Brick and mortar

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I’ve been coming to Penn State’s Pattee Library since I was a kid. My dad worked as a reference librarian there, and I learned my way around the Library of Congress cataloguing system before I learned my times tables. I remember when they first started to computerize the catalogue, how novel that seemed. Dad was active in the American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Services (MARS) committee way back in the dark ages before the p.c. revolution. Now, so many library materials are available through electronic databases, slogans such as “the true university is a collection of books” seem mossy indeed.

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The library has almost doubled in size since I was a kid, with the addition of the new Paterno wing. Everything’s been changed: what’s shelved where, what the different sections are called, how you get from one part of the library to another. They even repainted the ceiling above the central stairwell in the oldest part of the library a few years back. It had been monochrome, but I kind of prefer the new look.

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As an aging alumnus, I most treasure those parts of campus that remind me of the way it was when I was a student. It’s been undergoing a building boom for the last ten years or more, but two of the main ingredients of the central campus landscape that haven’t changed are locally quarried limestone blocks and American elms. The limestone seems especially appropriate because it’s faithful to the underlying geology. Preserving the presence of the American elms seems noble in a kind of Sisyphean way, since Dutch elm disease is such a threat. As soon as a tree contracts it, down it comes and a new elm sapling is planted in its place.

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Since universities may now exist partly or even wholly online, the phrase “brick-and-mortar” has become the usual modifier to distinguish the traditional kind. Built of limestone blocks below and brick above, Old Botany is easily the coolest building on campus. It’s not very big, and no classes meet there, so a lot of people don’t give it a second glance. It reminds me for some reason of the kind of student I used to be, gazing out at the sky, my mind elsewhere.

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I was always dreaming about a shortcut to knowledge, like everyone else since Adam and Eve. These kids today – well, they have that shortcut. Some other dreamers actually set about designing it. It’s called the Internet. Or maybe Google. Or the Wikipedia. Heck, I don’t know – call it the Tower of Babel if you want! Now, hand me another brick…

Walking on the crust

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Geez, Ben, has it really been nine years since you checked out? It was late January, I remember that. Three or four days after getting the news, I was still consumed by violent fantasies of revenge against that unrepentant son of a bitch who got you hooked. I needed someone to blame, I guess. I went out for a walk around the mountain, which was a bit of a struggle due to a deep snowpack with an icy crust that wasn’t quite strong enough to hold me up. So I lurched along, trying hard not to slip and falling through at unpredictable intervals. I made a bet with myself: “If I can take twenty steps on top of the crust without breaking through, I’ll stop fantasizing about violence and try to forgive.” And what do you know? Twenty steps later, I still hadn’t broken through! So I amended it: “If I can make it all the way down this hill on top of the ice…” Damn, how’d I get so light all of a sudden? It was spooky! Finally, I said, “If I can make it all the way back to the house” – and I almost did. I guess it had just been a matter of concentration all along. I could see the smoke from my chimney rising straight up, lighter than the air.

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You know, it’s funny – I’ve never actually sat on your bench. Well, it’s all wrong, the way they installed it facing away from the street. Probably when the plan for downtown benches was first put forth, someone in the Borough Council objected that they might become an inducement for the Wrong Element to loiter and scare people, so they compromised by putting in benches that no one would actually want to sit on for more than a few minutes – shoppers resting their weary arms, someone taking an important call. But your family did well in putting your name on the closest bench to the record store. You know, they have a new bus stop across the street, now. Big new library, too. And dude, right across from your bench, someone just opened a Jamaican restaurant! I heard it’s good.

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The kids still sneak down into “Little New York” to drink. They think they’re gangbangers now – it’s pretty funny. You should see them walking along with their pants down around their knees, all rebelling in step. I’m sure it’s no easier than it ever was to grow up blue-collar in State College, PA. But these days, as every place gets more and more like every other place, probably the only towns that aren’t full of fake-ass shit are the ones that are just about dead. And State College is booming.

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There’ve been a hell of a lot of changes in town and on campus in the last nine years, but one thing hasn’t changed: no matter where you go, in the borough or the surrounding townships, someone is always tearing something down or putting something up.

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“Happy Valley” may have started as a tourism promotion campaign, but then people started to believe it. Penn State even runs its own retirement community now on a hill above the bypass. Who wouldn’t want to grow old on the frontiers of utopia? Somewhere in State College, there’s always a light left burning in broad daylight to reassure us that progress is on the way.

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Proof that at least some people in State College can laugh at themselves: the State College Centennial Pigs. I guess you’d remember this. The official story is that the sculpture was based on an historic photo of a sow nursing two piglets right in the middle of College Avenue, but with the Penn State campus right across the street, the symbolism is pretty hard to miss.

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The shoppes and restaurants downtown come and go, seemingly unaffected by all the new box stores on the outskirts. I’ve never seen so many upscale clothing stores and hair salons in one place. You can actually buy pre-ripped jeans now – imagine that! Instant authenticity! And there are more pizza places, coffee shops and tanning salons than ever. The owner of one tanning place just got busted for making secret videos of his patrons. Sick bastard.

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There are not one, but two Wal-Mart Supercenters now, one for each end of town. A group of about forty local activists staged a protest outside of one of them last month, holding signs and handing out literature. The funny thing is, according to the article in the paper, nobody really gave them a hard time, and some people were downright friendly. Does anyone actually enjoy shopping in a place like that? Go into Wal-Mart and all you hear is stressed-out parents yelling at their kids. I think being greeted at the door by people who are paid to act cheerful sets the tone – the whole place stinks of humiliation.

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Bouyed up the university, State College is still bubble-land surrounded by Bubba-land, metastasizing suburbs with no urban core, its bounty untroubled by the occasional small mutiny.

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Anyway, I don’t want to bore you. I saw your bench sitting there empty next to the record store and thought I’d just say Hey.
__________

Please note that the last photo is not a double exposure, simply a shot of reflections in a store window to the inside of which a poster of John Coltrane had been taped.

When the clouds lift

1.

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Photography can demystify vision, which is good. It teaches you that the ability to see, really see, depends on a kind of aesthetic muscle that gets stronger with use. It teaches you about grace: that “chance favors the prepared mind,” as Louis Pasteur once put it.

2.

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“As I was walking up the stair, I saw a man that wasn’t there.” Well, O.K., I was actually walking down the road, and it was a tree rather than a man, but you get the idea. The sun sets early in a northeast-facing hollow in January. Right around the next bend, I would drop down into the shadow.

3.

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When I was younger and more idealistic, I thought that a direct, Zen-like seeing of things as they are in themselves, completely free of the veil of interpretations, was the only worthwhile goal of authentic insight. Now, I feel that the more ordinary kind of defamiliarization – the anthropomorphic, “othering” impulse – might be just as important. Last week, at a public lecture by the preeminent historian of American religion, Martin E. Marty, I learned a new word that incorporates both the process of making the familiar unfamiliar and making the unfamiliar familiar: syntectics, from the Greek syn-, together, and ektos, outside or external. It seems to have been coined by educational theorists interested in trying to find ways to teach creativity back in the 70s, and if it remains obscure – well, I can think of some pretty obvious reasons for that! Learning to see as a poet, artist or scientist sees involves a relentless questioning of every cliché, every assumption, every accustomed view. But how else, barring enlightenment, can we retain a sense of wonder and at-homeness in a universe far more complex than we can ever hope to imagine?

4.

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“The sacred is that which repels our advance.” I remember when I first came across this quote in a book by the contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis, feeling ridiculously pleased with myself that I had also had this same insight not too many months before. But by now, some four or five years later, I’m afraid this discovery has calcified into another comfortable view. Isn’t the immersion and attempted dissolution of self in other also a sacred thing? Isn’t compassion at least as necessary as syntectics to the perception of holiness? Must the eye or the finger inevitably diminish whatever they touch? Must the mind always grasp in order to understand, or can it learn also to dwell in openness, like an inexhaustible ear?

Landscrape

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On Thursday morning, the remnants of Tuesday night’s ice storm still gave things a bit of sparkle, here and there. Even so, it hardly resembled a typical January landscape. And with any landscape, picturesque typicality is what we look for, isn’t it? Recall that the word for landscape in Mandarin Chinese is composed of the characters for mountain and water: apropos if you happen to live in the mountains; not so apropos if you live in the plains. But in a traditional Chinese landscape painting, the mountains in the far distance curve upward toward the horizon to dwarf the human figures in the middle distance, suggesting the kind of vastness that one almost never experiences here in the East.

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Landscrape, I thought as I stalked along the ridgetop with camera and tripod, peering through the naked trees at the farm fields and rounded hills like a lab technician peering into a petri dish. Make a scraping, add it to some sort of fertile fundament, and grow a culture: isn’t that how it works? Landless peasants arrive with their axes, their seeds and their visions, and within a few decades, the pastoral landscape of Western Europe has taken over. The landscape-specific treaty formula, “as long as the grass grows and the waters run,” somehow gets lost in the transition. This is dairy country now.

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I’m still learning how to use the camera. Pictures taken with my old camera had no depth of field; background and foreground were always equally focused. With this one, I have yet to fully absorb the lesson that zooming in is not a substitute for cropping. If you want the landscape to be legible, you have to pull back – or as they say in football, go deep. Way deep. Let the foreground take care of itself.

Later, as I review the photos in my desktop monitor, I think of David Byrne in the musical mockumentary True Stories, sitting in an obviously stationary convertible and pretending to drive while the landscape scrolls past behind him. Well, that’s the reality, isn’t it? Even a landscape composed in the best Chinese style should probably have little automobiles in it to attract the eye. Nobody goes out walking anymore, except for dog owners and the odd photographer.

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On the other hand

The wind had blown hard out of the east throughout the late-morning snow squall, plastering a half-inch of snow on the east side of every tree trunk. From the driveway at 1:00 p.m. the western ridge shone white, while all the woods on the other side appeared brown.

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I think of this the following morning, around 6:15. I’m coming down through the field after a long, rambling walk in the moonlight. The full moon is still well above the trees, but shadows are beginning to fade. The eastern sky has just begun to lighten beyond the spreading crown of an old white oak at the woods’ edge. I think to myself: a crow or two right now would be nice. But of course it’s too early for that – the owls are still out. Besides, the universe has better things to do than satisfy one man’s dilettantish craving for an aesthetic experience. Which makes me love it all the more, that it continually so confounds my expectations and challenges me to accept whatever happens. I think of all the creatures whose lives are hidden from me, except for the occasional glimpse or a rustle in the walls. I think of brief moments of joy and eternities of needless suffering. These thoughts pass through my mind on well-worn trails, much more quickly than it takes to tell it. Then comes their shadow: But what if it really isn’t like that at all?

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Conditioned by the love of order or an aesthetic impulse, our minds rarely make room for more than one source of light at a time. As I watch the eastern horizon grow slowly more distinct, enough stars remain visible overhead to remind me that, regardless of where the spark originally came from, every being shines for a while on its own. I look around at the weeds and tufts of grass, each with its shadow. But what if it really isn’t like this at all? And I feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, a moving forest.

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Springhouse

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1.
The springhouse is a refuge I rarely enter:
cool as a cave in summer, warm in winter.
The grates on the windows have rusted away,
& the outlet pipes have long since silted up.
The spring seeps in through breaks in the masonry,
& a thin whisper of water covers the floor.
Phoebes nest under the rafters every April;
salamanders leave their footprints in the mud.

2.
The springhouse is the one building on the farm
that doesn’t line up with the others.
I see it every time I go out my front door,
but rarely give it a second glance.
It sits apart from everything we know.
I think of those who, for the sake of some
dangerous or unfashionable truth,
grow old in prison cells or hermitages,
no way to keep their feet up out of the mud,
no place to sit apart from the corrosive flow.

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Well

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The sky at the bottom of the walk-in stone well looks almost blue – an illusion. We have not seen the sun for days. The snow is mostly gone, dissolved by days of cold rain. Last night, my niece left us to return to Mississippi with her parents, and it seemed to all of us that her visit had been much too short. Between the rain and a bad head cold that she and I both got, we never got a chance to go sledding, build a snowman – even walks with her Nanna were few and far between. This morning my father and I took down the Christmas tree and put the boxes of lights and ornaments back up in the attic for another year. The tree went out on the back slope below the feeders to provide the birds with a shelter from the weather and a refuge from the sharp-shinned hawk.

*

Among the baby’s new books, there’s one with a small round mirror on every facing page, each replacing the head of a different animal. She points, chortles, repeats her one word, Dada.

The book is from a series called Baby Einstein, designed to make your child smarter. But what is the lesson? That other beings are nothing but ciphers? I think of Einstein fathering his own thoughts on a non-capricious G-d.

Dada. Very good! And see how it smears when you put your fingers on it? When you bend the page back and forth, see how it warps?

The drive

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This past Saturday was the last day of regular rifle deer season in Pennsylvania – kind of like the twelfth day of Christmas to those for whom hunting season is a bigger deal than Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s put together. Oddly, though, there didn’t seem to be too many hunters out. And the light was perfect, so around 2:30 I put on my blaze-orange hat and vest, grabbed my camera and headed into the woods.

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I was wrong: the hunters were out. Those who weren’t sitting in trees on down the hollow had spent the morning on the other side of the ridge, in the woods above I-99 – an unsuccessful drive. I learned this from Carl, who stood a little ways up in the woods and motioned for me to come over.

I barely recognized him. Normally clean-shaven except for a mustache, he now sported a full beard. “Damn, you’re getting shaggy!” I said. “So are you,” he observed. “Yeah, well, I thought I’d grow my hair long for the winter,” I said. “Well, there you go,” he said. “This is my hunting beard.”

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They were about to start a drive up toward the spruce grove at the very top of the watershed – right in the direction of the setting sun, which was also the direction in which I wanted to walk. Carl’s wife Carolyn was one of the two hunters lying in ambush. I quickly offered to go walk somewhere else. But they could use an extra driver, Carl said, and let the others know via walkie-talkie. He moved on up the ridgeside and told me to walk slowly forward through the laurel along the contour, pausing at the powerline right-of-way until the fellow on the other ridge – who bore the walkie-talkie handle “Iceman” – came even with us.

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I was grateful for the excuse to bushwhack. My trajectory led me on a route about fifty feet above, and parallel to, one of our main trails: precisely that part of the property which is least familiar to me, because how often does one go bushwhacking so close to a trail? And the slow-but-steady pace forced me to stay attentive, make decisions quickly about what to photograph, and move on. The recent snow was still dry and easy to move through.

At the powerline, we had about a ten-minute wait, since Iceman’s route took him right through the areas hardest hit by last January’s devastating ice storm. Evidently this whole drive was his idea, though, so I didn’t feel too sorry for him. I watched anxiously as the sun sank lower and lower through the trees.

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At the far edge of the powerline, I found a clump of sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina), a huckleberry-sized shrub related to bayberry. Due to its wonderful aroma, it’s one of those plants I always stop to sniff and admire during the warmer months of the year. It’s just a very charismatic plant. According to the Wikipedia article, “Comptonia is used as a food plant by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Grey Pug and Setaceous Hebrew Character.” Setaceous means “bristle-shaped; slender and gradually attenuated to the tip.” The Hebrew character in question is nun, the one that looks a bit like a backward C. I’d never stopped to look at sweetferns in winter – a calligraphy replete with ornate, bristly Cs. Their dried leaves would probably still make a decent cup of tea, but that would seem like a desecration now.

You can probably begin to sense why I am content to leave the deer-slaying to others, much as I admire the Pennsylvania hunting tradition and recognize its ecological value.

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My more tender-hearted readers will be happy to hear that the deer were elsewhere that afternoon. I found one, day-old track – that was it. When the drive was over, the hunters stood around glumly contemplating their next move. “You should carry a camera, ” I teased them. “That way, you may not shoot what you set out for, but you always bag something.” For once, Carl didn’t have a snappy comeback. I probably should’ve kept my mouth shut.

I left them to their hunting and walked back down through the field, following my shadow.

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You can live on the earth a long time and not get tired of that “certain slant of light,” as Dickinson called it.

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —

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