Photos – Page 51 – Via Negativa

October 9, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Disaster area

It starts innocently enough: just a small rift, a discontinuity in the otherwise seamless joinery of our days. The pulse quickens. We feel a bit more… alive. Yes.

We were always told such frightening things about courting disaster. But what do the old people know? Surely they are just jealous of our youth and energy — they want to deny us the heady pleasures they themselves are too worn down to handle.

And the pleasures now are nothing if not heady. Bark turns to bite; bony dinosaur hide splits open and lifts into feathers. Welcome to evolution, baby!

But each new opening only retains its brightness for a little while before it, too, turns dull. The body is continually subverting the mind’s best efforts to fly free, and returning us to our cages of solid matter.

Nothing matters: that is our chant as we look for new chasms to outgrow, new eyeholes to peer out of, new mouths with which to whisper in disaster’s ear: save us.

And so we become like snakes, slipping our skins, going belly to belly with our parent rock. Our tongues taste the wind in stereo. We tap into the simple on-or-off reptile brain.

With our fellow heads we talk, we dance, we howl. Disaster possesses us in turn. We paint our headstones.

All photos taken at or near Wolf Rocks, a popular teen hang-out spot in the Gallitzin State Forest of Pennsylvania.

October 8, 2007 by Dave Bonta

For men may come and men may go…

Fans of 19th-century poetry in particular might enjoy my mother’s nature column from October 2004, October’s Bright Blue Weather.

Dad and I shared a love of the outdoors, of poetry, and also of operettas. As a teenager, I would sit up until midnight with him, watching the old Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy movies on television. One of our favorites was Sigmund Romberg’s Student Prince. As we drove that October day, I sang Romberg’s “Golden Days” — a song of remembering the “golden days, in the sunshine of our happy youth.” And, indeed, Dad reminisced about other Octobers as he “oohed” and “aahed” over the spectacular color. Now that he is gone, a golden October woods reminds me of that “Golden Days” afternoon with him when the sun backlit a shimmer of golden, scarlet, purple, and orange leaves. And every time I look at our stream, I remember Dad reciting Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Brook” whenever he drove up our road.

October 6, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Journey

The birch leaf had gone flying, flying, and had lost its way. It got caught in the needles of a juniper tree beside the house and couldn’t get free. Up under the gable, an unilluminated spotlight kept watch over the garden from the end of its rusty eyestalk. It was the day in early October when the ant drones swarm up out of the ground, climb to the top of the nearest blade of grass or shrunken head of a weed, and take to the air on flimsy, disposable wings. A few of them would get to mate; most would not. All would die soon.

That night, high winds heralded the arrival of the cold. The leaf was ripped from the juniper’s prickly embrace and sent tumbling far out over the dark forest, where oaks creaked and rattled their branches and acorns thudded down like hailstones. It fell in a wide gyre through the crown of a chestnut oak, slipped through the outspread branches of the understorey gums and landed at the edge of a moss-covered clearing. The wind hissed in the dry, drought-curled foliage of the lowbush blueberries and rustled through the forest litter — the fallen leaves that had preceded the birch leaf in death. They lay dozens deep, whole leaves together with those that had been riddled by caterpillars or skeletonized by leaf miners, and let molds and bacteria begin the slow work of turning them into loam.

Another reminder to keep an eye out for spooky trees.

September 29, 2007 by Dave Bonta

First blood

View the slideshow.

Autumn has come to Margaret’s Woods: to the sawhorse and the stump, the tangled beds of hayscented fern and Japanese stiltgrass. The blood-colored Japanese barberry bushes are festooned with rows of scarlet berries and a scattering of fallen maple leaves impaled on their thorns. Feathered migrants learn the way to the best fruit from the early colors: wild gravevines are turning yellow, and the Virginia creepers are red flames against the pale trunks of white oaks. Hercules’-club trees are bowing under the weight of their monstrous purple heads, and their three-foot-long, triply-compound leaves fall nearly intact in the rush to bare their goods.

It’s a cool morning. A cranefly sits motionless on a blackberry leaf, too cold to fly. A pair of pileated woodpeckers, year-round residents too young to remember when this 100-acre deer-ravaged savanna was a mature forest, sun themselves at the top of an oak snag already dead when the loggers came through, one dry, beautiful autumn just like this. Their red crests blaze as they groom themselves, finding insect nourishment under their own black bark. This morning, a new autumn color — hunter’s orange — has entered the woods, and with luck, the first arrows will find their targets and water the parched ground with fresh blood.

September 24, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Tea leaves

I haven’t been in much of a mood for writing this past week. But when I took my camera out for a walk yesterday afternoon, everything I looked at reminded me of pen marks on paper, beginning with the mast where the electric wires connect to my house in swirly Gothic serifs.

The clear air made for sharp contrasts. A runic pair of aspen trunks at the edge of the woods stood out as clearly against the dark background as any light font on a stylishly dark webpage. (Click on photos to view at larger sizes.)

What does it mean to see the world not merely as something created — a work of art — but as text? The origins of most writing systems are closely linked to divination, I believe: the world itself was read long before humans devised their own glyphs. And as phenomenologist David Abram noted in The Spell of the Sensuous, reading connects us to a form of absorption virtually indistinguishable from a shamanic trance.

How to pronounce them, these new letters hidden in the cattails? The wind has one idea, and the wren another.

In the bottom corner of the field I found some wild mint, which I picked, brought home, and made tea out of. I found the mint because I stopped to admire a garden spider’s web. She too had correctly read the tea leaves, though what they said to her wasn’t tea but flowers — and insect pollinators. And sure enough, the purple blooms were abuzz.

Much as I want to find significance in the world, I don’t want to limit it to a single interpretation. This is where poets and omen-readers part company. The former insist on retaining a large element of mystery and nuance — even out-right confusion. In the same way that the perception of music depends upon the recognition of noise, the part of the world that eludes easy interpretation brings the rest into sharp relief: for every figure there must be a ground. Science now treats DNA as a kind of programming language, but so-called junk DNA accounts for up to 90 percent of a genetic sequence. I don’t know if that’s directly analogous or not, but I’m a poet, so I’ll just throw it out there.

Genetic code and computer languages should serve to remind us, though, that language doesn’t simply mean; it transforms. This is the point that academic disquisitions on hermeneutics so often miss. We read for the same reason that our Paleolithic ancestors went into shamanic trances: to feel ourselves a part of a larger whole. The rightness that one senses in natural surroundings — even in a badly damaged ecosystem — is far more than a matter of interpretation. It is our body remembering how to listen.

The tea was delicious. And I think my dry spell is almost over.

September 17, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Going to ground

Poets are popularly supposed to have their heads in the clouds, but not me. Some days, I rarely look up. Why bother? There’s so much to see right at my feet.

Even still, I can’t avoid the occasional view of the clouds. I’m not sure what this shard of glass is doing in the middle of a well-used trail. I had a bit of a Chicken Little moment before I figured out what the hell it was.

Some people are obsessed with the idea of a sky-father watching over them. But the ground has eyes, too. Finding these puffballs right after the shard of glass, I’m reminded of the Aztec kenning for the earth: mirror that smokes.

Views of autumn foliage from a moving car quickly grow tiresome. It’s much more rewarding to do your leaf-peeping one leaf at a time, I find. And again, the ground is the best place to look — you don’t need binoculars.

With the temperature in the mid-50s, every pool of sunlight has its sunbathing flies. I almost expect to see them rubbing their front legs together to get warm.

A little farther along the trail, I find another piece of misplaced sky: a patch of mud from an almost dried-up spring shining blue from animal excrement. A Google search of “blue mud” turns up the idiomatic phrase “full of blue mud,” meaning “full of shit.”

A log-end down by the stream bristles with white polypores. But when I bend close, it’s these pinhead-sized cup fungi that catch my eye instead. They remind me of spider mites, seemingly trying to compensate for their diminutive size by being as red as possible.

The stream has been reduced in many places to a series of large puddles. The only ripples on the surface come when the water strider changes position, which it does twice a minute or so. I watch it for a while, fascinated as always by the saucer-shaped dimples under its feet, like a literal demonstration of Einstein’s discovery that gravity bends space.

On the way back up the road, I’m charmed by the view of a white wood aster against a large pine tree. Whatever the rest of the tree might be doing against the sky almost doesn’t matter. I’ll have all winter to look at things like that.

September 14, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Making sense

Qarrtsiluni, the online literary magazine I help curate, is now soliciting for submissions to a new theme, Making Sense. “We challenge you to build up a world in scent, taste, touch, sound, or any combination of these. … To have a full and concrete awareness of space, physical detail, and emotion, you do not need sight,” the editors write.

Last weekend, I ate both eyes of a fish. They were slightly sour, and full of a salty juice that couldn’t be tears. Later, somebody told me: You’ll never cry again!

If you saw your nose all by itself, would you recognize it? What would it smell like?

A. sat on the floor and sketched our feet as we listened to Bach’s partitas for solo violin. You can tell from the sketches: those feet had completely forgotten that they were feet.

Conversing with someone who is undergoing a massage is a bit like consulting a Ouija board. The words hold extra weight for passing through the hands, but it’s hard to tell where they’re coming from.

I’ve been single for so long, I like to go out in the rain just for the contact.

September 11, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Iron aged

So much of modern urban coolness seems to derive from smooth, reflective surfaces.

A deliberately aged, industrial artifact can draw a crowd.

Surrounded by millions of strangers, who wants to risk open vulnerability?

Unless you grew up in the rust belt, surrounded by shuttered factories, I guess you’d have no particular reason to associate a Richard Serra sculpture with unemployment, drug abuse, and domestic violence.

The primary associations would presumably be romantic or nostalgic. It would seem almost rustic, perhaps — a wall in search of a garden, an extension of the earth.

Its vulnerability to the elements might connote a kind of innocence. Visitors would be warned against touching the rusty surface, or even (for the indoor portions of the exhibition) snapping photos.

All it takes is a simple frame to turn the innocent ironic.

But the sculptor wants to provoke “an engagement between the viewer, the site, and the work.” We must do what we would never do with a stranger: take off our sunglasses and meet the iron’s yellow eyes. No irony there.

September 5, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Making Sense

Qarrtsiluni, the online literary magazine I help publish, has a brand new look and a brand new theme: Making Sense. Here’s how guest editors Katherine Abbott and Rob Mackenzie describe it:

Writers often lean on what they see. But for this issue, we challenge you to build up a world in scent, taste, touch, sound, or any combination of these. We are not outlawing imagery, not at all. We value a clear, active connection with the world. As Wislawa Szymborska said in “Conversation with a Stone”: “Even sight heightened to become all-seeing/ will do you no good without a sense of taking part.” To have a full and concrete awareness of space, physical detail, and emotion, you do not need sight. Take your impetus from another sense, or let material from another sense define or guide the piece.

Read the post for the rest of the guidelines, and the other news about the magazine.

September 3, 2007 by Dave Bonta

IRFD 3: Plummer’s Hollow Run

My young cousin Morgan had so much fun exploring the mountain with her Great Aunt Marcia last year on Labor Day weekend, she brought along her best friend Devon this time. They arrived around 10:00 and wanted to go down to the stream and start looking under rocks right away.

Salamanders of two main species — slimy and northern dusky — live under the rocks in abundance, but not the ones out in the water, which was mostly where the kids wanted to be. With two kids, the energy level was quite high, and splashing in the water, debarking rotten logs, and looking for wild mushrooms often diverted their attention from the task at hand. Plus, only Mom was quick enough to actually catch a salamander — or perhaps it was just that she didn’t recoil from their slimy skin. The kids wanted to take one home with them, but we explained how these were lungless salamanders that breathed directly through their skins, and that they would die if removed from their subterranean homes.

We found a couple of earthworms, and Morgan was delighted with a small one that quickly came to life on her hand and circled her thumb. She was having such a good time, Mom and I couldn’t bring ourselves to mention that it was a non-native, invasive species, like almost all earthworms north of the Mason-Dixon line. Why risk spoiling the magic of discovery with a dose of gloom and doom?

Other rock-flippers had preceded us that morning, but we weren’t lucky enough to catch sight of them — unlike Fred First, who won the IRFD Grand Prize for getting a picture of something other than a human flipping a rock yesterday, which we will consequently have to rename Interspecies Rock-Flipping Day. (And no, I still haven’t figured out what the prize will be. Any suggestions?)

Many of the rocks in the stream concealed crayfish burrows, which Devon in particular took great delight in finding. When I caught an actual crayfish, though, neither one of them could be convinced to hold it. It waved its claws belligerently at me as I crouched to take its picture.

About a quarter mile below the houses, we came to an area where Mom had taken a couple of other kids earlier in the week. Judging by the print on top of this rock, not all the rocks had been returned to their exact positions. That’s probably O.K. for creek stones, though — they get moved around quite a bit in the normal course of events, so the creatures that live under them must be adapted to a fair amount of turmoil.

The rock with the rock-print on it turned out to be hiding a wood frog! Mom said they had found a frog here the other day, too, under a different rock — presumably the same individual. As their name suggests, wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) live in the woods, and we tend to think of them as needing water only during their brief mating season in early spring, when they crowd ephemeral woodland pools for raucous orgies. The rest of the time, they are off in the forest doing who knows what, and perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to discover one in what is essentially salamander habitat. They may not breathe through their skins, but they do need to keep cool and moist, and the humus isn’t nearly as deep as it used to be with all the non-native earthworms gobbling it up.

To read other bloggers’ posts about IRFD, please refer to the links list at the end of yesterday’s post.