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The U.S. Forest Sevice has announced its intention to push ahead with oil and gas drilling within roadless areas in Utah’s Uinta National Forest, despite widespread opposition from the actual, legal owners of the land (us). The head of the Utah Petroleum Association, however, knows what’s best for us: “We have to make a decision as a society to allow the responsible development of oil and gas leases on public lands.”

An even more heinous violation of the public trust is underway in Maryland, where Republican governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has admitted an intention to begin selling off state parks and state forests to real estate speculators (a.k.a. “developers”). “We’re absolutely looking at surplusing properties wherever we can,” the newly installed kleptocrat told the Washington Post. “Just having government holding pieces of land that should be developed is a policy we want to confront.”

It may interest cultural conservatives to know that Woody Guthrie’s first draft for “This Land is Your Land” had every verse end with the line, “God blessed America for me.” The thin strand with which I connect all this to the via negativa, however, is the little-known fourth verse (from Guthrie’s final version):

As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side – it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Today is St. Lucy’s Day, one in a series of December celebrations of light.

Lucy is a Sicilian saint, the patroness of Syracuse where she was martyred in the reign of Diocletian. One story says that when a suitor admired her beautiful eyes she cut them out and sent them to him, asking to be left in peace thereafter (like most early Christian virgin martyrs, she refused marriage). Now she is the patron of eye diseases and the blind and is often depicted carrying her eyeballs on a plate….

Apparently untroubled by the gruesome imagery, Italians eat St. Lucy’s eyes, cakes or biscotti shaped like eyeballs….The celebration of St Lucy spread over all of Europe. But the place where she is most beloved is Scandinavia, where light is especially welcome in the long hours of winter darkness. On her day, the eldest (or youngest) daughter rises before dawn and fixes a breakfast of special pastries and coffee for her family. She appears in their bedrooms, dressed in a white dress belted with a red sash, and wearing a wreath of greens and four (or seven or nine) lighted candles. Sometimes the wreath is made of green rue and decorated with red ribbons. She serves traditional pastries called lussekatter (or Lucy cats), x-shaped pastries, sometimes flavored with saffron. Other traditional foods served in her honor include saffron buns, ginger biscuits and glogg, a hot spiced wine with aquavit.

Here in central Pennsylvania, the weather gods are celebrating St. Lucy’s Day with our first real snow of the season. And why not? A blanket of snow is the only real way to diminish the darkness this time of year.

UPDATE: Check out the great poem, and additional links, at Watermark.

1. Marin Outings, the brand-new blog by Maria of alembic, looks promising. It features photos matched with finely-wrought poems or prose poems. Start at the beginning.

2. Suzanne’s Sapphodes are not so much spacey as they are holey – maybe even via negativistic.

3. From the guys this week, metaphysical wrestling with the Big Questions. (You know how much we guys obsess about the size of our questions!) First, Chris Clarke wondered about Worship:

In an old edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone once responded to the Spaceship Earth metaphor as like being out in the New Mexico night, looking at the stars, and gasping “it’s just like the planetarium!” Church is like going to the Oakland Museum, looking at the wonderful diorama of Joshua tree, Tegeticula moth, loggerhead shrike, and Mojave green rattlesnake, all artfully preserved and decorously posed.

Reality? Reality bites.

Then Grace and other curses came in for some sharp questioning at the vernacular body:

Fortunately, grace doesn’t require belief of me. In this, it is like many of the wonders of our world. No belief required. A thing is what it is, regardless of what I might choose to impose on it. My believing or disbelieving is immaterial.

This at least is my explanation for what happens in that precisely callibrated moment (precisely callibrated: look at me talking like a believer!) when I encounter the work, or when the work encounters me.

Finally, Kevin of Big Hominid entered the ring (three-way matches are allowed in metaphysical wrestling, right?), guest-blogging at Ditch the Raft on Zen and Postmodernism.

As Korean Zen master Seung Sahn says, if you want to “attain watermelon,” you have to cut a piece and eat it. “BOOM! Your experience!” Seung Sahn cackles. You and the watermelon are not-two, of course. In a deep sense, you don’t really “attain” watermelon any more than you “know the taste of” watermelon. Nothing to attain; nothing to taste; no you. Think of the watermelon as your dharma talk, a sermon about the nature of all things….

4. But my favorite single line of the week appeared in a diatribe by Natalie at Blaugustine last Sunday:

But, like many people, I go to hell sometimes because you can find bargains there.

Sad but true.

I’m still accepting nominations for the “Reader’s Picks” addendum to Tuesday’s post, Loose canon: 20th century poetry in English. The only requirements are that it be a book- or chapbook-length collection of poems in English (no translations, though I fudged a little on Pound’s Cathay) published between 1901 and 2000 – and that, most importantly, it be a strong personal favorite of yours.

John McKay, where are you? Some names are kind of hard to Google, you know.

John was my roommate in my last semester at Penn State; we’d studied abroad in Japan at the same time, though I didn’t get to know him too well then. He was always chasing after one redhead or another. Must be an Irish thing.

Anyway, it was John who first introduced me to the blues –

“Good morning blues, blues how do you do?
Good morning blues, blues how do you do?”
“I’m doin’ all right, baby, how ’bout you?”
(Leadbelly)

– for which I remain eternally grateful.

I was thinking about John yesterday. He was an English major, and for a fiction class he had embroidered a bit on a real character he had met during a summer job at the morgue, a guy named Shorty. I can’t remember whether Shorty starred in a short story, a novella or a full-length novel. Whatever John was working on, it seemed always to take a back seat to the parade of redheads in and out of his bedroom. But I do know that I got into the act myself a couple years later:

Shorty’s Ballad of Unrequited Love

I want to love you slowly sweetly
One spoonful at a time
I want you holy & completely
For no good reason or rhyme

I want your love to refine me
Like sugar from sugarcane
I want you to seal & sign me
Over to a home for the insane

I want to feel your teeth your nails
Your hands around my throat
I want the blues when passion fails
In each pocket of my overcoat

I’ll stand outside convenience stores
In the middle of July
I’ll wave my sleeves like semaphores
Until I learn to fly

And then my sweet I’ll change my name
Bus drivers will call me Bill
I’ll put your face in a pretty frame
Beside my windowsill

So don’t call me unromantic dear
Because I don’t talk nice
It’s really been a frantic year
Since they laid you out on ice

I was reminded of all this yesterday, when some of our hunter friends were giving us an update on the progress of the 2004 deer season. There’s a general paucity of bucks this year, they said, and what few are around are still in full rut, possibly because the weather has stayed so warm.

“You don’t want to get in the way of a buck when he’s chasing a doe,” said Troy. “Ray, down here in Sinking Valley? He shot a doe from his tree stand last week, and when he got over to it there was a big buck working her over. It’s like he didn’t even notice that she was dead! And he would not go away.

“Ray got a friend to help chase him off, then stand by with a loaded rifle while he gutted her out. The whole time, they said that buck was just a few yards away, acting like he was gonna charge. I said to Paula, if that buck had made up his mind to charge, that rifle wouldn’t’a done no good whatsoever. He shoulda just left it alone and come back later. You don’t want to mess with a buck when they’re like that.”

Words to live by.

Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) 4:1-12

So I returned, and considered
all the oppressions that are done under the sun:
and behold the tears of such as were oppressed,
and they had no comforter;
and on the side of their oppressors there was power;
but they had no comforter.

Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead
more than the living which are yet alive.

Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been,
who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

Again, I considered all travail, and every right work,
that for this a man is envied of his neighbour.
This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.

The fool foldeth his hands together,
and eateth his own flesh.

Better is an handful with quietness,
than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.

Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun.

There is one alone, and there is not a second;
yea, he hath neither child nor brother:
yet is there no end of all his labour;
neither is his eye satisfied with riches;
neither saith he, For whom do I labour,
and bereave my soul of good?
This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

Two are better than one;
because they have a good reward for their labour.

For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow:
but woe to him that is alone when he falleth;
for he hath not another to help him up.

Again, if two lie together, then they have heat:
but how can one be warm alone?

And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him;
and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Rogation: prayer minus one. First in seed time, then right before the ascension, when history threatens to resume. What to do? Take up the cross and circle the parish in solemn procession. Kneel. Sprinkle holy water in the furrows, glorify the corpse. We still need to eat down here, in this Calvary stripped bare for interrogation.

*

I dreamed I was crawling on my belly through the grass, but my eyes were positioned such that I could see everything around me, including the sky above. Yellow jacket hornets kept buzzing me, but I knew that their underground nest was behind me on the hillside. I was saying to myself, Their spies will report back to headquarters on my movements – the retreat of a hated enemy. But their colony is sick, and they don’t know what to do. I’ll have to come back after dark and try to heal it. The part of my consciousness that was not dreaming wanted to know, then, how it could be that a human healer’s responsibility extended to all of nature? I took stock of myself: armless, legless, nothing but head and tail. The world was my vagina. I tasted the air with a stereophonic tongue.

*

Heretics try to tear the seamless robe of our God. . . . They are the most evil angels. They are the sons of depravity from the father of wickedness and the author of evil, who are resolved to deceive simple souls. They are snakes who deceive doves. They are serpents who seem to creep in secretly and, under the sweetness of honey, spew out poison. While they pretend to administer the food of life, they strike from their tails.

Frederick II, 1231 (translated by James Powell, The Liber Augustalis, Syracuse University Press, 1971)

*

So when divine grace cleansed rather than deprived me of those vile members which from their practice of utmost indecency are called ‘the parts of shame’ and have no proper name of their own, what else did it do but remove a foul perfection in order to restore perfect purity? Such purity, as we have heard, certain sages have desired so eagerly that they have mutilated themselves, so as to remove entirely the shame of desire. The Apostle too is recorded as having besought the Lord to rid him of this thorn in the flesh, but was not heard. The great Christian philosopher Origen provides an example, for he was not afraid to mutilate himself in order to quench completely this fire within him . . . Yet Origen is seriously to be blamed because he sought a remedy for blame in punishment of his body. True, he had zeal for God, but an ill-informed zeal, and the charge of homicide can be proved against him for his self mutilation. Men think he did this either at the suggestion of the devil or in grave error but, in my case, through God’s compassion, it was done by another’s hand. I do not incur blame, I escape it.

Peter Abelard, Letter 4 to Heloise (translated by Betty Radice, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Penguin, 1974)

*

The learned psychologist interrogates the 19-year-old “hysteric” about her excessive throat clearing. She confesses to a persistent fantasy of fellatio. He traces this back to her thumb-sucking habit as a child, which her father only broke her of at the age of five. He convinces her that she has merely substituted a penis for her thumb, which had been in turn a substitute for her nurse’s nipple. Thus the male psychologist creates an orobourus-like argument for the woman’s apparent craving, her supposed lack or envy that seems to mirror the power imbalance of the interrogation itself.

*

“In psychoanalysis it is very important to be prepared for the bisexual meaning of a symptom,” Freud writes (Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Collier, 1963). Better to say that all symbolic systems are deeply ambiguous. What about the world outside symbols? In the absence of an authentic I-Thou relationship, people will seek to satisfy their hunger with whatever palliatives they can find. As Martin Buber notes (Between Man and Man, translated by Roger Gregor Smith, Macmillan, 1965), “Only he who himself turns to the other human being and opens himself to him receives the world in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being, lives and faces me in the whole compression of my existence, brings the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one another with all that they are, ‘It is Thou‘, is the indwelling of the Present Being between them.”

*

The final shock came when I discovered in early 1960 that there is not one, but hundreds of Kalvarios [‘Calvaries’] in Zinacantan, located throughout the municipio in all the hamlets. Thus, the Zinacanteco view of Kalvario gradually becomes clear: it is a special kind of cross shrine where particular groups of ancestral gods are believed to meet, deliberate about the affairs of their living descendents, and wait for offerings of black chickens, white candles, and rum….

In the case of the tribal sacred mountains around the Center there are cross altars both at the foot and on top of each of these mountains. The Zinacanteco view of these crosses is that they are ‘doorways’ to the ancestral gods. For example, when a curing procession arrives at a sacred mountain, the members, led by the shaman, decorate the crosses with pine boughs and flowers, burn incense, light candles, and offer prayers to the crosses at the foot of the mountain. By so doing, they ‘pass through’ the outer doorway of the house and proceed up the trail to the top of the mountain where another set of crosses designates the patio cross for the house of the ancestral god who is sitting inside to receive his visitors and their offerings. Here the ritual is repeated and then the curing party proceeds to the next mountain on the circuit.

Evan Z. Vogt, The Zinacantecos of Mexico: A Modern Maya Way of Life (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970)

If Via Negativa is the only blog of its kind you read, this week you missed some real gems. Three posts in particular stand out in my mind. I’ll give the opening sentence for each; please click on the links. (The one thing they have in common is that they are all SHORT.)

I knew a woman once, a long time ago, who had murdered her children.

And:

The summit ridge of Mount Diablo bears a couple of radio transmitters, relics of the days when the best and highest use of an isolated mountaintop was to use it as an antenna.

And:

Simply offer a jar of grubs.

And in case someone hasn’t already forwarded this to you, check out The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time. (Thanks, Fred!)

Helleborine is like unto white Hellebor, and for that cause we have given it the name of Helleborine. It hath a straight stalke of a foot high, set from the bottome to the tuft of floures, with faire leaves, ribbed and chamfered like those of white Hellebor, but nothing neere so large, of a dark greene colour. The floures be orderly placed from the middle to the top of the stalke, hollow within, and white of colour, straked here and there with a dash of purple, in shape like the floures of Satyrion. The seed is small like dust or motes in the Sun.

*

Comfrey joyeth in watery ditches, in fat and fruitful meadows; they grow all in my Garden.

*

The stalke of Clot-burre before the burres come forth, the rind pilled off, being eaten raw with salt and pepper, or boyled in the broth of fat meate, is pleasant to be eaten: being taken in that manner it increaseth seed and stirreth up lust.

*

The root and seed of the great water Lillie is good against venery or fleshly desire, if one do drink a decoction thereof, or use the seed or root in powder in his meates, for it drieth up the seed of generation, and so causeth a man to be chast, especially used in broth with flesh.

*

There groweth in Aegypt a kinde of Aron or Cuckow pint which is found also in Africa, and likewise in certain places in Portingale neere unto rivers and streames, that differeth from those of our countries growing, which the people of Castile call Manta de nuestra senora: most would have it to be called Colocasia; but Dioscorides saith that Colocasia is the root of Faba Aegyptia, or the Beane of Aegypt.

The common Cuckow pint is called in Latin, Arum: in Greeke, [aron]: in shops, Iarus, and Barba-Aron: of others, Per-vituli: of the Syrians, Lupha: of the men of Cyprus, Colocasia, as we find among the bastard names. Pliny in his 24. booke, 16. chapter, doth witnesse, that there is a great difference between Aron and Dracontium, although there hath been some controversie about the same among the old writers, affirming them to be all one: in high Dutch it is called , Passen pint: in Italian, Gigora: in Spanish, Yaro: in low Dutch, Calfsuoet: in French, Pied d’veau: in English, Cuckow pint, and Cuckow pintle, wake-Robin, Priests pintle, Aron; Calfes foote, and Rampe; and of some Stratchwoort.

*

The Caper groweth in Italy, Spaine, and other hot Regions without manuring, in a leane soyle, in rough places among rubbish, and upon old walls, as Dioscorides reporteth.

Theophrastus writeth, that it is by nature wild, and refuseth to be husbanded, yet in these our daies divers use to cherish the same, and to set it in dry and stony places: my selfe at the impression hereof, planted some seeds in the bricke walls of my garden, which as yet do spring and grow green, the successe I expect.

*

There be found two Aglaophotides, described by Aelianus in his 14.booke; one of the sea, in the 24.Chapter: the other of the earth, in the 27.chapter. That of the sea is a kind of Fucus, or sea mosse, which groweth upon high rocks, of the bigness of Tamarisk, with the head of Poppy; which opening in the Summer Solstice doth yeeld in the night time a certain fierie, and as it were sparkling brightnesse or light.

That of the earth, saith he, which by another name is called Cynospastus, lieth hid in the day time among other herbes, and is not knowne at all, and in the night time it is easily seene: for it shineth like a star, and glittereth with a fierie brightnesse.

And this Aglaophotis of the earth, or Cynospastus, is Paeonia; for Apuleius saith, that the seedes or graines of Peionie shine in the night time like a candle, and that plenty of it is in the night season found out and gathered by the shepheards….

Aelianus saith, that Cynospastus is not plucked up without danger; and that it is reported how he that first touched it, not knowing the nature thereof, perished. Therefore a string must be fastened to it in the night, and a hungrie dog tied thereto, who being allured by the smell of rotting flesh set towards him, may plucke it up by the rootes. Iosephus also writeth, that Baara doth shine in the evening like the day star, and that they who come neere, and would plucke it up, can hardly do that, save that either a woman’s urine, or her menses be poured upon it, and that so it may be plucked up at the length….

But all these things be most vaine and frivolous: for the roote of Peionie, as also of Mandrake, may be removed at any time of the yeare, day or houre whatsoever.

*

[Peony root] is also given, saith Pliny, against the disease of the minde. The root of the male Peionie is preferred in this cure.

Ten or twelve of the red berries or seeds drunke in wine that is something harsh or sower, and red, do stay the inordinate flux, and are good for the stone in the beginning.

The blacke graines (that is the seed) to the number of fifteen taken in wine or mead, helpes the strangling and paines of the matrix or mother, and is a speciall remedie for those that are troubled in the night with the disease called Ephialtes or night Mare, which is as though a heavy burthen were laid upon them, and they oppressed therewith, as if they were overcome by their enemies, or overprest with some great weight or burthen; and they are also good against melancholicke dreams.

The squalor of mind
is formlessness,
informis,

the Romans said of ugliness,
it has no form,
a man’s misery, bleached skies,

the war between desire
and dailiness. I thought
this morning of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work . . .

“Songs to Survive the Summer,” Praise (Ecco Press, 1979)