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I keep the thermostat turned way down; it’s cold. Reading the Internet isn’t like reading a book. I can always use the wait between one electronic page and the next to rub my hands together, breathe into my fists.

A fly bumbles into the glass on the front of my computer monitor, falls onto the desk. It rights itself, but still doesn’t seem quite right. I absent-mindedly drop a bottle cap over it and go back to reading the headlines: Gov’t, Rebels to Sign. Heart Scares Hit. Tsunami Toll Jumps. Artie Shaw Dies. Crude Oil Surges.

Several hours go by. I find myself staring at the bottle cap – a gold twist-off – with increasing frequency. It hasn’t moved. Finally, curiosity gets the better of me and I pick it up. There’s the fly, rubbing its forelegs together. I quickly replace the cap.

The period between solstice and New Year’s usually finds me thinking about time: what it is, how we experience it. Few cultures have gone as deeply into the nature of time as the Maya. But so much of their worldview is so strange to me that, no matter how lucid the explanation, I find myself at a loss to grasp what is really being said. Some of my incomprehension derives, I think, from our deeply ingrained modern tendency to view place and time as separable. But there’s more:

“Since he revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that now remains.” The scribes who transposed these words from New World characters into Old World letters felt the need to add an interpretation – or, to phrase the matter more the way it is phrased in Quiché, they felt the need to tell the reader what these words would say if we could hear what was hidden inside them, namely,

The sun that shows itself is not the real sun.

There are people down around the Great Hollow today, people reckoned in the Book as relatives of the Quiché, who at least allow us the sight of the sun for half of each day. They say that when he reached noon on the day of his first appearance, he placed a mirror at the center of the sky and then doubled back, unseen, to the east. During the second half of that day only his reflection was seen, and so it has been on every day since.

“Reflection,” these people say, and so says the Book. Lemo’ is the word, and it’s also the term for mirror. But the mirror reflects, during the second half of the day, what the Sun did during the first half. Or else it reflects, during our own times, what Sun did only once, and long ago. Coming here among these Mayan nations, we seem to have entered a world where reflections are not simultaneous with the things reflected. Reading the Book, we may guess that reflections ceased to be simultaneous the moment vigesimal beings [i.e., humans, people who keep score] lost their perfect vision:

“They were blinded as the face of a mirror is breathed upon.”

And what about the face in an ordinary mirror, seen close up? Leaving the land where they say lemo’ and coming back home won’t help. If any face is the true face of a vigesimal being it’s the one we all see in the mirror.

Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices & Visions of the Living Maya, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

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See Deforming mirror and Therapy and the face in the mirror, which deal with Nahuatl conceptions of mirrors. Influence traveled in both directions between the classic Mayan and Nahuatl (Toltec, Aztec) civilizations. See also my brief meditation Consulting the mirror, from last January.

Late yesterday afternoon I typed out several dense paragraphs on – Jesus, I can’t even remember what. And then I must have inadvertently deleted them, because I can’t find a trace of any such document now. All I can think is that when I went to post about the tsunami last night, I must’ve composed directly in Blogger, but copied and saved the post in MS Word as if it were simply a second draft, putting it in the already-open document and erasing its preexisting contents without looking. Either that, or I’m losing my mind. Here I have been contentedly reading poetry and thinking about other things since I got up this morning, telling myself I already had today’s post pretty much written. Instead I find this blank space in my files, in my memory. I do recall thinking, “Hadn’t I better jot these thoughts down in my notebook?” but answering myself that no, it would be easier to put flesh on the bones now, while the ideas were still fresh. Too easy!

Ah, whither the abstract maunderings of yesterday? For that matter, whither atrophy? But I do remember the vague half-thoughts I had in the morning, walking about in the ice-cold wind with great delight at the clearness of the air. Sharp contrasts, so beloved of simplistic orators and fear-mongering politicians, also characterize the favored terrain of artists – especially photographers. Winter with its perpetually low sun and desert-like conditions appears to simplify things, but really, that’s a bit of an illusion. The reduction of complexity often makes fundamental mysteries that much harder to ignore. Picture the bent back of a light-skinned nude against a black background, head, neck, and limbs hidden: a fine ceramic vessel, you’d think. And the chilled hands long for contact – the fingertips to ghost along that flange that used to be a spine – even as the eyes strive to resolve desire’s banished shadow with this radiant perfection.

I have no trouble remembering how I sat out on my front stoop with a mug of hot tea around 2:30, the brim of my cap pulled low against the sun, watching the translucent wings of chickadees and juncos among the cattails and then the midnight black of a feral cat slinking through the weeds. The sky was as blue as it ever gets. I worried about the cat, so painfully skinny now at the start of winter. As I watched, it pounced once, twice but came up empty: no squirming furry body between its teeth, not even the shadow of a smile that might linger on when, Cheshire-like, the rest of it fades away. The tea in my mug stayed warm for a surprisingly long time.

Comprehensive, up-to-date information on the impact of the tsunami and how to help are available through a new blog. (Thanks to Watermark for the link.) The Wikipedia already has a great deal of information up as well, including an animation.

As with the big earthquake that devastated Bam, Iran exactly one year ago (to the hour, according to the USGS), I find myself reaching for Artur Lundkvist’s Agadir:

Words also crumbled, broke into pieces, scattered in shreds,
in vain I tried to find some still unharmed and usable
but found only splinters of metaphors, cracked, like a split mirror;
visions floated about, islands adrift in air as white as milk but thicker,
almost like molten, viscous marble,
trees floated about, torn up by the roots and turning slowly upside down upon themselves,
people floated like driftwood, many whole and outwardly unmarred, others cut in half or worse,
floating about in the white with eyes wide-open, hair streaming upward…

Walking up the road, I hear a soft tapping sound & wonder if something has come loose on my coat, or even inside my skull. Of course not! It’s just a downy woodpecker working over a punky snag. Stopped thus in my tracks, I take out my pocket notebook & jot down a few notes about a dream I’d just remembered from the night before. Writing this now, a week later, I think about the rusty nail heads I found clustered in the bark of the big birch, how I had so quickly rejected the first explanation that popped into my head – witchcraft – in favor of something considerably more humdrum. But nailing up a sign that says No Trespassing, Keep Out or, more reflexively as the fashion is these days, Posted – can you think of a better example of apotropaic word magic, a formal curse?

What makes dreams dreamlike is the way we inhabit them, half abstracted from our foolish bodies, which can never run or fly fast enough but which somehow always escape destruction. This morning I was walking quickly through Roman-style ruins of a city on a wild coast, past decapitated colonnades and rooms without walls or roofs, everything lit up strangely from within. Tourist hotels on a once-popular beach, devastated by some new Vesuvius. Then there were people in a classroom on the hill & I became a sudden imposter. We were somewhere waiting to be bombed, & I convinced everyone to hide under their desks so the pilots wouldn’t spot any soft targets.

That’s all I remember clearly enough to arrange in any kind of consecutive order. I wish I could remember how & why at one point I came to be kissing a beautiful woman who, I sensed, was working actively toward my destruction. I can recall everything about how that kiss felt & tasted. What I don’t remember is whether I had introduced myself as “Bond. James Bond.”

This time of year, with the nights so long, the line between dream and waking seems especially thin. On Christmas night we sat in the darkened living room of my parents’ house for an hour and a half looking at the tree full of lights & mysteries. It was a smallish tree, a Douglas fir, but the shadows of its branches on the green walls were enormous & made us imagine a spirit forest right there in the living room, as we talked in soft voices. Then around 9:30 I went for a long walk down the hollow and back along Greenbriar Trail in the light of the almost-full moon. Although there was no snow on the ground, a heavy frost sparkled in the moonlight as I walked along. This was my second walk of the day: such silence as one gets on Christmas doesn’t come but once a year. Even the trains weren’t running, and only a very occasional jet marred the stillness.

Out in the field, the moon’s reflection glimmered in every weed & blade of grass. I stood still for a while, looking at the familiar landscape turned strange & entrancing, a place I could never tire of, I thought. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be in love, to feel that one will never really get to the bottom of someone or something – but to have perfect assurance that the deeper one goes, the more beautiful she or he or it will become.

If I moved my head ever so slightly, the moon would dance from one set of crystalline mirrors into another. This prompted a brief chain of abstract, Nagarjuna-esque reasoning ending in the totally underwhelming realization that the moon’s reflection – & in some sense, the moon itself – was not actually in the field but in my eyes, in my mind. Or perhaps I could make it live a kind of half-life in a poem that I didn’t propose to write. (Because, let’s face it, the world doesn’t need another goddamn poem about the full moon!)

Yesterday, the day after Christmas, was anything but magical: a dull white sky above a brown and frozen earth. I sat inside moping & thought that, if my dad weren’t sick, we might as well have joined the throngs crowding the stores to return gifts & buy replacements at half price. The superficial excitement of all that noise & bustle seemed suddenly attractive. Instead, I spent hours inside surfing the Internet.

Dream and illusion are often treated as synonyms, but sometimes I wonder if they have anything in common at all. Say what you will about their use in psychoanalysis, the fact is that in dreams we relive or rehearse contacts made with real beings and real landscapes – that is to say, with things experienced as possessing their own will or logic apart from our own. Illusions, by contrast, arise from daydream, from the sunlit world of the conscious imagination. They are essential attributes of all games, & if we believe in them too strongly, we might come to think that the whole universe is nothing more than a vast game, a cunning contraption, the result not of time & chance (as the Bible so eloquently phrases it) but of some Intelligent Design.*

Dreams connect & reveal; illusions distract & obscure. I can think of no better illustration of the difference between the two than to quote the Biblical passage I just alluded to – preceded by George Orwell’s brilliant rendering of it into the language of the modern bureaucrat. This is language at its most ensorcelled, designed not merely to obscure but to intimidate. See if it doesn’t fill your head with a blank grayness:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
(“Politics and the English Language,” 1946)

It may not be immediately obvious that this is a translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell says he chose this phrase because of its familiarity & admirable concreteness. But I doubt he could have been insensitive to the fact that it expresses a common truth – common in the sense of easily available to anyone, whether through the analysis of dreams or through fully awake contact with greater-than-human realities – that architects of grand illusions everywhere have regarded as anathema.
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*Before you inundate me with comments suggesting that the Bible does, in fact, postulate such Design, let me remind you that, in Genesis 1:1, the universe was already in existence, and time and chance were already in operation in the primordial tohu-bohu. “In the beginning” is a mistranslation; what it really says is, “When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…” And as Stephen Jay Gould noted in one of his last essays, the subsequent Biblical creation is largely a process in which fundamental order is discovered or revealed. Yahweh, in other words, creates as an artist or a craftsman might; he is no engineer.

This morning I am mulling over the sheep/shepherd imagery that so thoroughly infects the Christian tradition. What might the popularity of this imagery tell us about our relationships with each other – and with the divine Other? According to eco-philosopher Paul Shepard (The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, University of Georgia Press, 1973),

Among animals, suitable candidates for domestication are social, herd-oriented, leader- or dominance-recognizing forms. Their response to their own species (possible sex partners) and their own habitat is more a matter of learning and less of fixed responses to fixed signals. Husbandry seeks out and exploits three characteristics of these animals: the tendency of the young to follow whoever is caring for it by imprinting – the process of irreversible attachment; the gradualness of the transition from nursing to eating; and the way in which different social relations may be mediated by different senses. For example, mother-daughter nurture relationships may be based on imprinted taste. A Scottish milkmaid lets the cow lick her bloodied hands (as well as the calf) at birth, and thereafter the cow will “let down” – give milk – for the milkmaid and the calf, but only for them.

Inborn metabolic errors condemn wild animals to swift destruction. In captivity such cripples are sometimes not only protected but prized. These flaws (“hypertropies”) in growth result in the production of extra meat, wool, silk, eggs, and milk. All such freaks carry a burden of genetic weakness. The nurture of these weaklings is a large part of modern animal science, which may be defined as the systematic creation of animal deformities, anomalies, and monsters and the practice of keeping them alive.

Another mutant trait common to domestics is excessively delayed maturity and sexual precocity combined with rapid growth. In culling out the irascible and stubborn individuals, the hard, mature, lean line is sacrificed for animals with submissive and infantile responses. Individuals maturing at slower rates are favored. Cows and horses have long-enduring mother-child relationships just as primates do. By exploiting this relationship, new social interdependencies can be created. Infantile animals are less attached to their own kind and readily join other barnyard animals or the human household. Children are eager to adopt them as “people” and adult humans are attracted by their helpless appeal and immature faces – for juvenile qualities are as apparent in face and body as in behavior. The effect of all this is that domestic breeds are creatures who never grow up in spite of their sexual precocity.

By contrast, animals that have not been domesticated, but are simply caged for human amusement or edification, frequently suffer mental and physical breakdowns, because they

lack the extensive range of choices necessary to a healthy physical or social existence. Some species simply cannot be kept alive, necessitating a constant flow of “living material” to replace the dead or dying.

Domestic animals who also live in restricted environments are not stir-crazy and malnourished because they are the survivors of hundreds of generations of captives. They are the well-padded drudges, insulated by blunted minds and coarsened bodies against the uniformity of the barnyard, having achieved independence from the demands of style by having no style, coming to terms with the grey world of captivity by arriving at the lowest common denominator of survival….

Occasionally man himself [sic] is included in lists of domestic animals. But man is civilized, not domesticated.

In fact, human beings are still genetically wild, suffering a variety of mental and physical ailments as a result of artificial confinement, literal or metaphorical. The irony is that many of these diseases stemming from an over-civilized condition are interpreted as signs of weakness, whereas in fact – if Shepard is right – the individuals least adapted to zoo conditions are those with the most wildness, the most vigor. Allan Ginsburg was not imaging things when he “saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, / starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

It’s practically a truism that the sentimentalized objects of many a self-professed wildlife lover’s concern have little in common with true wild animals. What worries me is the possibility that many Christians might hold a similarly infantile conception of God. More than any specific dogma, it’s the abundant sentimentality of Christianity, along with its insistence on herd-like submissiveness, that I find off-putting. For many believers, it seems, God is simply an all-benevolent servant of their desires, an idol, a Santa Claus writ large.

Needless to say, it’s this side of the religion that is most on display during the Christmas season. Nativity scenes resonate with our deeply acculturated appreciation for domesticity. Instead of the random and frightening noises of untamed nature, angels sing in harmony. Their message: fear not. Everything is safe and snug and cozy. Barnyard and hearth, shepherd and benevolent king are symbolically united in this adoration of the Lamb.

*

My mother just stopped in as I was typing this to ask if I’d heard the coyotes last night. Unfortunately, my computer is so loud that I didn’t hear anything until I went to bed, shortly before 10:00. Just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard what sounded like the world’s loudest screech owl right outside my window. My mother informs me that the coyotes were yipping and barking up in the field around 8:00, then began singing volubly not too far up Laurel Ridge a little after 9:00, continuing off and on till at least 11:30. “I can understand now why they call them song dogs,” she said. “These coyotes are much more musical than the last bunch!”

There was a pack in residence on this end of the mountain for a couple of years, but a year or two ago they all disappeared – probably the victims of hunters in the valley who don’t appreciate the perceived competition, and who believe any number of horror stories about coyotes’ viciousness toward their precious deer. Members of that pack had been, perhaps wisely, very infrequent singers.

Then in mid-November we started seeing abundant coyote scat on the trails again. It’s exciting to think that a new group has adopted this mountain as its refuge, and has survived the regular rifle deer season – but what is Coyote, after all, but a master of survival, the ultimate habitat generalist, civilized humanity’s most resilient foil? Something tells me I’ll be spending a lot less time on-line in the coming months. I’m already imagining long snowshoe walks on moonlit nights, feeling the ache of cold air in my lungs, keeping an eye out for the northern lights and an ear cocked for another outpouring of wild, anarchic music from the animal the Christianized O’odham Indians still rightly call God’s Dog.

I may be suffering from writer’s block today, but at least nobody’s sticking lit cigarettes in my ears.

A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as “torture” and a June 2004 “Urgent Report” to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

“These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers.”

God bless the Freedom of Information Act – for however much longer it lasts.

UPDATE: Helena Cobban’s analysis of the released documents is here.

From Indian Country Today, some rare glad tidings:

In one of the largest and most spectacular inaugurations in the history of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Cecelia Fire Thunder, the first woman ever to lead the nation as president began a new era….

Cecelia and Vice President Alex White Plume are fluent in the Lakota language and she said they plan to speak the language while in the offices, because, as she added, there may be solutions in the language.

The inauguration was a special event for Oglala women and for women from other tribes. A special ceremony by the women’s society distributed sacred food, or “food of the Gods,” said Rick Two Dogs, uncle to Cecelia and Oglala spiritual leader.

The food contains the spirit, mind and heart of the tribal leaders, he said.

Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to lead the Cherokee Nation as principal chief, is a special friend to Fire Thunder; the two call themselves sisters.

“It takes a strong person to stand up in Indian country,” Mankiller said.

“She [Fire Thunder] is a healer of people. She carries herself with dignity and was not elected because she is a woman. She was elected because she gets up every morning, says prayers in her language and goes out and fights for her people.”

Mankiller said Fire Thunder doesn’t accept things the way they are, which makes her optimistic about the future.

“We have survived relocations, massacres and wars and we are still standing; how can I not be optimistic,” Mankiller said.

Put it off all you want; there’s no escaping the pull of the blank page. We writers stare into it the way, in ages past, a body might have confronted and tried to befriend its own mortality. It was considered greatly enlightening, in fact, to acknowledge one’s “inner death” that way, back in those benighted centuries before the gospel of unlimited Growth unseated the old values of poverty, humility and hospitality.

Mid-afternoon a few days before the winter solstice and I’m up at the spruce grove at the top of the field. The air is as clear as it gets and the view out toward the east is spectacular, but I’ve seen it too many times to become entranced. Mountains and rivers without end, big deal. But turn around, go into the grove. Look: a small patch of sunlight on the needle-covered ground illuminates an otherwise invisible, glistening tapestry. Marvellous!

I kneel before it, run my fingers along the ground to make sure this isn’t some kind of wintertime mirage. A few threads bend to the pressure of my fingertips, but most of them somehow escape my touch. They are extremely fine, and stretch right across the surface of the ground: the ruined webs, I suppose, of what I always like to think of as handkerchief spiders. They are too taut simply to have fallen from the trees, I think. The whole network trembles in this barest ghost of a breeze, while all around the unlit ground looks bare and ordinary.

Then a few minutes later at the so-called vernal ponds along the crest of Sapsucker Ridge, another kind of revelation: three flat, white spaces on a forest floor otherwise free of snow, blank pages for the tracks of coyote and white-tailed deer and the long shadows that stripe them from end to end. I stand and stare at the largest one, contrasting its present opacity with my memory of how it looked on my last walk here a week ago. It was a few hours closer to dusk, and I stood watching the dark outlines of tree trunks shake and shimmy against a reflected sky for so long, I almost managed to convince myself that I was being given a glimpse into some other time, some other forest.

Now this frozen and snow-dusted pond in the woods is the opposite of a looking glass. But with the sun so bright and the sky so blue, its surface offers a sneak preview of coming attractions one or two months away. The long shadows will be just this shade of blue, yes, and in between, the granular surface of the snow pack will glisten, just like that. I will time my walks and set my course so as to head as much as possible into that “certain slant of light,” alert for anything that gleams. I remember how my friend Crystal Dave used to walk when he was out searching for quartz in a freshly bulldozed site of a future subdivision, head down, hands clasped behind his back. “You just go along blinking into the sunlight,” he said, ever the night owl, “and look for that one stone that winks back.”

*

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

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

(The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, R. W. Franklin, ed., Belknap Press, 1998, # 320)
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A contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Solstice Place.

Today is Via Negativa’s first birthday! It hardly seems possible. I am trying hard to remember what I had in mind when I launched her into the world one year ago. I think I had very little inkling of what I was getting into. I had seen only a few, political and links blogs – and none of the popular ones, either. Diary blogs, philosophy and religion blogs, literary and nature blogs were all beyond my ken. I had no concept of blogrolls and little understanding of the importance of linking.

I did know that I wanted primarily to generate original content, but as I recall, I envisioned brief (!) essays and lengthy quotes from printed sources. To the extent that I had a motivating idea at the beginning, I believe it was to write some sort of anti-blog, a post-ironic website devoted to Nothing – hence (in part) the name. After a few weeks, I developed a firmer sense of direction and crafted the Apologia that I still link to, though I think a re-write is long overdue. A few more weeks, and I stopped worrying about whether a given post “fit.” The notion that, “Hey, it’s my blog, I can put up anything I want!” quickly proved intoxicating.

Except that it wasn’t just my blog. From the beginning, I had a strong conception of this as its own thing, an organic whole made up of (as it turned out) very disparate parts. But one thing I didn’t understand when I got started was the importance of comments. Hell, it took me a good two weeks just to figure out how to add a comments feature. In the meantime, I stumbled more or less into the present blog neighborhood, I think from following a Blogwise or Blogorama link to the cassandra pages – always a good place for newcomers to get their sea legs. It turned out that comments threads at blogs were unlike message boards in one, important respect: they were respectful. At least for the smaller and less political blogs, flaming seems to be quite uncommon, and more importantly, the quality of the exchanges is often quite high.

This, I soon decided, is what reading was meant to be: a mostly solitary yet still communal, almost campfire experience, where a reader’s response can prompt new insights from other readers and from the original author, too. As a more-or-less Serious Writer I had always believed strongly in the need for new forms of interaction between audience and author and among authors and texts. In addition, I have a longstanding interest in finding ways to re-invigorate literary culture with some of the methods and emphases of oral traditions, such as communal authorship and the ability to extemporize songs, stories and everything in between.

In the blogosphere, all of this now seems possible. One good way to overcome the tyranny of the secondary text/experience, it seems, is to greatly expand the number and accessibility of primary sites. My most unexpected discovery was the extent to which I would connect with other blogs and other bloggers, and the intensity of some of the friendships that formed as a result. It turned out that there was an astounding number of impossibly talented and/or fascinating people writing with verve and passion about things that matter. I discovered food bloggers, travel bloggers, photo bloggers, audio bloggers, poetry bloggers, birding bloggers, Buddhism bloggers, model airplane bloggers – you name it. It remains a source of wonder to me that I can log onto Bloglines any given morning, click on one of my subscriptions at random, and read something as good or better than anything published in Orion or The Georgia Review.

Of course, there are peculiarities about this blog neighborhood that distinguish it from the rest of the blogosphere, where different sets of values may apply. A few days ago, I spent an hour or two reading some of the hipper weblogs and came back to my own feeling slightly abashed. “Look at all this rampant sincerity!” I muttered to myself, scrolling down the main page of the Via Neg. But perhaps, I thought, the problem isn’t sincerity per se, but the fact that it’s mixed in with cynicism, humor and outright silliness in ever-varying proportions. Can’t I just find one predominant mood and stick with it? And I knew, of course, what I would want that mood to be: grave, vatic to elegiac, spiced with flashes of irony. I would have to rein in my enthusiasm for things I like. Gushiness is never cool.

Well, it ain’t for nothing that I have a lengthy Rabelais quote right under my picture at my geocities site. See, Rabelais was The Man. In his one, gargantuan book he found room for everything: not just the bawdy and scatological humor that everyone remembers, but social commentary (including a serious proposal for a commune), philosophy and religion, word lists, recipes, all in a spirit of provisionality and experimentation that few other literary authors have managed to emulate. Then there are the myth cycles of certain indigenous peoples, which employ a similar mix of genres, moods, voices and levels. To hell with gravity and consistency! Long live the melange!

*

This would probably be a good place to do one of those Year in Review things, but I’m not sure where to start. Besides, the “High Points” links are there for anyone who wants to take a core sample – though some of V.N.’s more memorable posts, such as Conjuring Place, the Bathroom Poems, Hot Raccoon Sex and How to Make an Egg Salad Sandwich, aren’t included. My two personal favorites among all the things I’ve written for this blog so far are the poems In the Ice Forest, from last February, and From a Distance, dashed off in one draft last July.

I could go on and on about how much blogging has changed and improved my writing, but you’ve probably heard it all before. One of the few things, if not the only thing, I’ve written about blogging here is the essay Hanging Gardens, from last May, where I compared bloggers to paper-making hornets for some reason. (I had the devil’s own time trying to find it just now, so you better all go read it! The Google Search bar doesn’t always work when you’ve got too much content in one place, it seems.)

The main thing I want to say is THANK YOU to everyone who’s been a regular reader, whether or not you’ve ever left a comment.

*

Last Saturday was the final day of regular rifle deer season in Pennsylvania, so not wanting to risk interrupting the hunt, I confined myself to a walk down our mile-and-a-half-long driveway and back. It was about 40 degrees out – just cold enough to require a knit cap.

Down near the bottom of the hollow, right in the middle of the driveway on a level with my nose, I found a small spider with a spot of yellow in the middle of a thin, brown abdomen. She was spinning a web.

I couldn’t believe it. For a month or more, every time the sun shone strongly I’d go walk in the woods and see if I could still see strands of spider and caterpillar silk hanging from trees and bushes, and sure enough: the woods seemed as interlinked as ever. I had chalked it up to the resilience of webs spun much earlier in the summer or fall, but now I wasn’t so sure.

She was climbing up a very long anchor thread leading from the edge of the road to an overhanging hemlock branch. The silk was virtually invisible, so my first impression was of this strange, small being crawling upside-down through the air. I watched her inch her way back up to the branch, and would have watched longer if I hadn’t had to hurry back and start supper. It didn’t seem like a very good time or a very auspicious place to start a big new project like that. On the other hand, I guess someone has to prey on all those January mosquitoes!

But maybe it wasn’t about prey at all. Maybe it wasn’t even about the web. Who knows?

Two days later it was snowing.