Snowball’s chance

October’s theme for qarrtsiluni is Change and Continuity, which, as some readers may have noticed, I’ve been riffing on here as well. I submitted the following series of linked prose pieces, but on reflection, my fellow editors and I felt that it didn’t really hang together all that well; the third threatens to overwhelm the first two, and really deserves to stand alone.

This editing is a tough job, and we worry about the extent to which blogging has made us lax in the standards we apply to ourselves and each other. It’s a peculiar, god-like dilemma: how to be appropriately merciless and compassionate at the same time…

1.
I stood watching traffic and thought: a winch, a windlass. Some iron drum on a medieval instrument of torture, allowing pain to be administered in increments no thicker than an eyelash. That kind of wheel.

The day before, a friend of mine had been impossible to console: he had received two pieces of terrible news that morning, he said, and the one he was willing to talk about involved a young teenage girl in South Africa – the daughter of a woman he used to work with – raped in her own room by three masked men. “You know, there’s this persistent myth that AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin. Preferably dry sex.”

I wondered about the other piece of news, but said nothing. We were playing cards, one of those games where the jokers can steal any identity and the player who finishes with the lowest score wins. I was winning, and whistled under my breath.

2.
In my last dream before waking, I am trying to find a poetry reading in a restaurant basement. Raw sewage is oozing through the cracks in the floor and under the stairs, green, incredibly foul. The manager shrugs: the health inspector won’t come around for another two months, and anyway, the city floats on a river of shit and stale urine. I find the exit and take deep gulps of the alley’s gentrified air. Here’s some fancy brickwork, an old brass hitching post. Every passing hand rests briefly on its cool metal skin.

3.
The news isn’t good, almost by definition. Polar icecaps are melting; the Amazon is drying out. All across Siberia, methane gas percolates through the warming soil, suddenly unencumbered by a frozen ceiling. Millions of years of freeze-dried shit and corpses have a sudden date with the anaerobic rulers of the planet, whose patience and whose appetite are equally infinite.

The wheel has turned too far, it seems, and now the ligaments are beginning to snap. In the long-term forecast, there’s an 80 percent chance of the extinction of most multi-cellular life forms on earth. Our ancestors were cold and lonely and desperately afraid of their own extinction, and read in the heavens a promise of unlimited semen. Now we will be plenty warm, I bet. And life will continue without us, in whatever form; those who believe in biogenesis can take comfort in the thought of earth’s own bacteria seeding the stars.

I remember once as a kid, toward the end of January, putting three or four snowballs in the freezer for some reason. I found them six months later while trying to make room for blueberries, and it took me a few moments to recognize what they were. The snow had turned to lumps of ice, gray and lifeless: such a fragile crop, impossible to preserve.

How will we describe the snow to our great-grandchildren? It drifted down from the night sky like flour, we’ll say, or sometimes like a rain of flowers the color of light: little vajras, wheels with six spokes. It gave cover to mice and to the ugliest of wounds. It made us dream of oneness. Wasn’t it cold, they’ll ask, and we’ll say no, you could burrow into it as into a down comforter. Sometimes a ruffed grouse would burst from the snow right in front of you in the middle of a still morning. It changed by the day and by the hour, and when the sun came out you could see the shadow of the sky itself: blue, blue.

The fresh chance

This entry is part 21 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the second poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Snow
by Paul Zweig

Love is all we could manage,
Its particles floating from the hard rim of the air.
Our tracks were clear in the fresh chance
Heaven threw behind us….

[Remainder of poem removed 10-10-05]

* * * *

Dust

In my dream running after you, lungs aching
as you rise above the shore on sudden wings,
watching you grow smaller & smaller
against the sky,
I shout myself awake.
It’s past four.
A wind moves in the curtains, bringing the scent of rain.

I turn over, & something small & sharp
pokes my cheek: the needle end
of a breast feather from
some long-dead goose
has threaded a small hole in my pillow.
I pull it out.

The darkness quivers with distant lightning.
I lie awake, listening for the first rumble,
the first random taps against the pane.
Today, I think, I will take a broom
to the stairs below the window
where dust has settled in the corners of every step.
An hour later, when the storm passes,
the sky is already light.

City of absences

Raked sand garden at Ginkakuji Temple, Kyoto
Raked sand garden at Ginkakuji Temple, Kyoto, by Richard Jackson (used by permission)

View the full-size image here and the whole photo set here.

Update: Links glossary added (see bottom of post). In case anyone but me is keeping the track, this is my fourth (Friday morning) draft of a response to Zweig’s poem about Venice…

The City of Absences
Kyoto 1985-86

1.
Crossing an unexpected bridge,
I find myself once more in the city of absences,
twenty years gone. It’s August, I think.
The cicadas drown out every human motor.

I return to labyrinths of old wood,
disposable chopsticks,
the absent-minded purchase cocooned in paper.
My eyes adjust to the darkness in all-night coffee shops
& pagodas of moss.

City where I learned to live
on little but the morning bakery’s give-away bag of bread heels
& the peaches & pomegranates left at roadside altars
to buy off the peripatetic dead.
I bow my head for its low ceilings & sticky air
& an unseen female voice sobbing iki, iki, iki every day at noon.

Horribly pale, full of awkward & inadvertent gestures,
I return with my larval tooth
chewing, chewing, slicing slow half-circles from the air
with the wing of a mantis,
brandishing a Noh dancer’s open fan.

2.
City where I first learned my vocation
as a chorus of one.
My split-toed slippers whisper over the bridge
as I chant my itinerary: through the gate
to the inner provinces, past the gnarled pine that marks
the traveler’s naive goal, & now,
seemingly by accident,
some ancient battlefield deep in autumn grasses.
It’s as if the celibate poet gets drawn into the vacuum
left by every improperly commemorated death.
His task is to question, to listen, to transmute.
The difficult entrance past, he steps to the side.

I return for the mudra of automatic encounters:
two cups & we’re friends,
three cups & we’re trading insults
& lighting each other’s cigarettes from the embers of our own.

3.
Nothing changes.
Water drips where it has always dripped
until invisible fingers replace the worn-through stone.
Some outcaste genius rakes sand in a certain way
& eight centuries later the monks still take the same steps,
chant the same words to pace themselves,
walking backwards through the pure-white ocean
without leaving a ripple.

This time, too, I will make plans & abandon them,
I will return to the disco walled with mirrors
whose patrons dance alone with their reflections,
like the Kinkakuji
when a carp comes to the surface: that languid sway.
Kagami no ma, the mirror room
where the actor tries to become one with his part.

I will tan myself to a golden hue
& slip in among the crowd of smooth-faced buddhas
posing for snapshots at all the sights:
Pachinko Palace, constructed under the Showa emperor.
Rabu Hoteru, where married couples can shed the costumes
marked papa, mama.
Tachimamben, famous for its blue-suited businessmen
leaving offerings of saké in the gutter.
Makudonarudo, where shadows are barred at the door.

This time I will fill my pockets with one-yen coins.
They weigh next to nothing – sexless little moons of aluminum –
& I float up over the ticket sellers
with one sudden gulp of focused breath.
The sky fits me like a mask with two backs.
I am past the gate with its double roof, through the torii.

4.
Garden paths unscroll like kimonos, glossy
from centuries of discriminating use,
turning away from everything that teems or hungers.
Two steps and the moon,
three steps & the summit of an uninhabited peak
with inch-high pines.
Impossible to find a novel place to sit.

City of imperial absences,
city of foreigners with fat Daruma asses,
go ahead, try pushing me from my seat behind the pillar.
My very gravity rights me.
My eyes are filled with so much wakefulness,
I can hardly focus on anything here in the present.

But the ear – listen! – is finally all lotus.
My forefinger & thumb unite
to press the eraser’s pink tongue to the page.
__________

Links glossary:
Japanese roadside shrines (a very unique example) usually feature the bodhisattva Jizo and are intended to placate hungry ghosts
Disposable chopsticks (waribashi)
Noh drama (section 2):

The main character of a Noh play is called the shite (pronounced sh’tay) who sometimes appears with one or more companion characters called tsure. In many plays, the shite appears in the first half as an ordinary person, departs, then appears in the second half in his true form as the ghost of famous person of long ago. The former is called the maejite and the latter the nochijite. They are traditionally performed by the same actor.

The secondary actor, the waki, is often a travelling priest whose questioning of the main character is important in developing the story line. He also often appears with companion waki-tsure. An interlude actor called ai or ai-kyogen also often appears as a local person who gives further background to the waki, and thus to the audience, in order to understand the situation of the shite.

The waki is dark, passive yin to the shite’s yang. He never wears a mask.
Mudra
Japanese outcastes (Burakumin, called kuwaramono or “river-bank dwellers” during the Kamakura period, when many of them found refuge in Zen monasteries)
Kinkakuji (temple of the Golden Pavilion)
Kagami no ma is the immediate backstage in Noh, connected with the main stage by a bridge. “Here the actor, already dressed in many layers of robe and a wig, puts on the mask and sits before a large mirror to study the figure he makes; this is where he undergoes the process of becoming the character.” (Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater, Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983)
Pachinko; Showa emperor
Rabu Hoteru
Tachimamben (no Google results) means “stand-and-piss spot.”
Makudonarudo
Daruma (cf. the common Zen ko’an, “Why did Daruma come from the West?”)

Migration

Quarter till six. I’m sitting outside with my coffee and a brand new pocket notebook, in which I am writing the following words: A jet crosses the chest of Orion, dragging its roar half a sky behind it. Fog forms around me as I write, guessing at the lines, unsure of whether I have started this notebook with black or blue ink. Trucks are loud in the valley — I try to determine from the quality of the sound whether or not they are driving through thick fog.

Last night, I dreamed about finding my missing set of keys — they had been right where I usually keep them, and had simply been hiding from me each time I looked there before. Now, they were ready to be found. But other things remain lost. It seems that I am part of a group of pilgrims about to set off for New Orleans on foot, but I want to bow out and go by car instead because my glasses are in such bad shape. One of the lenses keeps popping out, and I’m afraid that if the frame breaks I won’t be able to get it repaired on the road. Even in the dream, I realize the foolishness of this anxiety. But I am quite nearsighted, and always feel terribly vulnerable without glasses.

We’re following one of New Orleans’ cemetery angels come to life, who is searching for her missing thumb and thinks that it might have been ‘borrowed’ by a hitchhiker desperate to get out of the city. Our plan: to comb the shoulders of every major road and highway between here and there. When we find the thumb, the angel will turn back to stone and will return to her station, directing traffic at the center of a vast necropolis. For now, she seems human enough — in fact, she has a bit of a pout. I want to find out if her wings smell of mildew, but she keeps her distance.

As the light strengthens, my handwritten words get smaller and straighter, falling into line. The stars fade. I hear the “wick wick wick” of migrating wood thrushes dropping down into the trees to rest and forage. They have thousands of miles yet to go. It makes me sad to think I won’t hear them sing again until next May.

Four nights of dream

I dream of beaten fields, whole landscapes cleansed of desire & pressed flat by an enormous iron. I start awake, not as if from a nightmare but from the ingestion of something too heavy, too incompatible with dreaming. I stumble downstairs & scan the latest headlines: people cutting holes in their attics, standing in water up to their necks. Whole towns smashed to rubble. There are rumors of bodies floating through the streets.

The next night, I dream of meeting my fetch, who resembles me in every way except that he seems to be a bit of a pedant & is not at all good-looking. We join forces to beat up my older brother, who is greatly offended. I wake to stories of gunfire & looting & the president surveying the damage from 20,000 feet.

In the following night’s dream, my nine-year-old niece gets a visit from herself as a five-year-old. They exchange spiteful words & withdraw to a safe distance, glaring. I wake & read about rapes and near-riots in the Superdome, mothers carrying dead children, children standing watch over dead grandparents, helpless to stop the bloating & the grim ministrations of rats.

Early the next morning, I find myself kneeling in my parent’s dining room beside the ghost of a young girl who grows steadily more visible as we talk. I casually touch the black skin of her arm. She feels solid, alive, she giggles & chatters like any five-year-old. “What is your name?” I ask softly. She pretends to mishear. “Her name is Lucy,” she says, holding up her blond doll. “I’m going to go stay in her house now. She lives in a big ol’ mansion on a hill with columns out front.”

My mother watches anxiously from the sofa. “Were those your parents we saw disappearing in the middle of the field?” she wonders. A look of panic crosses the girl’s face. She grips my hand tightly, & I wake. I get a shower & sit outside in a folding canvas chair under the stars, taking small sips of black coffee, then tilting my head all the way back. The Pleiades stand high overhead; Mars glimmers to their right, a bloodshot eye. Meteors flare one after the other & quickly gutter in the dark waters, whichever route they take toward the horizon. I sit breathing in the honeysuckle fragrance of wild tobacco – also called white shooting-star, after the shape of the blossoms – & listen to the crickets stuttering toward dawn.
__________

My Paul Zweig reading project is, I hope, only temporarily stalled. I have been following the news closely, for once, and busying myself with many distractions. The title here plagiarizes Natsume Soseki’s 1908 collection of linked stories translated as Ten Nights of Dream. I’d love to hear from readers who may have had similarly disturbing dreams over the past week.

Green plague

This entry is part 9 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the ninth poem in the first section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after one week to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Pastoral Letter
by Paul Zweig

I will name nature’s poisons. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 8-31-05]

* * * *

Pastoral Spell

1.
I dreamed I drove a sprayer truck
slowly along the berm of a road
in prayerful silence.
Behind me, the red letters of sumac leaves
turned brown
& my rubber gloves shone
like the udders of a cow,

all for the crown vetch
& its hateful pink.

2.
I name the invaders:
buffel grass, barberry, knotweed,
kudzu, privet, leafy spurge.
Cursed be houndstongue & snakehead,
stiltgrass & tree-of-heaven.
A plague on every scourge
of purple loosestrife, hemlock
woolly adelgid, cane toad;
the European rabbit down under,
demonstrating its fabled gift
for multiplication in the wrong abode;
Australian eucalypt in California
stretching resinous leaves toward
the redwood’s portion of the sky;
medusahead rye.

Far from their native countries,
free of restraints, the immigrants
do not swarm; they mob.
They lodge in the earth like shrapnel.
When they sprout,
they are already in full uniform.
The Greeks called them Spartoi,
the Sown.

The only way to get rid of them
was to pit them against each other.

3.
I dreamed of skinning feral cats
& selling their meat at auction:
Fresh mutton, I chanted.
They were slick with the fat of tanagers.

Ergonaut

I dream a ghost-body, heavy on top of mine. At first I am aroused, then frightened. It sits on my chest the way my big brother used to sometimes when we were kids, though it doesn’t taunt, doesn’t speak a word. I snort loudly to wake myself, find only my own arm sprawled across my ribs. I drift back to sleep and into a new dream, in which a psychopath smiles ingratiatingly and explains that he really couldn’t help murdering over 200 members of a small, isolated community in the mountains. I try to talk the others into locking him up, but we’re not able to reach consensus. The only suitable jail is the old springhouse, damp and cold, where I once imprisoned my little brother for several hours. I find myself joining the others to plead for his human rights. When the cops come, it is not to apprehend him but to interrogate us. “Have you seen a suit like this?” one of them asks each of us in turn, displaying a child’s plastic model of a gangster, furred in what someone informs me is meant to represent a zoot suit. I realize there is no right way to answer. I look at the handcuffs that I found in the basement and decide they really belong around my own wrists. “If they take me to jail, I’ll be safe from the murderer,” I think.

*

It’s only at the end of their all-day hike, as they begin to pitch camp beside the wilderness trout stream, that they realize they forgot to pack the bag that contained half their fishing gear. Time to improvise, says the engineer, while his friend the poet rummages around for the dime-bag of pot. A half an hour later they’re good and stoned. The engineer begins shaving willow wands for the basket trap he sees as clearly as a lure flashing in a sunlit pool. The poet rolls up his pants and wades out into the stream. He feels the hair rustling all over his body, follicles suddenly standing at attention.

*

I finally succumb to curiosity and install a free site meter from statcounter.com. I realize that it won’t be terribly accurate, since many regular readers use an aggregator such as Bloglines. I’m primarily interested in the search strings people use to get here, but the visit length data is fascinating, too. In two days, 83% of all visitors alighted here for less than five seconds. On the other hand, four people spent more than an hour with their browser open to Via Negativa. What sort of masochists are these? Here’s someone who’s been back five times already, and visited thirteen separate pages! And good grief, he lives in the same town and uses the same server as I do. Same browser, same operating system, everything. Unbelievable.

*

But what were they looking for, those less-than-five-second visitors? Two searched for the via negativa, poor souls. All the other Google searches were unique, and included the following (Via Negativa’s order in each search result is given in parentheses):


“bird calls” birdy birdy (5)
“origin of words” “spelunker” (3)
ADDIS ABABA FOAM &A PLASTIC FACTORY (3)
tribesman “man essence” (1 [!])
william stafford methow valley poems (4)
“The Recorded Sayings of Ch’an Master Lin-chi Hui-chao of Chen Prefecture” (4)
coon dong (2)
raccoons sex (4)
bestseller “baghdad burning” (3 [?!])
The word Hammock originates from a Haitian word (7)
THEODORE ROETHKE,DOLOR,analysis or explanation (2 – a Yahoo search)
lion fucked (2 [!])
Zuni vulture (5)

*

“But how many people actually remember seeing Barney Google in a comic strip?” asks Toonopedia. Indeed. While the search engine that bears his name seems omnipresent, he of the goo-goo-googly eyes and his once-famous steed Sparky have been mysteriously absent for half a century. There was no celluloid finish, no riding off into a sunset. One pictures instead some repudiation or return to sanity, as with Don Quixote. Except that Sancho – or Snuffy Smith – doesn’t buy it. It’s all too real to him, this epic snipe hunt, this been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me. “What’s so funny?” he wants to know. He’s still out there in his lonesome hollow, hunched over a keypad, typing outlandish search strings in the gathering dusk.

*

Late afternoon isn’t always the best time to read poetry, I find. The book is Katha Pollitt’s Antarctic Traveller, her first. After a while, I decide to jot down some of my accidental misreadings:


…sphincters [splinters] of glass and pottery…

…the world [word] that widens
until it becomes the word [world].

…the orchid,
which signifies the virtues of the noble man:
reticence, calm, clarity of wind [mind].

…now you’ve travelled half the world and seen
the ergo [ego] glinting at the heart of things…

Pollitt’s poems are wonderfully luminous; this is one of the best first books I’ve ever read. Its language is strange the way all truthful language should be. If my slips seem even stranger, perhaps that’s simply a measure of the mind’s difficulty in assimilating unfamiliar truths. We hear what we want to hear, reverse-engineer the worlds that come out of our mouths and call the results logic: the ergo glinting at the heart of things, just so much wind from a glass sphincter.

Weeds

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Suddenly, beginning yesterday morning, my inbox is overflowing with German spam. Auslaender bevorzugt! Tuerkei in die EU! Deutsche werden kuenftig beim Arzt abgezockt! Graeberschaendung auf bundesdeutsche Anordnung! Vorbildliche Aktion! Volk wird nur zum zahlen gebraucht! Du wirst ausspioniert ….! And so on. The two that I open by accident contain no HTML, just Internet addresses. Clearly, the senders are “pharming,” trying to lure the curious or unwary into visiting a website where the seeds of malicious software lie waiting for new victims, new agents of dispersal. But why me? I don’t know a word of German. Whence this sudden invasion?

A few hours later I’m on a botanical field trip where one of the other participants is German and speaks authoritatively (albeit with a heavy accent) about plants and disturbance regimes, here and in Europe. We’re examining one of the few, tiny, remaining fragments of xeric limestone prairie in Pennsylvania. Why do European plants so easily out-compete ours? I ask. The German guy explains it’s because many of the northern European weeds have had a thousand years of intense cultivation to learn how to be aggressively weedy.

In North America, by contrast, the only really widespread form of anthropogenic landscape alteration was fire. Regular burning favors oak forests or savannas, depending on geology, exposure, moisture level, and other factors. This perpetuated openings that were originally natural, dating from a much warmer climatic period ending around 4,500 years ago in which wildfires were much commoner than they are today. Given fire, deep-rooted warm-season grasses can successfully out-compete cool-season grasses – mostly European imports. Large Pleistocene herbivores such as ground sloths and mastadons also played a role in originally creating these openings; in more recent times, the American bison helped spread prairie seeds between far-flung openings. Our trip leader describes an experiment with samples of different kinds of animal fur in order to find which would best transport the seeds of side-oats gramma grass, a prairie indicator species. Some pelts, such as deer and elk, shed the seeds immediately; the densely matted buffalo pelts picked up and retained side-oats gramma seeds like nothing else.

As with the wolf and panther, the wild bison still has a sort of ghostly presence in the Pennsylvania landscape, recalled by numerous toponymns: Buffalo Valley, Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Run. Run they did, but never fast enough. You can, however, still see them around – there’s a farmer who raises buffalo right on the other side of this hill, one of the local participants informs us. That really gets us talking!

We discuss spotted knapweed, a plant I only know from the railroad right-of way. Most of the invasive species in our hollow first appeared down along the tracks, hoboing in from god knows where. Spotted knapweed is that tall, rank stuff with the purple thistle-like flowers, but no spines. Turns out it doesn’t need them. It’s what they call allelopathic, poisoning the soil for other plants, and it’s potent enough to repel would-be grazers as well. Humans foolish enough to pull it out bare-handed may be susceptible to a nasty rash, but just as often it doesn’t leave a physical sign, going instead straight for the nervous system. You get recurring headaches, our trip leader says, and for a week or two, nothing will taste quite right.

Following local leads, we discover a previously unknown prairie remnant on the side of a hill above a plowed field; the owner mows it every few years because it’s a popular sledding hill in the winter. A number of indicator plants are intermixed with non-natives; the bright, orange-yellow patches of hoary pucoon are the most extensive we’ve seen all day. They intermingle with red columbine for a wonderful, natural garden effect.

One of the botanists shows us how to identify the planted pine trees: gather their long needles together in a sheaf and press them against the palm. If they bend readily, it’s red pine. If they threaten to go right through the hand, it’s Austrian pine. These are definitely Austrian, stout swords. We laugh nervously about possible ethnic parallels. Our erstwhile German participant has already bustled off to scout out other rare plants, convinced there was nothing more to be seen with us. Earlier, he had asked me to show him the location of another prairie remnant on the map. I explained how it was right across from the entrance to a very charming cave. “I have no interest in caves,” he said. It was impossible to tell from his intonation whether or not he meant that remark to sound friendly.

The strange thing about yesterday’s outing was that I had been to the first site we visited nine years before, but had absolutely no recollection of it. I figured something would eventually ring a bell, but nothing ever did.

*

Last night, I didn’t dream about either German botanists or Vorbildliche Aktion, as far as I can remember. In the last dream before I get up, a train I’m riding returns to the station so I can search for my boots. I had taken them off and left them somewhere without noticing how much harder and rougher the ground had become to my stockinged feet. In this dream – maybe in all dreams? – the surfaces of the world are as smooth as a lover’s thigh. But no true beloved could ever be half so innocuous.

The train travels backwards for one whole stop, disrupting service up and down the line. “We do this all the time,” the conductor says. “We’ve learned to accommodate the special needs of our passengers, who are uncommonly forgetful.” Everyone disembarks, and the other passengers wander off in search of coffee or newspapers. My companion helps me retrace my steps: over a metal bridge, through cobblestone alleys, into a slick-floored casino. Perhaps the boots were stolen right off my feet? I search through the Recent Acquisitions rack in a second-hand clothing store, and although I do find several pairs of army boots that look virtually identical to mine, none respond to my plaintive whisper. One large pair gleams, freshly spit-shined. They almost sneer. Their former owner couldn’t have made it through Day One of Basic Training.

In the very last place I look, there they are: old and comfortable, caked with limey mud, perhaps carrying a few seeds of side-oats gramma. Now I remember! But I had to swim upstream to the source, the very start of the dream. I take off the loaner pair of women’s boots – they’d been just a little tight – and step into my own with a sigh of pleasure. Read into this what you will. Me, I woke up. I lay in bed rehearsing the apologetic speech I would have to deliver to my fellow passengers. “From now on, I’ll always take the train,” I thought, “even if it never takes me where I want to go.”

*

This morning, a Baltimore oriole has begun persecuting his reflection in the window opposite my writing table. He’s not quite as aggressive as last year’s cardinal, preferring to sing rather than attempting a full-scale assault. From a perch two feet away he flutters up against the glass, singing loudly. It must confuse him the way his rival opens his beak at the same time he does, since his is the only song. He’s looking right in my direction as he does so. If I didn’t know better, I might think I was the intended target of his sharply worded messages.

Shooting the water

A small procession on a red dusty road, and everyone’s dressed in red, red. The pace is not fast, the song is not slow, the pines aren’t stirring in the breeze. As they grow nearer you can see the black coffin, and it’s only three feet long, my dear, it’s only three feet long.

*

Well, yesterday morning I was making breakfast, and believe me when I tell you that there was nothing different about that. I always make the very same thing, because who wants a surprise first thing in the morning – or second, or third? A glass of orange juice from concentrate and two eggs fried sunny-side up in butter, sprinkled with dried tarragon. I sat down with the newspaper while I waited for the eggs to fry, my plate heating on a separate burner. Well, just as I got up and started across the kitchen toward the stove, I had the strangest feeling. It was a little like that feeling of weightlessness or disassociation one gets during orgasm, except there was no sensation involved, no question of pleasure or release – simply an absence. It lasted for less time than it takes to tell you about it, because to become conscious of a thing like that is to banish it almost immediately. Indeed, what I call a feeling was probably not the experience itself but its impression, like the afterimage that forms on the inside of your eyelids if you open your eyes for a split second and close them again.

*

What are they singing, these people, and why don’t they all look sad? The road is straight and hot and the heat waves make their legs appear to wobble from side to side. I climb the bank and rest in the shade of the scrubby pines, waiting, my camera at the ready. As they get closer, I notice something odd: the coffin has no lid.

*

Warning: objects in dreams are farther away than they appear. Whenever I happen to wake, right away I begin thinking about blogging. A dream that might otherwise seem unremarkable gains in significance simply from the prospect of being recounted. But I’m always wary of “recounting fraud,” you know? I ask myself, were things really so logical? Were they even as sequential as narrative conventions imply? And what was so frightening, why did familiar landmarks seem so huge, so full of shadows? The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life. I turn over onto my left side, knowing that I can only fall asleep on my right. Just before I drift off, I’ll roll back into place.

*

Like a log, my dear. I always sleep like a log. Like a log hitching a ride in a coffin. I peer through the telephoto lens in disbelief. They’ve dressed it in baby clothes, but it’s clearly no infant. If they’d debarked it, I might not have recognized it, but I can see the reddish-brown plates: it’s a mate to the trunks I’m standing among. The people shuffle past in weary cadence, clapping softly the way you clap when the cemetery’s a mile or two from town.

*

It’s rare that I’m terrified of something in a dream, but it’s just as rare that I don’t feel at least a little fearful. Face it, I’m a slow moving, medium-sized mammal with a number of potential predators to worry about. Sometimes I’m smaller and more rodent-like, but I’ve never yet dug my own burrows, always taking over the abandoned homes of other creatures instead. That’s human enough, isn’t it? At one point last night, for example, I was exploring a couple of woodchuck burrows near the top of the field that seemed to open up into some kind of cavern. I decided to test the echo, stuck my head into one of the holes and gave a roar. A couple of huge shadows detached themselves from the side of the pit and growled back, a low rumble. I felt a blast of hot, stinking air like a week-old corpse.

*

Whose log-body can this be, dressed so fine for its own funeral? I follow at a distance, already picturing how this will look on the glossy pages of National Geographic. The scene at the cemetery merits a three-page pull-out, at least. In place of gravestones, large, curved animal horns jut from the earth. Some are painted white; others have been wound about with colored yarn. Little bells dangle from the point of every horn. The wind is a welcome visitor, it seems.

*

Have you ever felt a wind inside your skull? Talk about mute, abject terror! A nightmare you’ll remember years later, looking through a magazine at the dentist’s office with the whine of the drill dimly audible above the Muzak. You find you can’t concentrate on much besides pictures, and fortunately this magazine has quite a few. In fact, it’s difficult to find the articles, apart from the captions and a few paragraphs following the titles – or are they headlines? The Misunderstood Manta. Ancient Nubia: Birthplace of the Pharoahs? A Funeral for the Whooping Cough. And here’s a nice piece on the Venus de Milo, which seems so emblematic of something or other. (Yes, of course she’s a which, never a who.)

*

Listen. Here it comes now through the pines, hissing. A gourd rattle gives it legs. Someone starts swinging a bullroarer and all the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The shutter clicks away, seemingly of its own accord: the sound made by the claws of rats on an empty granary floor. Not that they’d ever print that sort of thing. By the time the editors get done with my prose, baby, I barely recognize myself among all the cliches. I might as well be shooting so much water under a bridge, back in goddamn Iowa.

Blogging color, dreaming blogs

Some of the bloggists I read regularly have been writing about color in pretty striking ways. In a post last Friday – complete with a full-color sketch – Blaugustine described a man and his sons who boarded her car on the London subway:

To say that they were black says nothing. Their skin was African midnight blueblack, the colour of a starry desert sky and polished as the stones in a clear stream. There was not a hair on their heads or brows. Their smooth hairlessness and the extraordinary intensity and innocence of their eyes made them seem like beings from another planet. The man was dressed in a light-coloured tracksuit but the boys, under their black casual jackets, wore formal white shirts and white trousers. My sketch from memory does not do them justice. If I had brought my camera I would have asked permission to photograph them. Sometimes life generously offers you a brief encounter with absolute beauty to remind you that all is not lost and ugliness can never entirely take over the world.

On Tuesday, Fragments from Floyd reported on an encounter with unexpected, otherworldly beauty even closer to home:

A rounded mound that the rake could not clear away proved to be a flat rock under the leaves, thrown beside the shed for no good reason. I harrumphed as I bent over carefully to prize it up on end to lift and toss it to some other pointless place out of the way. And out of that mundane chore of autumn, in this world of orange and ochre, in that cool, safe space under the flat roof of rock where it would have spent its anonymous days fattening on spiders before winter, a newly-hatched Smooth Green Snake lay coiled in an emerald knot.

This time, there is a photo. The green snake against the autumn leaves looks every bit as stunning as Fred says it was.

At Vernacular Body yesterday, I was charmed by

the sight of a pile of yellow leaves on the sidewalk. They are suddenly carried on a gust: it is a precise and unified motion, exactly like that of a school of fish.

And at Ditch the Raft, Andi is in northern India, on the first leg of a Buddhist pilgrimage with her father. Along with vivid descriptions of the people, the temples, the filth and squalor of the cities and the experience of being stared at everywhere she goes – and of learning to return that stare – she writes:

I’ve never seen such colors. The Rajasthani women wear lime greens, pine greens, saffron and tangerine oranges, lemon yellows and tumeric yellows, pomegranate and blood reds–and these colors mixed in with the incredible array of saris makes my eyes swim. I feel drunk on the color: it’s edible, tangible, colors I could walk on. If the colors in Malaysia were like wings, this is like flocks, waves, oceans of color.

In her latest post, she describes a visit to the cloth market at Udaipur:

Sometimes mirrors are sewn in, sometimes sequins, giving the cloth an extra glitter. On the really fine stuff, gold and silver thread is worked in. But what catches me again and again is the unmitigated sensuality of the cloth and the clothing. Colors to make poets die–they cannot be written–and live again–hope springs eternal. Colors to make women want to be beautiful or to feel beautiful, or at least this woman. You start imagining your home decked out in these colors. A room for reds, a room for blues, a room for greens, and a room for whites. Who knew white came in a rainbow of shades, hues, subtleties? A creamy white cotton relaxes next to the sharp shiny silk white; a matte hand-woven white envelopes where a filmy woolen white pulls one along like a breeze.

This is travel blogging at its best. Who needs photos?

*

Reading blogs before bed may or may not be a good idea. In my last dream before waking, I had been invited to a costume party at Elck’s flat in New York City, which he jokingly refers to as Long Hall. It was enormous. We sat awkwardly across from each other on overstuffed, Victorian chairs, Elck and I, and realized we had absolutely nothing to say to one another, having long ago exhausted our eloquence in our blogs. Then other people began flowing in. They were all wearing gorgeous saris and matching headscarves, even the men.

Suddenly, I realized I was similarly outfitted, Lord knows how. The six meters of cloth were striking, Andi, but they were suffocating! I stripped back down to my usual jeans and quilted plaid shirt.

Before I knew it, however, I was wrapped in a sari again! How was this happening? Clearly, someone must be slipping something into my drink – or else those two wily magicians Elck wrote about the other day were hiding somewhere about and using me for an impromptu demonstration of their powers. For the second time, I divested myself of the exotic cloth, folded it and placed it on the chair. My usual cocktail party paranoia set in. Why was nobody talking to me? Were they really all snickering at me, or was it just my imagination?

Well, you know how these kinds of insecurity dreams go: once you get into an imaginative rut, it’s hard to change course. The third time, I found myself outfitted in a heavy, gray monk’s habit. In addition, they had strapped one of those backpacks for carrying small children on my back. What did this mean? I had no idea. But I knew this much: they weren’t going to get away with it!

I tore off the backpack and the habit and carried them into an empty storeroom. There was only one thing to do, I realized as I stood there listening to the clinking of wineglasses, high-pitched laughter and fragments of witty repartee. I would take off all my clothes! That’ll teach ’em to make fun of the hillbilly!

I remembered the last time I had been naked at a party, a late-night affair with a backyard hot tub on a quiet back street in Tyrone. Everyone else was naked, so I figured it was cool. Only months later did someone leak the truth: they’d all been staring at me! No one had seen that much body hair on a human being before, my friend Chris informed me. “We weren’t making fun of you!” he assured me. “We were just, you know, amazed! I mean, you even have hair on your butt!

So fifteen people – including one fairly attractive, hetero female and a couple bisexuals – had been staring at my naked butt. Great.

But that was years ago – long before I discovered blogging. Now, after ten months on the Via Negativa, I said to myself, being naked at a costume party seems pretty much par for the course. I can do this!

Unfortunately for the sake of this retelling, that’s when I woke up. So I guess you’ll have to supply your own endings. And I’m afraid that, since I have put the image of my hairy, naked body unbidden into your heads, your dreams too may take a disturbing turn, like a pile of yellow leaves on the sidewalk. They are suddenly carried on a gust . . .