March rain

It’s raining.
Downspouts gargle furiously
around frogs of ice.
The barn cat listens & licks her pregnant belly.

It’s raining, the first warm rain of spring.
Sap rises, & the green nibs
where bulbs will write
their deathless names in the air.

It’s raining, it’s pouring.
Worms poke through the muddy ruins
of once-grand palaces of frost.

It’s raining.
Under the bark of a log,
the ant queen resumes her slow march.

Dump in the woods

Same pics, different day

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It was in a month of Sundays, shirking from work, that I drove a shovel’s metal moon deep into the old farm dump & came up full. Squat bottles lay nested in circles like dinosaur eggs, or children at play suddenly engulfed by the pyroclastic flow from a backwoods Vesuvius.

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To be human is to be the object of a bear’s withering scorn. You won’t read this in any philosophical treatise, but it’s true. I have found survey tape ripped from trees, hunters’ blinds torn apart, an abandoned plastic jerry can stippled with tooth-marks. We must seem slow & skinny & hairless & weak. But worst of all, we are heedless. We dump in the woods. A bear could be watching me right this minute, blinking myopically as the moist wings of her nostrils flutter open & shut.

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Springs hope eternally for one last go-round before the ground swallows them, one more, rusty bump & grind of their hurdy-gurdy epithaliamium, muffled now under sheet music of leaves.

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Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleep little baby,
When you awake, you will have cake,
And all the pretty little horses.

Way down yonder, down in the meadow,
There’s a poor little lambie,
Bees and butterflies pecking out its eyes,
The poor little thing cried mammy.

Good god, what hullabaloo used to qualify for a lullaby! No wonder the old toys still make a break for it whenever a flood interrupts their uneasy sleep.

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Heaved from the bed of a pickup, the microwave oven bounded down slope and came to rest against a clump of witch hazel with its door ajar. Now at last it was free to welcome all comers, including metal forks & spoons & anything with an ounce of water in it, all the one-time occupants of Noah’s Ark. Scattered nearby, plastic bones of the microwave-safe leviathan slowly crumbled under the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

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Glass is forever, chant the moss plants as they crowd in for another mass betrothal.

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After Ma Bell gave birth to the first transistor, an engineer quipped: Nature abhors a vacuum tube. But it’s not so. All circuit boards face an equally grim future as viscera: the glass & metal organs of some monstrous creature of habit, abstract & imperishable.

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I peer down at the rusty bucket as into a crystal ball, seeing clear to the other side of a slightly squashed world where blue geese rise from rice stubble on wings of zinc.

Why I love trash

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Until I was five, we lived on an old farm in central Maine, near the town of Waterville. It was a great place, with a couple of derelict barns to explore, an old field, some woods – in short, not too different from where I live now. But one of the things I really missed after we moved down here were our visits to the Waterville town dump. Every month or so Dad would load up our red Volkswagen bus with everything we couldn’t compost, and Steve and I would clamor to go along. Once there, we’d race around looking for cast-off treasures. I think there was even a special area for this, where people would pile all the half-decent stuff that they no longer wanted or had room for, in case someone else might care to pick it up. It was the original Freecycle network. I don’t remember if we ever found anything really good at the dump, but the possibility was always there. This early childhood experience imprinted me with a strong notion that trash was fun.

You can learn a lot about a people by studying how they relate to their trash. My brother Mark, the geography prof, once described a field trip he’d led through East Texas. As soon as you drive into a town you can tell who lives there, he said. Tejanos like lots of flowers in their yards, and the shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe are a dead giveaway. African-American yards tend to be neat but minimalistic: bare dirt swept with a broom, just like in West Africa. And Anglos? “You can tell the white neighborhoods by all the trash.”

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So as hateful as the term “white trash” might be, like most stereotypes it didn’t come out of a vacuum. When we moved back to our ancestral homeland of Pennsylvania (albeit a little farther west than any of my grandparents had lived), we quickly and unthinkingly fell into the pattern of taking all our trash out to the old farm dump. It was just what people did back then. Dumps were usually located in the nearest patch of woods to the house; our neighbor Margaret’s old dump was less than a hundred feet from her porch. Our dump had been established maybe a hundred yards from the house, just beyond the powerline right-of-way. Two things about its placement seem baffling today: they threw their trash on what I think was originally an old charcoal hearth from the early nineteenth century, located right where the stream that drains the whole watershed emerges from the ground. Every hard rain, smaller pieces of trash floated downstream, along with god knows what seeping poisons. And the other weird thing was that the dump was right next to what had been, for three generations, the Plummer family picnic grove.

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So on the one hand, before the environmental movement took hold in the mid 1970s, we rarely gave a thought to the toxic effect of some of the stuff we pitched out, such as batteries or almost-empty cans of Raid. But on the other hand, we didn’t necessarily regard trash as something to be shunned and avoided. Like many farm kids, my brothers and I actively sought out abandoned dump sites and attacked them with shovels, hunting for old bottles. Dad closed our own dump around 1975 and started taking our trash to the local landfill – a joyless place. But we continued prospecting in the dump for years, rewarded by the occasional, unbroken bottle from a hundred years ago, the glass wavy, spotted with bubbles and aged to a mellow purple. And though several large trees have fallen across it, and we’ve covered as much of the dump site as we can with dirt from various construction projects, ancient plastic toys and detergent bottles still do wash out and migrate downhollow during the occasional flood.

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Raised without television, we were deprived of the allegedly educational benefits of Sesame Street. But thanks to an elementary school music teacher, I did learn the tune and some of the words to Oscar’s theme song:

I’ve a clock that won’t work
And an old telephone
A broken umbrella, a rusty trombone
And I am delighted to call them my own!
I love them because they’re trash

I still feel that way to a degree. While I no longer bring trash home, now that I own a camera, I have begun collecting again. Chris Jordan’s photos of landfills and recycling centers, mentioned in my post last Friday, made me think there might be some value in building my own photo exhibition of “intolerable beauty.” But while Jordan focuses on trash in the aggregate, in all its teeming splendor, I am more attracted to single pieces and small groups. And whereas Jordan’s perspective is unapologetically urban, I am much more interested in looking at trash as part of a human-impacted, semi-wild landscape.

To me, litter is a form of found art. When an object is discarded, it becomes free: free for the picking, yes, but also existentially free, no longer bound to one, narrow, utilitarian role. A well-situated dump is like a sculpture garden.

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Old dumps are attractive in the same way that ruins are. Ask any volunteer at an archaeological dig: as things corrode and decay, they gain charisma. A great deal of our visual intake on any given day consists of the too-bright, too-good-to-be-true allurements of kitsch culture and advertising. But let those cheap plastic toys sit out in the sun for a few decades, let the tawdry billboards in “blighted” neighborhoods peel and flake and attract graffiti, and such objects – designed as trash – can attain a wholly unintended picturesque quality – even a hint of redemption.

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Two very different types of people are attracted to the environmental movement: fans of cleanliness and order, who shudder with horror at all forms of pollution, and those of us who feel most at home in the apparent chaos of wild nature. Though able to form alliances around many issues, our priorities do sometimes divide us. For example, like Ed Abbey, I regard roadsides and especially highway median strips as the perfect place to store our trash, and view people who “adopt” sections of highways as part of the problem, not part of the solution.*

Litter is like a weed: obnoxious because it’s in the wrong place, because its virtues are under-appreciated, and/or because it is simply too numerous, and threatens to overwhelm the native inhabitants. A single, stray tire, rusty old bucket or whiskey bottle out in the middle of the woods hardly seems like litter at all.

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Like Chris Jordan, I’m deeply troubled by our consumer culture and its effects on the planet. But I am less troubled than he seems to be by the potential of trash to entrance us. As mortal beings, ultimately we are what we throw away, and I think it’s good to be reminded of that. Time can ravage, but it can also illuminate with a wholly unexpected grace. It’s the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude that really enables the thoughtless impulse to throw the old stuff away and buy new – and at the same time leads us to disregard the harmful effects of anything we can’t see at all. We’re an intensely visual species.

Learn to appreciate the patina of age, and you’ll soon find yourself haunting junk shops and yard sales rather than the mall, and when you do have to buy new, saving enough money to buy high-quality stuff that won’t end up in the landfill. Or you may become like me (quel horreur!) – satisfied with the images alone, returning from the dump with a full memory card and a renewed appreciation for the stuff you already have. Hey, you say to yourself, that doesn’t look half-bad! At least it still works. Sure, it’s got some nicks or rust spots, but a little bit of elbow grease and it’ll be as good as new. Better, in fact.

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*Here’s my standard, anti-anti-litter rant, provided free of charge as a public service: We don’t need “cleaner” highways, we need fewer highways. Perhaps if they didn’t look so neat and uncluttered, people wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about building new ones. And what happens to the trash you “clean up”? Doesn’t it simply abet the spread of landfills, which are almost invariably located well out of sight and smell of major roads and population centers, often smack in the middle of wild areas? If you must indulge your neatnik impulse, why not adopt a railroad?

More on love

Thanks to everyone who took part in the discussion about love, sex and Brokeback Mountain in the comment thread to Monday’s post, which in many ways has turned out to be more interesting than the post that spawned it.

Now one of the participants, Zhoen, has fleshed out her thoughts about love and the body in a brief essay called, simply, Body. Hers is a very embodied kind of thinking, moving from story to story and avoiding didacticism – a model of the blogging art. Do stop by.

The grass snake

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This morning was so clear, so blue. The bluebirds began singing long before the sun came up, when Venus was still ablaze over the eastern horizon. I sat watching her inch sideways through the trees, fading into the dawn sky.

I didn’t write anything substantial this morning, but I knew I could’ve – and sometimes just that knowledge, that feeling of the writing spirit close at hand, is sufficient. It was too hard to stay indoors. All the melancholy pictures that I’d taken yesterday afternoon, under a flat, gray sky, had to be taken over again! But before I did that, I’d need some fuel.

Going into the kitchen for breakfast, I felt an odd impulse to listen to a few songs by Ali Farka Toure while I ate. Sure, he’s one of my favorite musicians and singers, but I almost never listen to anything during breakfast – no radio, no music. I don’t want to derail my own train of thoughts. But this morning, I wanted to hear his evocation of the grass snake, “Sega,” on the one-string West African fiddle (njarka). The next song on the Talking Timbuktu CD, the Tuareg blues song Amandrai, also complemented my mood. But it was the conjuring sound of the njarka I had most wanted to hear.

Ali Farka Toure’s music has deep spiritual roots, born of a classic shamanic initiation type of crisis – this despite his Sunni Muslim beliefs. (Islam in Mali tends to be very tolerant and syncretic.) Years ago, when I was reading a translation of a French anthropological text on the Gimbala spirit possession cult of the bend of the Niger, I was surprised to find Ali Farka Toure included as an informant. In some album liner notes I just discovered online, he describes his entry into the world of spirits and music:

I knew the spirit who gave me the gift very well. And I remember that night in Niafunke [Toure’s home village]. A night I’ll never forget. I was about thirteen years old. I was chatting with some friends. I had a monochord [single string guitar] in my hand. I was wandering playing ordinary songs, just like that. It was about 2.00 am. I got to a place where l saw three girls standing like steps of stairs, one higher than the other. I lifted my right foot. The left one wouldn’t move. I stood like that until 4.00 am. Next day l walked to the edge of the fields. I didn’t have my instrument with me. I saw a snake with a strange mark on its head. Only one snake. I still remember the colour. Black and white. No yellow, no other colour, just black and white. And it wrapped itself around my head. I brushed it off, it fell and went into a hole and I fled. Since then l started to have attacks.

I entered a new world. It’s different from when you’re in a normal state; you’re not the same person you know. You don’t feel anything anymore, whether it’s fire, water or if you are beaten. I was sent to the village of Hombori to be cured and I stayed there for a year. When l felt better, I returned home to my family. There I began playing again and I was very well received by the spirits. I have all the spirits. I possess all the spirits and I work with them. I was born among them and grew up among them.

Ali Farka Toure became adept at crossing between worlds, mastering many languages and translating traditional music into modern idioms. He adapted to the international concert scene with great ease. At the same time, however, he remained firmly rooted in his home ground, and considered himself first and foremost a farmer.

He pioneered the adaptation of Sonrhaí¯, Peuhl and Tamascheq styles to the guitar. Even today, few have followed his path. His charismatic person, his fine voice and intricate flowing guitar technique, his good looks and enigmatic character, have all contributed to give him prestige. He remains uncompromisingly wedded to his traditional music, refusing to “go commercial”. His songs celebrate love, friendship, peace, the land, the spirits, the river and Mali; all expressed in dense metaphors.

What was it that made me decide to listen to Ali Farka Toure this morning, on the very day of his death? Something in the air, perhaps, something in the sky. When my brother Steve emailed the news a few hours later, my other brother, Mark, replied with some amazement that Ali Farka’s name had come up in class the night before – a mere couple of hours after his death. “That sort of thing is always happening to me,” he said. Maybe this was a worldwide phenomenon: fans of the great Malian bluesman suddenly feeling odd compulsions to listen to his music as they breathed in the atoms from his dying breath, like particles of dust from the ever-shrinking Sahel blown high into the jet stream, encircling the globe, adding a faint blush to the dawn sky.

What is the via negativa?

R. S. Thomas knew.

VIA NEGATIVAWhy no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Found via Janus at the door. R. S. Thomas was the preeminent Welsh poet of the second half of the 20th century. He was an Anglican clergyman, an ardent Welsh nationalist and a conservationist. A discussion of the apophatic dimension of his work may be found here.

The love that dare not speak

Brokeback Mountain‘s financial and critical success may well mark some sort of societal progress toward greater tolerance for sexual nonconformists. But does it really represent progress in our understanding of what true love might consist of – or does it simply reinforce widespread, materialistic views? I have yet to see the movie – and being a contrary sort, the more I hear how important it is, the more resistant I become. But I must admit I’m curious about whether it offers any real challenge to the popular dogmas about love, i.e.:

1. Love is a feeling of strong attraction toward someone or something.

2. The quintessential expression of love is in romance, which derives from the desire for sexual union between two individuals.

3. Sex is a pleasurable form of self-indulgence whereby we seek gratification through mutual possession. Unless directed toward procreation or sublimated in romance, it tends to become anti-social and/or debased.

4. The highest form of love involves self-sacrifice.

It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear that, though my opinions about non-standard expressions of sexuality are thoroughly mainstream,* I’m an arch traditionalist on the subject of love itself. Which is to say, I cling to what had been more or less the consensus view in the pre-modern period, at least among mystics, believing that:

1. Love is the practice of uncalculating generosity, thoughtfulness, and respect for the integrity of others.

2. The quintessential expression of love is in the friendship of equals, and derives from the impulse to learn, to give, and to share.

3. Sex in the context of love can be a joyful form of self-transcendence in which bodies are continually re-discovered and re-created.

4. The highest form of love involves immersion in timeless, selfless Presence.**

Once upon a time in America, homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.” If those days are finally coming to an end, I’m glad. I don’t believe that sex and spirituality are as antithetical as many traditional religious teachers assume; I’m cynical enough to suspect that the main reason for organized religion’s hostility toward sex is the desire of religious authorities to maintain a monopoly on self-transcending experiences. (How else to explain blanket prohibitions against alcohol and drugs?) But I worry that an excessive focus on sex, whether by religious people or by secular humanists, simply reinforces reductionist views about love and sex, and plays into the hands of those who seek to profit through the trade in bodies. We must beware the advertiser’s shell game: Are you lonely and insecure? You need more/better sex! And here’s a short cut. Buy this product.

In place of the pre-modern mysteries of soul, spirit and original sin, we are now taught to believe in such abstractions as personality, intelligence and sexuality. I’m not sure this represents a step forward. In either case, we are made to feel helpless without the intercession of experts. To my way of thinking, “soul” and “sexuality” are equally vapid concepts, the only difference being that “sexuality” is even less poetic. The ideologues of the market are all too happy to have everyone buy into the idea of self as bundle of desires. You are what you want. If you’re not in tune with your sexuality, you must be unhappy and repressed.

Well, fuck that! I’m less interested in the love that dare not speak its name than the love that dare not speak at all. True communion is always wordless, is it not? Past a certain point, language becomes not merely extraneous, but downright obscene.
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*I.e. that homosexual behavior is natural for those with that orientation; that pedophilia is as inexcusable as rape; and that bondage/discipline and sadomasochism, while acceptable between consenting adults, is awfully silly and somewhat repellant in its celebration of power and humiliation.

**It may be unclear from the way I set this up that I don’t intend the two definitions of love presented here to be mutually exclusive. Obviously, the fact that we have one word to encompass so many different things can both help and hinder clear thinking. It can help to remember that what the Greek Bible calls agape and caritas are not as separate from eros as we like to imagine, and that eros in turn may often be difficult to disentangle from caritas, etc. It reminds us to keep the passion in compassion, so to speak. But obviously this multiplicity of meanings leads to confusion if we forget to distinguish between them, and allow the eros component to overwhelm the others.

Iced fields

…While iced fields of the Milky Way look on.
Paul Zweig

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Suddenly alluring, the world wears a bodysuit of ice.

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All cast from the same ice, the flash mob revels in its perfect fit.

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Whetted by the sun, a blade of grass springs free of its icy sheath.

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Grass or glass? Glitter shatters underfoot.

The view from the stoop

Chris Jordan’s powerful photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are featured in the on-line environmental magazine Grist (and also in the February Harper’s). I was especially struck by the story that accompanies the slideshow. Jordan describes meeting an elderly black man who had returned to his deserted, devastated neighborhood in New Orleans by November 2005, because he couldn’t bear to be away from his beloved front stoop. There was little left of the house his great-grandfather had built except the stoop.

“They’re paying for me to stay in a motel room in Kansas City,” he told me. “It stinks of smoke and I don’t know anyone. I lost my wife a couple of years ago.” He pointed down the block to a small white building that was pushed off its foundation into the middle of the street. It was still standing, but twisted sideways with its back torn open. “That’s my church. The people are all gone. There used to be people…” His voice stopped as he gestured at the ruined landscape.

After a pause I asked him what he was going to do. “Same thing I’ve always done,” he said. “Sit on my front steps. I don’t belong anywhere else. I’m not going to rot away in some motel. This is where I am from, and this is what I do – I sit on my front steps – so here I am sitting on my front steps.”

As an inveterate front porch sitter, I empathize completely. One reason I think Jordan’s images are so moving is because he has the eye of someone deeply rooted in place and in a particular vantagepoint, and is unafraid to sacrifice aesthetic comfort and commit himself to chronicling what he calls “intolerable beauty.” In an interview elsewhere, he says this:

Journalistic disaster photos portray what is happening in that instant, but those instants have already passed by, and we can’t know what became of the people, or what else happened in their lives, or who they really were, or whether it got better or worse for them, and so on. There are exceptions of course; some photos of people suffering are shatteringly powerful, but not very many that I can think of.

For me, my work is about something different. It is not about portraying other peoples’ suffering, or trying to evoke sympathy for the victims. It is about connecting with a sense of loss that I feel myself, a deep experience of my own grief for what is happening in our country right now. In the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, we have all lost something sacred. That is a personal loss, not someone else’s.

A big part of this for me is the fact that Katrina was not an entirely natural disaster. If this were a purely natural event like an earthquake, I would feel differently about it, and may not have photographed it at all. The sense of loss for me has something to do with our collective failure as a society, maybe like the loss a parent might feel if their teenaged child died from a drug overdose. If we had been more aware, we could have done something sooner, but we weren’t, and now it is too late. This would be different than losing a child to an untreatable illness, for example. There is an element of accountability, or shame, or maybe regret, and perhaps an inspiration to be different in the future.

Be sure to read the whole interview; it’s excellent. Many more of Chris Jordan’s In Katrina’s Wake photos are posted at his website, alongside his earlier series Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption.