I am taking a few days off to go camping and to visit some blogger friends in Montreal. There will be no updates to Via Negativa or the Smorgasblog until at least next Tuesday. See you later, and thanks for reading.
Announcing Festival of the Trees
Pablo of Roundrock Journal and I have decided to launch a blog carnival devoted to trees — a Festival of the Trees. This will be a monthly gathering of blog links, similar to the Circus of the Spineless for invertebrates. The first installment will be here at Via Negativa on July 1. Please submit links to me at bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line, no later than June 30. All posts should have appeared during the month of June. We’ll inaugurate a coordinating blog in late June or early July to archive links to blog hosts, announce upcoming hosts, and blogroll participants.
For the purposes of the Festival, we’re defining trees as any woody plant that regularly exceeds three meters in height, though exceptions might be made to accommodate things like banana “trees” or bonsai. We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract, so while stories about a particular forest would be welcome, newsy pieces about forest issues probably wouldn’t be. Our emphasis should be on original content; we don’t want to link to pieces that are 90% or more recycled from other authors or artists.
The Festival of the Trees seeks:
- original photos or artwork featuring trees
- original essays, stories or poems about trees
- audio and video of trees
- news items about trees (especially the interesting and the off-beat)
- philosophical and religious perspectives on trees and forests
- scientific and conservation-minded perspectives on trees and forests
- kids’ drawings of trees
- dreams about trees
- trees’ dreams about us
- people who hug trees
- people who make things out of trees
- big trees
- small trees
- weird or unusual trees
- sexy trees
- tree houses
- animals that live in, pollinate, or otherwise depend on trees
- lichens, fungi or bacteria that parasitize or live in mutualistic relationships with trees
I look forward to reading your submissions soon!
Aviary (2)
On Saturday, after picking up Eva at the airport, we spent several hours at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. My niece’s name has the Spanish pronunciation rather than the English, so it made a certain kind of poetic sense to take Eva to the Aviary. This is the second of two posts.
Resplendent in his cloak of a thousand eyes, trailed by a royal train five times the length of his body, the great Argus pheasant is reduced to beggary by an insatiable craving for grapes.
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The curly head of the curassow draws many admiring fingers to her sleek back, which is speckled white from the most recent aerial bombardment. She seems equally indifferent to all blandishments.
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“Dead as a Dodo” describes so many far-flung members of the pigeon tribe — quintessential strange birds, castaways on remote islands who went native and forgot the predatory ways of the real world. The Nicobar pigeon nests within easy reach of the walkway. When did we start thinking that “wild” was synonymous with “fearful”?
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Every thing the Victoria crowned pigeon did, every pose he struck, was photogenic. Even standing in his feeding pan and crapping into his food, he looked magnificent. I got so bored of looking at my pictures of him, I almost decided not to post one at all.
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In the huge Rainforest of the Americas room, among so many brightly colored species, the pelican makes a convincing case for brown.
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An injury to his bill made this one incapable of feeding himself. His gullet is a large, moving target that the keeper finds nearly impossible to miss.
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The total population of the Japanese crane, which symbolizes good fortune and longevity to a nation of 127 million people, is down to less than 2000 individuals. The National Aviary plays a critical role in its recovery, coordinating an effort by American zoos to send fertilized eggs to a nature reserve in eastern Siberia. When a keeper enters their compound to refill their food trough, she moves quickly, carries a sturdy, five-foot-tall shield and wears goggles to prevent the cranes from pecking out her eyes.
Aviary (1)
On Saturday, after picking up Eva at the airport, we spent several hours at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. My niece’s name has the Spanish pronunciation rather than the English, so it made a certain kind of poetic sense to take Eva to the Aviary. This is the first of two posts.
Aviary sounds more like a book than a place — think of bestiary, or breviary. We step into the pages of an illuminated manuscript where implausible birds flit through the impossible foliage.
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Many of the inhabitants seem curious about the large, loud birds who keep parading through their glass-walled forest. Our plumage is infinitely various, and our flocking behavior is bizarre in the extreme. But sometimes, fish appear at the ends of our outstretched wings.
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An embarrassment of riches, they say — as odd an expression as flock of sheep. Show me a flying sheep, and I’ll find a rich man embarrassed by his fortune.
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In my dream of conscious poverty, I completely divest myself of forks, and get by with a single, all-purpose spoon. But every day, I would serve a different soup.
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What a statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe represents to a Mexican immigrant, a pink flamingo represents to a certain kind of suburbanite: not salvation, exactly, but a vision of grace. Look Ma — no hands!
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I watched the flamingoes for a while to see if any would assume the classic pose and stand on one leg. But the kind of balancing act they had in mind required all available appendages.
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You can envy birds their ability to fly if you want, but for me, it’s that second pair of eyelids I covet. Oh, the daydreams I would have!
Signs
Yesterday, we drove to the Pittsburgh airport to pick up my niece Eva. Since I didn’t have time to write a blog post before we left, I contented myself with jotting down some of the messages I found along the way.
On Route 22 west of Altoona, a billboard proclaims The Power of More. Another billboard exhorts us to Think BIG, and a third, advertising surcharge-free ATMs, touts Money for Nothing. I will see each of these billboards at least once more before we reach our destination. Advertisers pretty much always believe in the power of more, don’t they?
McDonald’s Is Now Hiring People Just Like You. No doubt.
Fight Mannequinism. Uh, O.K. A mile further, also on the left-hand side of the road, we pass a church marquee: If Ignorance is Bliss, Why Aren’t More People Happy? Good question. I think I’m going to keep my eyes on the right from now on.
Thirty miles from Pittsburgh, we pass the World-Famous Climax Drive-Thru, a “Gentleman’s Club” in which one does not need to get out of one’s car in order to view a strip show. That might be a better arrangement for everybody, I’m thinking. A few miles further, a sign advertises Bee Hive Live Dancers. I’m picturing strippers with very big hair.
I guess you could call this the strip strip.
Big Flavor, Little Price, says a billboard for something called Getgo’s. A couple miles further and there’s the store. Funny how that works.
You get an odd impression, driving along a big highway that bypasses all the towns, that stores far outnumber shoppers, and that Western Pennsylvania is nothing but strip malls. Where are all the people?
Right before the mammoth Monroeville Mall, where Dawn of the Dead was filmed, there’s a short section of road with four massive furniture stores, one after another. The Power of More. When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth, as the tagline for Dawn of the Dead put it.
Then we merge with Rt. 376, and an even odder phenomenon appears: the median-strip flower garden–a couple beds of petunias and some severely trimmed little bushes–featuring a big green sign with gold letters. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy: Saving the Places We Care About.
I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t care about median strips at all. They are pretty much non-places, in my estimation. The same goes for highway interchanges, where some of the other prominently signed petunia beds are sited. Once upon a time, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy was a reputable, science-based land trust dedicated to saving, you know, forests and stuff. Now they’re a glorified garden club.
In all, we spot five of their gardens between the Squirrel Hill Tunnel and the Pittsburgh International Airport. The petunias all look the same, but each sign is different, because each includes a different list of sponsors–Mellon Bank, the Heinz Foundation, whatever. Money For Nothing.
Old China Hand
The old china hand is crazed with hairline cracks, in addition to the maze of painted lines meant to represent the archetypal palm with five trunks in whose dubious shade a palmist has taken shelter.
Her shop is deserted. The hand stands guard in the window, flanked by crimson curtains like a morning sky flushed with portent: sailors, after all, take warning from a single hair in the pilot’s rosy palm. If he wants to take a loss in the futures market, that’s his own business, but no one wants to see him go blind.
And though the palmist knows this simulacrum like the back of–well, you know, she has yet to notice the spider setting up housekeeping above the Mount of Venus, stretching a hyperbolic Line of Fate between thumb & index finger, & pulling it taut with a Heart Line to the far side of the Mount of the Moon.
The web blossoms like a handkerchief between the fingers, like a magician’s tissue of lies. Such legerdemain is not for the slight of hand. Now the spider waits for customers as warily as the owner of the hair salon across the street, a quintessential small-town girl who feels more than a little disoriented by the china hand’s cheerful, permanent wave.
Five-second fables
If it walks like a duck, but leaves purple footprints, what then?
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“My wish,” said the shipwrecked man to the genie, “is for a lifetime’s supply of lamps!”
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The spider gazes at the dried basswood fruits and & is possessed by an Idea. She feels it stirring in her lower abdomen.
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Without the constraints of tradition, there would be no culture, no art, no beauty! Or so we like to imagine, shaking our little green bells.
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Only a savage would dance for no reason, making up new moves with every step.
Lacrimae rerum
I went for a walk yesterday morning along the stream
I saw shadows & reflections mingling in the same pool
the reflections too mingled images & shadows
a mayfly dipped her ovipositor in the pool & a fern began to twist
& I looked down & saw my own body turned into a screen for the shadows of reflections
a flickering black-&-white feature
then the sun moved on
this is that stream you can’t step into twice
in fact you can never step out
outlines dissolve in the current
words fail
the vision blurs
Spring fields
In classical Japanese tanka and haikai poetry, “spring fields” (haru no or haru no no) was a stock image and seasonal marker (kigo). Every poem had to have some word or phrase indicating the time of year; “spring fields” actually connoted earliest spring, not late spring, as in these photos. At any rate, my favorite poem using the phrase is this hokku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):
kami-jirami hineru toguchi mo haru no kana
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I stand in the doorway
digging the lice from my scalp–
spring fields.
The mountains stand apart from us; that is their appeal. But the fields invite a more intimate kind of care. The Japanese Emperor Kí´kí´ (830-887) brushed this tanka for a lover:
kimi ga tame haru no no ni idete wakana tsumu
waga koromode ni yuki wa furi tsutsu
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For you, I hurry
out into the fields
in search of spring greens.
My wide sleeves fill
with falling snow.
I’m not much of a fan of stock phrases or received opinions, especially in poems. But farmers are such rank traditionalists–one can hardly look at their handiwork without the familiar pastoral images crowding in. And here in Central Pennsylvania, at least, where the geology resembles a layer cake on end, you’re never far from a sudden insurgency of trees.
An essential extension
Just yesterday I was deliberating over what to call a new section of links in my sidebar. Should I feature “Most Commented-Upon Posts” only, or go in a more subjective direction with “Most Interesting Comment Strings”? I’m not sure why I chose the former; it certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue.
And then last night comes this addition to the so-far brief comment string for Animal presence – as eloquent a demonstration of the virtues of quality over quantity as you’re ever likely to see:
Reading your words brought me back to the time I was still living in the States. Animals were a part of my daily existence even in the heart of Boston. I remember pipistrelle bats flying up and down my Boston apartment, the musk of skunks along the side of the Charles River as I bicycled home from work, the furious bumble bee banging its head against my bedroom window screen, night hawks croaking as they soared over the setting sun, and humpback whales, fin whales, and a thousand common dolphins breaking the copper water out in the Stellwagon Banks one utterly magical afternoon.
Can you imagine what it is like living in Tokyo where animals are more or less incidental? All my life animals have been an essential extension of myself, a language of movement and expression of place-integrated other-self (is there a word for that? well, I guess “animal” is it, in’it?) that have all but disappeared since moving here. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so poverty-stricken with money all around. A world almost exclusively human (albeit with genetically altered, deformed creatures called “pets” that live out their lives as possessions).
The thunderclouds are rumbling though, for me. Big changes have already begun. And I don’t intend to ignore the call this time.
The author is Butuki of Laughing~Knees blog. (Feel free to join the conversation.) Among all the possible kinds of comments, most of them welcome here – including both constructive and destructive criticism – those that could make complete and poetic blog posts in their own right are always my favorites. It’s the ultimate compliment for a writer, I think, when someone responds at that level. I should leave more such comments myself at other blogs.