Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
On otherwise lifeless
tansy stalks, a green sprig
and a single yolk-
colored bloom. Snowflakes
drift past: far-flung voyagers,
their exile brief, their nostalgia
cut and crystalled with salt.
Harbor me in cold earth,
my winter lover. I long
for home most of all
when small birds come
to forage for seed
and light sieves
through cracks
in stones.
—Luisa A. Igloria
12.18.2010
Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 4.
Because we’ve loved,
the soft calls and dark
moving forms of sparrows
at dawn seem covert,
even illicit— Furtive
like some joys
tasted on the wing,
keen in their retreat
as any bladed thing.
—Luisa A. Igloria
12.17.2010
Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 17.
Listening to Poulenc’s Stabat Mater as I knead bread, I feel a sudden strong surge of affection for Christianity, which ordinarily I am neutral to or even vaguely repulsed by, depending on my mood. Poulenc makes me almost wish I were Christian, in the same way that the poems of Rumi, Hafez and Khayyam make me wish I were Muslim and the temples of Kyoto and Nara once made me wish I were Buddhist.
Perhaps it sounds shallow to admit that the purely aesthetic or sensory expressions of a religion make its traditions come alive for me, but I think the kind of gestalt such expressions can produce is central to the religious experience, at least as I understand it. Philosophically, I am a materialist and a naturalist: there is no room in my worldview for the supernatural. Something either exists, and is therefore part of nature, or it doesn’t. But although I’m unashamed of my agnosticism in regards to the specific truth-claims of any given religion, I still think of myself as religious, inasmuch as I share a basic set of intuitions and practices that I think can only be described as religious. “Spiritual,” with its overtones of woo, doesn’t do as good a job of characterizing such habits as:
People hostile to religion often seem to feel that if they can simply demolish the arguments for supernatural realities, that religious people will see the error of their ways. Their belief in the persuasive power of reason is touching, and smacks a little of superstition itself. I gather that modern psychology has found little evidence to suggest that people are ever persuaded by facts in this manner, unless they are already looking for things to justify abandoning beliefs that have become uncomfortable for other reasons. But be that as it may, I think critics sometimes fail to understand the appeal of religion in the first place — and fail to recognize the extent to which science does not and can never explain away the wonder and mystery at the core of existence. Whether organized religion is the best way to preserve this intuition is of course a completely different question.
I watch crows circle a dark carcass
a hundred yards off through the woods.
Only this white backdrop could make
bearable, the way the elements
have chosen whatever’s returned
as offering to the wheel. In spring
or summer we’ll come across its bones
under new growth of grass, bleached
white as stars that filter light
all this way through nets of trees.
—Luisa Igloria
12.16.2010
Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 13.
Today Via Negativa is seven years old: an anniversary of little significance to anyone but me and a few of my long-time readers (Hi, Mom!). But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, like so many of the bloggers I read, I began online journaling the year the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq. I remember how outraged and helpless I felt as even the most massive anti-war demonstrations received little notice in the mainstream media… and then my growing delight as I discovered how easy it was to share thoughts online and began to meet like-minded people through their own blogs and websites, people whose motto — if we believed in mottoes — might’ve been, “Make art, not war.”
So why didn’t we all become political bloggers? By choosing to focus on small moments, ordinary observations and our aesthetic responses to the world, weren’t we kind of abdicating our responsibility as citizens and intellectuals to fully engage in the political life of the nation? I don’t know. For me, the boundary between politics and culture has always seemed arbitrary. Radical questioning shouldn’t stop short of a reexamination of our society’s dominant worldview: hence (at first) Via Negativa. What is it in our thinking, I wondered, that so compels us to devalue the here and now, licensing the destruction of this world in our quest for others? Capitalism, commodification and industrial warfare are symptoms of a deeper malaise, I thought. Here’s something from my late, not-so-lamented Geocities site that I wrote in June 2003, three months after the invasion of Iraq and six months before I started this blog.
* * *
St. Brendan’s Isle. Antilla. The Fountain of Youth. New Jerusalem. It is a commonplace of historiography to note that European explorers from the 15th century on were after more than gold and spices; many were driven by a literal quest for paradise. Though long tradition had placed the Biblical Eden somewhere in the marshlands of southern Iraq, the restless European imagination kept moving it farther and farther east, until — influenced by the widespread recognition that the earth is round — paradise met and merged with the long-rumored Isles in the west.
Christopher Columbus set the pattern, wandering around the Caribbean voyage after voyage in search of something that now strikes us as more than a little bizarre. He wrote, “I have come to another conclusion respecting the earth, namely, that it is not round as they describe, but of the form of a pear… or like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a woman’s nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky” (Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, translated by R. H. Major). Fruitlessly the Admiral of the Ocean Sea sought to navigate uphill to storm the gates of paradise.
With the benefit of 500 years’ hindsight, it now appears that the most valuable discovery from that era — what was truly epoch-making about the New World — was the realization that people could live in orderly societies without kings or potentates. Reports of the relatively peaceful, prosperous conditions of many decentralized native communities in the Americas provided an essential objective correlative for European constitutional theorists and utopian thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
For many immigrants, of course, the Americas had and continue to have a utopian allure. But which came first, the dream or its realization? A new book on the making of the King James Bible (Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicholson) has attracted attention for its claim that our very conception of Eden may bear the stamp of New World revelations. Hebrew scholar John Layfield, one of the 50 scholars appointed to King James’ translation committee, “had been chaplain to an expedition to Puerto Rico and was enchanted by its exotic landscape and its natives, his narrative of the journey notably lacking in either cynicism or prejudice.” (See the review in The Guardian.) Nicholson speculates that this experience influenced Layfield’s description of the Biblical Eden in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, unchanged by the seasons, planted with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.”
Is it any wonder, then, that the United States of America — according to its founding mythos, Columbus’ true legacy — still seeks to storm paradise? Our mission to the Red Planet evokes the twin pillars of Manifest Destiny, missionary zeal and capitalist free enterprise, in the names of the two robotic explorers, Spirit and Opportunity. Oddly, these names originated through an essay contest sponsored by the Danish Lego Corporation. The winner was a third-grade immigrant from Siberia, Sofi Collins, who charmed NASA officials with her Horatio Alger optimism: “I used to live in an orphanage. It was dark and cold and lonely. At night, I looked up at the sparkly sky and felt better. I dreamed I could fly there. In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity.'” (link)
The search for life on Mars is Quixotic in the truest sense of the word, Cervantes’ Don Quixote having been, in part, a send-up of the conquistadors, according to the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (Memory of Fire: Genesis). No doubt, any actual discovery that life had once flourished on this now-dead world would prove as epoch-making as the New World conquest. On-going desertification and a growing water crisis on earth would gain an invaluable objective correlative.
Here, too, the language of the King James Bible has had a strong if subtle influence on the way we think. The word “desert” originally meant simply a place unoccupied by humans (“deserted”). But over time, the mental associations of the King James Version have taken hold, and the parched lands of Sinai and the Negev became the archetypal deserts.
Thus we tend to idealize the desert as a primordial condition of nature: the other side of the coin from paradise. And just as Edenic conceptions of the New World have often served as a fig leaf for genocidal conquest, so too an idealized image of the desert has licensed a pervasive myopia about the role of humans in fostering desert conditions. Few tourists in Arizona and New Mexico, for instance, are aware that some of the barren landscapes they find so spiritually energizing are in fact unnatural and relatively recent, the result of only a few years of catastrophic overgrazing in the late 19th century. And the picturesque, light-flooded landscapes of the Mediterranean rim derive from centuries of deforestation and over-browsing by goats.
But of course not all ecocide is accidental: witness Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshlands in southern Iraq, part of a genocidal campaign against the Marsh Arabs. Barring a concerted, international effort to restore the marshlands — unlikely in the current climate of fear and hostility engendered by the Anglo-American occupation — this original template for the Garden of Eden may turn into desert in a few more years. (Update: “The revival of the marshes remains uncertain.”)
With the same kind of casual, uncomprehending brutality that distinguished Columbus, Iraq’s new conquerors are simply too busy to worry about safeguarding lives, libraries, museums or natural treasures. Like Columbus, we’ve got better things to think about. “Black gold,” for instance. But oil is only the means to an end: the glorious future that awaits us beyond the sky. As the Air Force recruitment ads suggest, we must forever Aim High.
* * *
I was born too late to be a flower child, but of all the images of the 60s, the most powerful for me remain the anti-Goldwater TV ad with the girl pulling petals off a daisy as a voice counts down to nuclear Armageddon, and its counter-cultural mirror-image: that famous gesture of the Yippies, gathered in subversive absurdity to levitate the Pentagon, placing flowers in the ends of rifles. Yes, I still believe in flower power! The sexual partnership between plants and their pollinators is the single most powerful Creation myth evolution ever invented, I think, on a par with the stories about plate tectonics and the sun that had to die to give birth to the complex elements of which we are made. Unlike the fables proferred by religious and political institutions, however, these myths are true, and internalizing their lessons can make us better citizens of the planet. This is why I write.
Thing with whom we have
no common ancestor
a parallel line that never
intersects with our own
too different perhaps
even to have ancestors
coming into existence by
some method less messy than sex
foreign to our dilemmas
too other to be other
we probe the earth
& sky for you
cure for loneliness
like nobody we know
What leaf is small and black and falls
more slowly than a feather?
What ink washes deeper blue
then sable as it nears the shore?
What crystal spangles every
lidded eye on trees and bushes?
What letter writes itself over
and over in the wind?
A fire dances up in the trash burner,
the brightest thing.
—Luisa Igloria
12.14.2010
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This one borrows lines from my Morning Porch entry of October 21, 2008. (The title is my own.) Thanks, Luisa!
I see from the photo that it was snowing when I snapped this. I was intent on the flayed tree, this black locust savaged by a horny buck who must’ve bent it halfway to the ground to reach so far up its trunk. It’s O.K. with me; the tree isn’t one we necessarily want to survive. It’s one of the advance scouts for the forest’s never-ending attempt to take back the ground it lost 150 years ago to field and orchard.
Black locusts are good at that: rhizomatic, nitrogen-fixing, fast growing… the perfect native colonizer. As fast as we prune them out of the old meadow, they reappear, new sprouts capable of growing five feet in a year. The tree in the photo looks like a three-year-old to me. Armed for combat of a sort with its short thorns (nothing like those on a wild honey locust), a black locust sapling seems like good match for a deer’s antlers, which must be flayed themselves and then polished and honed: trees that live a single season and never sprout a leaf.
In the black cherry woods near the Far Field, time and rot have stripped all the bark from a tree brought down by ice five winters ago. Now its bare trunk burns with new life, albeit not the kind typically featured in parables about self-transformation. I look around for saplings in the openings the storm made, and spot a few, but almost none of them are hickories or oaks.
I have seen this forest devastated again and again: by gypsy moth caterpillars 30 years ago and by ever-more-frequent ice storms, the result no doubt of the changing global climate. Will stands like this ever revert to closed-canopy forest, or will they continue to thin until half the mountain is covered by savanna and dominated by fast-growing colonist species such as black locusts, black cherries, striped and red maples, and the alien tree-of-heaven?
It’s easy to get depressed and forget that whatever happens, however stark a desert we make, it will still be beautiful. On a cloudy late afternoon in the monotone winter woods, this allegedly dead tree was by far the most colorful thing.
2011 is the International Year of Forests. For the New Year’s edition of the Festival of the Trees, which will be hosted at the British blog Nature’s Whispers, we’re asking bloggers to share tree-related plans or resolutions, or simply to reflect on their relationship with forests. As for me, I hope to see our family’s 640 acres of mountaintop land given long-term protection through a conservation easement by next year’s end. Uncertain as the future of the forest may be, we need to give it at least a fighting chance.
How to read it, that intangible squat object in the plaza of Literature, Inc. that forces us to take a circuitous route to the door? We scan it uneasily looking for something we know. Does it mark us as rubes, to say a poem straight? Should it not be chanted like a Latin Mass, or the Quran in an Arabic no one actually speaks? Should we commit its every syllable to memory like Chinese reciting Li Bai, the 1300-year-old lines turned incomprehensible in Mandarin by the homonymic convergence of once-divergent words? Time eventually translates all poems into pure rhythmic babble, as open to interpretation as the surf. Why fight it? Why impose one possible reading out of many? The choices seem so arbitrary: how studied or how spontaneous, that catch in the breath, a half-second pause before the interrogatory rise. What if we ignored the doors to Literature, Inc. and let ourselves forget whatever it was we thought we came to read? Try it. Try squatting on your haunches to watch the pigeons, heads nodding as they walk, that self-important bob. Let the poem open on its own. Try turning your mouth into an ear.
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For more concrete advice, join the discussion at Voice Alpha blog, which is all about reading poetry aloud for an audience. We’re even offering free advice in the form of a poetry-reading agony column (or would like to, if anyone screws up the courage to actually write us). The most recent post, by Kristin Berkey-Abbott: “Make Your Poetry Reading More Like a Festive Party than a Forced Eating of Rutabagas.” My own most recent contribution asks, “Can a good poetry reading get you laid?”