Via Negativa

June 7, 2006February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Montreal

Paying attention primarily to the meanings of words, one loses so much. In retrospect it almost seems as if we went to Montreal for the music — those of us with no French — and on the weekend of the Pentecost, no less. We saw how the stones of language make ripples in the pool of a stranger’s face, traveling outward in rings of gesture and posture and gait. Flakes of poplar down made the air visible, and in lieu of tongues of flame, we were beset by schisms of drizzle.

Uncertainty about meanings and intentions can spawn misreadings that are both unsettling and delicious. There was graffiti that resembled publicly sanctioned mural and mural that imitated graffiti, and in each, the letters turned vegetative and sexual in defiance of the canons of legibility. “Choose your noodle,” said one restaurant menu, and we did. The rain ran between the cobbles in the Old City and we heard a loudspeaker from somewhere overhead like the voice of God saying “Testing, one, two!” in the absolute language of Descartes.

“When I travel, I just go,” said the self-styled vagabond, whose skills at packing made him far more useful than the ordinary run of poets. And so we went, for hundreds of miles aiming the car’s tires straight between the painted lines, until arrival released us into the blissful wandering of a small school of fish.

On Sunday, dissonant blasts of the pipe organ — a postlude by Olivier Messiaen — released us from the spell of the Anglican service, and we spilled out of the hard pews and stood in a circle in the square with the cathedral’s arched entrance to our backs and the double arches of a McDonald’s facing us from across the boulevard. The hymns had made us weep for no particular reason. “The language of ritual is not the language of reality,” the poet intoned.

Next to the polyglot angels of merchandise, I felt inscrutable. The robotic money changers under the temple effortlessly translated between currencies and denominations. A couple blocks away, we posed for pictures in front of a giant, anthropomorphic cairn made by the Inuit. It shone bluely among the glass skyscrapers, arms extended to either side like a squat traffic cop. Whatever site or trail it once had marked must now be bathed in the unbroken light of a day that lasts all summer.

Read other accounts of the blogger meet-up at the cassandra pages, Hoarded Ordinaries, Velveteen Rabbi, 3rd House Journal, mole, and frizzyLogic.

June 1, 2006 by Dave Bonta

On vacation

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.

June 1, 2006 by Dave Bonta

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!

May 31, 2006 by Dave Bonta

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.

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.

“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”?

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.

In the huge Rainforest of the Americas room, among so many brightly colored species, the pelican makes a convincing case for brown.

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.

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.

May 30, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Aviary (1)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

May 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

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.

May 26, 2006 by Dave Bonta

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.

May 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Five-second fables

If it walks like a duck, but leaves purple footprints, what then?

“My wish,” said the shipwrecked man to the genie, “is for a lifetime’s supply of lamps!”

The spider gazes at the dried basswood fruits and & is possessed by an Idea. She feels it stirring in her lower abdomen.

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.

Only a savage would dance for no reason, making up new moves with every step.

May 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

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

May 23, 2006October 10, 2017 by Dave Bonta

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
*
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
*
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.