Out-of-the-blog experiences
After rain, a dry high blows in, bringing such clarity that one can see the tiniest gnats dancing in the sun. It was days like this that used to make me feel the most anguished, back in the days before my heart shrank to the approximate size and durability of a black walnut. You can live in the most beautiful place in the world and still wish to be someplace else – or at least to be somebody else. Those yearnings haven’t entirely gone away, merely subsided a bit as I coasted into my long middle ages. And I have learned that I am far from alone in feeling that way. I can sit on a figurative pew in the figurative cathedral here in the back forty and watch the light streaming through the figurative stained glass with a kind of vague contentment verging on joy. I can contemplate a lady’s slipper orchid, listen to a cacophony of coyote pups or watch a black bear nosing around the lawn at dusk and feel – for lack of a better term – blessed. It’s still escape that the mind is after, though, I know that.
I’m going out again in a few minutes, but if you’re stuck inside for the day, here are a few other places worth visiting in this Neverneverland called the blogosphere.
On Tuesday, Susan of a line cast, a hope followed described a moment of near-panic in a Rite-Aid store:
My son walks over to the shelf of cars and picks up an army tank, saying something like “I don’t have this” and quickly putting it down as if he recognizes why he wouldn’t have one, and then says “I like all the Hotwheel cars” waving expansively at hundreds of tiny cars, which does not surprise me but I am feeling like I will faint if he asks me to buy him something, as the excess of the stuff in our house has loomed up in my mind to meet the cacophony of colors of baby bowling pins and Frisbees and neon pool toys and women’s Ked’s style shoes in fuschia and cobalt. Why is this bothering me now? Why doesn’t it bother anyone else? All I can see at this moment is a meaningless excess of cheap soul-stealing stuff. At home many things are broken – the fluorescent kitchen light, the garage door and siding on the south side of the house need replacing, the pond leaks, a car is dead in the driveway and requiring towing. I’ve spent the last hour talking to the repair guy about all the different ways to replace the fluorescent light with no clear answer.
In Acerbia, Abdul-Walid briefly inhabits the hell-realm known as CNN:
My mind was disturbed by the multiple layers: lies, vapid lighting, torpid commentary, mob mentality, more lies, stage-managed debate (on stem-cell research), “news”, trivial pursuits (a report about a housecat stuck in a tree in Oregon, followed by footage of fighting in Iraq), canned laughter, death dealing as entertainment, car commercials, perfect blonde hair, gleaming teeth, and even more lies.
I thought I would lose my fucking mind. A baby being held near me started crying. I must have had a crazed look on my face.
I sought refuge. I started to think of the Zen Center in Cambridge, I thought of an Arboretum in the midwest that I love, I thought of Mount Athos, I tried to still my mind with the words of Krishnamurti. I knew that, given the choice between constant exposure to the obvious insanity that is capitalism, and the mental effort it would take to pretend I actually believed in the dogma of a religious orthodoxy, I would gladly worship the Theotokos or Kuanyin.
On a more cheerful note, earlier in the week Chris at Creek Running North treated his readers to an engaging description of a canyon hike. That’s “Canyon” as in “Grand.” The ending of his five-day sojourn was, predictably, bittersweet:
On the trail in the inner canyon, especially away from Phantom, each person you meet is a welcome spark of humanity in a huge inhuman landscape. You stop, you ask if the person is comfortable and they ask you, you trade life stories and plans for the next hours of hiking, you feel a bond of sincere appreciation. Over a few days, I met a dozen folks I thought of as friends. I never learned their names.
Walk toward the rim and that diminishes. The closer you get to the ice cream trucks and gas stations, the less important it seems to cultivate those ties. Your every need is granted, assuming you have the cash. The closer you get to the rim, the more distant the strangers’ eyes become, the more your wave of greeting is seen as a startling intrusion. Mommy, what does that dirty, hairy man with the backpack want? It took me a few hours, after Cindy and I stepped triumphantly and with some wistfulness onto the Rim, to stop striking up conversations with total strangers.
The Middlewesterner continues to report on Tom and Mary’s recent drive around Iceland.
For lunch we stopped in view of another g-damn waterfall. Yeah, it has come to that. To the tourist in Iceland, the waterfall becomes as ocean is to the fish. Soon enough you just don’t notice the waterfalls. Your spirit may need them but you cannot think too much about them. You cannot process the reality of them after a while. At least that might be the case if you had grown up in the great middle flatness of the USA where even one of these throw-away falls in Iceland would be a source of great wonderment; yet eventually the sky-full of waterfalls becomes too much to comprehend.
A few days ago, Natalie of Blaugustine blogged about her visit to a maxilofacial unit’s waiting room:
A Rabbi in full mufti enters the room and sits down beside me. He immediately pulls a handsomely bound volume from a briefcase and opens it. Out of the corner of my eye I notice the large, beautifully wrought Hebrew lettering. Strangely, at that moment I am reading a chapter about the Nazis who went into hiding in Paraguay after the war. I don’t dare ask the Rabbi what is written on the page of the holy book he is absorbed in. The Rabbi and I are the only people reading in the waiting room, everyone else is staring into space.
Over at alembic, Maria describes her narrow escape from an MRI machine:
Does magnetic resonance shake up your brain? Is it like a mild version of electroshock therapy? When we came out in the sunlight on Post Street, and later, as we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, I could have sworn everything was aglow with color. Maybe it was just that the timid poking fingers of the first summery fog withdrew into some other pocket over the Pacific….
Meanwhile, in Keene, New Hampshire, Lorianne makes some startling discoveries about her fellow inhabitants: some are
transgender hermaphrodites, starting life as male and turning female upon maturity.
And Fred First travels to Vancouver, where the locals also have some surprising customs.
Rain or shine, Vancouver BC is a city of walkers. We would look out our hotel window and see folks sitting on park benches along English Bay, no hat, no umbrella–in a heavy drizzle. Water is like a second skin for these people and to be outdoors, they think nothing of being wet. In an hour it can stop and start raining a dozen times, so you can’t really wait for ‘good’ weather to leave the house….
On one of our umbrella-walks on Sunday–our second night at the Sylvia on the west side of downtown–as we approached Stanley Park, I heard what I assumed was a chorus of frogs. The raucous calls were coming from the trees. It had to be tree frogs. I’d never heard such a dense cluster of any other invisible creature calling back and forth in great numbers; and the wet weather seemed perfect for amphibians, didn’t it? But wait. What were those manhole-cover-sized clumps of sticks in the branches–ten in this tree, half again as many in that one there? And I could see movement, but in the dismal light against the somber sky, it could have been anything. Anything but frogs….
Finally, in the cassandra pages, Beth – like Susan in the essay quoted above – writes about Allergic Reactions.
The past few days I’ve felt crummy: I’ve had a bad headache from, I think, my usual spring time allergies: the dark side of all those blossoms. But it’s also from too much stress, too much breathing-in of the suffering that goes on around me and the impossibility of finding solutions. I wish I could just hate it and push it away; dismiss without compassion the woman barking at her child. But what made her that way? As much as I despise a world in which beautiful dark-eyed girls end up begging on city streets and small boys, bribed with fast food, learn early to cherish the fat-drenched moment when the unhappiness around them seems to abate, I’m unable to find release either in judgmentalism or escapism. As Merton said, we’re meant to hold both the dark and the light. I wish it were easier.
Now I really need a walk.
Words on the street
Cibola 103
Pekwin (a.k.a. Sun Priest, Word Priest) (conclusion)
As they pass south of Kyakima,
a boy herding turkeys on the hillside
hears the commotion, looks,
scrambles down to head
off the mask. He tackles it,
the others help him wrestle the man
to the ground, this poor thing
with no words
of his own remaining.
A mind given over
wholly to the elder brothers,
the eaters-of-raw-food.
They have the mask down but it won’t
come off. They pull & tug
& it screams curses in
the sacred language of the East:
it’s stuck fast.
The masker gasps for breath,
he’ll suffocate! They tug
& pull & stretch.
With one last scream the mask
comes loose, a layer of flayed skin
sticking to its back.
The mummer has become the Man
Without a Face, an impossible being.
Despite all the doctors can do
he dies four days later.
They try to clean the Shumekuli mask
as they would any other, scrubbing off
the paint, the pattern of raincloud steps.
Does a masker keep the god’s
turtle-shell rattles on his legs,
the spirit gourd in his hand
for everyday use?
The sacred & the common must be kept apart.
Except this mask,
the White Shumekuli–
a mask that should never
be worn lightly–
it won’t give up its newest
layer of skin.
__________
The story about the White Shumekuli mask comes from Zuni oral tradition, as presented in two separate sources.
Nursery rhymes free verses
1.
Crow at the top of the tall locust tree,
let’s have some straight talk for once.
How many bright, round things have you stolen today?
A speckled warbler egg,
an ugly pink nestling,
the big brown eye of a newborn fawn,
the moon in the water.
With a snip and a snap I slurped them up.
Delicious!
You did all this mischief by yourself?
Heavens, no!
Steal all you want, my mother always said,
but be sure to share.
2.
A fire in the valley: the sirens wail.
The fire trucks race through the water gap,
blowing their horns.
The sound travels up the hollow
two miles to the top of the mountain
where the coyotes live.
The pups have just woken up
and think they hear their parents
bringing breakfast.
They yip and howl at the sirens,
bark back at the horns.
Their mother comes at a trot,
dangling her long, red tongue.
*
The remaining verses are my re-translations of Chinese nursery rhymes included in the bilingual Folksongs and Children-Songs from Peiping, collected and translated by Kinchen Johnson, Orient Cultural Services, Taipei, 1971.
3.
Day after day, the old cow is sad
and says nothing at all.
Every night, a cold wind curls around her shed.
What will become of her hide?
They’ll stretch it over a drum and beat it with sticks.
What will become of her bones?
The big ones will be whittled into hairpins,
the small ones will be carved into dice.
Her tired old muscles
will flavor the soup.
4a.
Lord Moon is bright,
so bright!
Open the back gate and hang out the laundry.
Washing makes white,
starching makes whiter,
but the fun-loving maid makes
a lousy wife.
A long pipe dangles from her mouth
and she holds eight cards in her hand.
If she wins, she buys flowers to pin to her dress.
If she loses, she flies into a rage.
4b.
Lord Moon is bright,
so bright!
Open the back gate and hang out the laundry.
Washing makes white,
starching makes whiter,
but a man too free with his money makes
a lousy husband.
He loves to drink liquor and he loves to play cards.
He builds a big pile of rolls and cakes
and brown flour biscuits – two silver dollars apiece.
But right next door, old Jiang’s third son
knows how to live well.
His boots are green,
his hat is green,
his robe is green
and he wears a green jacket.
5.
Old thistle-seed,
old thistle-seed:
long white hair from top to bottom.
Along comes the wind and blows it sky-high.
It lands feet-first, with nary a scratch.
6.
Get that bald man!
Put a vise around his bald head.
Squeeze out enough oil
to fry up some tofu.
As the tofu turns brown,
the man takes a trip to the underworld.
He sees the King of Hades
wearing an iron crown.
The bald man is so scared,
he gets a fever and burns up.
7.
The little dog clears the irrigation ditch
in a single bound.
He doesn’t have a hair on his body
and he was born without a tail.
You can walk right up to him –
he never barks.
He spends his time running back and forth
among the cattails.
8.
A mule for going up the hills,
a horse for going down,
a donkey anywhere it’s flat.
Who needs a whip?
9.
Mr. Pot-belly, one day,
wanted to start a pawn shop, they say.
He didn’t have any capital that day,
so he took his pants to
another pawn shop, they say.
10.
I know a little girl who isn’t afraid of anything.
She always calls the flower peddler “uncle.”
“Hey uncle, hey uncle!
How about giving me
a red pomegranate flower?
I’ll pin it to my chest,
I’ll pin it to my sleeve,
and everywhere I go
the ground will be covered
with red petals!”
Words on the street
Cibola 102
Pekwin (a.k.a. Sun Priest, Word Priest) (cont’d)
The other night in the kiva as
a few of us sat & smoked,
the daylight priest of Kechipawa reminded us
of what happened last year at the Yaaya festival.
The Helix Society had set up the fir tree
& all the townspeople were out
dancing, they’d linked arms
& formed the four concentric rings
alternately turning
in opposite directions–entrancing
spectacle for old Knife-Wing, no doubt,
peering down through his smoke hole
in the sky. Everyone’s there, from all
the six towns, dancing, when
the Helix People bring out the masks,
the Horned Ones outside
& the six Shumekuli at the center
circling the tree.
But one of the maskers has, it seems,
an improper thought.
The White Shumekuli mummer
suddenly remembers some transgression–
the night before, let’s say,
he slept with his wife. The mask
goes mad. The masker screams,
claws at his face
but it sticks tight.
He runs full tilt at the inner circle
& the circle breaks,
they try to catch him but the mask
has turned savage, roaring
like a trapped bear, smashes through
the next circle & the outer
two rings of dancers falter
& give way. The Shumekuli
who lives in the East has decided
to take his mask & go home.
Caught up in his guilt, the dancer
has forgotten who
gives life to whom: acts
like a child tagging after
an angry parent. He runs pell-mell
& the crowd dwindles.
__________
The story about the White Shumekuli mask comes from Zuni oral tradition, as presented in two separate sources.
Martin’s Gap
We’re in Martin’s Gap, on the edge of the Rocky Ridge Natural Area in Central Pennsylvania’s Rothrock State Forest. We got lost for a while on the drive in, and now, wandering along the stream in search of the trail, we encounter showy orchids in full bloom. In the dim light of a rainy late afternoon, you almost expect flowers like these to begin speaking. It’s not as if they lack for tongues. I sprawl on my belly, trying to shoot their portrait in the gloom with my little snapshot camera. A pickup truck stops on the nearby gravel road: “Is everything all right?” “We’re fine, thank you!” That bland baldness that most speakers of the English language mistake for truth.
A few minutes later a barred owl calls from the ridge: Hu HU huhu, hu HU huHU-awl. He flies in to query us more closely; I’m not sure how to answer. Barred owls, like their close cousins the spotted owls, are quite unafraid of human beings and often seem curious about these strange, flightless birds trespassing in their woods. The traditional birders’ onomatopoeia has them asking, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”
In the forest, one cannot help hearing voices, I think. But a hundred feet down the road, we run into another group of wildflower enthusiasts. “Did you hear that barred owl?” “No! Where was he?” They seem like very nice people, but I’m reminded once again of why I shy away from large group hikes. A little while later, I find this crowd of open-mouthed puffballs on the end of a log.
Wild yam and maidenhair fern: two ways to spiral. When the dervishes whirl, they say, they’re searching for something they know they’ve never lost. Or for someone, all in green, variously known as Adonis, Elijah, Khidr or St. George. The tighter the whorl, the more earth his velvet coat takes in. For a double helix, add one dragon.
Narcissism is fine for the moon-faced narcissus. For orchids, we need another word: orchidism. You want mythic content? Surely the evolutionary tango of pollinator and blossom will suffice. If you’ve ever steeled your heart against jealousy and self-love and sought salvation in complete otherness, that was orchidian behavior – highly evolved.
The sky slowly clears. We climb out of the shadow at the crest of the ridge, which is capped with strange sandstone outcroppings: megaliths, stone heads carved solely by the weather. I’m reminded that more light doesn’t necessarily mean less mystery – especially if it comes from the sun, which has always struck me as being full of darkness. Try staring at the sun for more than a second and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll carry its smudgy thumbprints around on your retina for the rest of the day.
While my hiking partner relaxes on a flat rock to listen to the forest, I go clambering in search of still more images. Here’s a burl on a rotten rock oak, half-debarked: a coroner’s view of the brain. If you aren’t following a map, you find maps everywhere.
Below one of the largest outcroppings, I hear low murmurs and creep cautiously around, not especially enthusiastic about catching people in some intimate or illegal act. But there’s nobody there, just this young Hercules’ club, otherwise known as devil’s walking stick – a common native colonizer of forest gaps. In lieu of branches, it sports enormous compound leaves and has the odd habit of producing so much fruit in the fall as to bend and even break its brittle stalk, otherwise fiercely defended with collars of thorns. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Its masses of berries rapidly ferment, making them all the more attractive to the songbirds it counts on to spread its seeds far and wide, shitting them out in drunken, erratic patterns – spirals, wheels.
__________
For previous portraits of Pennsylvania natural areas, see The Hook and Tow Hill.
Words on the street
Cibola 101
Pekwin (a.k.a. Sun Priest, Word Priest)
This is how it unfolds, as plainly
as if it were painted
in lines of prayermeal:
when the men in metal come to Shiwanna
our warriors, outnumbered as they are,
put up a respectable fight.
This time our enemies enter from the west,
drink like fools from the Lake
that withholds nothing,
this time their dreams will burn off
like a morning fog. Will turn
to light, a white breast feather,
one grain of gold.
When they depart,
their stone-footed familiars
crumple under them.
This time we have better intelligence:
that their witch doctors–five men in brown
robes & two in tunics–will prevent
a slaughter. They ask after
the black man, yes–but not
to avenge him. They’ll come to feel
his death relieves them
of some distasteful thing. And greedy as
they all are–as apt to steal
& murder as any witch–
they’re voracious for tales
that enlarge upon their runaway
slave’s appetites. Why shouldn’t
we feed them?
Still, these strangers arouse
some sympathy. They are such children.
(To be continued.)