In the month of small flies
In the month of small flies and the sharp & bitter leaves of wild mustard, a hair fell from heaven & flipped & spun & turned by stages into the first hornbeam tree. But not right away: for a time it slipped in & out of small clearings, walking with a bit of a limp. The people at that time were living in lean-tos made from hemlock boughs & old, yellowed newpapers. Easy come, easy go, they used to whisper whenever a hard rain brought the roof down on their heads. Half-forgetful of his origins, the old man took to carrying stones from the creek, mixing grayish mud with sand. He had fallen in love with the song of a sparrow no one had ever noticed before, and had decided to devote the rest of his life to its study. Meanwhile, pink lady’s slipper orchids in mossy thickets exposed themselves to deluded bees. Black cherries bloomed with a scent as cloying as prom queens. Wherever one stepped, something hopped out of the way & looked back over its shoulder with a reproachful gaze. One heard the peepers down by the pond, the toads around the spring & up on the hill the solitary tree frogs, trilling as if it meant something.
Around this time somebody noticed that none of the calendars showed the days of the week the way they always had. It was as if a long-ago ramp festival-cum-revival meeting took off like a hundred helicopters and swept every last Monday into the forgotten corners where only children playing hide-and-seek ever go. Unless, in fact, the calendars had simply begun to look a great deal like weathered boulders, all decked out in clubmoss and rock tripe. The old man’s skinny arms grew hard as antlers, and his skin turned gray because he shunned direct sunlight. The sparrow – if that’s what it was – had taken to nesting behind his left ear, because it was warm there & out of the wind. There was an almost inaudible rhythm, a pulse that could’ve been the sound of the surf or a woodpecker thinking about his next composition.
Ultimately, the decision to put down roots is more than mere decision, said the hornbeam tree as its nondescript buds unfurled nondescript leaves. We would all do well to heed such a sense of urgency more wordless than love. A true spirit guide never says what you want to hear, & sooner or later leaves you on the lurch. That night, they say, will be a dark one. But is it too much to ask for, this feeling of intimate involvement in the unfolding of others’ destinies? You wake up from a dream in which the only two women you have ever loved have found each other, lose themselves like mirrors turned face to face with nothing, not a speck of dust to come between them: that bottomless ocean.
You wake up & it’s all true, tears of joy – if that’s the word – run down your cheeks. And you remember how every hundred years a mischievous bodhisattva brushes the side of the mountain with a fly whisk, anticipating its ultimate disintegration into the everythingness of Nevermind. We might well expect a different kind of measure to drive the mountain’s own slow symphonies.
The old man’s unfinished house should serve in the meantime – not that anyone needs very much where founding myths are concerned. A sharp digging stick & the ears of a night watchman, little else. But this day that used to be a day of rest has brought the finest weather we’ve seen in a month of Sundays. There’s no time, no time for this foolishness! The pancakes will be on in two minutes!
Submitted for the Ecotone Wiki topic, “Time and Place”
Words on the street
Definitions
SPECIAL NEEDS
From The Middlewesterner, “Notes from the Vagabond Journals: Emmetsville, Iowa, April 20, 2004”:
Here in the “pre-vocational” area, the workers also do paper-shredding. Since passage of laws mandating greater protection of personal information, more and more documents need to be shredded. “That’s what Richard is doing,” Teresa said. Richard was sitting in a wheelchair in front of a small paper-shredder, feeding in a few sheets at a time. The work of shredding material with personal information is assigned to people who are unable to read.
Interesting that our hyper-textual, information-obsessed society has niches that can only be occupied by the knowledge-deprived. Beyond that, however, I’m intrigued by the possibility of putting a positive valuation on conditions that we tend to regard as negative by definition. Rather than treating individuals afflicted with blindness, autism, mental retardation, etc. as if is they who have “special needs,” what would happen if we recognized that it is the rest of us who have special needs for them?
***
Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
translated by Idries Shah, in Caravan of Dreams (Penguin, 1968)
Reporter: A cat waiting by a mousehole.
Community: Irrationals united by hope of the impossible.
Patience: A support for the disappointed.
Sword of God: The empty stomachs of the poor.
Mirror: A means of laughing in your own face.
Intellectual: One who knows no craft.
Penitent: Someone who has been made incapable of enjoying himself.
Wisdom: Something you can learn without knowing it.
A fool: A man trying to be honest with the dishonest.
Emotionalist: A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.
Poet: A beggar with pride.
Bribe: Substitute for law, which is a substitute for justice.
Truthful man: He who is, secretly, regarded by everyone as an enemy.
Adherent: Someone who will believe anything except what he should.
Shah writes, The Mullah’s definitions form contemplation-materials rather than aphorisms. The reader is supposed to be able to interpret each saying in several different ways. As an example, the message about the Fool may mean: ‘Don’t be honest with the dishonest’ – of it may mean ‘Don’t try to be honest: be honest.’ Most people tend to interpret the sayings defensively. ‘This,’ says Do-Piaza, ‘is the first step toward not being defensive.’
Words on the street
Guts
Pressure to Go Along With Abuse Is Strong, but Some Soldiers Find Strength to Refuse:
The power to resist coercion reflects what psychologists call internal locus of control, or the ability to determine one’s own destiny. People at the other end of the scale, with external locus of control, are more heavily influenced by authority figures. They prefer to put their fate in the hands of others.
And you?
Waiting for Brood X
Periodical cicadas? Every magazine and newspaper has an article. And they all use the term “invasion” – as if the writers welcome the chance to use this forbidden word so openly. These creatures, the beasts of Brood X, will irritate only the irritable; children will be delighted, they say. They will not even really hurt the trees, though for some of the smaller ones, when the cicadas finally die it will be a bit of a re-leaf. We are therefore looking forward to a fairly painless invasion, an un-plague of proportions not so much biblical as Unitarian: if you want it to be a blessing, it’s a blessing. Fire up the grill: these suckers are good eatin’!
Their strategy for staying ahead of predators partakes heavily of the economies of scale. As an article in The Economist – The Invasion of the Brood – observes,
Most biologists believe that the odd lifestyle of periodical cicadas is an example of a survival strategy called ‘predator satiation’: the insects emerge in such prodigious quantities that predators cannot possibly eat them all. And their curious prime-numbered lifecycles may be another anti-predator strategy.
Glenn Webb, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has demonstrated mathematically that prime-numbered lifecycles could help cicadas avoid damaging ‘resonances’ with the two- and three-year population fluctuations of their predators. These would result in lots of predators being around in years when there were lots of prey. Dr Webb’s model shows that, over a 200-year period, average predator populations during hypothetical outbreaks of 14- and 15-year cicadas would be up to 2% higher than during outbreaks of 13- and 17-year cicadas. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to drive natural selection towards a prime-numbered life-cycle.
As with most insects, little is known about the habitat preferences of periodical cicadas. Fortunately, a long-term study is underway:
Dr Clay’s research builds on data that generations of Indiana’s entomologists have been gathering at 17-year intervals for over a century. He estimates, though, that he will need results from at least three more Brood X outbreaks to draw firm conclusions about cicadas’ habitat preferences. Like his forward-looking predecessors, he will have to rely on future generations of entomologists to ensure that his labours bear fruit. Many entomologists in the American mid-west, it seems, are also now on a 17-year cycle.
This is not the stuff of a 2-year master’s thesis – or even a PhD. In fact, I venture to suggest that the “publish or perish” strategy for survival differs quite strongly from “predator satiation,” and is more proper to a higher trophic level.
There is something refreshing about the cicada ethos: unlike the mentality of a horde of locusts, say, or American shoppers intent on mass consumption, the cicadas aspire only to molt, metamorphose, sing, mate and lay eggs. There’s no mistaking the mechanical quality in a male cicada’s noontime trill: this is a sex machine. His real life as a larva burrowing in the dark, sucking sap from tree roots – that’s all over. This is the afterlife; he’s in cicada heaven now. And according to the preliminary findings of Dr. Clay and his colleagues, that heaven looks a whole lot like a sprawling suburban subdivision in the American Middle West.
This post also appears on the PA Wildlands news blog.
Words on the street
Green
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
Y el caballo en la montaña.
Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonambulo”
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship upon the sea
And the horse in the highlands.
These very famous lines, with which the ballad begins and ends, may be taken to connote love of both literal and figurative greenness. It’s hard to show this in the translation, but perhaps we could have the first line say:
Green, how much I love your greenness . . .
But for me, what’s important is that the beloved remains unspecified. One wants/loves this greenness in the sea, in the mountains, one searches for the beloved in every green thing.
AFTERTHOUGHT (afternoon):
In Sufism, the ‘unseen guide’ is Khidr, the Green One. Though comparable to the figure of Elijah in Judaism, in fact, scholars assert, he is none other than Adonis in a new guise.
According to the Wikipedia, “Green is the traditional color of Islam . . . because of its association with nature. Muhammad is reliably quoted in a hadith as saying that ‘water, greenery, and a beautiful face’ were three universally good things.” The Quran compares the divine word to a green tree planted in the heart.
The Wikipedia article points out two further connotations of green: envy and go. Green may be associated with both peace and warfare. Truly, a color with a split personality!
Words on the street
