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Black gum or tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) always begins to turn color in late July or early August here in central Pennsylvania, though it won’t reach its peak until September. This leaf cups water from last night’s thunderstorm, which is probably also what stripped it from the tree.

Sharon Brogan (Watermark) is on a roll. Her latest poem blows me away, but the two that preceded it were pretty impressive, as well. However, they are each too succinct, too all-of-a-piece for me to be able to quote less than the full poem, so please just go there and read them for yourselves.

I was also moved by two essays “writing the erotic middle-aged body”: Brenda Clews’ Portrait of the Sexuality of a Middle-Aged Woman and, in response, Dale of mole’s Shameless Flowering Temples. Parental discretion is advised: both essays contain adult themes not suitable for anyone under the age of 35.

And what will you do with the grail when you have found it?
– Benjamin Disraeli

That there are good fats as well as bad fats should surprise no one.

Indeed, experts say, 60% of the brain is made up of fat, 25% of which is DHA. This hardworking omega-3 fatty acid is also essential in maintaining vision by protecting the retina.

Low levels of DHA have been linked with visual disorders as well as other mental conditions, including dementia and depression.

We have heard about bad fats ad nauseum: the dull thickness under the skin and around the heart, byproduct of a hopeless but understandable effort to fend off life’s blows. But we must speak, too, about this other kind – part fish, part cream, part olive oil – that makes the skin glow and the eyes shine, as Psalm 104:15 says. In our modern, reductionist way we are accustomed to thinking about food as fuel, composed of units of heat. But there’s a kind of divine symmetry in the fact that the same fats necessary for vision and clear thinking also give the best light. Think of the five foolish virgins whom the bridegroom refused because they took no oil, “but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps” (Matthew 25:1-13).

Losing fat not only won’t get you a ticket to the Kingdom of Heaven; it may even be hazardous to your health. According to a new study, “the physiological and metabolic stresses associated with weight loss could be so great as to outweigh the benefits of being thinner.”

A woman with the right kind of fat is a joy to others and a joy to herself. Her body is pure lubricity, able to move in several directions at once: go watch a belly dancer if you don’t believe me. One night with such a woman, my friend, & no skinny woman will ever again be able to entrance you with her momentary cry & one-dimensional hunger. The exclamation point soon loses its power to astonish, but the round curves of a question mark? Ah, there’s something to ponder! A thousand queries flood my tongue with the tang of olives.

Taking pictures leaves a smudge on my glasses. Did I get it from the garlic shot, or from the poison ivy?

I’m reading the blogs this morning rather than writing in my own, still catching up after a week and a half of offline distractions. If I collected my various comments on other people’s blogs, would they add up to something I could post here?

Beth’s post on “Stealing the Image” and the comments it garnered have me thinking about self-consciousness – though, looking at my pocket notebook, I see I was already thinking about this first thing in the morning. Pure coincidence (as if there’s any other kind).

“So often,” I wrote, “my writing for the day begins with reflection on the act of writing itself.

“Is this just me, or does the composition of text involve self-reflexivity from the get-go? One translates perception into image, image into sound, sound into object – writing. Before, as speech, even in the mind’s ear, words were embedded in a flow. But on the page or screen they achieve some kind of autonomy – they become knowing witnesses rather than mere participants.

“The writer feels both more powerful and less powerful than the orator: more powerful, because able to employ vastly more arrangements than the mechanics of oral composition and delivery permit; less powerful, because the newly autonomous words turn the scribe into a servant of meanings that now seem continually to elude judgement. The flux is no longer between words but within them.”

In other words, to occupy oneself with written words is to become involved in a sort of infinite regression. Artists and musicians, by contrast, dwell in closer proximity to the origins of consciousness.

Sounds like horse-pokey to me, Dave!

But see, that’s the thing: I may be self-conscious, but I’m also an exhibitionist. I don’t mind letting it all hang out: the warmed-over philosophy, the half-finished poems, the ingrown toenails, the bad teeth. I revel in my imperfection.

“My body may not look like much, but let me tell you: it’s one unbelievable multi-tasker! I get dizzy just thinking about all I get done without thinking.”

I had just written the preceding sentence in my notebook when I bethought myself to stop by Maria’s blog, alembic. There I read this:

Some people collect rare coins. Others, antiques. Me, it seems, I like to keep my body well stocked with autoimmune diseases…

But the comments to that post are closed, so I am left with my mouth hanging open.

“It’s only news if the man bites the dog.” I remember an old story from the Weekly World News in which a collie carried a small child back into a burning building. “I know my dog anywhere I hear him bark,” says the old blues verse. It’s the sound of home, no matter where you are.

“You are waiting for the poodle to stick out its tongue at you and wag a friendly tail,” Maria wrote – though “you” in this context means, of course, “I.”

But the diagnosis says Lupus, “the sharp-toothed stealthy wolf.” (It helps to know that Maria is originally from Romania, which still has a healthy population of wild wolves.) And: “Poetry has turned on me, and maybe the cure, the only effective cure for it is silence.”

“No comment” is still a comment, though, isn’t it? This thing keeps turning back on itself, like a dog chasing its own tail – that wagging monstrosity of domestication that any self-respecting wild canid would long ago have caught and put to a merciful end.

THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS. I think it was no accident that I came across a quote from Franz Kafka last night – to the effect that if you remain quite still and solitary, “the world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” Will it? I am an empty cup. What will show itself?

– Tom Montag, Curlew: Home, Chapter 1 – “The Journey,” third paragraph

A couple newly scanned articles were added to the archive of articles on peaceful societies at Peaceful Societies.org this morning. Of greatest general interest is one called “The Natural History of Peace: A Positive View of Human Nature and Its Potential,” by Leslie Sponsel.

Sponsel reviews a vast range of literature to support his argument that peace is an essential part of the human experience. While he does not deny the obvious reality of violence and warfare in the past and present, his evidence casts strong doubts on many of the arguments made by those who maintain that humanity is intrinsically violent. The author reviews literature from biology, primate ethology, human ethology, human paleontology, prehistoric archaeology, ethnology and ethnography to make several critical conclusions: that human violence is not inevitable; that warfare is not universal; that peacefulness prevails, and has prevailed, in many societies; and that humans, by nature, can be either peaceful or violent.

On the outskirts of Frostburg, MD (a college town)

A single, very hot and humid day – last Friday – was enough to bring the peonies to their peak of blooming, and late that same afternoon, a storm flattened them. Petals covered with age spots litter the dirt. Yesterday, walking through the meadow, I found a dock leaf brilliant with autumn, though the summer solstice is still a week away.

Gazing at Spring

Flowers bloom:
no one
to enjoy them with.

Flowers fall:
no one
with whom to grieve.

I wonder when love’s
longings
stir us most –

when flowers bloom,
or when flowers fall?

XUE TAO
(translated by Jeanne Larsen, Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao, Princeton University Press, 1987)

*

Yesterday afternoon the air lightened for the first time in nearly a week of intense humidity. I might have squandered this time in front of the computer, but fate intervened in the form of a pair of red oak trees, roots loosened by two days of torrential rains, that smashed down across our mile-and-a-half-long access road up the hollow. My parents had been heading off for an appointment, but they came back to get me. Clearing a big nest of trees is always much faster with two people: one to cut, one to toss. My mother’s bad back excuses her from this kind of work, so I handed her my camera.

It’s always a shame to see big trees fall over in their prime, but a little knowledge of forest ecology helps put it in perspective. The toppling of individual trees advances the forest toward a mature condition by introducing valuable elements of structural and chemical diversity. The huge rootball of these side-by-side trees brought subsoil to the surface, and will collect moisture and create a unique microhabitat on the steep slope as it settles and erodes. Fallen trunks and branches are always needed to help restore soils badly damaged by clearcutting in the 19th century. And new canopy gaps provide light for saplings, shrubs and wildflowers.

A little ways beyond the fallen oaks, a tall tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) had shed one of its limbs across the driveway. This was fortuitous for me because, lacking a telephoto lens, I don’t have any other way to get a photo of a tulip tree blossom.

Tulips, also known as yellow poplars, are among the signature species of the Appalachians. They are similar to white pines (Pinus strobus) in structure and habits: colonizing large openings, especially after fires, they grow tall and straight, overtopping the canopy. Though first-succession trees, like white pines, they can live for hundreds of years. Pioneering forest ecologist E. Lucy Braun described her visit to a patch of virgin forest in Lynn Fork, Kentucky in the 1930s, which culminated with a truly magnificent specimen of L. tulipifera.

The leaves of trillium, bellwort, phlox, spotted mandarin, buttercups, foam-flower and a host of other spring-flowering plants stirred our imagination and painted the hillsides in spring bloom. But dominating it all is the primeval grandeur of a forest. Each changing vista brings to view additional large tulip trees, each larger, it seems, than those before. And then, ahead, rises the majestic column of the “big poplar” – straight, sound and perfect, towering eighty feet to the first branch, lifting its crown far aloft. In reverence and awe we stood and gazed upon this tree, the largest living individual of its kind in North America. Such monarchs of the forest are not grown in decades, nor yet in centuries. Few but the mountain folk had ever seen it, even knew of its existence. If the people of this nation loved and revered this splendid tree as do these mountain people – they once held church service in this cathedral of Nature – its safety would be assured.

E. LUCY BRAUN, “The Forest of Lynn Fork of Leatherwood,” in American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists, by Marcia Myers Bonta, Texas A&M University Press, 1995

Unfortunately, this tree, along with the rest of that “cathedral of Nature” in Lynn Fork, was razed shortly after Braun published her impassioned plea for its preservation in Nature Magazine. The young forest that sprang up in its place was logged again a mere fifty years later.

Losses of this magnitude make mourning the passing of flowers, or even of individual trees, seem frivolous by comparison – not that frivolity is always a bad thing. Living in an era of widespread habitat destruction and the extinction of species, ecosystems and cultures, perhaps it’s wise to school ourselves in loss. But I think it’s important to retain a sense of proportion. It’s all too easy to become impassioned at the destruction of human embryos or the cruelty inflicted on laboratory animals, because these events occur at scales we comprehend. It’s much harder to get people excited about the loss in soil biodiversity as a result of chemical-intensive farming, or the loss in microbial diversity within our own bodies as a result of simplified diets and antibiotic use. Conservative commentators decry the loss of learning and refinement among English speakers while all over the globe whole languages are going extinct. And with each language perishes a universe of thought and expression, a unique way of being in the world.

To get a sense of just how different some worldviews can be – and of how much will be lost if we let them all be overwhelmed by the global monoculture – check out the new Archive of Articles on Peaceful Societies at the Peaceful Societies website. (Since I have just been quoting from one of my mom’s books, I figure I might as well put in a plug for my dad’s site, too!) I was especially struck by Signe Howell’s piece, “‘To Be Angry Is Not To Be Human, But To Be Fearful Is’: Chewong concepts of human nature” (PDF file).

The host of different beings attributed with consciousness that exist within the Chewong universe have structurally similar qualities to humans. With the possible exception of Tanko and keoi, none is perceived as hierarchical, aggressive, competitive, quarrelsome, angry, or domineering. Neither are they brave. Humans and the rest of the conscious non-humans are shy and fearful. Of these, semantically and ideologically the leaf-people and the original people stand closest to the Chewong, while Tanko and keoi stand closest to the outsiders. On the whole, the terms bad, brave, quarrelsome, and angry are associated with outsiders, not with the Chewong or the various superhuman beings who participate in the wider Chewong social universe. The Malays and Chinese represent the prototypes of these characteristics. They are therefore to be feared and avoided. There is very little the Chewong can do to prevent the Chinese and Malays from harming them, except to stay out of their way as much as possible. Not being part of the Chewong social universe, they operate according to different rules but, interestingly, this does not mean that they can be treated in qualitatively different ways — such as be attacked. There are thus no circumstances in which the Chewong may behave in contradiction to their ideologically constructed concept of human nature. To them, the meaning of human is to be fearful, and this permeates their cosmology. Conversely, to be angry, quarrelsome, or brave marks one off as not human. Such characteristics, in effect, either prevent social relations from being established or, whenever manifested through behaviour, they cut them off.

I like the idea of fearfulness playing a formative role in developing character, because to me, fear, awe, wonder and humility together comprise a vital response to the mystery of being. I agree with the ancient authors of the Hebrew Bible that fear/awe of Whatever is the beginning of wisdom. And the complex and nuanced views held by the Chewong in regard to disease and death, the predation of other beings on humans and our own need – as they see it – to kill and eat sentient beings, strike me as far wiser than a simplistic belief in mutually exclusive realms of good and evil.

*

The first few fireflies have begun to punctuate the nighttime darkness. It’s funny how the addition of blinking lights makes the stillness seem so much more profound.

I remember waking at one point last night and feeling my mind poised as if to ask a question, but no question arose. It was right at the tip of my tongue… which is a fascinating expression, isn’t it? Think of them, all the words we want – perhaps already possess – but can’t quite find: there in the darkness, barely beyond the reach of our impassioned tongues.

In the middle of the 5,000-acre wild area, itself surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of state forest, a sturdy footbridge spans a large creek. Twin telephone poles serve for its beams, supporting a four-foot-wide deck of pressure-treated planks and a single railing on the downstream side. It took a National Guard helicopter to airlift the thing in, ten years ago or more. And there it sits in the middle of this mini-wilderness, a tribute to something-or-other. Hikers who would never consider spray-painting a rock or carving a tree – not even a dead one – have scarred the railing with names, dates, even a crude etching of trees and a campfire. I wonder how many of these graffiti artists would have ventured so many miles off the pavement were it not for our country’s draconian drug laws? But then, I suppose we all go out in the wilderness to alter our minds a bit.

I don’t know why this comes to mind now; perhaps it made an appearance in one of last night’s dreams. So often in the dreams that I can remember I have found myself suddenly on a bridge, staring at the water. Living where I do at the head of a small stream, and having grown up here, I have never felt threatened by floodwaters, though they’ve cut off our access to the outside world more than once. But a river marks the physical end of this hollow and the ridges that enclose it. When I was a kid, the school bus always dropped us off on the far side of the river, and our mile-and-a-half walk home began by crossing the one-lane county bridge. The first time I did this, as a five-year-old kid returning from a highly traumatic first day of public schooling, I was terrified. The bridge has open metal decking, a grid with three-inch-wide squares. Twenty feet below, the river ran brown and gave off a peculiar odor. It was all my big brother could do to coax me across.

During last autumn’s flood – the result of two hurricanes a week apart – my dad and I made our way down the hollow with some trepidation about whether the bridge would still be there. It was. The roiling, chocolate-colored waters were barely a foot below the deck of the bridge, and a massive pile of logs and debris against the upstream railing showed that the river had crested several feet above that. The highway beyond was still flooded; only an occasional pickup truck ventured through. We stepped gingerly out onto the bridge, venturing maybe a third of the way across. The bridge shook with the force of water thundering against its single, stone pier; once or twice a minute something large would strike against it with a hollow boom. We quickly retreated, remembering stories of how the previous bridge had been taken out by a floating oil tank back in the flood of ’36.

It seems a little odd, even to myself, that I’ve never run a river – not in an inner tube, a raft, a kayak or a canoe. On the one hand, it does seem like fun. On the other, I don’t relish the thought of spending all that time sitting, and in the hot sun to boot. I’d rather be walking in the woods, thank you very much. It has nothing to do with any fear of water, the fact that I’m a poor swimmer or that I almost drowned once while swimming in the ocean. No, sir.

I do enjoy walking beside streams and rivers, and I imagine I’d enjoy fishing if I ever got into it. There is something undeniably refreshing about running water, even in a small stream like Plummer’s Hollow Run. Not only Baptists, but Cherokees with their “going to water” rite and Hindus bathing in the Ganges are all convinced of the curative powers of streams and rivers. I’m not too well-versed in the science of this, but a Google search of “ions” and “flowing water” brings up a commercial website for some purveyor of home water fountains called – I kid you not – Holy Mountain.

The air all around us is electrically charged with positive and negative ions. Positive ions are emitted by computers, microwaves, air conditioners, heaters, televisions and other conveniences of modern-day life. These positive ions in the air we breathe can result in feelings of mental or physical exhaustion and affect overall health.

It has been said that the movement of water releases negative ions which in turn make you feel refreshed, and bring peace to your heart and mind. This is because these negative ions naturally attract airborne particles, such as pollutants and dust. A waterfall or water fountain acts like a magnet to pull these particles out of the air. As a result, the air is purfied [sic], humidified and noticeably fresher.

So “troubled water” – as in “a bridge over” – may be far less troubling than we think. A little more web searching reveals that, as one might expect, these claims are regarded with some skepticism in the scientific community. But then, scientists are supposed to be skeptical. Given the title of this blog, I am intrigued by the notion that something referred to as negative can be regarded so positively.

Another site, peddling high-tech negative ion generators, summarizes a couple of experiments that seem to bear out some of the claims of mental health benefits. I was interested by the suggestion that long periods of negative ion depletion – caused by, say, sitting in front of a computer monitor – can lead to “an increase in serotonin and its attendant drowsiness and relaxation.” Serotonin, eh? No wonder blogging is so addictive!

Does this mean that if we want to be properly productive Americans we should all be rushing outside to stand beside waterfalls, or installing miniature waterfalls from HolyMountain.com in a corner of the office? Well, not necessarily. Apparently, far simpler options are literally right at hand.

Josh Backon, a member of the Department of Cardiology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes in an Internet posting that in order to increase left-hemisphere activity (linear, language, logical), one can block the left nostril and engage in “forced unilateral nostril breathing.” Likewise, to increase right-hemisphere activity (creative, holistic, emotional), the right nostril should be blocked. This practice increases the supply of negative ions to a specific hemisphere.

So the astounding mental agility you’ve come to expect from Via Negativa probably owes something to the fact that I am an inveterate nose-picker. Whenever I pause to think – which is more often than the evidence might suggest – either one nostril or the other is getting blocked, you can count on it. And while the thumb goes diving, the index finger leans comfortably against the bridge of my nose, high and dry.