Category: Memoir

I don’t like to write about myself too often, but a personal blogger can’t avoid it altogether. A few things about family here, too.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exorcism

Daoist advice

The Big Idea woke me up after less than six hours’ sleep. Hey, what’s the big idea? I asked. You’re about to find out, it said. Put down your sleep and follow me.

Me: Go away and leave me alone. I need a new project like I need a hole in the head.

B.I.: There’s a hole in everything. That’s how the mutagens get in.

Me: Spare me the bad Leonard Cohen paraphrases. Hell no, I won’t glow!

B.I: Thirty-year-old bumper sticker slogans won’t save the earth, either. But I just might.

Me: Hey, whoa! The track record for ideas saving the earth is really, really poor. Just about every time people have tried that, they’ve ended up providing cover for new systems of oppression instead. Look at Marxism, Fascism, Christianity. We don’t need any more of those kinds of big ideas. Go away.

B.I.: I am not that big! Besides, I am much too whimsical to inspire sociopaths like Stalin or Constantine, and you know it. I would be at best a part — a small part — of any solution. Just one of many things that could help bring about a subtle but significant shift in the global consciousness…

Me: “A shift in the global consciousness”?! Jesus fucking christ. Take your goddamn simplistic New Age babble and get the hell out of my head!

B.I.: So you’re content to go on drifting through life as a tinkerer, a putterer, an intellectual dilettante? You don’t want to contribute to something larger than yourself?

Me: I contribute every time I capture an insight on paper — or in pixels, as the case may be. And it’s not like I’m completely self-centered, either. Well over half my energies these days are already directed toward promoting other people’s work. If I decide to put you into practice yet, that will not only eat into these other commitments, but leave me with hardly any time for my own creative work. Not to mention rob me of sleep on a regular basis, give me ulcers, and lead in all probability to an early grave.

B.I.: But I could make you famous! Then your own words would have an astronomically larger audience. And eventually, once I’m well established, you could pass the baton to someone else and go back to what you’re doing now.

Me: Get thee behind me, Satan.

B.I.: Well, who’s got the messianic complex now? You see — you do want to save the earth.

Me: The very idea that we should aspire to “save the earth” — that any one of us, or even any group of us, could possibly begin to comprehend what the earth needs — it’s total hubris. It’s nothing but the old colonialist, white-man’s-burden bullshit times ten. The earth doesn’t need to be saved, it needs to be left the fuck alone.

B.I.: That’s a very convenient belief for someone who happens to own thousands of dollars worth of stock in evil transnational corporations. Come on. Give up everything you have and follow me.

Me: Don’t try to sweeten the deal. You know what a masochist I am. Look, the fact is I am not the right person — not your Saul, if we want to keep playing with this ridiculous New Testicle analogy. Even the best idea, if brought into the world by the wrong person, will either be still-born or die slowly and painfully after a few, heart-wrenching years of life.

B.I.: But nobody else would love me as well as you do! And you do, admit it. Why else does anyone wake in the middle of the night? What you lack in connections and technical expertise you could more than make up for in passionate commitment.

Me: Tired. I’m so tired.

B.I.: People would literally come out of the woodwork to help. O.K., figuratively. But build it — build me — and they will come.

Me: O.K., that’s it. When an idea depends on clichés from sentimental baseball movies to communicate its importance, it is officially NO LONGER WELCOME IN MY HEAD. Get out! Get out!

To be continued. Or — in all likelihood — not.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

All this time

leaving trunk

I was three and a half when my mom went off to the hospital to give birth to my younger brother. Dad was left in charge. Five days later, my maternal grandmother arrived to help out, and was astonished to discover that I was wearing five pairs of underpants, one overtop the other. Every morning my dad had reminded me to put on clean underwear, and I had.

This story is sometimes still re-told at large family gatherings to general merriment. Yes, kids can be literal. This afternoon when I walked into my parents’ house, Mom said to her four-year-old granddaughter, “Here comes trouble!” “What do you mean?” Elanor said. “That’s not trouble! It’s just Uncle Dave.” Thanks. I think.

Two weeks ago, I caught a whiff of body odor from my underarms. As long as I change shirts regularly, I never get B.O. I decided it must be time to do laundry. The next morning, when I went to pull out the T-shirt from inside the usual layers of turtleneck, sweatshirt, and quilted flannel shirt (I keep a cool house), I discovered not one but two T-shirts, the newer one underneath the old. It gave me a funny kind of deja vu.

*

I’ve written before about the dreams I used to have in which I’d walk over the ridge and discover another hollow, parallel to this one, often with very similar buildings and inhabitants, “where the orchard was never bulldozed out in the 1950s and the old farmhouse was spared its extreme makeover into a faux plantation home. Everything is twice as big and twice as far.” Last night I had a version of this dream, but the previously unknown, Land-of-Faerie Plummer’s Hollow I found myself staring down into this time was a hellscape of strip-mine terraces and settling ponds: Lost Mountain.

Or rather, it was Lost Mountain crossed with a very local instance of mountaintop removal northeast along this same ridge, where an area known as Skytop was carved out to make room for a controversial highway cut a few years back, and a smaller geographic analogue to Plummer’s Hollow was almost completely buried in what turned out to be toxic pyritic fill. I shudder every time we drive over it on our way to Penn State. It’s like we’re driving over our own grave.

*

When I was a teenager, I used to day-dream about finding a small clearing in the woods where tree branches touched overhead, water dripped in a hidden spring, and you couldn’t hear a sound that wasn’t natural. Sometimes it had a small hut in the middle of it, but most of the time it didn’t. When I went to Japan in my sophomore year of college, I think I was still searching for that clearing — it had acquired Zen and Shinto overtones. I visited hundreds of rural shrines and temples that year, and would often take a bus or train to the end of the line and wander around in the hills. I was a bit of a romantic, it’s fair to say. Then I’d come back into the city and get back-slappingly drunk with friendly strangers. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking for that magic clearing and just stuck with the drinking.

Last week, for no particular reason, that old day-dream sprung to mind again. Maybe I’d still been inhabiting it all this time without realizing it. I took a walk up to the ridgetop, and instead of a second hollow, found myself looking into a sunlit clearing that stretched along the far side of our property line for half a mile where a small-scale logging operation has been underway since August. I’d been avoiding it for weeks. As my mother said resignedly the other day, at least we have a better view of the migrating hawks and eagles now. I stared across the valley at the Allegheny Front and saw another recently logged patch, marked with the raw Z of a steep haul road.

Today was crystal-clear, so I went back with my camera to take some pictures for documentary purposes. Every disturbed patch of forest recovers differently, based on chance factors as well as features intrinsic to the site, so I like to observe what I can. This was a diameter-limit cut, with everything under ten inches in diameter still standing except for the collateral damage of saplings run over by the skidder, so aesthetically it wasn’t as harsh as it could have been. But the freshly cut stumps were still hard to look at, especially those from trees I remembered well. I snapped more pictures of stumps than anything else. I studied the patterns left by the chainsaw’s teeth, the way they made a crosshatch with the concentric layers of what had once been xylem, the bark that would never be stretched over another new layer of life.

One pair of stumps from a double-trunked oak had small hollows at their center — a surprise to the loggers, I imagine. They must’ve found solid wood not too much farther up the tree, though, because I didn’t see any discarded logs lying about. I brought my face down close to avoid the glare on the top surface of the stumps, peered into the closest hollow and saw another face staring back. Hello sky. Hello water.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What I’ve been doing on my internet vacation

A freak snowstorm on Thursday night/Friday morning ripped down numerous, still-leafed-out limbs and some whole trees. We got up to five inches in Plummer’s Hollow, though the accumulation dwindled to almost zero at the bottom of the hollow. State College, which is roughly at the same elevation as our farm, made the national news. The damage was greatest on the trees with the largest leaves: oaks, maples, tulip poplars, and black locusts — the reverse of what tends to happen during icestorms that hit after the leaves are down, when oaks and tulips are among the most damage-resistant trees.

The storm left us without power for fourteen hours, and without internet and telephone for three days and counting. I’m typing this from a computer in my brother’s house in Tyrone. So how have I been taking advantage of this enforced separation from the internet?

  • I’ve been getting some reading done. My parents subscribe to a few magazines, such as Newsweek, Orion, and the new weekly Christian Science Monitor, and this kind of reading is a fair substitute for a lot of what I’m used to reading online (though it’s frustrating not to be able to Google references for more information). It’s kind of like taking methadone to treat heroin addiction: it’s fundamentally the same substance, but without the high. Reading magazines, it’s more difficult to shake the persistent impression that you’re actually just wasting time.
  • I’ve been checking the internet connection.
  • I’ve been reading copies of American Poetry Review from 2008. Penn State Library discards its paper copies at the end of every year when they get it on microfilm, and a friend of mine who works in the library passes them on to me. I certainly wouldn’t pay money for APR, but it’s amusingly snooty and a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the U.S. poetry establishment. (In a year’s worth of cover poets, the only one who manages not to look like a dork is Stanley Moss, who posed for his photo leaning on a horse’s ass.) I’m surprised that APR keeps publishing in such a disposable format rather than putting full content up on the web, but poets are a conservative lot. The editor of Linebreak tells me that some of the poets they solicit work from refuse to submit to an online journal.
  • I’ve been checking the internet connection.
  • I re-read Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole’s novella. For a story without much of a plot, it was surprisingly re-readable. However, I did feel that he should have done more with the mysterious Ondaatje reader on the danfo. I hope she gets a more substantial role in the screenplay adaptation.
  • I’ve been checking the internet connection.
  • I also re-read another book by a blog buddy: Tom Montag’s The Idea of the Local. The essays about walking made me feel I should take up walking for exercise again — photography has made me such a dawdler! However, the weather has been cold or wet, so I didn’t actually go on any long walks.
  • I’ve been checking the internet connection.
  • I started a fire in the woodstove, something I rarely do anymore. I guess the flicker of flames behind isinglass were a substitute for the flickering light of a computer monitor. It made the house too warm, though, and I had trouble sleeping.
  • I’ve been checking the internet connection.
  • I read most of Lost Mountain, a searing book about mountaintop removal that’s been sitting on my coffee table for more than a year, alternately beckoning and repelling. Who wants to be reminded about where our electricity comes from, its terrible cost? But the book turned out to be very well written, and sympathetic in its treatment of miners, mining, and Appalachian culture. The cast of characters is very compelling, including Lost Mountain — that’s its actual name — whose obliteration the author chronicles month by month over the course of a year. Compared with something like that, this storm seems very minor indeed.
  • And now and then I’ve been checking the interent connection.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

The dark night

I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

ID

Second syllable of what was once my name, now used only by the bank, by the government, and by certain few women who insist on it: you are like the necktie I long ago forgot how to fasten. No, scratch that. You are like that great bulb of an Adam’s apple I sported before my neck widened and absorbed it. I and D, you make me trochaic. You turn me into my ancestor, that quiet boy I suspect that I, as a Dave, would’ve hated, because he thought he was special, and not in the short-bus kind of way. A David. God’s favorite sociopath, going buck-wild in front of the ark: no David is ever quite free of that chaos, that cauldron, that id.

But Dave? A name without promise or poetry. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Dave now, you say — but that’s precisely the point. It was only when I freed myself of the i.d. that I started to discover who all I might become.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rain

I scan the sky the way others study
a lover’s face. It is
all I have. Three nights ago when
I went out to urinate,
the smell of rain was so rich I couldn’t
get enough of it.
I turned my face to the invisible sky
& stood there taking
great deep breaths, drawing the strange
air into my nostrils,
& when I went back in my glasses were
so wet I had to grope
for a cloth — swatch of cotton softer
than any skin.
__________

Sorry for my relative absense around here; I’ve been busy with qarrtsiluni stuff.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

On the Road to Santiago

My brother had chanted its name for days
until, voilà, it hung
a hundred feet above our astonished faces:
lammergeier, impossible to miss,
the open book of its body so wide
it could be read by the thinnest updrafts,
dark against the clouds —

& us standing by the very rock
that Roland’s sword was said to have split
when he fought the Basques & prepared
a feast for vultures. But this one
with its fully feathered head
& wisp of beard looked nothing like
one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.

We lamented its empty talons,
having fed ourselves on tales
of an expert locksmith
taking the bones one by one up
into the sky & letting them drop
onto some likely rock, there to glean
from the splinters the wine-red
marrow, mother of blood.
We watched it pivot,
rocking in the high wind,
then slide quick as a sword down
that long & boney ridge.

 

International Vulture Awareness Day

Click on the image to read the other posts in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day and learn why vulture conservation is so vital. Sentence-of-the-day award goes to Charlie at 10,000 Birds:

On the face of it, all this attention for a group of scavenging birds that are fairly universally seen as ugly, quarrelsome, and unkempt, dark reminders of mortality, and definitely not the sort of guests you’d invite to a dinner-party (“We sent the invitations out Mrs Vulture, I know we did — it must just be coincidence that both you and the Hyenas didn’t receive them…”) must seem a little odd (especially to any non-birder who stumbles across IVAD and who had probably assumed that we birders usually celebrate delicacy, beauty or song rather than excrement-coated bags of feathers who spend much of their day with their heads shoved up a rotting corpse).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Lacewing

green lacewing

This lacewing may be experiencing a teachable moment. I know I was: up late dreading poetry, I suddenly realized I was dreading over someone else’s shoulder. It must’ve come in through a hole in the screen door, and perhaps thought — erroneously, of course — that the computer screen was another way out.

Green lacewings are as sensitive as they look. Their hearing is so acute that some species can even pick up bats’ sonar, whereupon they fold their wings and plummet to the ground to avoid capture. They communicate through subtle vibrations of the body, especially during courtship — inaudible “songs” unique to each species.

This was not always such a sensitive being, though. In its wild youth as an aphid-lion it ate any soft-bodied invertebrate in its path, and was even capable of resorting to cannibalism if no other food was handy. It had large sucking jaws with which to grasp its prey and inject stomach acid, turning the other’s insides into a Slurpee.

If you too are up late tonight, you might still have time to confess your poetic sins before “100% Honest Day” is over at Read Write Poem. Here’s what I wrote:

I have a deep-seated fear of unconscious plagiarism, to the point where I even suspect all my best lines and images to be stolen from someone else. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusism for publishing my work anywhere other than my own blog is the fear that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern poetry will discover my unwitting thefts. And even if I could know for sure that all my works are original, I would probably continue to feel at some level that I am an utter fraud as a poet. (I wonder if this is why so many of my fellow poets get MFAs?)

If I want to overcome this fear, I think I simply need to retrain my ears. Surely it can’t be too difficult to learn to distinguish one’s own unique vibrations from anybody else’s. My aphid-lion days are, after all, well behind me now.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Modularity

After the death of my fierce Nanna, my grandfather, otherwise lucid as ever, began to lose his grip on names. His grandson he called the little fella, his grandaughter the little girl, and nearly every object became the thing. Set the thing on the thing and bring me the thing, he’d say. Which thing? That thing, he’d point. The thing! His stories were even harder to interpret, with no landmarks at hand to aid in navigation. He’d gesture anyway, frowning at his failure to make us follow. When I was head of the research lab at Mobil — he liked to tell us — anyone who seemed to have a good idea, I’d say go ahead, work on that! He’d left the details up to others, and got his name on scores of patents — half the plastics of the age. He’d learned to read organic compounds with almost Talmudic devotion, and had come to understand the importance of thinking big, but not what can happen to small details that don’t fit into an engineer’s tidy equations. How they wash downstream and out to sea. I’m glad he didn’t live to read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It might’ve reduced him to a complete stutter, so many bland things stripped of their thingness by decades of sunlight, his grand inventions converging in submerged islands and ground down into toxic floating sand.