Where I grew up, and still live for part of the year. It’s located near Tyrone, Pennsylvania in the valley and ridge province of the Appalachians. Plummer’s Hollow Run drains into the Little Juniata, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
2007 (November 22)
Something approaches at a slow shuffle, gray in the gray light: porcupine. He threads the thistle patch, squeezes under the porch.
2008 (November 27)
That drum so low it sounds as if it’s in your head? A ruffed grouse, beating the air with its wings like one hand clapping. Or so they say.
2009 (November 26)
As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl.
2010 (November 25)
Steady rain, and the temperature just two degrees above freezing. In the herb bed, the pale blue wheel of a blossom on the invasive myrtle.
spectral frequency display of this podcast (click to see larger)
On a long-ago family trip to Europe, we were amused and impressed by a national park sign in the French Pyrenees that urged visitors to turn off their radios and “listen to the music of the mountain.” But do these have to be mutually exclusive? Today’s podcast episode is what a radio station devoted to the music of the mountain might sound like. Following my five-minute spoken intro, it’s nothing but natural and anthropogenic sound recorded from my front porch between dawn and full daylight, 7:00 to 7:35 a.m., on Wednesday, October 27.
Readers of my Morning Porch microblog sometimes seem to think I live far removed from the human world, but as this recording shows, that’s hardly the case — and yesterday morning was a quiet one, especially for this time of year when strong inversion layers often mean that the highway noise from over the ridge to the west drowns out everything else. I was also fortunate in that the wind was hardly blowing, and because it had rained during the night, there was a steady if irregular beat as water dripped off the top roof onto the porch roof.
I used my new toy, a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder, which packs front and rear mikes and records in a non-lossy, .wav format. Just listening through it with ear buds while it records really focuses my attention on the soundscape. As I say in the intro, I’ve long been interested in natural sound. John Cage is a hero of mine, and I was pleased to read a new appreciation of him in the October 4 issue of the New Yorker — it isn’t online for non-subscribers, but Lorianne DiSabato was kind enough to send it to me. The author, Alex Ross, quotes John Cage about his infamous “4’33””: “There’s no such thing as silence.” And he quotes composer and scholar Kyle Gann, who recently published a book with that phrase as its title, and describes the composition as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.”
Making a podcast strikes me as another way to frame “environmental and unintended sounds,” though in the natural soundscape birds and other animals do occupy distinct aural niches, so I think it’s no accident that natural sounds seem more “right” than, for example, mechanical noise. The fact that we evolved in concert (pun intended) with the former obviously colors our perceptions as well. But I do think there’s value in learning to listen to all sound, even noise — which is increasingly inescapable — as if it were composed. It’s a practice perhaps similar to religious faith, increasing one’s sense of gratitude for the givenness of the umwelt. Perhaps I’ll repeat this experiment next May or June, at the height of migratory bird breeding season, so y’all can hear a real dawn chorus, but the more minimal sound of an autumn morning has its pleasures, too, as I hope you’ll agree.
Many cultures recognize natural sound as the ultimate inspiration for human music. The 4th-century B.C. Daoist classic Zhuangzi includes a paean to “the music of heaven” — the sum of environmental sounds — calling it superior to all other forms of music. And the Irish Fenian Cycle includes this exchange, translated by James Stephens:
Once, as they rested on a chase, a debate arose among the Fianna-Finn as to what was the finest music in the world.
‘Tell us that,’ said Fionn, turning to Oisin.
‘The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,’ cried his merry son.
‘A good sound,’ said Fionn. ‘And you, Oscar,’ he asked, ‘what is to your mind the finest of music?’
‘The top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield,’ cried the stout lad.
‘It is a good sound,’ said Fionn.
And the other champions told their delight: the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laughter of a gleeful girl, or the whisper of a moved one.
‘They are good sounds all,’ said Fionn.
‘Tell us chief,’ one ventured, ‘what do you think?’
‘The music of what happens,’ said great Fionn, ‘that is the finest music in the world.’
A few highlights. Those who bore easily might skip ahead and start listening about half-way through, when bird calls are more or less continuous.
4:49 end of blather, start of recording
4:50 first of numerous loud taps that punctuate the recording: water dripping onto the roof
5:30 distant horn/whistle, not train
6:35 first bird call (white-throated sparrow, I think)
6:55 unidentified mechanical noise
8:54 more sparrowish chirping
9:36 the flock moves closer
11:00 first cardinal
11:15 brief cut to erase noise of wind filter being inserted over mikes
11:36 first Carolina wren
11:49 beginning of jet overflight (cruising altitude)
13:03 blue jay calls intermingle with wren song
15:19 song sparrow singing
17:00 Carolina wren getting closer
17:47 first crow
18:44 crows getting closer
20:00 two wrens greet each other
25:40 distant plane
27:10 nuthatch’s “yank yank” call intermingled with red-bellied woodpecker’s “cha cha cha” and crow caws
28:36 plane still going over
29:26 begin loud/close crows
31:36 call of pileated woodpecker on fly-by
37:00 another, more distant jet is going over
38:21 crow flies over house
38:30 second snip in recording to remove very loud sound of me leaving porch to answer call of nature
spectral phase display of this podcast (click to see larger—it's beautiful)
The old metal corncrib beside the barn is almost 100 years old, and it shows. In this photo from 1919, it’s the small structure to the left of the barn toward which the toddler appears to be pointing. It’s never been anything but an ugly, functional building, even when it wasn’t yellow with rust. Now the metal roof is bowed in, and is probably beyond saving. We don’t use the building for much of anything these days — I’m not sure how much it was ever used to store corn, since this place was primarily an orchard — and there are plans afoot to tear it down next year and haul the metal off to the scrap yard to be recycled.
And yet inside, the light patterns can be quite beautiful. When I poked my head in today around noon, my camera card was already nearly full with photos of autumn foliage, but I would’ve deleted any of them if I’d needed the room for pictures like this. At first I concentrated on the patterns of light shining in and falling across an old table. Continue reading “Corncrib”
What do you mean
by knife, by wind?
The bluest sky below the wash
of sunset pink, delectable
as a slice of blue fruit riding
the horizon’s blade.
Half a moon over the barn.
The field of goldenrod fuzz
gathering its sparrows, brown
into brown, poor Sam Peabody
as lamentable as ever:
a song that catches in the middle
like a shirt on a thorn.
The wind dying,
& the color in the trees
darkening like dried blood.
So as I mentioned, yesterday was the Big Sit. Though I didn’t count birds, not being a real birder, I did watch a bird for close to twenty minutes, and sitting was most of what she did. I actually don’t know whether she was male or female, but for some reason I thought of her as female. Since I didn’t have a tripod with me, most of the video I shot was kind of shakey, which is why I opted to make this into another one-minute videopoem and cut straight to the standing-up part. Otherwise, I think it would be neat to try and share what it’s really like to watch wildlife (as opposed to what tends to make it onto Animal Planet and the like). When the vulture yawned, I think she was expressing a deep truth about sitting in general.
I approach videohaiku a little differently from regular videopoetry, as you’ll see. For one thing, I prefer the poem to appear as type, without audio. Also, the text can flow more directly from the imagery than with a regular videopoem. And finally, while some videohaiku makers use three short scenes in imitation of the three-line pattern that characterizes most English-language haiku, I prefer the style I’ve followed here: holding the poem until the end of a quiet, meditative scene or two. This resembles the effect of a poem on a scroll, or a haiku following a passage of prose (haibun).
I might get a second videopoem, haiku or otherwise, out of footage I shot today, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.
This entry is part 6 of 34 in the series Small World
The oaks have
dropped more acorns
this year than anyone
can remember. It’s
like walking on ball
bearings, except
sometimes they pop:
a cap comes off
& one blank face
gains a split. It
must be lonely
having the only
mouth. Do you take
a breath? Do you
invent eating?
Do you look for
another broken soul
& improvise some
kind of minimal
kiss? But wait
a while: soon
everyone will awake
& turn & stick
a yellow tongue
into the earth.
More and more publishers are producing video trailers for new books. Perhaps it’s time to start making them for websites, too. This action-packed trailer, though, is intended less to promote The Morning Porch than simply to introduce it to new readers — something to embed on the About page.
I shot the video yesterday for my one-minute movies project, and I suppose I’ll still class it as such even though it goes five seconds over with the addition of the Paul Eluard quote (which I stole from a friend’s pseudonymous Facebook profile a while back). This one is definitely more documentary than videopoem. I could probably make it more exciting with a few, brief inserts of other images: you know, close-ups of things glimpsed from the porch. But that might clash with the message of the text, I don’t know. Here’s what I wrote for it:
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a prisoner, condemned to the same round every day, compelled to do things I had little appetite for, surrounded by others in the same situation, all of us desperate with loneliness and the desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. What would I do? I’m a writer, so I suppose I would write. It would be an almost enviable situation: all that free time. I would take note of everything I saw, immerse myself in the moment no matter how bleak, because daydreaming would only lead to despair. I would write small, spare things 140 characters in length that some would call poems, but that I would see as clauses of one long sentence. I’d be in for life.
It’s astonishing how few local residents are aware of the fall foliage display of black gum, which begins a month or more in advance of most other trees. The oblong pointed leaves go from green to yellow to orange to red, different trees and sometimes even different branches turning on different schedules. But you have to get out of your car to see it: black gum tends to grow either in swamps and bogs or on dry, acidic, heath-oak forests. In Plummer’s Hollow we have plenty of the latter, and black gum is a major understory tree for a couple miles along our Laurel Ridge. About 15 years ago, we built a footpath paralleling the Plummer’s Hollow Road about two-thirds of the way up the ridge-side to afford maximum access to the black gum, following existing animal trails wherever possible. Today we led a small group of fellow nature enthusiasts up Plummer’s Hollow Road and back along Black Gum Trail, trying to spread the word about this under-appreciated tree. Continue reading “Black Gum Trail”
It began raining right around midnight, the first real rain we’d had in more than a month, and I was happy, even though there was a good chance it would make for a soggy International Rock-Flipping Day. It was still raining when I got up around 6:30, but tapered off slowly into drizzle, then fine mist, then nothing at all by noon. Around 3:30, the sun came out.
my first rock for IRFD 2010 (click all photos to see larger versions on Flickr)
So it was with mixed feelings that I slung the camera around my neck and set out to see what, if anything, I might find under some rocks. Due to the severity of the drought, I had a feeling that the answer would be “not much.” But I guess it all depends on what you’re looking for.
I started with a rock in the corner of the little herb/butterfly garden in front of my house, next to the concrete walk — a rock I placed there myself more than 15 years ago for decoration. If IRFD were held in the northern-hemisphere spring, I’m sure it would be good for an assortment of earthworms, sow bugs and ground beetles, but yesterday I saw nothing but shadows.
