Via Negativa

Now here are some troops I can support!

A whole unit refusing to go on a mission in a war zone would be a significant breach of military discipline. The military statement said the incident “isolated” and called the 343rd an experienced unit that performed honorable service in nine months in Iraq.

One of the 19 urges the folks back home to “raise pure hell!” This will mean, among other things, holding President Kerry’s feet to the fire come January.

I know it makes no sense for an anarchist to feel patriotic, but this kind of story just makes my heart go pitter-pat.
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Going hiking in West Virginia. Have a great weekend, y’all.

I need help. More to the point, Via Negativa needs help. It just doesn’t look as good as it could or should. The problem is, I’m too bleeping lazy to knuckle down and learn the HTML necessary to improve it.

And why should I bother? Other people already have those skills.

So basically I’m just appealing to those of you who know how to do this crap to give me a helping hand. In return, I can write you a poem and publish it here. And/or include a permanent link to your site (or charity of your choice) in the Tomb of the Unknown Reader. Hell, I could even send money. Or pieces of bark and old pine cones. Whatever you want. Name your price.

I have pretty definite ideas of what I want – nothing fancy – and have even come up with the background for a new banner. So we’re not talking about a whole lot of work here, I don’t think. If you’re interested, please e-mail me: bontasaurus at yahoo. Thanks.

The blogging world is rife with sudden disappearances and unexplained hiatuses. So it was nice to get a “goodbye” message from Beth at Switched at Birth the other day – and even nicer to have her return from her “sabbatical” in just three days! Despite the devastation wrought by Ivan, she writes,

The beauty is back. It never went away, only temporarily my ability to see it. The brokenness is all I could see.

My words dried up.

It rained yesterday, settling the dust and settling my spirit. . . .

It occurs to me that many if not most of my favorite bloggers are engaged in similar acts of courageous seeing, of making-whole, of counter-creation, as the philosopher and literary critic George Steiner might say (see Real Presences). Is it possible that we are all working on different parts of the same puzzle?

Welcome back, Beth!

FINE PRINT

mid-October: high autumn I like to think of it & literalist as I am I’m sipping some old, too-dry homemade melomel adulterated with a dash of sickly sweet fine wine product as the fine print calls it, more & more agog at the way this gulf of space beyond my front step teems with insects zooming swarming floating pogoing, seeds & strands of spider silk drifting in the strong sunlight – aeroplankton as Fred First so aptly says, & though I feel at this moment a kind of joy it is not without longing or perhaps concrete representation, as into my mind’s eye comes unbidden the image of a woman swaying to the music she pulls from a violincello, collaborators in the translation of some dead composer’s long-ago feeling about a day perhaps not too different from this, the two of them, woman & cello, wearing nothing but the blanket of the poor as the Mexican dicho has it – I mean the sun

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COUNTING COUP

3:40 p.m.
overcast & still except for a single cricket
a screech owl trills 3 times

15 seconds later the ground shakes
there’s a deafening roar as an A-10 Warthog
hurtles low over the ridge

the sound is gone almost as quickly as it came
but this sudden tightness takes so much longer
to come unclenched

in fact it takes a lifetime
for the heart to unlearn all
its stubborn habits
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The A-10 Thunderbolt II was nicknamed the Warthog for its general ugliness and slowness relative to other jets. It is possibly one of the most terrifying killing machines ever built. As one fan puts it, the A-10 may be “best described as a flying gatling gun. The airframe is such that it is essentially designed around the gun itself. High battlefield survivability is built into the A-10 with heavy titanium plates around the pilot and vital control components. Landing gear is spaced to provide optimum placement of ordinance. The large General Electric turbofans are placed high on the rear fuselage exhausting above the tailplanes to partially mask the infra red signature to ground based missiles.” What this site fails to mention is that the Gatling gun tends to be loaded with depleted uranium shells – hence the jet’s other nickname, Tankbuster. A-10s can also carry a variety of high explosive and cluster bombs, laser-guided missiles, etc.

For those who have never had the experience, I can only say that when a jet like this roars over your house with no warning you feel a mixture of terror and helplessness, like a cockroach without anything to scuttle under. But on a visit to a National Guard base two months ago, I watched A-10s in action and was thrilled – even awed. So I guess that, just as with powerful, mind-altering drugs, how one reacts to weapons of mass destruction is mostly a matter of mindset and setting.

This past weekend, as I worked on my essay for Columbus Day, I developed an outline for a far more ambitious piece than what I eventually posted. Up until the last moment, when a quote from Tennyson saved me, I still intended to spend this entire week exploring ramifications of Columbus’ frustrated search for paradise. But when I actually started trying to organize all the material I wanted to cover, I realized that I’d have to embark on months of research and probably end up writing several hundred pages in order to do this topic justice.

In that spirit, I am reading up on the belief system of just one people – the Piaroa, from the upper Orinoco – which I hope to begin posting about before the end of the week. In the meantime, I thought it might be of some interest to share my ideas in outline form. (I know elck, at least, is fond of ennumerated puzzles!) I figure this way – blogging being what it is – I can absolve myself of any further responsibility for thinking these ideas though.

“The Nipple of Paradise”

1. Columbus: Paradise may be located, but not ascended w/out God’s permission

2. Homeric riddle: What we found we killed; what we didn’t find we brought with us. (Used as epigraph for W.S. Merwin’s Vietnam-era book of poems, THE LICE.)

3. Dreaming and madness: quote George Steiner (No Passion Spent) on role of individual and collective dreams in history. The Crusades. Centrality of dreaming to Native American experience of reality, according to which dreaming and waking are complementary states

4. Myth of the Fall present if not prominent in huge number of belief systems. “Original sin” is eating of animal flesh, for which human beings still must atone through disease, death. Acquisition of cultural knowledge essentially tragic. Quote Eliade (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries)

5. Knight of the Sad Countenance vs. Sancho Panza. Quote Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World) on W. European concepts of the earthly paradise as apotheosis of material, lower bodily strata (panza, e.g.). Luilekkerland compared with upside-down/chaotic mythical time of indigenous peoples of W. hemisphere: examples from Yaqui, Tohono O’odham, Iroquois. Inclusion of carnival time w/in sacred calendar (pace Bakhtin) represents attempt to tame uncivilized urges – greed, envy, bloodlust

6. Pilgrimage and displacement – “lost horizon” – Indians not lying when they told conquistadors that earthly paradise lay just beyond the next set of hills

7. Real-world basis for myths. “Isle of St. Brendan,” etc. based on memories of real voyages. “Fountain of Youth” reflects incredible purity of spring water in S. Florida, complicated hydrology and geology, enduring conception of watery paradise (myths of Miami street children). “El Dorado” refers to central figure in Andean ritual drama. “Cibola”/Shiwanna as myth-time version of former (?) centers of power along Chaco Meridian

8. Jesuits in NW New Spain & Paraguay and the fulfillment of Renaissance humanism’s dream of a practical utopia. Pastoralism and cowboys – environmental devastation in the service of a “return to Nature” ethic. From Yaquiland to the kibbutz, selective memory enables successful experiments in communal living. Myths of Piaroa and other, relatively peaceful “indigenous communitarians” are far more realistic about tragedy implicit in trade-offs between nature and culture

9. Gaviotas – a “topian” community in Columbia
We are very free, yet we have few conflicts. We have no priests, no police, no governors. If someone takes up a musical instrument, learns how to play it and joins with others in musical expression, he will never take up a gun. (See here.)
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The blogosphere too is a type of utopia, an impossible, placeless place. Those who consider ourselves “bloggers of place” are not merely apart from the mainstream of blogging culture, we stand in some measure opposed to it because we believe that the possibility of salvation/enlightenment/whatever only begins where the links/sidewalks end. From the author of Johnny Cash’s immortal hit, “A Boy Named Sue”:

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Shel Silverstein