Via Negativa

July 1, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees 1

Excerpt of a much larger photo by Cindy Mead

“In the company of trees”

I have always been happiest in the company of trees. When I was a freshman in Houston I used to take my books out to a grove of pine and oak in a forgotten corner of the campus and sit underneath a tree reading in the warm afternoons. Sometimes I would pace back and forth and read my essays out loud. I cannot recall ever seeing another person in that grove. Except for the squirrels and birds I had it all to myself. Years later I think I remember the trees better than the books I was struggling to understand. I would stay there until the light played out and then head back to my dorm along sidewalks set between parallel rows of oaks drenched in Spanish moss. In the waning light the trees seemed dark and mysterious and at the same time compelling.

So writes Bill at prairie point blog. Welcome to the first monthly roundup of blog links to all things arboreal: the Festival of the Trees. Today, I want to showcase as many different ways of looking at trees as possible. Some might complain that this approach results in too long a blog post — “That ain’t no post, it’s a stinkin’ TREE!” But my assumption is that people who like trees are, by and large, given to contemplation rather than hurried skimming and haphazard clicking on links. Also, while most blog carnivals focus on the near present, I’m including some archival material to try and show that tree bloggers, like trees themselves, have been around for a while.

Let’s start with some biology: trees are flowering plants. This simple fact is something we wildflower enthusiasts sometimes need to be reminded of, as a recent post in Rurality demonstrates.

I thought I spied parasitic growths on the palm trees. But no, they were blooming!

Almost all plants bloom in one way or another I suppose, but I tend to think of those with inconspicuous flowers as non-blooming. You never hear anyone rhapsodizing over oak tree blossoms, for example. Before last week I had assumed that palms were the same. Only it turns out that all my previous trips to Florida were just mis-timed to catch them.

From flower, of course, comes seed or fruit. Any recent visitors to frizzyLogic must have seen the new masthead, which features silhouettes of what qB calls her bauble trees — London plane trees, close relatives of the North American sycamore. Here’s a full-color version from a recent post (click on link for larger version).

As many of qB’s tree photos suggest, a closer-than-usual look can turn the most familiar-seeming trees into strange and exotic beings.

Last July, Nuthatch at bootstrap analysis went into delicious detail about something else we seldom pause to contemplate: how leaves are arranged on a branch.

I spend a lot of time in forests. As an ornithologist, I spend a lot of time looking up in forests. With luck, I see the bird I am searching for. If not, my eye will wander the canopy, appreciating the play of light through the leaves. One day, my mind, as well as my eye, wandered. Was there a pattern to this seemingly chaotic riot of green? Nature, I know, is a most efficient master. It seemed reasonable that leaves, as food factories designed to carry out photosynthesis, should probably be positioned in order to maximize their exposure to sunlight.

This is, in fact, the case. It may not always be easy to see, because environmental conditions, physical constraints, injuries, etc. obscure the patterns, but the method of leaf arrangement, or phyllotaxis, on plants is both precise and quite astounding.

Ontario-based blogger Pamela Martin, in Thomasburg Walks, ponders the ability of southern trees to survive a northern winter.

There is another tree in the yard that does not wait: the shagbark hickory. There are two, around the same age as the catalpas; they are about 50 centimetres high (currently lost in the tall grass). Reputed to be hardy to this zone […] this tree is also not at all frost-tolerant, and yet it insists on leafing out first every spring. It freezes, leafs out again (occasionally freezes again), and then, resources spent, it basically rests for the rest of the growing season. The linked article warns nut farmers, “Grown from seed, it can take 10 or more years for hickory trees to start to bear.” In this case, perhaps thirty or forty years.

Pamela wonders whether “an internal clock of some kind” might play a role. As it happens, another contribution to the festival goes into great detail about internal clocks. Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock reports on the results of a Spanish study that “measured the levels of expression of circadian clock genes in the chestnut tree.” When the temperature and length of daylight together indicated “winter,” they found, the trees shut down entirely. Fluctuations in temperature during the course of the winter had no apparent effect — the trees stayed “asleep” (my word, not Coturnix’s) until the lengthening daylight and warmth of spring together restarted their clocks.

So, the clock is stopped — but is it still sending some kind of signal? Coturnix describes himself as a specialist in circadian rhythms, which makes his conclusions worth quoting in full, I think. Plus, something about the precise language of science is very appealing to me as a writer, even if I don’t always completely understand it.

How can we interpret these data?

Overwintering is the stage in which all energetically expensive processes are minimized or shut down. However, workings of the clock itself are not very energetically expensive, so this is an unlikely reason for the elimination of rhythmicity during winter.

Second interpretation would be that, as the tree shuts down all its processes, there is nothing for the clock to regulate any more. There is also no feedback from the rest of metabolism into the clock. Thus, circadian rhythmicity fades as a by-product of overall dormancy of the plant.

Third, the clock itself may be a part of the mechanism that keeps everything else down. In other words, a clock stopped at (for instance – this is a random choice of phase) midnight will keep giving the midnight signal to the rest of the plant for months on end, keeping all the other processes at their normal midnight level (which may be very low). Thus, the clock may be central to the overall mechanism of hibernation in trees — i.e., the autumnal stopping of the clock is an evolved adaptation.

Bark beetle calligraphy (one of my own photos)

Then there are the mysteries of identity itself, often felt most keenly by the amateur naturalist struggling to pinpoint a species. Let’s remember where that word amateur comes from: while the professional is supposed to be detached, the amateur can be amorous, full of enthusiasm for his/her subject. Pica at Feathers of Hope has just posted a poem that excites my enthusiasm for poetry to an extreme degree. I must reproduce it in full.

Like and Unlike

Botany
keys
yes no one zero
differentiated or opposite
five petals or four
a series of
cancellations

Madrone is not
manzanita
smooth bark
but different leaves
quieter
less showy
hidden in the
chaparral

yes
no

not
a
cancellation,
its bark says
smooth and red
peeled and sheer

me
I’m here
I am
madrone

the sweet smell
in late sun
oak titmice
and ravens
say
oh, sure,
that’s madrone,
not a
nothing
you
blindhuman

afternoon
sun

Madrone

Tree names haunt the streets of towns and subdivisions all across the United States: Maple Vista. Oak Drive. Cherry Lane. Last month, the Middlewesterner had a revealing look at the origin of one of those street names.

I interviewed a man last night, nearly 80 years old, just about my father’s age. He was born in the house he’s living in. He has roots set down like the elm tree he said Elm Street is named after. A great blast of dynamite would not bring that tree down back when they were pouring cement on Highway 44. It took a second great blast of dynamite to topple the tree; the force of it broke windows way across the street at Stellmacher Lumber. Because the blast was directed to the south, the windows of the fellow’s house, just a few doors away, were not affected, though the house shook.

It was a stubborn tree. It had been there a long time and it wanted to stay. The old fellow said: You don’t know what you’ve got til you take dynamite to it and it’s gone.

Porcupine tree (another one of my own photos)

Some urban and suburban forests can be quite lush, though. I remember visiting my brother Mark years ago when he lived in Austin, how refreshing it felt to walk through neighborhoods where a lack of the kind of zoning we have here in the uptight northeast meant that people could let their yards run wild, if they wanted. And down there, let me tell you: stuff grows fast. Another post at prairie point blog, based in north Texas, brought some of that back, for me.

Though I haven’t visited it, Berkeley, California is evidently another place where yards are allowed to run wild, judging from the reports of Katsuri in her blog not native fruit.

our neighborhood is like a park, it’s a horticultural wonder that has sprung up on the grasslands of the berkeley hills. in other words, it’s mostly artificial. but it’s older, and very much overgrown – a feature many newcomers do not like about berkeley – but that’s just it, we don’t ‘manicure’ or ‘spray’ much. (Although that is changing as a more monied group moves in. Berkeley used to be more about idealists of many ilks.) We wanted things to be ‘organic’ and to ‘let nature be nature.’ So we have some mighty tangles here and there around Berkeley, some briars that have gone bananas, but also just a lot of very relaxed-looking plants. I love the plants of Berkeley.

some of our plants are natives: live oaks, redwoods, pines. these are my favorite trees, and they just exude spirit and soul.

You can kill a tree with kindness. Sometimes, a little bit of neglect is just what the doctor ordered. New blogger Ashley Kramer lives in Los Angeles and calls herself a Green Urban FarmGirl.

The first and perhaps key step in saving a peach tree is to know almost nothing about trees. Aside from the trees in your backyard growing up, you really have no experience with growing trees, and even that experience was limited to the fact that you have parents who cared for those trees, and also you paid no attention.

Next, move into a converted art studio that has a big overrun garden and a half dozen fruit trees. Nod knowingly when the owner identifies the trees for you: Avocado, Plum, Fig, pomegranate, Lemon, Lime, Tangerine, oh and that volunteer Peach that never produces good fruit. Agree that the peach tree should be removed to give more space to the Avocado and that weird yellow flower kind-of succulent tree thing that looks tropical.

Up in Vancouver, artist Marja-Leena Rathje finds inspiration in a huge old conservatory.

What a wonderful atmosphere in there, full of tall tropical trees reaching to the top of the dome, trees such as figs, palms, and a lovely African Fern Pine with its very soft needles (left of the palm in the photo above) plus gorgeous flowers, and many colourful tropical birds.

Photo by Jean (larger version here)

And in London, Jean also finds the exotic quite close at hand, as in the subject of the above photo, which she calls “kind of Chinese-looking.”

Living very near to a big, Victorian city park, full of huge old trees, is a constant pleasure. I’ve been there several times a week for 17 years and still look up, look around and see something new.

One of the great things about hosting this festival was finding out about new blogs — and new trees, too. I was surprised to find a blog devoted entirely to trees right here in my home state of Pennsylvania: Arboreality. Like me, the author lives on an old farm dotted with black walnut trees. But the post J L Blackwater selected for this festival discusses an ornamental tree I’d never heard of.

Allow me to introduce you to the tri-color beech (tricolor, tricolour, tri-colour), or tri-color European beech, scientifically referred to as Fagus sylvatica Roseomarginata. […] The tri-color beech tree you see in today’s post has a dark red/purple, a lighter red/brown, and a white shade which isn’t visible in these images. According to my reading, the best way to ensure that all the colors show up on your tri-color beech tree is not to baby it. This tree needs stress and hardship in order to show its truest and most beautiful colors. If a tri-color beech tree is overfed and given too much care and attention, it will lose the variegation in the leaves, and fade into a single reddish color.

Hmm. If only we could introduce J.L.’s beech to Ashley’s peach! They seem to have a lot in common.

Do you have a favorite tree or tree species? For Pablo of Roundrock Journal, it’s the white oak. Nor is he alone in his affections.

White Oak lumber is favored for furniture and barrel staves. Something about the graining allows the oak to remain water-tight. And the forest critters appreciate the tree for its abundant branches suitable for nesting as well as its cavities for denning. White Oaks produce acorns, of course, but the amount of energy required to do this can mean that they may take a half dozen years before they can produce a heavy crop, and in some years they may not produce any acorns at all. Of the ones produced, those not eaten by the deer or the turkeys or the raccoons or the opossums or the other wild things can fall victim to worms. It has been said that it takes 10,000 acorns to produce a single White Oak tree. You can understand, then, why I try to nurture the ones I have.

Urban geographer Jarrett Walker takes us down under and introduces us to a favorite Australian tree, Ficus macrophylla.

Hard plasticlike leaves, brown and hairy underneath, all perked toward the sun. At moments, the tree resembles a thousand-strong flock of birds ready to take flight.

It’s hot, though, so come in underneath. Everything’s upside down here, so the vast buttresses seem to support the earth more than they do the tree. Here is a city of shade, with many secret chambers behind high walls.

There’s room to think here, and just enough darkness that we can see.

Photo of cedars by Cindy Mead (larger original here)

We can’t talk about trees without talking about forests. And we shouldn’t talk about forests without admitting that few of us know what a truly natural forest ecosystem would look like. Back in 2004, I translated a parable from the 4th century B.C. by the Chinese philosopher Mencius — Ox Mountain.

Ox Mountain once was covered by trees. But it had the misfortune of standing too close to a city. People came with their axes and their hatchets; they climbed all over the mountain. They cut down the trees, stripped the mountain of all vegetation.

Nevertheless, the night breeze wafted over its slopes. Rain and dew fell; everywhere sprouts of green began to show. But cattle and sheep had been let loose to pasture on the mountain. Before too many years had passed, it stood gaunt and bare. Today, people see its barrenness and can’t believe the mountain wasn’t always that way.

Who can tell when forests have been altered, cut down with axes, demolished with hatchets? Day after day the trees are cut down. How will the mountain ever recover?

The good news is that, in most parts of the world, it’s not too late; with careful conservation planning, we can bring the forests back, and given the political will, we can preserve much of what’s left, even at the current level of human population. Though Cindy of Woodsong mourns the loss of old growth in Michigan, she hears promise in the songs of blackpoll warblers — and in a recent article by Pennsylvania-based naturalist Scott Weidensaul, whom she quotes:

Sat on my farmhouse’s back step in the low light of dawn, watching two blackpoll warblers — slim, streaky and hyperkinetic — flit through the new leaves of the maples, which the sun turned into tiny lenses of green.

My trees were a way station for these birds, moving between their winter home in South America and their destination to the north — the boreal forest, the vast shield of spruce and aspen, of muskeg and marsh, that stretches from Newfoundland to western Alaska. Larger than even the Amazon, North America’s boreal zone is one of the biggest intact ecosystems left on the planet, with 1.4 billion acres in Canada alone, most of it still in immense, interlocking tracts that make up a quarter of the earth’s remaining original forest.

“Canadian Trees,” by Curt Stump (larger original here)

As some of the previous excerpts have already suggested, wilderness can come as close to home as we let it — if only we can bring ourselves to stop forever cleaning and straightening things up. Hal of Ranch Ramblins, a blog based in the Ozarks of north-central Arkansas, warmed my heart with his passionate defense of standing dead trees, or snags.

The dead wood itself becomes a meal for ants, termites, and wood-boring beetles. These insects, as well as their larvae, in turn become a meal for various species of birds. Raccoons will also visit the snag for a delicious meal made up of insect larvae.

Besides serving as a feeding station, a snag provides cover for a vast array of creatures. The loose bark of a snag provides cover for bats to roost, as well as a cozy spot for caterpillars to pupate. Also taking cover under the loose bark are tree frogs, salamanders, and various types of beetles. Tree holes also provide a place of refuge for a large number of critters, including woodpeckers, owls, bluebirds, nuthatches, chickadees, wrens, titmice, squirrels, raccoons and opossums, to name just a few. It has been estimated that up to one-third of all forest birds and mammals depend on dead trees for either nesting or shelter. The great popularity of providing man-made housing for birds stems from the fact that many species have lost a good portion of the snags that they depend on for their survival. Thus the need for bluebird houses, bat houses, purple martin houses, etc.

It sounds a little clichéd to say so, but in some ways I think folks like Hal are simply recovering an ancient wisdom — one that found hidden order in the apparent chaos of wild nature. If I may be permitted one other translation from my archives, here’s an old Pennsylvania German folksong that conveys something of the attitude my European ancestors had toward trees and forests.

Who lies with this woman?
A very beautiful lover.
Lover in the woman, woman in the bed,
Bed in the feather, feather on the bird,
Bird in the egg, egg in the nest,
Nest in the leaves, leaves on the branch,
Branch on the limb, limb on the tree,
Tree in the thicket, among sticks and leaves.
What grows in the wood? A dense thicket.
That’s what grows in the greenwood.

People from a variety of cultures have felt a continuity between trees and humans that goes well beyond a simple homology of trunk to legs and torso. In ancient Israel, the goddess Asherah — she of “cakes for the queen of heaven” fame — appears to have been worshipped in arboreal form, as the Wikipedia entry makes clear.

[T]he word asherah also refers to a standing pole of some kind, pluralized as a masculine noun when it has that meaning. Among the Hebrews’ Phoenician neighbors, tall standing stone pillars signified the numinous presence of a deity, and the asherahs may have been a rustic reflection of these. Or asherah may mean a living tree or grove of trees and therefore in some contexts mean a shrine. These uses have confused Biblical translators. Many older translations render Asherah as ‘grove’.

“Glorytree,” by Curt Stump (larger original here)

Rabbinical Judaism long ago incorporated a version of this ancient Near Eastern tree reverence into its normal, yearly observances: Tu BiShvat, “the New Year of the trees.” As Velveteen Rabbi explains,

The holiday has its roots in a passage in the Talmud, tractate Rosh Hashanah. […] We mark the new year of trees at the full moon in the middle of the month [Shevat]. Out of the notion that trees have their own new year (originally used to mark the age of trees, to determine when one should begin tithing fruits to God and when one could eat of the fruits oneself) came an elaborate set of holiday traditions, up to and including a mystical journey through the four worlds.

People often compare trees to teachers, parents, or spiritual mentors. Lorianne DiSabato of Hoarded Ordinaries once wrote that way people grouped themselves at a Buddhist retreat reminded her of a forest.

During the talk at the end of the retreat, I mentioned how wonderful it was to sit in the presence of these strong, experienced guides: “This weekend felt like sitting in the shadow of a whole row of Mighty Oaks, tall, strong, gray…” Earlier this year a newspaper here in New Hampshire interviewed me (me!) about Buddhism in the Granite State, and I mentioned this notion of the Mighty Oaks: saplings who are new to practice think Chris and I have been practicing a long time — in fact, they sometimes think we’re Zen Masters. But in truth, we’re mid-sized trees dwarfed by those giants who started practicing long before us. It takes all kinds — saplings, mid-sizers, giant knobby hulks — to make a healthy forest. It takes roots and air and spring showers — and lots and lots of patient sitting — to become a Mighty Oak.

Waves of grain on a fallen log (another of my own photos)

Bonnie Bruno at Macromoments finds in nurse logs an apt image for the people who help guide us through life.

As the wood softens and breaks down, a cushy layer of moss creates a moist carpet atop the log. It provides a fertile home for lichen, moss, mushrooms, and wildflowers — new life from a seemingly useless tree.

Nurse logs provide a sturdy base and nutrients for new trees, too. A keen eye can spot trees that got their start from a nurse log. The old rotted log eventually breaks apart as the tree grows strong and straight.

Rabbi Shai Gluskin, reflecting on a photo from Carpenter’s Woods in Philadelphia, writes,

Our task in this world is to see the connection of life and death clearly. In the photo, I imagine a funeral scene where the young trees are attending to the fallen dead older tree lying before them. The biology of it is that the dead tree is tending to the living ones. It has made some room in the crowded forest canopy for some light to reach the younger trees. And soon the decomposing tree will nourish its comrades with minerals as well.

My kids are 11 and 8–which is a time ripe with seeing them out-do me in a host of physical as well as even some intellectual arenas (my daughter is better than me at Sudoku and Boggle).

In Bava Metzia 59b [in the Talmud], after a vigorous legal debate in which human beings perform miracles and reject heavenly evidence as having no standing, God says, “Nitzchuni banai, Nitzchuni banai.” The literal meaning there is “My children have defeated me.” Most commentators have God proclaiming this with joy.

Bev, at Burning Silo, writes about an ancient sugar maple that she has come to think of as the Oracle Tree.

Upon one’s approach, the most conspicuous feature of this tree is a large, rounded opening leading to a cavity within the trunk. In fact, this feature is what led me to regard this maple as the Oracle Tree — the cavity reminding me of a bottomless well, or some other mysterious natural phenomenon that might have had mystical significance to a culture. In another age, I can picture someone leaving offerings at this tree in exchange for luck, advice, or a piece of knowledge. I may not be the only one to think such a thing as, during a visit in midsummer two or three years ago, I found a thick handful of very long green grass draped over the edge of the opening. There was no grass of this type growing in the vicinity, so someone or something carried it from some distance to place it there. I find it a little difficult to believe that it was deposited there by a bird or mammal. For now, it seems the offering will remain another secret safely kept by the Oracle Tree.

Photos and graphic design by Erika Rathje (see higher-resolution original here)

Over at Rubies in Crystal, Brenda contemplates paper.

The world is papered with knowledge. Burn all the paper in the stoneage firepit of our souls.

Smooth burning words under my fingers.

Forests are the lungs of the planet; and wood dust and water promise of immortality.

In perhaps the most philosophical post submitted to the festival, Paris-based geologist and poet Jonathon Wonham of Connaissances considers a variety of ways in which “something which was once present and has now disappeared may have left a fundamental impact” on present-day reality, preserved somehow in literal or figurative text.

[W]e might think of a tree sticking out of a river bed. As the sediment is transported around it, the tree exerts a fundamental influence on the structures developing in the sediment around it. Yet eventually, the tree is likely to rot and disappear, leaving the sediment that has gathered downstream compacted and preserved. The sediment is the history of that tree that is now no more.

I think these ideas may serve as a metaphor for what happens in poetry. The poet is the tree in the river.

Beth Adams — author of the brand-new biography of Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson — contributed a post from her old blog about the dismemberment of a favorite old willow tree. I don’t know whether the stark image of the mutilated tree was meant as a Christ-symbol or not, but her conclusion didn’t shy away from religion:

I’ll remember the willow best on those nights, years ago, when I was trying to figure out if God existed. After I’d meditated for an hour, the incense burned down to ash, candle extinguished, I’d come out into the night, and to my polished mind, open, newly innocent, every sensation appeared fresh, important, astonishing. The Milky Way had never seemed so vast, the air so exhilarating, the snow under my feet so white. And there the willow loomed: hugely alive, pulsating with being-ness and a quality of home that strangely did not feel closed to me. I stopped trying to paint it or write about it, but just stood there, night after night, as if it were part of the meditation ritual; looking up, not thinking, I let it tell me whatever it had to say.

Many contributors seem to feel that trees have something important to tell us. But whether they can communicate it in a language we can understand is another question. Tim Burns at Talking to the Owl seems doubtful.

… I leaned in close to hear him speak
And pressed his trunk against my cheek
Yet no noun or verb could I unfold
I had no ear for a tongue so old …

Curt Stump (who, in an ironic name-is-destiny kind of thing, is currently employed “putting dead chipped trees on new young trees”) wrote this spring that he was keeping his window open for

… the cool hiss
of the young
liquid leaves of spring

bringing me that sound
which I swear
when I close my eyes
I couldn’t tell from ocean
washing over rocks …

But what might trees make of our own babble? Dale of mole reports on a recent dream.

I go walking beside them, trying to explain in my turn, but my mouth is all full of a huge, meaty tongue; saliva drips from my mouth, but no words will come out. The trees moan in frustration, fretting the bark of their limbs together. I want to reassure them, but they point at my mouth and shudder. I realize I’m soft and repulsive to them, as a slug might be to us, and that my huge tongue is for them the crowning horror. I want to explain to them — it’s not always like this, I don’t know why it’s this way, this isn’t how people usually are — but I can’t get intelligible words past it, only slaverings and grunts come out, and the trees crowd away from me, muttering in alarm.

Photo by Erika Rathje (higher-resolution original here)

Finally, Florida-based writer of speculative fiction Elissa Malcohn, at Chronicles from Hurricane Country, invokes the myth of Daphne and Apollo in a poem she posted just yesterday. Here are the final three stanzas.

Daily the chicks scream into the wind
For food. Daily their parents oblige, thrusting
Moth and worm down tiny gullets. You take your place
As world-tree, bursting limb after limb through holly
Turned to sacred ground. Hiding that tender profile
Of nest. Letting new lives take root.

Eons away from Apollo’s pursuit, your route
Is not an easy one. The rainforests wind
Down to devastation. Clear-cutting turns green profile
To brown. My kind encroach in droves, thrusting
Like the besotted god into your groves. Let my holly
Be a sanctuary, and when trimmed a hiding place,

Until the thrusting of your holy leaves
Again breach tamed suburban profile, in that place
Where we continue to let our roots run wild.

__________

Thanks to everyone who contributed (including a couple of unwitting contributors)! Thanks are especially due to Pablo for having the idea in the first place. He’ll be hosting the next festival on August 1 at Roundrock Journal. Send all links to him: editor (at) roundrockjournal (dot) com.

June 30, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Reminder

This is the last day to send in links for the first-ever Festival of the Trees, which will appear here sometime tomorrow morning, inshallah. (Send links to me — bontasaurus at yahoo dot com — with “festival of the trees” in the subject line.)

Let me reiterate that for this first edition, I am accepting pieces from your archives, as far back as you care to go. I want to suggest that writing about trees has deep roots in the blog world; it’s not some new fad just invented for this blog carnival. But recent posts are also, of course, most welcome.

I’ve already received a respectable number of contributions, which means that I won’t be doing much hunting for stuff on my own. So if you’d like to make sure your own blog — or your favorite blog read — is included, you’ll have to send me links. It’s O.K. to send multiple links and let me choose (though future hosts of the festival may set different rules).

Also, I’ve decided that I’ll follow a quote format, with somewhat lengthier selections than is the norm for blog carnivals. (No, this will not be a post for the ADD-impaired!) The implication for artists and photographers is that I may reproduce your images to illustrate the post — with due credit and a link back to the original, of course.

That’s it for a post today. If you don’t think you can get through this last day of the work week and the month without a Via Negativa fix, here’s something from the archives that you probably don’t remember (I didn’t): Looking ourselves over. It’s actually two posts in one, but the heart of it is a comparison between anthropologist Keith Basso’s descriptions of the Western Apache and my own, anecdotal impressions of rural white folks in Central Pennsylvania. A little on the wordy side, but you’ns might like it.

June 29, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

News

My eighth entry in the self-portrait marathon

Meanwhile, there are entire towns where nothing terrible is happening for an hour or two, where parents are caring for children with remarkable tenderness, where nurses are tending patients, mail carriers are delivering packages, and at least one man who owns a small business is taking off work early to coach a girl’s soccer team. Terrible things will continue to happen in those places, which the best efforts of such people will not be sufficient to prevent, but their bursts of gratuitous kindness are the mustard seeds from which healing bushes sometimes grow. They constitute the alternate reality that I want to live in, even if it means limiting my exposure to other kinds of news.
—Barbara Brown Taylor, “What’s new?” The Christian Century, May 30, 2006

As I sat on my porch this morning drinking my coffee around 6:30, I watched a lightning bug fly past with its lamp extinguished and decided it was time to do another self-portrait.

I don’t know what kind of play the self-portrait marathon is getting in the larger blogosphere, but I doubt it’s attracting the kind of breathless attention devoted to the latest Supreme Court decision, or whatever fresh horror is emerging from Iraq or the Occupied Territories. And perhaps that’s as it should be. But if you haven’t stopped by lately to check out the gallery, you should. You can view it as a Flickr slideshow, too.

While it’s easy to be cynical and dismiss the self-portrait marathon as nothing more than an outlet for bloggers’ unflagging tendency toward self-absorption, I think that misses the real story. Over 75 bloggers, from amateur shutterbugs like me to professional portrait painters, have committed to taking a prolonged, in-depth look at one subject — a subject that Agatha Christie once described as “perhaps the greatest mystery of all: ourselves.” And as the galleries attest, many of the results have been quite striking.

The blogosphere has been billed as an alternative to the mainstream media, but in many ways, it’s just as superficial. The emphasis remains on speed rather than accuracy, sensationalism rather than nuance, and two-sided conflicts rather than the full complexity of life as most of us experience it in our daily lives. Even for us non-political bloggers, there’s a great temptation to simply post our latest snapshots, with a few accompanying sentences of breathless prose, and move on to something else. To try to see anything more fully, to observe it attentively and then take the time to describe or depict it with as much care and effort as we can muster seems almost counter-cultural. But if the bloggers I tend to read have anything in common, it might be precisely this, that they are dedicated to documenting what Barbara Brown Taylor refers to as “alternate reality.”

Twenty-eight great-
spangled fritillaries
on one small clump
of butterfly weed

lifting & settling
to pivot on the un-
steady dust-devils
of their tongues,

their wings rocking
halfway open for
balance, orange
against orange.

Ezra Pound famously described literature as “news that stays news.” Fine. But what do we mean by news? Isn’t there something inescapably sensationalistic about the practice of selecting and highlighting certain phenomena, pushing the rest into the background? Well, perhaps so. But barring enlightenment, how else are we to see?

It occurs to me that this definition, “news that stays news,” captures pre-modern and non-Western attitudes toward elevated language, as well. Consider, for example, the song cycles that once accompanied all-night circle dances of the O’odham, or the spontaneously generated, loosely linked verses of one of the old-time blues poets like Son House or Bukka White. From one perspective, such lyrics employ traditional folk material, and therefore must be the opposite of news. But if words are treated as living, ephemeral beings rather than marks on the page, and therefore must be re-created for every performance, how can their inspired production not constitute news?

So in that sense, I think the ephemeral and fairly spontaneous nature of the blog medium should help nudge us away from our usual Western attitude toward art as something static and eternal, the realization of some bullshit Platonic Ideal. I think the non-Western view is closer to reality. All art is inherently messy and imperfect, a moment temporarily rescued from the ceaseless flux. Whether its subject is the world without or the world within, a good work of art is nothing more or less than inspired journalism.

When I wrote an email to some family members yesterday, I mentioned two things I thought were newsworthy: the twenty-eight fritillaries, and the discovery of a nesting solitary vireo (A.K.A. blue-headed vireo) less than a hundred feet away from the nest I found last year. I can’t claim credit for this discovery, though. Two biology students from Penn State Altoona, who are working on a research project up in our woods, told me about it when they stopped to admire the fritillary-covered butterfly weed on their way back down the mountain. They were abashed they’d never noticed the nest before, and so was I when I went to look. It’s about eight feet off the ground above one of our most frequently traveled trails, right in front of one of the gates to our three-acre deer exclosure. How in the world could we all have missed it?

The vireo let me walk right under the nest and snap pictures from two feet away, her head swiveling to follow my movements. Since the nest is wedged into a small fork on a witch hazel branch — the favorite tool of water dowsers here in the Appalachians — I wonder whether the eventual fledglings will be gifted with the ability to locate hidden springs? Will the healing properties of witch hazel make the nest’s occupants somehow less vulnerable?

At the beginning of this post, I quoted Barbara Brown Taylor on “healing bushes” (a phrase which, taken out of context, might seem to have a certain political resonance!). Her focus was on the Bible’s Good News, but this quite literal healing tree with its avian occupants — not an “alternate reality,” but the real world as we all too seldom remember to see it — is gospel enough for me.

June 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Eyesight to the blind, etc.

With apologies to Sonny Boy Williamson. The homebrew made me do it.

She’s my baby. Every time she knocks on wood, it opens, with a soft parting of cellulose.

Her smile doesn’t just light up the room; it can power all the household appliances for a month.

She’s better than a street sweeper, because wherever she walks soon gets a spit-shine from the scores of men rushing to kiss the ground.

She visited Lourdes once, & the abandoned crutches got up and walked away.

The last time she strolled past a cemetery, the dead didn’t stop at coming back to life — several of them danced on their own graves. They were that grateful.

She went to visit her congressman in Washington, & by the next morning, astonished headlines twice as solid as the last Presidential erection were precipitating a nationwide shortage in black ink: CONGRESS VOTES SELF PAY CUT, MAKES SUBSIDIES ILLEGAL.

You say your woman is fine, but mine can actually get you fined in dozens of municipalities where the transport or possession of my baby has been declared a threat to public health & decency.

Six hundred & sixty-six ordained ministers have denounced my baby from the pulpit. Jesus is still O.K. to worship — he’s safely off in heaven — but if this broken stink of a world were ever really healed, how could you tell the sinners from the saved? It’s a dilemma.

That’s why, for her birthday, I’m buying her the second-most expensive sunglasses on the rack — the kind with mirrored lenses.

Not prescription, mind you. Her eyesight is perfect.

June 27, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

For the birds

Squish, squish, squish went my boots as I waded through the tall grass on Greenbriar Trail. But much as I looked forward to changing into dry pants and shoes, strangely enough, I was content. Starting at 6:05 in the morning, we had managed to tally many of the deep-woods species for which the Bald Eagle Important Bird Area was designated, including Acadian flycatchers; worm-eating, black-throated green and cerulean warblers; and a plethora of wood thrushes, ovenbirds and scarlet tanagers. We had run into a box turtle on Laurel Ridge Trail, and enjoyed views of the adjacent ridges rising above a thick blanket of fog. Though it was extremely humid and the vegetation was still sopping wet from the previous evening’s downpour, at least the air was cool and it hadn’t rained on us.

True, the real birders — my mom and my brother Steve — were unhappy at all the no-shows, but that’s in the nature of point counts, I guess. The idea isn’t to count every bird every time, but to capture most of the breeding species every year, in a consistent enough fashion to be able to track population trends over the course of decades. And it’s not everybody who’s fortunate enough to be able to go out their front door and find themselves in the middle of an IBA. In our case, though we don’t have a hawk watch on the property, we’re situated on a ridge with one of the highest recorded counts of golden eagles in eastern North America, which I think helped persuade the scientists on the Ornithological Technical Committee of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey that Bald Eagle Ridge was worthy of designation as an IBA — one of over 80 in the state. Its abundance of interior forest habitat was the other key consideration. As conservationists here never tire of pointing out, Pennsylvania is home to 17 percent of the world’s scarlet tanagers and nine percent of the wood thrushes. Long-term data, such as those generated by point counts, will help scientists monitor the health of these species.

The point count protocol developed by Audubon Pennsylvania involves counting every bird seen or heard in three minutes at each permanently designated point on a route. Counters must go out two times each breeding season, defined as the months of May and June, between 6:00 and 10:00 in the morning. The points must be 500 feet apart, and we have sixteen of them in our route, starting at the spruce grove at the top of the field, and taking in both ridges and the deep hollow in between before ending up on my parents’ front porch — Point 16. On Saturday, I was the official timekeeper and note taker; Mom and Steve identified the birds, mostly by ear.

Point 14 is in the field near the edge of the woods, along a mowed trail we call Butterfly Loop. As we stood there counting, a pair of fawns came bounding down the trail toward us. I whipped out my camera and snapped a couple of pictures before they turned and raced off. Then, as we squished on toward the next point, they came running back. This time, the bolder of the two got within six feet of me before deciding that I might be dangerous. We almost had ~~the venison equivalent of veal for supper~~ a lovefest.

Steve spotted a sharp-shinned hawk harrying a red-tailed hawk in the sky over Laurel Ridge as we neared Point 15. Then, on the way back down toward the house, he asked if we’d seen any Baltimore checkerspots. “Not yet,” I said. But then we spotted one.

You may remember my post about the caterpillars, which feed mainly* on turtlehead, a plant that isn’t nearly as common as it used to be, thanks to ~~the hooved rats~~ our friends the deer. We found two Baltimore checkerspot caterpillars this spring, and on Saturday morning, we saw two adults, one after the other — both in the vicinity of our largest patch of turtlehead.

Most of the yard birds remained stubbornly silent during the three minutes we listened on the front porch, so the count ended on a bit of a gloomy note. But there’s no denying the pleasure that can come from changing into a dry pair of socks. I draped my wet socks over the railing on my own front porch, and later that afternoon, I noticed they had become a Mecca for great spangled fritillaries.

When I poked my head out around 5:00, I even caught a pair of butterflies mating on my socks, though I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. I guess there are all kinds of good reasons to get one’s feet wet.
__________

*Edited from “exclusively,” which turns out not be true, according to the latest science. Thanks to commenter “striped twistie” for the correction (see message string).

June 26, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Beads

“Personal ornaments are a powerful tool of communication,” says Francesco D’Errico at the Institute of the Prehistory and Geology of the Quaternary in Talence, France, one of the team that studied the beads. “They can indicate social or marital status, for example. But you need to have a complex system of language behind that. To me [these beads] are very powerful archaeological evidence that these people were able to speak like us.”
–“Ancient beads imply culture older than we thought,” New Scientist

Rain makes
a cave of the air.
It doesn’t mean to fall,
any more than
the thrush
means to sing such
an ache into the heart.
Tell me what
your tongue tastes like —
blood? Metal? Your reflection
in running water?
This is how it happens.
When the first
bone drill pierces
a nugget of shell,
something round
as the day can suddenly
admit a saving loop of hide:
time can be savored.
The world’s first
belt or necklace
divides
the waters from the waters
like a movable wound,
like a smile
full of teeth
when
the others see.

June 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees reminder

A visitor to Alan Seeger Natural Area, a small old-growth forest near State College, Pennsylvania

No shirt, no shoes, no problem. No link: problem! You only have one more week to write a blog post in time to get it included in the first-ever Festival of the Trees. What are you waiting for?

True, I haven’t bestirred myself to do a tree post so far this month, either. But I did just set up a coordinating blog for the festival, so cut me some slack, O.K.?

What is a blog carnival? It’s just a fancy name for a periodic collection of links to recent blog posts about a given topic — in this case, all things arboreal. (See here for more information on what we’re looking for.) Usually, the host invents some sort of theme or narrative to connect the links and make things more entertaining: see the invertebrate carnival Circus of the Spineless or the birds and birding carnival I and the Bird for some good examples. But that’s my problem, this month. What I need from y’all are links.

Most people submit links to their own blog posts, but some exceptionally kind and generous people like to help out by sending links to other blogs and websites, too. Send anything that you think might fit to me: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line. For this initial installment of the carnival, I’ll probably allow posts prior to June 2006, as well.

June 23, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Finding the crayfish

The other week, we took Eva to visit some friends of the family who live a few miles away. The main inducement was easy access to a quiet portion of the Little Juniata River, and the promise of good crayfish hunting there. Their interest was scientific or aesthetic rather than culinary, though Eva is from a part of the country where crawdads are considered a delicacy. But how do you find creatures that are almost the exact color of the mud they burrow in?

While the kids honed their crustacean search images, I went hunting for smaller invertebrates. Along the shore, several foot-long bays seethed with tiny rowboats — the aquatic insects known by the somewhat redundant name “water boatmen” (family Corixidae). Their bodies are fully submersible crafts; they have the enviable ability to capture bubbles between the hairs on their bodies and turn them into shiny wetsuits of air.*

It was a hot and humid late afternoon, and everything seemed a little stunned. In the woods along the river, I found a daddy longlegs resting quietly on a small black cherry leaf, rather like the Little Prince,

while nearby, a long-legged cranefly took the opposite approach, suspending itself between several sassafras leaves. Clearly, it was a good place to hang out.

In the adjacent wetland — which was rather parched on account of the drought — a question mark butterfly also seemed intent on doing not very much at all. Of course, it’s the larvae of the species that do most of the work, including locate their proper host plants, elms and nettles. Once they emerge from their chrysalises, life slows down. The females lay eggs hither and yon, as the mood strikes them.

A white moth floated dead on the surface of a muddy pool. I wondered whether, like the Chinese poet Li Bai, it had drowned while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon. You never know. Back at the river, Eva’s newfound hunting buddy Nathan took a fall that he swore was an accident, and totally unrelated to his previous pleas to be allowed to swim. So much of the hunting impulse seems driven by pure envy of the prey.
__________

*UPDATE: Rebecca Clayton thinks that the bugs in the photo are more likely to be juvenile water striders (see comments). After checking out several reference sources, I’m inclined to agree.

June 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

In the hallway of the ancestors

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

My seventh entry in the self-portrait marathon

My mother’s people gaze across at my father’s people in the narrow upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. It all seems amicable enough. Some were rich, some were poor, but most were somewhere in the middle. Both sides are dominated by people of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, with a little French Canadian and Irish thrown in. A discouragingly large number on both sides were teetotaling Methodists, but for all that, they don’t look any more sober than decorum required.

Aside from genealogists, most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about their ancestors. After all, we are descended from the disinherited and the violently dispossessed — or at the least, from people who believed in leaving the past behind. And we’re still that way, aren’t we? We think of our ancestors as forebears only, and believe them quite irretrievably dead and gone — perhaps to a better place from which they might occasionally cast a fond glance in our direction, but that’s all. They’re not expected to take an active interest in the affairs of their descendents, much less transmigrate back into the clan. Sometimes one of them might come back as a ghost, but that’s about it.

I think it’s important to remember how odd this belief about our ancestors makes us, how much of an exception to the general run of societies around the world. Combine that with our astonishing ignorance of history — even quite recent history — and I think it’s safe to say that we Americans are almost uniquely alienated from our roots. It goes along with our alienation from nature, I believe, and in some respects probably helps license the on-going commodification of what used to be thought of as Creation. In pre-modern Europe, the dead were buried in the churchyard at the center of the village, and had their day on the calendar (All Souls Day). Ancestor reverence formed a minor part of a complex system of traditional observances — including local saints’ days, rogations, feasts and fasts — which all together told people who they were and where they came from. Carnival rites linked bodily symbolism, both sacred and profane, with the cosmic drama of changing seasons and renewed fertility.

The Protestant Reformation did away with most of that, and the Industrial Revolution finished it off. The 19th-century bourgeois novel and 20th-century psychology invented the isolated, narrowly sexual and generally neurotic individual, and the Great Awakening and subsequent religious movements stressed a personal relationship with God or Jesus above all else. My Methodist ancestors seem, on the whole, content with this arrangement. They knew how to compose themselves for a photograph, wearing their Sunday best and meditating on eternity, or something else completely apart from daily life, for as long as it took the man with the box and the flash to capture their likenesses. They rest easy in their frames, smiling sardonically — if at all — at the thought that some lonely fool might someday long to re-enter those frozen moments.

June 21, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Today

Today my head is very itchy. Today I am newly fascinated by the words nightjar and (thanks to pohanginapete) fossick. Today we have ample sunshine, cool temperatures and low humidity. Today the wood thrushes are continuing to sing well past 10:00 in the morning, accompanied by an indigo bunting, a wood pewee, and a common yellowthroat. Today I have begun by reading other people’s words instead of writing my own, which means really that I have been whispering, murmuring, and chanting under my breath the same as always. Today I broke my usual rule of no radio in the morning, and caught the headlines on NPR while I fixed my eggs — not that an egg ever can be fixed once it’s broken. Today the Middlewesterner is retiring from his sidebar such immortal Internet search strings as last chance notes to girlfriend, Blue hypnotic liquor, poems that rhyme with John Deere equipment and Commodification of the sasquatch. Today, says the Guardian, Bush accuses Iran of dragging its feet. Today the Stanley Cup goes head-to-head with the World Cup in the sports headlines.

Today I have been engaging in an odd form of egosurfing with typoGenerator, inserting the text “dave” and “bonta” and marveling at the random images the program retrieves from the web. Today I am wondering where we got the idea that something like music could ever belong to its author, given that every instance of authentic listening involves a re-creation of the thing heard as well as a subtle reshaping of the one who listens. Today they are protesting in Vienna. Today I am trying to picture a jar full of night — a voice in the night woods, as Peterson describes the whip-poor-will: by day camouflaged as dead leaves, or flit[ting] away on rounded wings like a large brown moth. Today is the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere. Today the rudbeckia in my garden has begun to bloom in earnest, and it looks very much as if the first butterfly weed blossoms may open by late afternoon. Today by 11:30 the six Carolina wren fledgelings, who left the nest the night before, have still not figured out how to get out of the garage. Today is not even half over.