Festival of the Trees reminder

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A visitor to Alan Seeger Natural Area, a small old-growth forest near State College, Pennsylvania

No shirt, no shoes, no problem. No link: problem! You only have one more week to write a blog post in time to get it included in the first-ever Festival of the Trees. What are you waiting for?

True, I haven’t bestirred myself to do a tree post so far this month, either. But I did just set up a coordinating blog for the festival, so cut me some slack, O.K.?

What is a blog carnival? It’s just a fancy name for a periodic collection of links to recent blog posts about a given topic — in this case, all things arboreal. (See here for more information on what we’re looking for.) Usually, the host invents some sort of theme or narrative to connect the links and make things more entertaining: see the invertebrate carnival Circus of the Spineless or the birds and birding carnival I and the Bird for some good examples. But that’s my problem, this month. What I need from y’all are links.

Most people submit links to their own blog posts, but some exceptionally kind and generous people like to help out by sending links to other blogs and websites, too. Send anything that you think might fit to me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line. For this initial installment of the carnival, I’ll probably allow posts prior to June 2006, as well.

Finding the crayfish

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The other week, we took Eva to visit some friends of the family who live a few miles away. The main inducement was easy access to a quiet portion of the Little Juniata River, and the promise of good crayfish hunting there. Their interest was scientific or aesthetic rather than culinary, though Eva is from a part of the country where crawdads are considered a delicacy. But how do you find creatures that are almost the exact color of the mud they burrow in?

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While the kids honed their crustacean search images, I went hunting for smaller invertebrates. Along the shore, several foot-long bays seethed with tiny rowboats — the aquatic insects known by the somewhat redundant name “water boatmen” (family Corixidae). Their bodies are fully submersible crafts; they have the enviable ability to capture bubbles between the hairs on their bodies and turn them into shiny wetsuits of air.*

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It was a hot and humid late afternoon, and everything seemed a little stunned. In the woods along the river, I found a daddy longlegs resting quietly on a small black cherry leaf, rather like the Little Prince,

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while nearby, a long-legged cranefly took the opposite approach, suspending itself between several sassafras leaves. Clearly, it was a good place to hang out.

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In the adjacent wetland — which was rather parched on account of the drought — a question mark butterfly also seemed intent on doing not very much at all. Of course, it’s the larvae of the species that do most of the work, including locate their proper host plants, elms and nettles. Once they emerge from their chrysalises, life slows down. The females lay eggs hither and yon, as the mood strikes them.

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A white moth floated dead on the surface of a muddy pool. I wondered whether, like the Chinese poet Li Bai, it had drowned while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon. You never know. Back at the river, Eva’s newfound hunting buddy Nathan took a fall that he swore was an accident, and totally unrelated to his previous pleas to be allowed to swim. So much of the hunting impulse seems driven by pure envy of the prey.
__________

*UPDATE: Rebecca Clayton thinks that the bugs in the photo are more likely to be juvenile water striders (see comments). After checking out several reference sources, I’m inclined to agree.

In the hallway of the ancestors

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

 

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My seventh entry in the self-portrait marathon

My mother’s people gaze across at my father’s people in the narrow upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. It all seems amicable enough. Some were rich, some were poor, but most were somewhere in the middle. Both sides are dominated by people of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, with a little French Canadian and Irish thrown in. A discouragingly large number on both sides were teetotaling Methodists, but for all that, they don’t look any more sober than decorum required.

Aside from genealogists, most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about their ancestors. After all, we are descended from the disinherited and the violently dispossessed — or at the least, from people who believed in leaving the past behind. And we’re still that way, aren’t we? We think of our ancestors as forebears only, and believe them quite irretrievably dead and gone — perhaps to a better place from which they might occasionally cast a fond glance in our direction, but that’s all. They’re not expected to take an active interest in the affairs of their descendents, much less transmigrate back into the clan. Sometimes one of them might come back as a ghost, but that’s about it.

I think it’s important to remember how odd this belief about our ancestors makes us, how much of an exception to the general run of societies around the world. Combine that with our astonishing ignorance of history — even quite recent history — and I think it’s safe to say that we Americans are almost uniquely alienated from our roots. It goes along with our alienation from nature, I believe, and in some respects probably helps license the on-going commodification of what used to be thought of as Creation. In pre-modern Europe, the dead were buried in the churchyard at the center of the village, and had their day on the calendar (All Souls Day). Ancestor reverence formed a minor part of a complex system of traditional observances — including local saints’ days, rogations, feasts and fasts — which all together told people who they were and where they came from. Carnival rites linked bodily symbolism, both sacred and profane, with the cosmic drama of changing seasons and renewed fertility.

The Protestant Reformation did away with most of that, and the Industrial Revolution finished it off. The 19th-century bourgeois novel and 20th-century psychology invented the isolated, narrowly sexual and generally neurotic individual, and the Great Awakening and subsequent religious movements stressed a personal relationship with God or Jesus above all else. My Methodist ancestors seem, on the whole, content with this arrangement. They knew how to compose themselves for a photograph, wearing their Sunday best and meditating on eternity, or something else completely apart from daily life, for as long as it took the man with the box and the flash to capture their likenesses. They rest easy in their frames, smiling sardonically — if at all — at the thought that some lonely fool might someday long to re-enter those frozen moments.

Today

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Today my head is very itchy. Today I am newly fascinated by the words nightjar and (thanks to pohanginapete) fossick. Today we have ample sunshine, cool temperatures and low humidity. Today the wood thrushes are continuing to sing well past 10:00 in the morning, accompanied by an indigo bunting, a wood pewee, and a common yellowthroat. Today I have begun by reading other people’s words instead of writing my own, which means really that I have been whispering, murmuring, and chanting under my breath the same as always. Today I broke my usual rule of no radio in the morning, and caught the headlines on NPR while I fixed my eggs — not that an egg ever can be fixed once it’s broken. Today the Middlewesterner is retiring from his sidebar such immortal Internet search strings as last chance notes to girlfriend, Blue hypnotic liquor, poems that rhyme with John Deere equipment and Commodification of the sasquatch. Today, says the Guardian, Bush accuses Iran of dragging its feet. Today the Stanley Cup goes head-to-head with the World Cup in the sports headlines.

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Today I have been engaging in an odd form of egosurfing with typoGenerator, inserting the text “dave” and “bonta” and marveling at the random images the program retrieves from the web. Today I am wondering where we got the idea that something like music could ever belong to its author, given that every instance of authentic listening involves a re-creation of the thing heard as well as a subtle reshaping of the one who listens. Today they are protesting in Vienna. Today I am trying to picture a jar full of night — a voice in the night woods, as Peterson describes the whip-poor-will: by day camouflaged as dead leaves, or flit[ting] away on rounded wings like a large brown moth. Today is the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere. Today the rudbeckia in my garden has begun to bloom in earnest, and it looks very much as if the first butterfly weed blossoms may open by late afternoon. Today by 11:30 the six Carolina wren fledgelings, who left the nest the night before, have still not figured out how to get out of the garage. Today is not even half over.

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Old hat, new rabbits

On Saturday night, I picked up seven books at a well-stocked Half Price Books in the strip mall outside Pittsburgh that I wrote about yesterday. Two were books I’d already read, but the rest are new and full of tantalizing passages.

My typical approach with newly acquired books is to open them at random and read a few pages until I find something thought-provoking. If it’s poetry, I’ll often continue reading in a haphazard fashion until I’ve read about two-thirds of the book, then go to the beginning and read straight through, skipping those poems I’ve already read. With nonfiction, I do feel an obligation to read books from beginning to end, but since I realize I might not get to them for a while — if ever — I also often begin with extensive random samplings. In fact, I think one reason why I favor poetry and nonfiction over fiction is that it lends itself so well to this kind of disorganized reading. Let me show you what I mean with a quote or two from each of the books I just bought.

1. A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs, ed. by T.J. Knab, tr. by Thelma D. Sullivan. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

This is in my estimation the best English-language anthology of Aztec literature, so I was very happy to get it. On reacquainting myself with it on Sunday morning, I found this wonderful factoid on page 83:

The word for storyteller is tlaquetzqui, he who holds something back.

2. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, by Pierre Clastres (Paul Aster, tr.). Faber and Faber, 1998.

This is the other book I’ve read before, an ethnography most notable for its penetrating and sympathetic portrayal of endo-cannibalism — that is, the eating of the members of one’s own tribe after their death. However, it has plenty of other fascinating tidbits as well, including a portrait of a berdache (Clastres calls him a homosexual), or this description of how the Guayaki language can be adapted to whistling:

As I listened to this surprising dialogue (which unfortunately I did not have a chance to record), what I heard was mainly whistling sounds such as tss, dzz, djj — explosions interrupted by abrupt glottal stops and followed by long vocalized expirations ending in a simple expulsion of air. Naturally, I could not decipher any of this. And yet this was ordinary Guayaki — a language I could understand to some extent — but reduced to that part of its consonantal structure that could be whistled and to breathed vowels. Basically it was the language as anyone could have whispered it, reduced to its simplest perceptible expression. The small range of sounds produced did not seem to affect the liveliness of the discussion that Jyvukugi and his wife were carrying on at a great rate; they even seemed to be having a very good time, and sometimes their faces would shake with repressed laughter. I also noticed that from time to time I would hear nothing and only their lips would be moving: instead of listening to the sound of the whistling, they were reading each other’s lips. … Why had the Guayaki created this strange way of communicating? I can only guess at the reason, but I do have a hypothesis. The main quality of this method of manipulating the language by deforming it was really its quasi-silence, which situated it halfway between sound and gesture. And I imagine that, out of fear for their safety, the Atchei had determined to minimize the chances of being overheard by their enemies: the ghosts of the dead, or, more plausibly, the Machitara and Beeru. But perhaps, in the end, this supposition is too pragmatic, and we should instead look for an explanation in the mythological character of Jakarendy, the master of honey, who did not speak but whistled in order to attract human beings and shoot his fern arrows at them.

In any case, I am almost sure that that day Jyvukugi and his wife were “whistling” instead of talking in a normal way so that I would not understand what they were saying to each other. And they were completely successful in doing that.

3. A’aisa’s Gifts: A Study in Magic and the Self, by Michele Stephen. University of California Press, 1995.

Clastres was remarkably lucky in uncovering so much about the people he was living with in just one year — but who knows whether further residence might have caused him to completely rethink his initial conclusions. Another book from my latest haul discusses the difficulty of interpreting societies in which “epistemology and cultural logic posits many layers of things concealed, and according to this cultural logic, one layer contains the opposite of another.” Thus, says the author in her brief introduction to this study of the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea,

[O]nce one gains access to esoteric knowledge and to the private worlds of individuals (which itself is no easy matter), the public symbolism and public descriptions given of the cosmological order seem to be overthrown. … The discrepancies were such that I might easily have concluded I was initially mistaken on many points; during my second extended fieldwork, when I learned the language well enough to converse without interpreters and was at last given access to esoteric knowledge, I was able to get the “real” picture.

Skipping ahead to the middle of the book, one discovers an example of what the author is talking about. I wonder whether it might also be the case for many other, imperfectly studied cultures that

The myth is the vehicle for transmission of secret knowledge. Which is why, of course, only abbreviated versions are told in public. What I assumed were merely simple explanatory folktales, such as “How the Dog Became the Enemy of Other Animals” or “The Origin of the Fishing Trap” … now emerged in their esoteric form as the explanations of important rituals — major rites for hunting in the former, fish-calling rituals in the latter. … Much more than just a social charter, Mekeo myths constitute a basic framework for the system of esoteric knowledge.

4. Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. by John Pemberton III. Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

I couldn’t resist jumping straight to Chapter 11, “Where the Mouse is Omniscient: The Mouse Oracle among the Guro,” by Lorenz Homburger. Yes, the Guro and their close neighbors in central Ivory Coast use live field mice as oracles, keeping them in large, specially designed pots. The Guro are animists whose highest god, Bale, dwells in the earth rather than the sky.

The mouse oracle pot, usually made from one piece of wood, sometimes of clay, is covered with the skin or fur of the red duiker. The belly of the pot is divided into two levels joined by a hole allowing the mouse to climb up and down. Two tortoise shells … are used in conjunction with the pot. The diviner places and removes them alternately, one of them … for divination in the morning and the other … for the evening. To the insides of the shells are fitted ten chicken bones — in certain cases, bat bones are used instead — one end of which is attached to the shell. A cowrie shell is sewed to the loose ends. After sprinkling some rice chaff over the cowries, the diviner places one of the tortoise shells with the bones arranged parallel to each other into the pot, which is then closed with a lid. According to Guro belief, once the client has explained the problem, the mouse climbs up and listens to what is being said. Then the mouse descends and questions the earth through a little hole in the bottom. Boti ba Tra described the messenger function of the mice: “mice can hear and understand all sounds of the earth, indeed they live in the earth, and we in turn populate it.” Finally, the mouse climbs up again to “place the cowrie shells.” After less than a minute, the client is told to lift the lid off the pot. It is rare to catch a glimpse of the mouse, as the animal lives in the dark, is scared by daylight, and therefore rushes back down to the lower half of the pot. The client carefully places the shell before the diviner. The configuration of the bones now discloses the answer to his previous questions. The position of the bones can be read and interpreted. The process is repeated until all of the problems of the person seeking advice are determined and solutions found.

5. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, by Jean de Léry (Janet Whatley, tr.). University of California Press, 1990.

Léry was a French Protestant missionary in 1556, whose description of the Tupinamba Indians was remarkably sympathetic for his era. I like how he concluded “The Bodily Description of the Brazilians”:

Before closing this chapter … I must respond both to those who have written and to those who think that the frequenting of these naked savages, and especially of the women, arouses wanton desire and lust. Here, briefly, is what I have to say on this point. While there is ample cause to judge that, beyond the immodesty of it, seeing these women naked would serve as a predictable enticement to concupiscence; yet, to report what was commonly perceived at the time, this crude nakedness in such a woman is much less alluring than one might expect. And I maintain that the elaborate attire, paint, wigs, curled hair, great ruffs, farthingales, robes upon robes, and all the infinity of trifles with which the women and girls over here disguise themselves and of which they never have enough, are beyond comparison the cause of more ills than the ordinary nakedness of the savage women — whose natural beauty is by no means inferior to that of the others. If decorum allowed me to say more, I make bold to say that I could resolve all the objections to the contrary, and I would give reasons so evident that no one could deny them.

Léry also defends manioc beer made by spitting the chewed up root into a pot. How is this any more disgusting than crushing wine grapes with the bare feet? he asks. Yet he admits that he and the other missionaries were generally able to brew rum for their own consumption.

6. Different Hours, by Stephen Dunn. Norton, 2000.

I can’t decide whether my tastes have changed, or whether my first impression is correct — that the poems in this book aren’t as inspired as some of Dunn’s other efforts. So far I’ve read about a third of the book, and the only thing that really grabbed me was a quote used as an epigraph:

John & Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
–from a freshman’s short story

The poem that follows — “John & Mary” — falls short as a response to this text, I thought. Like another poem in the book, which takes off from a student’s typo (“The town was in the mists of chaos”), it seems to have fallen victim to the author’s need to ingratiate himself with his academic colleagues by indulging in a display of wit at the expense of a hapless student. The poem focuses on John & Mary rather than, for example, on hummingbirds, which might have produced a more interesting poem.

7. Not Such a Bad Place to Be, by William Kloefkorn. Copper Canyon Press, 1980.

Two years ago, when they announced Ted Kooser’s selection as U.S. Poet Laureate, I thought that the Librarian of Congress had picked the wrong Nebraska poet. It’s not as if William Kloefkorn doesn’t know how to adapt the poet’s art to the unique needs of our nation and its public servants. “In 1978,” the bio states, “he won the Nebraska Championship for hog-calling.”

What I’ve read from this book so far confirms my impression that Kloefkorn’s poetry is second to none, with all the unsentimental detail, grotesque violence and absurdism proper to a contemporary North American poet of place. Here’s a poem that might serve as a fitting conclusion for this otherwise completely miscellaneous post.

LEGERDEMAIN

We must never empty ourselves
of that last surprise.
We must grow longer arms,
reach deeper and deeper into the dark hat
to bring forth the rabbit.
We must not decline its pernicious bite,
must not rule out the alley behind the eye
where our shadows run naked as jaybirds,
rending their hair,
foaming at their mouths,
snapping at the glances of birds and dogs
and mothers and small children.
We must balance our equilibrium
on the tips of noses
that we must have been willing to paint
a bulbous blue.
We must stare into the mirror
and marry the second woman to the right,
must honor her all the days of our life.
We must not be reluctant to correct her,
or to chop off a finger,
or if the going gets tough
to bury her eight paces south of the henhouse.
We must never fail to keep in mind
where we might or could or should have done
better, or perhaps worse,
slapping the children on their bare hind quarters
as they trot off to dress themselves
and to tighten their teeth.
We must not assume that those clouds
in the far southwest are not out to submerge us,
or that, if they do, we do not have something
small and hard, like a key, say,
up the slack of our sleeve with which to unlock
the torrential trunk.
We must never empty ourselves
of that last surprise.
We must have the dark hat always
in the position of ready,
our sleight of hand equal even
to the most improbable depth.

Flag

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Over the town-
less Town Center,
over the Commons
& the Pointe,
over Cracker Barrel
& Home Depot,
over Bridgestone Firestone
& Monroe Muffler Brakes,
over Pool City
& Circuit City
& Cabinet World,
over acres of crown vetch
& parking lots
& the motel where
I sit gazing out
a 2nd story window at
another motel,
a crow flies.
It glides.
It flaps.
Its sleek black
plumage glistens
in the humid air.
I twist in
my chair & crane
my neck, hanging
on every wingbeat,
my right hand
creeping up
to my chest.
__________

See also Stars and stripes.

Flies

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My fifth entry in the self-portrait marathon

But really, is this the face of an artist? Who am I kidding? Not my wise friends the flies, who rub their forefeet together in a travesty of devotion. En boca cerrada no entran moscas — flies don’t enter a closed mouth, says the Mexican proverb. But when is my mouth ever really closed, except for the fraction of a second that the camera shutter is open? Let the saints train their tongues to lie still as stones & their eyes to gaze modestly at their navels. It’s sheer hypocrisy to praise the open tomb while preparing oneself for the sealed reliquary. And in any case, the crawling faithful prefer the glistening surfaces of breasts or buttocks, with those dark & inviting hollows in between.

“First of all as to the patient’s face,” says Hippocrates: “does it resemble or not the face of persons in good health, and especially does it resemble itself?” This is what I’m wondering, my faithful physicians, health care in this country being as moribund as it is. You can rub your hands together all you want — you won’t get a dime of insurance out of me! Do I look like a rich man to you? Does my face have the unnatural glow of those who frequent health clubs with mirrored walls or fly airplanes into skyscrapers?

What you call dyslexia, I call poetry: an affliction in which nothing resembles itself, ever. A great poet like Eugénio de Andrade exceeds himself at every turn. Esta noite preciso de outro verí£o sobre a boca crescendo nem que seja de rastros, he wrote — “This night I need another summer on my mouth, gathering, even at a crawl.”

Would you recognize your own face if you saw it coming toward you down the street, without the usual soundtrack running through your head? Would you welcome it as an end to exile, or would you get out the flyswatter & the can of Raid? “Mama get your hatchet,” begged the bluesman Furry Lewis, “kill the fly on your baby’s head.” Buddhahood, they say, can be hazardous to your health. Best to go meditate on a corpse.

Man on the street

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

 

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My fourth entry in the self-portrait marathon

I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets — but it’s what the people want.
–Turkmenbashi

Never read about the Turkmenbashi right before going to bed. While I slept, a bland, doughy face came looking in the window.

Tink. Tink. Tink. Water dripping on a steel roof in the prison yard.

The golden statue revolves on top of its pedestal not in order to follow the sun, as malicious outsiders claim, but in order to keep from falling into shadow. A positive attitude is a powerful potion, chant the people’s deputies.

Tink, tink, tink: spoons on glasses in the golden-domed palace. The blandest of smiles, announcing the abolition of the death penalty. Across the boulevard at the U.S. embassy, it’s like a group orgasm as cellphones in pants pockets all begin to vibrate at once.

I am a bystander in my own dream. Who are all these blue horsemen flourishing their sabers so cinematically? They gallop into the forest in a large, public park just as some demonstrators — Young Turkmens, I guess — lead a mob of military police into the same forest from the other side.

Is it that I have no stomach for gore, or that, fed on a diet of bloodless history, I lack the mental imagery? The trees hide everything. I hear shots and screams, and the winnying of horses.

Half of the horsemen come out, but none of the police. The voice of the omniscient narrator hesitates, then tells the truth. The horsemen were patriotic defenders of Turkmenistan; the police were vile enemies of the people. There will be democratic elections. Tink, tink, tink.

Now I am there in person, and so are you. We bloggers have chosen Ashgabat as our next gathering spot — it’s centrally located, we say. The elections were a smashing success; they have democracy now. The Turkmenbashi’s head smiles blandly from the top of a revolving stake.

The former secret police have new jobs as pimps and pickpockets, thugs and drug runners. They follow us everywhere. Four of them rob us at knifepoint in a crowded restaurant.

Our shouts for help arouse nothing but studied disinterest from the other diners. Then I get an idea. Tap your spoons against your wineglasses, I urge my companions.

Tink. Tink. Tink.