So I go to a planning meeting for an environmental group I’m active in. At one point, someone says, “What if, by some miracle, a piece of legislation is introduced which,” etc.
“Part of the planning process is writing out the miracles,” the chair responds.
An old railroad trestle from an abandoned spur line crosses the Little Juniata River right where our access road joins the highway on the other side of County Bridge 45.
I had to meet a ride down there yesterday morning around sunrise, so I brought my camera along.
It was the coldest morning of the year so far – 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a bit of a shock, coming right after several days of unseasonable warmth. But it meant that the air was as clear as it gets, and the river had a thin layer of freshly-knit ice along the shore.
When the sun rose, the surface of the water came alive with swirls and streamers of rising mist.
I took dozens of pictures, most of which completely failed to capture the beauty all around me. In the same way that writing poetry forces one to confront the limits of language, taking pictures makes one appreciate the gulf between icon and vision.
Last summer, some of the local kids turned the river below the trestle into a swimming hole. They climbed all over the trestle, too, and fought boredom by vandalizing the railings of “our” bridge. During the colder months, the area around the bridge becomes much quieter – a good, out-of-the-way place for a variety of illicit transactions, most of which occur after dark. People seek transcendence in all kinds of ways, most of them as fruitless as my attempts to cling to ephemera through words or pixels. As for the trestle, it ends abruptly at the far side of the river, the victim of a highway widening project some fifteen years ago. Not even a ghost train could cross it now.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Pablo Neruda, Walking Around, Residencia en la Tierra, II – translation here
It’s a little disconcerting to me how, lately, the moment I step outside, something happens. Tuesday late morning, for example, two squadrons of geese came honking low over the trees just as I started out on a walk, and mid-morning yesterday, a pair of A-10 Warthogs thundered overhead seconds after I walked out on the porch to pitch an apple core. This morning at 5:05, no sooner had I sat down outside with my coffee when the resident feral cat, whom I call Coyote Bait (C. B. for short), trotted up the driveway in the moonlight like a detachable shadow. It was so still, I could hear her paws on the gravel: a soft rattle, like the sound the stream makes during a prolonged drought.
Why should this surprise me? Only because I sit inside gazing at the computer monitor like a shaman peering into a crystal, where the merest flicker might foreshadow some fundamental shift in the heart’s climate. Everything seems significant at first, but after a while, it all blends into a gray sea of information, and I begin to tire of the whole human race – our never-ending chatter and busyness, our genius for exploitation.
Outside, meanwhile, the unseasonable warmth returns to melt the snow from last weekend’s storm. Late in the morning, when I finally go out with the camera, a bluebird is singing up by the barn, and a black-capped chickadee fresh from its bath is drying itself out in the lilac bush, puffing out its breast feathers and shaking its wings.
The black-capped chickadee, Parus atricapillus L., is in the tit family (Paridae). Tits are “small, plump, small-billed birds; acrobatic when feeding. Often roam in little bands. Sexes alike,” says Peterson. Though they may appear comical to us, I think chickadees probably take themselves fairly seriously: witness the strict hierarchy maintained within their winter-long foraging flocks. Witness also their tendency to act as scouts in larger, mixed-species flocks and around bird feeders. When they sound the tocsin, all the other birds freeze, and when they issue an all-clear signal, everyone goes back to feeding. They’re like the boy scouts of the bird world. I remember once when I was burning trash, three or four chickadees flying in as close as they could to scold the leaping flames.
Black-capped chickadees are among the brainiest of songbirds. Their social structure is complex; non-breeding chickadees can have memberships in several different foraging flocks at the same time, with different positions in the dominance hierarchies of each. Their simple-sounding songs contain much more complexity than unaided human ears can detect, enabling the communication of quite detailed information. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, are their memories. Chickadees have been known to hoard a thousand seeds and dead insects each day, tucking them into knotholes, under loose pieces of bark, even up inside clusters of pine needles. And researchers have found that they can remember which item is stored where for at least a month. Think of it: 30,000 or more distinct caches within a home range of twenty to fifty acres in size. Not even the most obsessed of human geographers can ever hope to know a landscape in such intimate detail.
What of their ecological niche? Chickadees are foragers and scavengers par excellance. They can digest carrion from a gut pile as easily as goldenrod seeds, spiders, or wild grapes. Specialized leg muscles permit the acrobatics for which they are justly famous, and these contortions enable the gleaning of food that other birds can’t get at. I also can’t help supposing that their year-round, life-long residence in an area, following juvenile dispersal, contributes to their ability to exploit all available resources. With much denser plumage than other species of a comparable size, they are well suited to the vagaries of a northern climate. Each fall, they grow a fresh set of feathers, and portions of their unusually large hippocampus – key to their prodigious memories – also regrow.
Large brains; organization into small bands; physiological adaptations to permit scavenging in an array of habitats: we could almost be talking about Homo sapiens here. But a vanishingly small percentage of the human race retains any experience of what it might mean to become so local as to begin to resemble the very spirit of a place.
Con mi mano rodeo la nueva sombra del ala que crece:
la raíz y la pluma que mañana formarán la espesura.
Neruda, Naciendo en los Bosques, Tercera Residencia – translation here
elsewhere
Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in.
*
So his front end leaps over curbs, and his back end stumbles, and he falls in the street. If he walked, he would be fine. He just doesn’t know how.
*
He gave us the look that he always gives when he has just found himself on the floor: Why did you guys put me here?
*
(Thought: [if] otter hell is the life of a three-toed sloth, then sloth hell must be the life of an otter?)
*
What if we can’t stop the suffering? How do we practice from that point?
*
Blogging is a strange affair. On the one hand, in my experience it can be an effective aspect of practice; on the other hand, it can easily slip into what the Pali texts call papanca: the proliferation of thoughts, spreading out in all directions, without any prospect of finding a limit. The trouble with papanca is that it begets further papanca, and this can go on forever.
*
It was a fifteen mile drive to the graveyard, and I was still in the thick of a torrential acid trip and an escalating storm. I took it slow. Driving while tripping on acid requires incredible concentration. You really have to squelch all distortions of your perceptions and see what is really there. Do or die. You have to focus on your motor skills and reactions, and also, there’s the fear. THE FEAR. Just the routine underlying fear that’s always there when you’re tripping on acid. You are in an alternative state of mind where you really can’t be sure whether every atom in your body will suddenly unravel and fly apart sending electrons spinning off into space with the release of such intense energy that your brain can’t even comprehend what the end is like . . . but . . . I made it out there. I stood there in an ice storm looking down at the graves of my mom and my brother. I was completely wasted.
*
Who knew there were such mysteries inherent in taking out the garbage? Who knew that a lemon peel was so central not only to my sense of self, but also in the binding of a contract that delimits myself in relation to others? Who knew that taking out the garbage was a form of reassurance that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself”?
*
Snow all the way into the distance: I feel like a man losing his sight. The world dims with snow.
*
Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?
And God said, Let there be a fimament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
I’m on the mailing list of the Presidential Prayer Team. I keep hoping for an armband of some sort, but so far all I get are emails.
Why “presidential”? As it says on their masthead, the Presidential Prayer Team is “Mobilizing millions of Americans to pray daily for our President, our Leaders, our Nation, and our Armed Forces.” Well, if press accounts are any guide, people like George Bush, Kenneth Lay and Jack Abramoff certainly need spiritual assistance! The Presidential Prayer Team takes its scriptural authority from 1 Timothy 2:1-2 -
I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty
- and not, for example, from 1 Samuel 8:10-19, which begins:
And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots….
…And to protect his oil fields, no doubt. But let’s not cavil here! 1 Timothy clearly takes precedence, since it is so rich in instruction for those who desire to walk in the paths of righteousness. The rest of the chapter just excerpted, for example, tells us how we are to pray:
I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting. In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
Now I know some liberals may find the Word of God a little hard to take, but that just shows how narrow-minded they are. Men raising up their hands and praying out loud, free of any bedeviling doubts, while their women bow their heads in silence and make babies: why, this could easily describe our fundamentalist brothers and sisters in Islam, too, or in any number of other false religions. It’s very ecumenical!
So I do hope you’ll all go online and sign up for the Presidential Prayer Team’s special Presidential Prayer Rally, scheduled for President’s Day – Monday, February 20. They point out that “Whether he’s signing new legislation, meeting with the family of a fallen soldier or protecting our nation from terrorism, our President and Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, says your prayers sustain and guide him through the complex decisions he faces daily.” Click here to sign up for a time slot. And don’t forget to invite all your friends!
Of course, the actual content of your prayer is between you and God. But I know some of us become a little tongue-tied when we start thinking about including matters of such global significance in our private devotions. So if you’d like to share your ideas for some properly prayerful language that might fit the bill next Monday, please feel free to use the comment boxes below.
Real Live Preacher waxes eloquent about the perils of language (via the Progressive Faith Carnival for Feb. 5):
Words sound nice and they are like magic. You write words on paper and a thousand miles away, someone looks at the paper and says, “I like the sound of that. Do it again.”Only there is no such thing as a word. A word is only a sound, and writing is even farther removed from reality than that. Writing is a mark that stands for a sound that stands for something unknown and perhaps unknowable.
If you love words, you must renounce them. You must throw them to the ground like the statue of a false god and trample them. You must deny them three times. You must name these demons and cast them out.
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity…. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words… Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Eccl. 12:8,10,12)
Most bloggers I know are happy to come up with maybe one really good post per week, if that. Due to the very nature of the blog beast, few readers expect the kind of consistent brilliance I’m seeing at two different blogs right now. Each blog features a tightly focused series mingling art and personal narrative with a larger social critique.
Teju Cole‘s month-long Nigerian travelogue and meditation is due to expire at the end of January, so if you haven’t heeded any of my previous plugs, please consider doing so now. Here’s an excerpt from his latest post:
A phrase I heard often in Nigeria was idea l’a need. It means “all we need is the general idea or concept.” People would say this in different situations. It was a way of saying: that’s good enough, there’s no need to get bogged down in details. A flip, improvisory attitude. Idea l’a need. I heard it time and again. After the electrician had installed an antenna, all we got was unclear reception to CNN. The reaction wasn’t that he’d done an incomplete job. It was, rather: we’ll make do, after all idea l’a need. Why bother with sharp reception when you can have snowy reception? And once, driving in town with an older relative, I discovered that the latch for the seatbelt was broken. Oh pull it across your chest and sit on the buckle, he said, idea l’a need. Safety was not the point. The semblance of safety was what we were after.
The other thing I want to call your attention to is Natalie d’Arbeloff’s ongoing memoir project at Blaugustine. This seems to have happened almost by accident – sparked, as luck would have it, by a comment from none other than Teju Cole. While on the surface d’Arbeloff’s memoir appears more modest than Cole’s in its aspirations toward a larger critique, the sense of a life boiled down to its lyrical essence gives it a highly suggestive quality. Here’s an excerpt from the January 17 post, “Lost Treasure”:
So when and why did I decide to bury Mickey?I’ve tried but can’t get back into the state of mind I was in when on a certain day of that happy Paraguayan childhood I went walking (was it by the river or in the orange grove or in the wide open flat expanse of thorny palms?) and at some point, bent down and started digging (with my fingers?), laid my beloved little Mickey Mouse in the hole and covered him with dry red soil.
Didn’t I even leave a marker on the grave, some stones or sticks? Why would I want to bury my favourite toy? All I know is that I was sure I’d find him again and when I couldn’t, some time later (how much later?) I was devastated.
And why is it that after all these years I’m still desolate about losing the Mickey? “Taking the Mickey” means to make fun of. What does Losing the Mickey mean?
