Riffs – Page 12 – Via Negativa

January 8, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Disoriented

At one point around 3:30 this afternoon, with ladybugs, syrphid flies, and honeybees buzzing all about, I looked into the low winter sun and felt… I don’t know. Disoriented barely begins to describe it. Anachronic. Absurd. It’s almost enough to make me want to deep-fry a cell phone and dial 911 from my large intestine. I trust my gut — but does my gut trust me? Frankly, it would be a fool to.

It doesn’t help that the Presidential primaries are underway two months earlier than in the days of my youth. Candidates have already been spotted flying south in record numbers, much to the consternation of climatologists and adorable squalling infants. And like all birds of a feather, they sing a single tune: change. Well, I could use some change. Couldn’t you?

UPDATE: And so the good people of New Hampshire trudged to the polls in record numbers to endorse the establishment candidates, and the literal winds of change signalled the return of the cold. Whew! Back to soul-crushing inevitability. Plus í§a change…

December 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Artifact

Is there any news more significant than the weather? It’s sunny here, and in the 40s, and I’m shading my eyes against the low sun and watching the flash of birds’ wings as they go in and out of the feeders on my parents’ back porch. I’m thinking for some reason of an artifact we had in our museum when we were kids: a piece of soapstone with a hole bored through it, just big enough to fit a finger through. The stone bulged around the hole and tapered toward both ends, and thinking about it now, I guess it must’ve been some sort of tool — perhaps an unfinished axe, or some strange kind of mallet. But whoever gave it to us (I can’t remember now) told us only that it was made by the Indians, so I treated it with the reverence owed the inexplicable, and it never once occurred to me that the hole might’ve been bored for something as prosaic as a tool handle. I thought it was marvelous the way someone would think to create a hole like that and surround it with stone, like a portable well. I would turn it over in my hand and wonder about the time it must’ve taken, and the single-minded focus. Only a hunter would have that kind of patience, I thought, and imagined men with spears going up against a wooly mammoth. Viewed on end, the stone was shaped like a human eye, and I wondered if it might not have some vaguely religious significance, like the god’s-eyes I had learned to make in third grade by weaving yarn around crossed popsickle sticks. A couple of those artifacts of my childhood still remain among my parents’ massive collection of Christmas tree ornaments, and get hung up on the tree every year. As for the soapstone artifact, I’m not sure where that ended up, but I think it’s safe to say that I learned far more from it than I ever would’ve if someone had simply told me what it was.

December 14, 2007 by Dave Bonta

After the sleet storm

“Greensleeves was all my joy…” A song that seems to fit the season, wronged as so many feel by the inclement weather, the cold, the diminishing light.

That’s not snow on the hillside, by the way; it’s sleet — close to an inch of it. We’ve gotten far greater accumulations of pellet ice here in the past. A couple times, so much sleet rolled down the steep slopes that our road was almost completely filled in and erased, briefly restoring the mountain to a semblance of its pre-settlement appearance. But even a small amount of ice changes the whole purlieu.

Christmas ferns sit with their oars at the ready, like Viking longships trapped in a sudden freeze-up. Various other plants and leaves expose their extremities, as if testing the air, or brandishing weapons from a simpler age.

A chestnut oak leaf curls possessively around its hoard of incidental light. Wait till my lady Greensleeves sees this! Even after the pellets fuse, the ground remains granular, faceted like the eye of an insect.

Strange thoughts, to be sure. But this is not the same dull world I am used to finding under my feet.

December 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Fishy

What might it mean to dream of catfish? They lived in burrows like prairie dogs, whiskered heads popping up as we walked past. “The ground was too saturated to plant this year,” the farmer said, “so I switched to fish.” The small ones were red, and the big ones were bluish gray. They watched us with what I imagined was deep suspicion, but it might just as well have been melancholy, or a blithe lack of concern. “You can watch ’em all day, and you’ll never see ’em blink,” the farmer said.

The other night, talking about politicians, my mother said, “I don’t know how they can look themselves in the face.” It was, dare I say, a quote worthy of the president she so despises.

But perhaps the truly gifted ones do manage that. I think Bill Clinton, for example, sees Bill Clinton in everyone he meets. That’s why he always looks so happy in a crowd.

Whereas his successor sees a potential mob: unreadable, as he is to himself. “There’s no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide,” he babbles. “I know the human being and fish can coexist.”

There’s a certain period every day around mid-morning when the squirrels run back and forth across the roof. I sit trying to type while claws rattle overhead.

At least, I think it’s squirrels. Maybe it’s another typist. It must be a pretty dull story, though, if I’m in it.
__________

October 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Higher education

The locksmith’s daughter had beautiful bones that cast long shadows on her skin. She wanted to be thin. Cell phones were dwindling; why not those who pressed the sleek clamshells against an ear, as if to listen to the ocean’s test signal? She fasted, draped in hipster black, and learned to love desire for itself. Her hips grew sharp as blades of grass, and she trembled in the least breeze.

The doctor’s son wanted to be tough; he made the team. But then he began hearing voices, and thought it was the coach. They said that this was Olympus and the gods were near — take off your clothes. He took his chew out of his cheek and threw it on the ground. “To hell with you!” he shouted, and walked off the field with the scorched outline of his former life trailing behind.

They crossed paths on the cemetery hill, and stood smiling wanly at each other.

“Eat something, you stupid goth bitch.”

“Grow a brain, you dumb jock.”

But that isn’t what they said. And a good thing, too, considering how soon they would be sharing a bottle, a needle, a pipe.

“I can’t get the coach out of my head.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

She didn’t know, of course — she had no idea — but it was, as in mathematics, a serviceable assumption to begin on.

September 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Rockin’

Please do not feed the rocks. They can lose their fear of human beings and become dangerous. Yes, I know they look cute and cuddly, but they are wild creatures, not pet rocks. And if you feed one rock today, there will be ten rocks waiting to be fed tomorrow. It may seem as if you’re doing a good thing, but it’s not healthy for rocks to become dependent on human handouts. They are not like birds, who can simply fly away to another bird feeder when you tire of them.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the signs warning motorists about falling rocks ahead. Have you ever wondered how the highway department, which needs help just to get across the street, can predict the future so accurately? The answer is, these rocks have fallen before. They’re repeat offenders. But rather than get tough on them and lock them away, where tougher criminals have been known to actually break rocks to pass the time, we continue to let them terrorize our nation’s highways. This permissive, rocks-will-be-rocks mentality is emblematic of a culture of tolerance run amok. Today it’s falling rocks, but tomorrow it may be legalized necro-bestial butt sex. You can say “it’s gravity’s fault” all you want, but explaining behavior isn’t the same as excusing it. Plenty of other rocks grew up in the same circumstances, but somehow they managed to avoid the temptations of gravity and become solid, moss-gathering citizens.

Are you a rock addict? It’s never too late to quit and turn to the true Rock, who is ourlordandsaviorjesuschristamen. Some people will tell you that once the crack starts, falling is inevitable, and then nobody will want you. But the rejected stoner is to be the cornerstone of the temple, says the Bible. Peter means “rock” and Saint Peter guards the pearly gates, and once you penetrate that you’re pretty much free to rock in the bosom of Abraham, as I understand it. So Rock is a touchstone of sorts, only you mustn’t touch it if you can possibly help it, because it will lead you into sin and hellfire instead of into the arms of ourlordandsaviorjesuschristamen.

August 8, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Outside the box

for Natalie

Outside the box, the imagination grapples with opaque horizons of soil more alive than dead, teeming with earthworms and nematodes, grubs and ground beetles, bacteria that fix nitrogen and other bacteria that take nitrogen apart, root hairs extending into fungal mycelia like fingers into gloves, floating chunks of bedrock, and the condensed and highly polymerized substance known as humin, insoluble in acid and alkali alike and virtually impervious to the methods and instruments employed by the shadowy agents of decay. Right outside the box, the temperature remains a constant 54 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, and six feet above, another kind of uniformity prevails, according to which the grass is continually foiled in its attempts to flower and set seed, despite the inaudible cheering from what the Kabbalah claims may be as many as two angels for every blade.

July 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Sentence

You have to blog THROUGH your lack of inspiration.

The sentence was pronounced —

huge, in fact — and awkward

on stage, forgetting half its lines

in mid-stream, waiting with baited

hooks for the trout

season to begin — or so the fish

warden was gamely told and retold

to the judge, who pronounced it

utter non-

sentence.

June 26, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Return to paradise

The United States is building a wall on its border with Mexico to restrict immigration from the south; the Israelis are creating a “security barrier” to keep out suicide bombers; India is walling off Kashmir and Bangladesh; the Saudis have announced two walls, one to keep the conflict in Iraq from overflowing into their country; China wants to get back into the act of building walls to seal off North Korea; Russia is thinking about walling off Chechnya; and the oil-rich United Arab Emirates has decided to put up a barrier along its border with dirt-poor Oman, reports Mark Ehrman.
The Christian Century, “Century marks,” May 15, 2007.

The sky fell during the night without making a sound. A few late drunks might’ve wondered why going home seemed harder than usual, as if they were wading through snowdrifts. The bats might’ve wondered at the sudden congestion in their airspace. But the sky fell largely unnoticed, and the pieces found each other on the ground due to the same excess of gravity — or lack of levity — that had precipitated their fall. Being sky, they tended to collect in open places: along ridgelines, river banks, and DMZs, sliding together and turning until they locked into place.

We awoke to find that the sky had turned into the most vulgar sort of mystery, a puzzle with only one solution. The ancient Hermetic projection — “as above, so below” — had finally come true, and shepherds of every faith were triumphant. Clearly, it was in the natural order of things that we should live encompassed by strong, parental arms. “A mighty fortress” and all that. Only the weakest members of the herd died in the panicked rush for shelter from the new featureless hole that yawned above.
__________

See the etymology of “paradise” here.

May 21, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Dreaming of scotch

Whenever I drink too much, I often have a hard time sleeping. Last night, for example, I woke up around 3:30 and never did get back to sleep. And that was merely from dreaming about drinking. In real life, I can’t handle anything much stronger than wine, but in the dream, I was downing shot after shot of scotch, and actually enjoying it. Until my dream-karma caught up with me, that is, and transmigrated with me into my waking life.

Speaking of dreams, Peter emailed me this morning to describe a dream-visit to “a bricks-and-mortar Via Negativa,” located not in Plummer’s Hollow, but in the nearby city of Altoona, PA. “It was in a respectable local mall,” he wrote, “but it was kind of dark and musty — kind of mossy, actually — with large trees interspersed among the displays. There were books and DVDs, but the decor and clientele somehow suggested a beach bong shop.”

Speaking of malls, I was cheered by a story last night on NPR’s All Things Considered about the decline of shopping malls. Many of the anchor-store chains have gone bankrupt, outcompeted by the big-box stores, and the new chains — they cited the mega-bookstore Barnes and Noble — have no desire to take their places, since they already incorporate mall-like features such as coffee shops and kiddie play areas. New owners of old malls have to deal with many empty stores and a general air of decay (which does sound like a good match for Via Negativa, given my affinity for old, decrepit structures). Some malls are even being “de-malled,” they said: the roof is removed, and the storefronts migrate to the exterior wall, facing the parking lot.

Speaking of Barnes and Noble, a couple weeks ago I attended the first poetry reading at the new Barnes and Noble in Altoona. It’s part of a brand new shopping center built right into the side of the same mountain ridge I live on, at terrific environmental cost. But it’s the first real bookstore Altoona has ever had — at least in the 35 years I’ve lived in the area — so we’re not boycotting it, any more than we’re boycotting the so-called interstate built on the mountain’s flanks. At any rate, the reader was my friend Todd Davis, reading from his wonderful new book Some Heaven, whose cover reproduces one of my favorite works of Renaissance art: Dürer’s “Das Grosse Rasenstück.” Todd is perhaps one of the least affected poets I have ever known; he has a down-to-earth style of delivery that’s perfectly suited to his plain-spoken yet hard-hitting poems about landscape, love, death — all the great themes.

Speaking of the mountain’s flanks, the Davises live in a little subdivision about a half-mile to the west of the so-called interstate. If they want to see the sunrise — or the full moonrise — they have to hike up here, as they often do, to get out of our shadow. In “Moonrise Over the Little Juniata,” Todd writes,

The ridge hides most
of the moon until well into the evening, while in the valley,
where it’s still dark, we can see the silhouette of shale
and sandstone, delicate appendages of trees […]

In another poem, “Jacklighting,” Todd describes the physical geography of places like Plummer’s Hollow (though he uses the word “ravine,” rather than “hollow”):

In this part of Pennsylvania, roads run along
streambeds, or beside the narrow tributaries
the highest ridges conceal when they turn
their faces to the north or south–creases

marked the length of their long necks, ravines
as beautiful as the shadowed space at the base
of a woman’s throat.

Todd read from typed copies of his poems rather than the book itself, and used neither podium nor microphone. In his brief introductions to the poems, he often drew attention to members of the audience, making us all feel a part of the web of associations and influences undergirding his work. The bookstore lady hovered nervously, evidently preoccupied, it turned out, with the problem of how to distribute a small number of promised free drinks and pieces of cake to a larger-than-expected crowd. But the pieces of cake were enormous, and it was simply a matter of subdividing them, I think, because somehow, miraculously, everyone got a piece.

And that — as my friend Teju Cole would say — is what the kingdom of poetry is like.