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In what respect are the small hours small, I wonder? You can lie half-asleep and listen to the wall clock clucking its tongue, the refrigerator humming, the furnace shaking itself awake under the floor. It’s only when you get up and switch on the light that things retreat into themselves, the ordinary smallness that carries us through the day.

Last night, though, the small hours were measured in falling flakes. Just before I went to bed, I switched on the spotlight above the porch so I could take a picture of the snow falling out of a black sky. Even after all these years out of school, this sight, with its promise of a temporary reprieve, still turns me on.

The day before yesterday I mentioned Hank Green’s essay at Wild Thoughts, where he talks about the typical friendly greeting given by a gray wolf: it licks you on the teeth. Yesterday, Hoarded Ordinaries posted a photo of Yours Truly initiating friendly contact in a similar manner. But that’s far from the only reason to read that post. The theme of meta-photography and self-reflexivity is of great interest to me, and I was struck by the very real possibility that, by not carrying a camera, I missed an entire dimension of the Central Park milieu last Saturday.

I have been reading blogs with photos for as long as I’ve been reading blogs, but I guess I never realized how compatible the two activities are – instant photography and instant publishing. With the expense and hassle of developing film out of the way, even a lazy schmuck like me can enjoy trying to capture a bit of what I see. But will the camera lead me to see differently? If so, is that a bad thing? Will it hurt my writing?

Snow was on the ground and in the air when I went out yesterday afternoon. I left the trail and right away things got interesting. The bole of a hundred-year-old oak sprouted barbed wire, and I shuffled back and forth with the camera trying to get a good shot. The batteries were low. When I turned back around, something flew up from the laurel bush right beside me and landed on a tree branch a hundred feet away: a gray-phase screech owl. I barely had time to i.d. it before it flew back in my direction and dove into a hole fifty feet up a half-dead tree. I walked over and knocked on the bark, having read once that this can sometimes make an owl poke its head out. It didn’t. I stepped back to take a picture of the tree, which stands a few feet over the line onto our neighbor’s clearcut property, but the camera refused to take one more shot. I didn’t really mind, though. It occurred to me that if I hadn’t been in search of photos, I probably never would have gone off-trail.

At sunrise this morning I’m out again, camera in pocket. Snow is still gently falling, though the sky is half clear. In total, I think this storm has given us a good eight inches of fresh powder, just wet enough to cling to the smaller branches. The hours after a fresh snowfall, before wind and sun conspire to wipe the branches clean, are precious to me. It’s the only time between late October and early May when the woods resemble the ideal forest of my imagination, a labyrinth of lights and shadows, as teeming a profusion for the unaided eye as it would always present for the hand lens or the microscope.

I’m in search of tree beings for a Flickr album I’m planning, probably to be titled “Anthropology of Trees.” But I’m not averse to a few scenic vistas. Just as I reach the good view spot on Laurel Ridge Trail, a deer runs off, a pileated woodpecker flies from a nearby tree, and a hen turkey starts calling a few hundred yards away. Sometimes even the megafauna teems.

For the first half-hour this morning, my fingers freeze up every time I take my gloves off to snap a picture, and I have to walk as quickly as possible to keep my toes warm. Fingers and toes: that’s the mental image I get when I hear the word digital. The extremities – or most of them, anyway. I like the Mayan concept of humans as vigesimal beings – that our digits give birth to numbers that didn’t exist before we did. Anything to avoid the abyss of abstraction, I think. Can we include the other extremities in this accounting? The round head – shaved or otherwise – could stand for zero, then, and the male sex for infinity – or at least billyuns and billyuns. Little head, big head, a.k.a. forever and a day: this is that day, son, or it might as well be. It’s all in your head, as my friend Crazy Dave likes to say, but that’s where it counts.

That’s where we count, at any rate. Our necromancers have converted both sound and image into digital format, swapping homunculus for DNA, so to speak – analog for code. There’s even serious discussion now of making hand-held meters for retail taxonomy, like check-out scanners, identifying unknown life forms by reading some portion of their DNA. “Would you like paper or plastic? Thank you for shopping at Earth-Mart!” Excuse me while I go blaugg . . .

How many digits does a tree have? The sky’s the limit. Trees have a way of reminding us who we are – even if the fuckers never hug back. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, says the actress in the most-hated commercial ever. But for lusty braggadocio, I think I prefer goofy pop songs. Because, you know, sometimes I am too sexy for my clothes. Let’s get digital, baby, I said as I put my finger over the shutter. I’m plenty warm now. Small wonder!

Thanks to Via Negativa reader Matthew Albright for his generous gift of a used digital camera (a Kodak DC220 Zoom). If any other readers feel moved to make contributions to this not-for-profit blogging effort, my address is PO Box 68, Tyrone, PA 16686. Thanks. (Oh, by the way, tomorrow’s my birthday!)

But no, I’m not going to post today.

At last, Appalachian Winter is here!

I don’t mean the season. I mean the book.

This completes the tetrology my mother began in 1991 with Appalachian Spring. Each of the Appalachian volumes is a synoptic nature book: that is to say, it takes the form of a journal in which every entry is a true account of a real day, but the book combines entries from multiple years. The personal and geopolitical events of a single year are used to provide an over-all sense of continuity.

Because of their journal format, their attention to the details of a single place, and their frequent engagement with local, national and planetary issues, this book and its companion volumes should appeal to anyone who enjoys reading blogs. I realize anything I say here is going to sound a bit biased. But let me at least make clear that my mother and I are very different people, though we do draw plenty of inspiration from each other. Marcia Bonta is an exceedingly down-to-earth writer – you won’t find much wool-gathering or flights of fancy such as I indulge in here, though she does like to quote poetry and the classics from time to time. Instead, she has in spades something I am quite deficient in: real, in-depth knowledge of the natural world. She has an enormous nature library and keeps up to date on all the latest discoveries in the scientific journals. And in fact, scientists are among the biggest fans of her writing, because they recognize her ability to popularize their findings and theories without distorting them. So expect to be educated as well as entertained.

Regular readers of Via Negativa who want to know more about the mountain I live on (and even a little more about me) should be interested in Appalachian Winter. My mother even stuck in a poem I wrote for this blog last winter, “In the Ice Forest.” (Thanks, Mom!)

But enough of my blather. Here’s part of the description at the publisher’s website.

Winter is the season that most tests our mettle. There are the obvious challenges of the weather–freezing rain, wind chill, deep snow, dangerous ice–but also the psychological burdens of waiting for spring and the enduring often false starts that accompany its eventual return.

On the surface, perhaps, winter might seem an odd season for a nature book, but there is plenty of beauty and life in the woods if only we know where to look. The stark, white landscape sparkles in the sunshine and glows beneath the moon on crisp, clear nights; the opening up of the forest makes it easy to see long distances; birds, some of which can be easily seen only in winter, flock to feeders; and animals–even those that should be hibernating–make surprise visits from time to time.

Appalachian Winter offers acclaimed naturalist Marcia Bonta’s view of one season, as experienced on and around her 650-acre home on the westernmost ridge of the hill-and-valley landscape that dominates central Pennsylvania. Written in the style of a journal, each day’s entry focuses on her walks and rambles through the woods and fields that she has known and loved for over thirty years.

Along the way she discovers a long-eared owl in a dense stand of conifers, tracks a bear through an early December snowfall, explains the life and ecological niche of the red-backed vole, and examines the recent arrival of an Asian ladybug. These are but a few of the tidbits sprinkled throughout the book, interwoven with the human stories of Bonta’s family, as well as the highway builders and shopping-mall developers that threaten the idyllic peacefulness of her mountain.

This is the fourth and final volume of Bonta’s seasonal meditations on the natural history of the northern Appalachian Mountains. Her gentle, charming accounts of changing weather and of the struggles faced by plants, animals, and insects breathe new warmth into the coldest months of the year.

This will be my last post until Monday.

First came the story of a boy and his Plank. Then we all played House. Now the party’s over. Please put your chairs up on the tables before you leave.

Have you ever stopped to wonder how dogs with recumbent ears tend to hear the world? Clap a seashell to your head. I won’t say I hear the ocean, because I’ve never been there. But a waterfall, yes. It takes the edge off all but the harshest sounds.

So there I am, lying in my usual corner with nothing better to do than worry an old rag, when the shed door bangs. A moment later, a piercing whine that cuts right through that hush, as if all of a sudden my heart had stopped pumping blood.

It’s like a hornet made of metal, and almost as painful. Sawdust burns my nostrils, and something else: rage. Or so I would guess from context. It’s a potent odor, known to almost all animals (including some humans), but it’s impossible to distinguish from the stench of fear.

I raise my head cautiously above the woodpile. His face is a study in concentration – the same way he looks whenever he’s drawing something. But how did he learn to operate his father’s radial arm saw like that? Again and again he pushes the screaming wheel into the wood. Scraps of paper swirl over the shed floor, bearing the remains of an open mouth, a shocked eyebrow.

You might wonder what an inanimate being could have done to provoke such fury. My guess is nothing – though it did have its share of splinters. It’s just that it’s the bottom dog, and so it has to pay for whatever the alpha male or female might have dished out.

The boy’s jaw is set, but his eyes have begun to get watery, and it can’t be too long until he shuts off the saw – or until someone hears it and comes running over from the house. Keeping to the shadows, I slink around toward the door. With Plank gone, I’ll really have to watch my step.

Mid-morning, and a thin scrim of cirrus softens the sun just enough to make it possible to see the whole disc – not like on a cloudless day when you can’t see anything but aureole, an acetylene rip in the sky or on the retina. Soft is the only word for this light filtering through the hemlocks and glistening on the wet trunks of beeches. Though maybe it’s not the light that convey softness so much as the shadows with their indistinct edges. Everything is feathered.

The stream is full of voices and I begin thinking about the insane, their laughter that contains so little of joy and even less of mirth. When Jesus said by their fruits ye shall know them, he might have meant, “See if they know how to laugh about themselves.” They say asylums are packed with the only begotten sons of God. What makes a person so willing to believe the unbelievable? Perhaps nothing more complicated than boredom, or a dissatisfaction with the existing flavors of sky. But to want the whole world to taste of me . . .

Just as I reach the bottom of the hollow a westbound train comes through. I head along the tracks toward town with the train thundering past: more than a hundred flat cars, each bearing two cargo containers, a larger one atop a smaller. I’m almost to the bend by the time the last car passes with its blinking yellow light in lieu of a caboose. In the silence that follows I hear chickadees, and something else – a lovely liquid birdsong I can’t quite place, coming both from the mountainside to my left as well as from the trees above the river.

An hour later, after finishing my errands, I return to the tracks a slightly different way, taking a pedestrian footbridge over the Little Juniata and following the path up past the train station. This is the way I used to come 25 years ago walking to and from school, but I don’t think I ever really stopped to admire these four giant sycamores before. What’s now a well-groomed acre with a gazebo was then a scruffy, grimy place littered with broken beer bottles, and the sycamores as well as the one stone monument were painted up with graffiti. Now they stand clean and beautiful, and I long for a camera to capture the splay of enormous mottled limbs against the sky.

The empty space at the corner where the old hotel used to stand is now a parking lot for a new business with offices in the building right behind it: G&R Excavation and Demolition, “The Excavating and Demolition Experts,” as it says on their trucks and equipment. Was it they who tore down the old hotel where they now park? Whoever it was, I remember the way they left that three-storey, cast iron fire escape standing for several weeks after everything else had been removed. This was just last year. I remember standing at the end of the street and looking up at those lonely zigzag stairs to nowhere, with the end of the mountain rearing up behind. It would have made a great cover photo for a book of selections from Via Negativa, I think.

As I walk back along the tracks, another train comes along. Odd – the last two times I walked into town, at the very same time of day, there were no trains at all. This one consists of chemical tankers and boxcars, which are more and more enjoyable to watch these days because of a growing tendency of urban street artists to use freight trains for their canvases. It goes way beyond gang tags, although I admit a certain fascination with calligraphy so stylized as to be unreadable to all but its authors and their immediate neighbors. It occurs to me that the apotropaic sign may signify, but it does not speak. It refuses dialogue of any kind, like the bloody handprint that wards off the Evil Eye.

Some boxcars I’ve seen recently feature clearly representational drawings, even whole murals. I wonder if this growing trend reflects simply poor security at train yards, or whether the anonymous artists are deliberately trying to share their works with a vast, unknown, transcontinental audience? The one really striking artwork on this particular train is a large, humanoid duck with a boot for a head.

It’s a little before noon as I start back up the road, and the sun has just made it down to the stream at the deepest part of the hollow. On the slope above me I hear again that mysterious birdsong I heard earlier, along the tracks, and remember who sings it: tree sparrow. One day late for Valentine’s Day. There’s a certain admixture of joy and wistfulness that spells longing to me, and the tree sparrow’s song has it. But how much does that impression owe to the music itself, I wonder, and how much to knowledge of the fact that this courtship song is not merely out of season but far from the permafrost and muskeg that originally shaped its notes?

I stand for half a minute recording the event in my pocket notebook and enjoying the play of sunlight on the stream fifty feet below. Whatever made me think its murmur was lacking in mirth?

A year ago today it was Monday, and I wrote a pretty good post, which I subsequently forgot all about until just now, when I re-read it for the first time. (The “diva” I wrote about was actually Jennifer Lopez. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking about Google hits!)

This morning the Carolina wren is singing his signature tune in a minor key. What’s different, I wonder? Or should I instead be asking: what’s the same?

*

Sleet rattles against the empty shell of the old nail factory, passes through the missing panes of once-gray windows that stretched the length of the block.

*

In every book its receipt, saved for a bookmark. One can tell at a glance which among the thousands of volumes he has read clear to the end, & in which ones after a night or two of perusal he planted the white flag of surrender. Two ranks deep, the books crowd the shelves, immigrants bristling with the evidence of far-flung births.

(Prompted by a remark in the comments to a post at languagehat.)

*

That last line deserves a page of its own, the printer thinks. How else to rescue these shopworn words from irrelevance? A ladybug beetle has just drowned in the half-inch of cold coffee in the mug at his elbow. An hour from now he will think to reach for it, & stop in mid-sip. Is it just him, or has it always been this bitter?

Via Negativa has been getting a little extra exposure lately. At the beginning of the month, Slow Reads reprinted my post Therapy, along with some fresh content – a brief background essay on prose-poetry hybrids, which I tend to refer to indiscriminately by the Japanese term “haibun.”

For those who have never taken the time to explore Via Negativa‘s sidebar, Slow Reads is an interesting hybrid of web magazine and blog, dedicated to “reaching our hearts with our books.” Its editor, Peter, has a strong apophatic mystical streak. By all rights, he should be writing Via Negativa and I should be talking about Slow Reads! (I am, indeed, a very slow reader.)

Then today, another web magazine, Wild Thoughts, reprinted one of those Daoist short stories I wrote the other week under a new title: Newborn. Wild Thoughts is “an online journal of environmental writing” with “a commitment to art that will strengthen the more-than-human world.” Its editors are actively soliciting feedback and contributions.

It would be great if there were a lot more web magazines willing to reprint blog materials – to give them alternate and perhaps more permanent or accessible homes. This is something that Peter of Slow Reads has been ruminating on at his blog recently, as well. There is so much good stuff languishing in bloggers’ archives!

Just before I received the notice about the Wild Thoughts publication this afternoon, I had been browsing in Thomas Merton’s Mystics and Zen Masters (Noonday Press/FSG, 1988). In an essay called “From Pilgrimage to Crusade,” he wrote:

Peregrinatio, or “going forth into strange countries,” was a characteristically Irish form of asceticism. The Irish peregrinus, or pilgrim, set out on a journey, not in order to visit a sacred shrine, but in search of solitude and exile. His pilgrimage was an exercise in ascetic homelessness and wandering. He entrusted himself to Providence, setting out with no definite aim, abandoning himself to the Lord of the universe. Since Ireland is an island, this meant entrusting oneself to the hazards of sea travel, and there are records of Irish peregrini who simply floated off aimlessly into the sea, abandoning themselves to wind and current, in the hope of being led to the place of solitude that God Himself would pick for them.

Isn’t this almost what bloggers do, entrusting themselves to the frail coracles of their blogs, adrift in the placeless Internet with no firm notion of what shores they may ultimately reach? That’s how it feels to me much of the time.
*

Yesterday I did not write of the houses along and off of East Fond du Lac Street in Ripon. I did not know how to speak of them. In the grey morning these blue collar houses glowed. They glowed and hummed and vibrated. They glowed and hummed with stories wanting to be known, waiting to be told. The ordinary world is full of extraordinary stories, if we’d take the time to see them, to listen to them, to record them. I could see them shimmering there, just on the edge of my vision, just at the edge of consciousness. I think I must start to find these stories.

The Middlewesterner

*

Has anyone sung how rich and fine and satisfying a good obituary is? Especially the obituary of a long, long public life that so bestrode the century as to seem a metaphor for it? We’ve had three such, quickly: Marlon Brando, Philip Johnson, and now [Arthur] Miller. Figures who broke into prominence in their 30s, then rode the bronco/elephant/bitch of fame across the decades until they wound down, as gracefully as possible, and were finally still.

Creature of the Shade

*

This old gal’s mouth gets my attention even before she says a word, though, because of the large quantity of azalea-colored lipstick she’s wearing–expertly applied with a brush, very Arlene Dahl. She’s a bit bent and feeble-looking, and her grey hair’s a mess, but she still exudes . . . what is it? . . . ah, I know! It’s glamour. Even all rickety, she’s glamourous.

She dumps a pile of returns on the counter, cocks an eyebrow right at me, and croaks, “Ya got anything good, Honey? I’m desperate.”

Write Out Loud

*

He’s determined to hang onto the idea that he lives in a community, and that we all matter to each other.

I tried to tell him once that this is crazy. I told him, “Hell, you ain’t Jesus, preacher!” and I think he kind of heard me back then, but he keeps forgetting and trying to be Jesus again. There is a kind of wonderful but sad sickness in the hearts of many ministers. They try to let everyone matter to them. They let people inside their hearts, down on the inside where they feel things. They can’t do this, of course. Things have a way of unraveling and falling apart when you try to be all things to all people.

Real Live Preacher

*

The difference between the truths we extrapolate from the coyote’s fall is precisely the difference between Warren and me. Examine the competing laws, stated succinctly here.

My Law: The coyote won’t fall until he looks down.

Warren’s Law: The coyote won’t fall unless he looks down.

Get the distinction? I understand that the gag works because the coyote will fall. Warren, on the other hand, sees the possibilities.

Slow Reads (Feb. 12)

*

Her eyes were green, flecked with bits of apricot yellow, and I loved her most, maybe, when she gathered herself up in indignation, like a wave about to crest, an eloquent rush of wry humor about to come foaming down. Her wit would disarm her own indignation, and she would finish in delight. Then she would lock her gaze with mine — in my memory she is always moving suddenly from beside me to place herself squarely in front of me, and staring right into my eyes — and then she would seize my neck and kiss me.

I hope she has a happy Valentine’s day, wherever she is.

mole

*