines I visited today used to have a third companion, as well.
As a symbol of Christmas, bittersweet seems aptly named, at least as far as my own feelings about the holiday are concerned. For the first couple decades of my life, it was the unchallenged climax of the year, but now, I don’t know — I guess I prefer the smaller but more regular pleasures of daily life, and I no longer feel such an overwhelming urge to acquire new things. Christmas used to be all about the presents, but now seems significant mainly as a celebration of the slow return of light to the northern hemisphere; today’s gloomy weather simply made the holiday cheer more essential.
And of course I love that we get to bring a tree inside (though according to rigid family custom, that can’t happen until Christmas Eve) and decorate it with lights and a couple hundred ornaments, each with its own story. We have hand-painted Christmas balls that once belonged to my mother’s grandmother, and a couple of blown-egg Santa Clauses that my parents made in the first years of their marriage, before we were born. Originally there were a full dozen, each slightly different depending on the exact arrangement of glued felt pieces and cotton balls, but they, like the bittersweet, have suffered a gradual attrition. Mom still exclaims about how much work it was to empty all those eggs: “Never again!”
This year, my niece Elanor was old enough to help rather than hinder the tree-decorating process, which accounts for the unusual concentration of angels at about the two-foot line. She likes angels. And her Nanna told her something about each ornament they hung: “That’s a God’s-eye your Uncle Dave made when he was a boy. And here’s Santa Claus in the bathtub — isn’t he funny? A friend of ours gave this to us years and years ago.”
I was impressed by the extent to which the presence of a 4-and-a-half-year-old child could put the magic back in the holiday for me. She was very good about taking turns opening presents this morning, but was so excited by her own presents, at one point she actually started weeping for joy. She ran over and hugged her daddy after every present from him. And when everything had finally been opened, we discovered one present that nobody could remember giving. The odd thing was that her grandfather had been sitting on the floor with her the whole time reading the labels and making sure all the presents went to the proper recipients.
So a cheap plastic knick-knack suddenly acquired an aura of wonder, and I had a dim recollection of being five and taking it on faith that half my presents had been delivered in the middle of the night by a fat guy in a flying sleigh. Hey, it’s no weirder than the whole incarnation and virgin birth thing, right? Winter is, above all, a time for telling stories. Here’s wishing all my friends and readers an abundance of wonder this holiday season and in the year to come.
Light unmitigated by leaves can change in an instant.
This is what makes deserts both so alluring and so unforgiving — that lack of moderation. Sharp contrasts appeal to the eye as well as to the moral imagination.
The condition of the snow can change by the hour: what held you up at dawn might crumble under your boots at ten. The only constant is the need to walk and walk and walk, for warmth more than exercise and for revelation more than warmth.
In a radically simplified landscape there are fewer places to hide, and things that had been hidden are selectively revealed, in strong light and with maximum contrast: that’s what I mean by revelation. Nothing mystical about it. And the extreme conditions should serve to remind us that revelations are not necessarily pleasant; a preference for pleasant news and comforting beliefs can be a real obstacle to an accurate perception of reality.
The desertedness of deserts is of course another big part of their appeal. You can be alone with your demons. The wintertime desert is barren, devoid of fertility — but as anyone who has chosen to remain child-free will tell you, this can be a gift, too. All sorts of things need open space to flourish. Biologically speaking, the extreme environments known as barrens in the eastern U.S., like the western deserts, often accommodate species found nowhere else.
So what seems barren to most might be for some the most fruitful country imaginable, the moment-by-moment mutability as welcome as the phases of an unpredictable moon.
Half-way between a bestiary and an almanac. Multi-authored by an international consortium of the homeless. Heavy on Yes, low on No. Too big to fail. Available only in whalesong, and impossible to translate.
St. Brendan's whale, by Honorius Philoponus, Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621
I got some half-decent footage of crows mobbing what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk this afternoon. I wasn’t quick enough to get the hawk, so it didn’t make for much of a nature video even by my low standards, so I decided I’d mess around with it and try to make a videopoem instead. Here’s the text:
If the dead can’t rest,
it’s because we won’t let them.
We storm,
we harry,
we decry,
we implore.
We make them star
in our horror shows
for that surge of adrenalin
that lets us know
we’re alive —
as if they our dear departed
were the ones out for blood.
Jamendo.com was down, so I went to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection instead and quickly found some suitable music. The main advantage of searching on Jamendo is that you can filter out Creative Commons licenses that specify “no derivatives.” But I think from now on I’ll probably try the Internet Archive first, because it seems to have much more of the kind of music I’m looking for.
*
For what it’s worth, this is my 3,000th post at Via Negativa. Granted, 466 of those are just quote-and-link posts in the Smorgasblog category. And this figure does not include the 719 Morning Porch posts, which are in a separate blog. I mention them because, in my first several years of blogging, I almost certainly would’ve included them as part of the Via Negativa stream — and someday when I stop keeping the Morning Porch record, I will probably import all those posts into the VN archives.
As luck would have it, we just passed another milestone a week ago: the 12,000th approved comment, which was left by Dana Guthrie Martin. That excludes the several thousand comments that were lost when Via Negativa moved to WordPress on April Fool’s Day, 2006. And just to keep things in perspective: I’ve logged 1,118,233 spam comments during that same period.
Through gestures, the house painter indicates that the goddess appeared to him in a dream and asked for a sacrifice. He points to a small piece of flesh lying in front of her stone toe, a flattened pink slug trailing a red carpet: his tongue. That explains the blood all down his shirt and chin. He opens his mouth and blood pours out instead of speech. As the word spreads, other devotees rush into the temple to annoint him with garlands. There’s even a small procession, the newspaper reports, though it doesn’t give any details. The tongue still lies untouched before the goddess, whose name is Amba Mata. She is said to reward spontaneity and naturalness. Once each year, a group of 50-100 women gathers in her honor, dancing in circles for nine nights. They bend, they turn, they clap. Their husbands maintain a respectful distance.
What are you listening for, who
already know everything I have
to say? You are nothing but
a tourist of the night.
What appears empty to you
is in fact a fully inhabited tenement.
Your inscrutable fruit is far
more pungent than you can know,
who do not risk becoming
someone else’s morsel.
Who cooks for you?
*
Response to last night’s post. (In bird guides, the barred owl’s call is usually described as sounding like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”)
To hold the attention of a Sunday school class, my brother said, he once had to eat a piece of chalk. He never said what the lesson was about, just that the chalk was tasteless and thoroughly indigestible.
Watching a video of Borges giving a talk, I’m struck by the way he keeps smiling at something three feet above the heads of his audience. And how, seeing his smiles come and go, they smile too, pleased by their proximity to such a famous solitude which they are sure must be filled with light.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays from when I used to smoke, lovely as the stained glass of a church in which I can no longer kneel.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
Smorgasblog
Mark Doty
And then, when they were done, I turned my head and saw, on a video screen, my own heart. It was golden, and pulsing, and resembled a cross between a Georgia O'Keefe flower and a jellyfish.
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Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
The painter washes his hands on the flannel of the sky
Everything is in gouts of colour
And the hats of the passing women are comets
across the evening’s fire.
----
Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
----
Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
----
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
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