Via Negativa

September 26, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Houseplants in the garden

When I was in Honduras back in 1996 for my brother’s wedding, I remember one day in the market how a military helicopter flew low overhead, and I realized I was the only one who wasn’t cowering.

Ten years earlier, I spent a semester in Taiwan when it was still under martial law. We foreigners habituated a couple of bars that operated illegally, in defiance of the law against gatherings of more than a dozen (?) unrelated people. I remember when the mafia started showing up and occupying tables in the corner, how all us Yanks, Aussies and Kiwis treated it as a big joke. Why were the Taiwanese owners so frightened? Couldn’t they see that these would-be gangsters had come straight from central casting?

The houseplants sit awkwardly in the garden,
like tourists at some raffish foreign port.

A gust of wind is enough to tip them over
in their ceramic pots.

It rains,
& they hardly know how to drip.

Insects avoid their glossy, odorless leaves.

After dark, under the stars,
they are the only things still shining.

They send up flower stalks
one week before the frost.

September 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Rockin’

Please do not feed the rocks. They can lose their fear of human beings and become dangerous. Yes, I know they look cute and cuddly, but they are wild creatures, not pet rocks. And if you feed one rock today, there will be ten rocks waiting to be fed tomorrow. It may seem as if you’re doing a good thing, but it’s not healthy for rocks to become dependent on human handouts. They are not like birds, who can simply fly away to another bird feeder when you tire of them.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the signs warning motorists about falling rocks ahead. Have you ever wondered how the highway department, which needs help just to get across the street, can predict the future so accurately? The answer is, these rocks have fallen before. They’re repeat offenders. But rather than get tough on them and lock them away, where tougher criminals have been known to actually break rocks to pass the time, we continue to let them terrorize our nation’s highways. This permissive, rocks-will-be-rocks mentality is emblematic of a culture of tolerance run amok. Today it’s falling rocks, but tomorrow it may be legalized necro-bestial butt sex. You can say “it’s gravity’s fault” all you want, but explaining behavior isn’t the same as excusing it. Plenty of other rocks grew up in the same circumstances, but somehow they managed to avoid the temptations of gravity and become solid, moss-gathering citizens.

Are you a rock addict? It’s never too late to quit and turn to the true Rock, who is ourlordandsaviorjesuschristamen. Some people will tell you that once the crack starts, falling is inevitable, and then nobody will want you. But the rejected stoner is to be the cornerstone of the temple, says the Bible. Peter means “rock” and Saint Peter guards the pearly gates, and once you penetrate that you’re pretty much free to rock in the bosom of Abraham, as I understand it. So Rock is a touchstone of sorts, only you mustn’t touch it if you can possibly help it, because it will lead you into sin and hellfire instead of into the arms of ourlordandsaviorjesuschristamen.

September 24, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Tea leaves

I haven’t been in much of a mood for writing this past week. But when I took my camera out for a walk yesterday afternoon, everything I looked at reminded me of pen marks on paper, beginning with the mast where the electric wires connect to my house in swirly Gothic serifs.

The clear air made for sharp contrasts. A runic pair of aspen trunks at the edge of the woods stood out as clearly against the dark background as any light font on a stylishly dark webpage. (Click on photos to view at larger sizes.)

What does it mean to see the world not merely as something created — a work of art — but as text? The origins of most writing systems are closely linked to divination, I believe: the world itself was read long before humans devised their own glyphs. And as phenomenologist David Abram noted in The Spell of the Sensuous, reading connects us to a form of absorption virtually indistinguishable from a shamanic trance.

How to pronounce them, these new letters hidden in the cattails? The wind has one idea, and the wren another.

In the bottom corner of the field I found some wild mint, which I picked, brought home, and made tea out of. I found the mint because I stopped to admire a garden spider’s web. She too had correctly read the tea leaves, though what they said to her wasn’t tea but flowers — and insect pollinators. And sure enough, the purple blooms were abuzz.

Much as I want to find significance in the world, I don’t want to limit it to a single interpretation. This is where poets and omen-readers part company. The former insist on retaining a large element of mystery and nuance — even out-right confusion. In the same way that the perception of music depends upon the recognition of noise, the part of the world that eludes easy interpretation brings the rest into sharp relief: for every figure there must be a ground. Science now treats DNA as a kind of programming language, but so-called junk DNA accounts for up to 90 percent of a genetic sequence. I don’t know if that’s directly analogous or not, but I’m a poet, so I’ll just throw it out there.

Genetic code and computer languages should serve to remind us, though, that language doesn’t simply mean; it transforms. This is the point that academic disquisitions on hermeneutics so often miss. We read for the same reason that our Paleolithic ancestors went into shamanic trances: to feel ourselves a part of a larger whole. The rightness that one senses in natural surroundings — even in a badly damaged ecosystem — is far more than a matter of interpretation. It is our body remembering how to listen.

The tea was delicious. And I think my dry spell is almost over.

September 22, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Silver Line

Driving up the mountain after dark, at the edge of the cone of light one catches fleeting glimpses of pale fungi that might also be faces, shadows shaped like bodies, the upraised arms of trees deciding to hold back at the last moment. Small white moths weave drunkenly across the road in front of us, and once in a while, the sleek translucent skin of a bat’s wing dips into view. Lumpy shadows in the road must be approached with caution: sometimes they belong to a fat toad that must be herded off to the side, yellow eyes blinking much too slowly for a highway warning sign. A long silvery creature leaps out of the left-hand track and clears the bank in two bounds, and too late I realize it couldn’t possibly have been a squirrel. We know so little about some of our neighbors here. Riding in the passenger seat, I roll the window down and turn my face toward the darkness where the forest I knew as a child — a forest without gypsy moth caterpillars, hemlock wooly adelgids, barberry, stiltgrass, ailanthus — retreats a little farther every day.

Last Sunday, I walked up the road right at dusk. The hollow was full of the wicka wicka calls of wood thrushes — a migrant flock must’ve stopped here for the night. Another two or three thrushes flew up at every bend, and I kept hoping one of them would sing.

Some birds do sing on migration; on recent mornings I’ve heard phoebes, a common yellowthroat, and a couple of back-throated green warblers. Usually they’ve been flying all night, and touch down at dawn for a few hours of foraging in the company of local birds. Some haunt the surfaces of leaves, gleaning insects, while others flutter below the leaves, gleaning the hidden fruit. Many species of warblers have molted out of their distinctive breeding plumage in favor of a generic yellowish green — the bane of serious birders, who moan about the confusing fall warblers. But I imagine the duller colors are designed to give them better camouflage in the tropics, where they spend the greater part of every year darting through the underbrush and emitting sounds that few of us northerners would recognize.

I have been taking down the living room floor, going back and forth with a short, heavy, and very loud dancing partner: a Silver Line sanding machine, fitted with a Baldor industrial motor that blew a couple of fuses yesterday morning before I plugged it into another circuit. The floor, which had been painted in a patchwork of colors and covered most recently by a tattered green carpet, is very soft and rough, and I’m guessing it’s hemlock. A pine floor would be much more desirable for refinishing purposes, but part of me wants it to be hemlock, milled from trees that grew right here on the mountain, perhaps. In a few more years, all the mature hemlocks in the hollow will be dead, due to the woolly adelgid invasion, so the floor could serve as a memorial of sorts. It’s fitting, I suppose, because the all-but-vanished American chestnut is probably responsible for much of the exterior planking. This 150-year-old house is becoming haunted in a way few people would expect.
__________

Don’t forget to submit tree-reated links to the Festival of the Trees. The deadline for the next edition, in trees, if you please, is September 28. Email submission to festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com, or use the handy blog carnival submission form.

September 19, 2007 by Dave Bonta

My words

My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy
–W. S. Merwin, “When You Are Gone,” The Lice

September 17, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Going to ground

Poets are popularly supposed to have their heads in the clouds, but not me. Some days, I rarely look up. Why bother? There’s so much to see right at my feet.

Even still, I can’t avoid the occasional view of the clouds. I’m not sure what this shard of glass is doing in the middle of a well-used trail. I had a bit of a Chicken Little moment before I figured out what the hell it was.

Some people are obsessed with the idea of a sky-father watching over them. But the ground has eyes, too. Finding these puffballs right after the shard of glass, I’m reminded of the Aztec kenning for the earth: mirror that smokes.

Views of autumn foliage from a moving car quickly grow tiresome. It’s much more rewarding to do your leaf-peeping one leaf at a time, I find. And again, the ground is the best place to look — you don’t need binoculars.

With the temperature in the mid-50s, every pool of sunlight has its sunbathing flies. I almost expect to see them rubbing their front legs together to get warm.

A little farther along the trail, I find another piece of misplaced sky: a patch of mud from an almost dried-up spring shining blue from animal excrement. A Google search of “blue mud” turns up the idiomatic phrase “full of blue mud,” meaning “full of shit.”

A log-end down by the stream bristles with white polypores. But when I bend close, it’s these pinhead-sized cup fungi that catch my eye instead. They remind me of spider mites, seemingly trying to compensate for their diminutive size by being as red as possible.

The stream has been reduced in many places to a series of large puddles. The only ripples on the surface come when the water strider changes position, which it does twice a minute or so. I watch it for a while, fascinated as always by the saucer-shaped dimples under its feet, like a literal demonstration of Einstein’s discovery that gravity bends space.

On the way back up the road, I’m charmed by the view of a white wood aster against a large pine tree. Whatever the rest of the tree might be doing against the sky almost doesn’t matter. I’ll have all winter to look at things like that.

September 16, 2007October 25, 2020 by Dave Bonta

Kobayashi Issa: haiku about shitting

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) is generally counted as one of the four greatest haiku poets, along with Basho, Buson and Shiki. Issa was a devout, if irreverent, Buddhist of the True Pure Land sect whose pen-name means “one cup of tea.” His haiku are extremely down-to-earth, making ample use of vernacular speech and often taking insects or other invertebrates for their subject matter. He wrote at least fifteen haiku about excrement and excretory functions, in which I believe he was not only riffing on the Buddhist doctrine about the essential oneness of nirvana and samsara, but also trying to challenge traditional Japanese concepts of beauty and purity. Japan is a purity-obsessed culture, in which cleanliness and beauty are closely linked. Foreign visitors to Japan are often surprised to discover that, in this otherwise extremely clean and tidy country, public restrooms, especially in train stations, can be unspeakably filthy. Since such places are considered inherently impure, little effort is expended to keep them clean. But to Issa, any place where people or animals pause to take a shit seems worthy of a second look. After all, anything that breaks us loose from our ordinary mental habits might lead to rebirth in the Pure Land.

For a more comprehensive sample of Issa’s work, see David G. Lanoue’s massive online archive (to which I am indebted for the Japanese texts below). The following are my own translations.

ta no hito no kasa ni hako shite kaeru kari

flooded fields—
wild geese take wing
shitting on the farmers’ hats

sôjô ga no-guso asobasu higasa kana

in the middle of the field
the high priest’s parasol—
taking a dump

no setchin no ushiro wo kakou yanagi kana

impromptu outhouse
screening bare asses from view—
the lone willow

musashi no ya no-guso no togi ni naku hibari

Musashi Plain—
listening to a skylark
while I take a shit

nichi-nichi no kuso darake nari hana no yama

cherry blossom time—
each day the mountain is deeper
in excrement

kado-gado ni aoshi kaiko no kuso no yama

at every gate
that blue-green mountain—
silkworm frass

uguisu ya kuso shi nagara mo hokkekyô

bush warbler
intoning the Lotus Sutra
even as it shits

kasugano ya dagashi ni majiru shika no kuso

between the temples
in Kasuga Field, deer pellets
mingled with cheap candy

hatsu yuki ya furi ni mo kakurenu inu no kuso

first snow:
not even enough to hide
all the dogshit

Revised 10/25/2020

September 15, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Making sense, robot-style

This is so cool, it deserves its own post rather than simply an update. I just realized that the Feedblitzed email version of my last post — and I presume all other Via Negativa posts from here on — contained an audio link at the end. Clicking it generated the following creepy yet delightful rendering, via Talkr.

[audio:http://www.talkr.com/audio/v/i/a/n/1557834.mp3]

Email subscribers will not see the above player, however. They can click on this link instead.

September 14, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Making sense

Qarrtsiluni, the online literary magazine I help curate, is now soliciting for submissions to a new theme, Making Sense. “We challenge you to build up a world in scent, taste, touch, sound, or any combination of these. … To have a full and concrete awareness of space, physical detail, and emotion, you do not need sight,” the editors write.

Last weekend, I ate both eyes of a fish. They were slightly sour, and full of a salty juice that couldn’t be tears. Later, somebody told me: You’ll never cry again!

If you saw your nose all by itself, would you recognize it? What would it smell like?

A. sat on the floor and sketched our feet as we listened to Bach’s partitas for solo violin. You can tell from the sketches: those feet had completely forgotten that they were feet.

Conversing with someone who is undergoing a massage is a bit like consulting a Ouija board. The words hold extra weight for passing through the hands, but it’s hard to tell where they’re coming from.

I’ve been single for so long, I like to go out in the rain just for the contact.

September 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Caraway

I can’t seem to figure out what to do with my head. It is too small to carry the right sort of luggage and dangerously prone to spills and injuries. I was thinking I might rent it out for micro-idea transmission, but I’m not sure how well I’d like sitting on top of a metal tower during thunderstorms. Then there’s the whole issue of bird droppings. Perhaps I could put it in a breadbox to keep it fresh. But lately it has this alarming tendency to weep, which could promote spoilage. …

I wrote that after a trip to the Adirondacks back in 2004. Some people don’t like to travel due to the lack of comfort. For me, it’s the lack of sleep. A mere four or five days with less than five hours of good sleep per night are enough to turn me into a humorless emotional wreck. Then for days after I get home, I mope around wishing I had seen more and been more outgoing.

Fortunately, this past weekend’s jaunt had been in the company of fellow bloggers, most of whom are also social misfits of one kind or another, and we tolerated each other’s lapses, if that’s what they were. Lorianne writes about the pleasures of ditching one’s friends to walk the streets alone, something I wish I’d found time to do myself. Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi, on the other hand, eulogizes the joys of communion. Leslee seemed most affected by the heat, but still managed to take a number of good photos of the area of Brooklyn where we all crashed. Other photosets from the trip include Lorianne’s photos of MoMA, Velveteen Rachel’s Brooklyn set, and Frizzy Rachel‘s NY September 07 set (which includes two photos of my head). And Dale has a poem up called Pilgrim in Brooklyn.

UPDATE: New posts about the New York blogger swarm are up at 3rd House Journal – part 1 and part 2 – and the cassandra pages.

Halfway home on the train,
my tongue discovers something hard
between the molars, left over from
a rushed breakfast
at a diner in Brooklyn.
The molars break it open
& the tongue remembers: rye toast.
Our last meal together.
Caraway seed.