Drink Your Pudding!

across the skies

2012-01-25T22:35:00.001-05:00

Dawn came early, so very early, the sky just tinged with the expectation of sunrise, still several hours away. The ground had settled into a blanket of dew, the dampness absorbing deep into our bedrolls and around our feet, only somewhat protected by our woolen socks. The gong was struck, arise, arise, once more, arise, haste, haste, and, just like that, the dew still upon our clothes and sleep tangled with our minds, dreams not yet separated from reality, we rolled our bedrolls, laced our boots, and continued marching.

Step. Step. Step. March in line, march in formation, camp broken and carted away with our steps, the monotony of the footfalls enough to send one off to sleep again, here in the shadow of the ending night. There was no time for fires, for boiled water or porridge, for the march itself would warm us, wake us. When the sun had risen, we would pause for bread, cold water, and continue at the same pace until the sun rose high high in the sky. Noon we would boil water, cook grains, scavenge and harvest what fruits or greens could be found, refill canteens and water stores from nearby lakes or rivers, carefully boiling the water before adding it to our containers. Then a rest, a brief respite from the miles of blisters and boredom, before the deep long continuation of the march until shadows could no longer be distinguished from the night.

My shoes had grown thin, the leather under the pads of my toes threatening to wear through, seams beginning to let in water and sand as we crossed the countryside, but I did not have an additional pair to change into; I did not have a piece of leather and a needle with which to fashion repairs, much less a replacement. Some of my fellows were already reduced to bare feet, worn into blisters, callouses, and much worse by the steady unceasing pace of our migration and the harshness of the lands. We counted footfalls, carried infants on our backs who were too young to walk unaided, carried our camp and our supplies. We carried our future with us, in our stocks and in our souls, the future we could but hope we would still have the heart to create.

That day, by the noon fires, we formed council, and counted and planned, none of us the leader, but all aware of the need for order and purpose, without which we would not have survived to leave our city, the city of our childhoods and the city of our forefathers. From the crest of a hill we could see the landscape split, we were at some type of ridge and boundary between lands, and we were confronted with a valley and plain in the shadow of a mountain, which veered perpendicular to our current direction, or deep into the heart of the mountain, dead straight ahead.

All our childhoods we had heard tales of the mountains, had been told of their dangers so often we doubted the savage ferocity of the stories could be true. There were stories of bears as white as snow and as large as four men, with spikes on their claws which could impale small children. There were stories of cats who hunted in the eerie silence of the thin atmosphere, insulated by snow, cats who could leap leap through the air and snap an adult's neck in the blink of an eye. There were stories of great deer covered in shaggy winter coats with antlers covered in fur as thick as a dog's, deer who could run and dart swiftly through avalanches and over the thinnest crust of ice over the water. There were stories of men who had moved into the mountains years and years ago, men whose beards grew as thick as a bearskin and who wore patchworks of pelts, men who smelled of rotting flesh from their most recent kill, men who had forgotten they were men at all, and become wild animals, themselves, there deep in the mountains.

There were stories of snow drifts so deep entire villages were buried, and stories of nights so cold no one who went to sleep ever woke up again. Yet there were also stories of ice palaces, entire kingdoms carved and fashioned from the white granite cliffs of the mountains, with huge bonfires always lit in the center courtyard, and deep hot springs warmed by the volcanoes slumbering under the mountains. These stories told of a race of tall, thin people, whose skin was as pale as the snow itself, whose hair was the color of the bonfire, and these people were the soul of the mountains. They played trumpets and flutes, they sang from deep in their chests, long, tuneless chants that reflected the sun breaking through the clouds and protected them from the dangers of avalanches and volcanoes.

We did not know if these white beings existed, or if they were a part of our grandmother's grandmother's folktales; we did not know if they were cruel or kind. But our bare feet, our worn out shoes cautioned us against going into the mountains and snows, for we were unprepared for such an expedition, and did not care to chance the benevolence of fate.

There were, however, no stories at all that we had ever heard of the valley and the plain which ran alongside the mountains. None of us had any references to it in our memory, no stories of aborigines, no stories of horses, no stories of lands fair or foul, no stories of dangers or of promises. This emptiness, this void which should have been filled with the stories of our grandfather's grandfathers, filled us with fear, for we had learned to fear a land which keeps its secrets.

If we were to follow the contours of the valley and the plain, the water might be brackish, unfit to drink, unable to be purified. There might be beetles with crisp iridescent armor, beetles as large as a child, with grasping mandibles and a poisonous bite. There might be cannibal tribes waiting for the arrival of strangers, to mount our heads on spikes and turn our march-weary muscles into stew or jerky. We did not know if we would encounter monkeys, snakes, wasps, or giant spiders; we did not know if the vegetation would nourish us or sap our bodies of all nutrients.

And so, for the first time in many months, we paused the march and built a camp. We built tents and hammocks, gathered stores of firewood, and we brought deep into our circle every one who traveled in our company. A general pool was made, a tally of resources and materials, of skills and knowledge, and there, at the top of the hill, we prepared. We mended our shoes and our feet, our clothing and our bedrolls. We gathered and dried all of the fruit, plants, and meat we could prepare. We brought together our compasses, compared the due North of each against the other, and held trials in triangulating position from the sun and from the stars.

Two infants were born, as their time came ready, and they were placed in packs sewn for their carriage and protection. And still, still we hesitated, as ready as we ever could be for the known dangers of the mountain and the unknown dangers of the plain. Our days of preparation turned to weeks, and soon it was the peak of summer and grains which one of us had planted had begun to grow heavy for the harvest. Some of the tents had been strengthened to rustic cabins, and areas of craft were delineated on the outskirts of the settlement , where specialists met the demands of the many with whatever skill they could provide. If we were to head into the mountains, we would need to begin our march again immediately; but still we delayed.

One or two boys put together exploratory missions towards the valley, but they returned, exhausted, saying that however far or fast they traveled, the plain and valley stayed as far away, receding into the distance, and when they turned to return to our encampment on the hill, even after three weeks of hard marching away, they could always make the return trip in a single day. Still, we hesitated, uncertain, and watched the last rays of sun reflect off the snows of the mountains, unable to proceed either deeper into the story or to form a new story, in the unknown world we couldn't reach.

weather
a dram for the lads, a dram for the lassies, and a dram for the haggis : happy birthday, Rabbie Burns

reading
underground restoration efforts in Paris!

faded maps

2012-01-19T09:35:00.001-05:00

Remember what it was like, that summer when we left, the smell of dried peony, kept preserved in amongst the maps and the letters home that we wrote but never sent. The letters, unsent, unfinished, always begun with the best intentions: but there was never a post office. There were very few strangers traveling from where we were going to where we were from, and by the time we realized, many months later, that there were never going to be any post offices, the few strangers we had encountered at our outset had dwindled, until there were no opportunities to implore someone to act as letter carrier, for there were no people on the trail.

We would awaken from a particularly restless dream, almost able to smell the heavily spiced cakes and the scents of domestic family life, the washing, the shed with all its well-oiled implements, baking bread, a roast chicken, ground nutmeg, and chocolate dark and bitter, these smells would linger at the edges of our consciousness while we slept, would awaken in our hearts the ache of homesickness, and we would find a clean sheet of stationery, sharpen a pencil with a pocket knife, and write. Our headings were nontraditional, for we had lost track of precisely when it was, after so little to differentiate so many days of traveling, so our letters would begin thusly: "the moon, waxing gibbous, a dew frozen into a thin frost on the ground, rolling hills in the distance, now grassy plains." For this was all we knew for certain, and we wanted the first flush of the letter to convey our longing and our inexpressible love to those we could not reach, somehow invoked before telling of our own journey, part tedium, part nature documentary, and unremittingly redundant to us as we continued to travel further away from certainty.

The peony we found in a bush heavy with petals, where there had once been a cottage or an outpost, softened with domestic gardening. The flowers were just about to scatter away from the plants, full and lush with spring life, and we had slept in this place where once had stood a home, had pitched our tents where the ground had been smoothed flat and level. That morning I awoke to the smell of the peonies invading my thoughts, and I gathered handfuls of them, pressed them between stationery and the pages of books, so homesick did they make me for lemonade in the garden out of a crystal pitcher on a June afternoon, the lawn green with the enthusiasm of early summer, the longest day of the year.

Those memories were already so far in the past that it seemed a different lifetime, and now two or three other lifetimes have grown, accumulated, between what was and what now is. I find the peony, petals faded, slightly grayed with the passage of time, surprised that their scent still lingers in the air about them. How long had we been traveling, then; had we just finished the soul-weary exhaustion of the first winter, the weight of homesickness compounded by the effort it required to simply not curl up into a ball and go to sleep in the snow, to die quietly of exposure rather than to bear another battle with the world? Had we known what we were about, when the nights grew long and deeply cold we would have sheltered in a lean-to, a hastily built cabin, but we could not predict what lay ahead, we were ignorant as to the building of lean-tos, we thought our travels could outpace the descent of winter.

But I think the peony predates the crush of nature settling into our bodies, the peony was gathered in the first flush of excitement, shortly after we set off, before our legs and hearts grew heavy and our packs grew lighter and lighter. For we departed in the fullness of spring, just as the summer plantings were beginning, the ground thawed so that it could be hoed and raked and neatly divided into rows.

We left when the moon was full and the littlest cousin had toddled her first steps from the kitchen table to the doorway, we left after spending the winter studying maps and star charts, learning how to use a compass and navigate by the heavens. We drew up plans and lists, we packed, sorted, compressed, repacked, we made our tents and sorted seeds, grains into containers to carry with us. So much I did not do, I did not learn to splint a broken bone or to use an ax on timbers larger than myself, I did not study botany or animal engravings to distinguish what was medicinal from what was poisonous, what was predator and what was prey. I did not learn to shoot a gun or how to set a trap.

My knowledge was bound in other directions, how to tie knots and identify constellations, how to watch the tide and tell the weather, how to recognize the landscape for streams and lakes just beyond hills or trees. Perhaps it would have ended differently had we taken a boat, propelled across the waters in search of new lands, but that different may not have been gold or eternal youth, it may have been scurvy, seasickness, a loss of fresh water rations, and we did not have a boat, we were not sailors, we knew no sailors. That first spring of travel, we attempted to chart our course, using footsteps to count out distances, annotating the maps we brought with us, drawing in the missing areas as we traveled through them.

As we drew further and further away, the land grew to resemble the fairy tales we had heard as very young children: the sky at dawn was the color of cotton candy, drawn out gossamer thin onto the edge of the horizon as day chased night into hiding. Evening would arrive with an explosion of color on the opposite edge, yellows and purples warring against one another as the sun sank under the rising weight of the moon. The teeter-totter see-saw play between the sun and moon was a source of fascination, how even a crescent moon was enough to force the sun into seclusion, how even the threat of the moon's anger, on the nights when it turned away from our eyes and the sky was lit by Cassiopeia, the Archer, the Seven Sisters, the morning star, even the absence of the moon could send the sun into a nightly seclusion.

The landscape, as we traveled deeper and deeper, grew less domesticated: trees were gnarled in on themselves, instead of growing high, high in competition with the buildings for the sun's affections, here they began to wrap their branches around themselves, to pull their leaves away from their trunks with a toss against the pull of the wind. When we were not looking, the trees would stretch, change shape, settle into a new position, to freeze from view when our glance turned towards them again. Grasses, always kept to a sedate green in our pasture, tumbled in wild meadows along with clover and lamb's breath and Queen Anne's Lace and grew in a riotous curly profusion of emerald and chartreuse and and lemon yellow, out of sight of settlers.

The grasses seemed to chart our movements, to know where we came from and to guide our footsteps in the direction they wished us to take. Even on the stillest days, no movement of wind, the grasses were rustling amongst themselves, talking, sharing information, the low level constant murmuring of a train station or busy market. We did not trust the grasses, felt the way they turned our footsteps away from our carefully plotted course, and felt the workings of a trap waiting for our guard to fall. For the plant kingdom lives by more than photosynthesis, the carnivorous plants lure their prey into a final destiny of slow digestion, and we did not wish to end our days as the feed of grasses, at the whim of the mind of the plant kingdom. So we checked out compass regularly, we tied our tents stoutly to three trees each, three trees of different species so they would not conspire against us.

As we traveled further away from our homeland, as the rabbits grew to the size of small dogs, with lop ears that trailed on the ground, as the streams were aerated and carbonated from some underground effervescent source, we grew ever further from where we intended to arrive, and the days grew longer and richer and deeper, the nights shorter and sharper and leaner, and we basked in the newness of the world.

reading
The gone-away world / Nick Harkaway.

weather
cold but not too cold (or maybe that's the coat)

gods/demons

2012-01-11T22:16:00.001-05:00

The secret was elusive, even once I got the hang of how to look for it. Years, though, years of my childhood had been spent in the maelstrom of knowing something exists, without knowing just what it is or how to find it. Perhaps the key was merely to grow up, to discover that mysteries to children become finely wrought sculptures for adults, every shadow and expression clear to view, but, no, I don't think it is that. It was more of a scavenger hunt, the growing up, picking up the miscellaneous odd bits of the adult world, and trying each new fact, each new object, to see if it was the key to understanding all that hovered just on the edge of my mind, and one day, one combination of these accumulated keys provided the answer, the entry into that shadow world, where the streets and alleys change places with labyrinths, where the monsters in attics become dreams and love letters.

My first search, so very clear in memory, preserved in the amber of nostalgia, my first search was deep, deep into the heart of the earth. It stood to reason: pirates buried treasure, lost cities were unearthed by explorers, therefore the key to the secret could well be underground, in the realm of the River Styx and Persephone's pomegranate. Choosing where to dig the first shovelful of earth: was there any sense of argument? Somehow the mind of a child knows instinctively where the points are that lead most quickly to other places. There was no need for an oracle or map, for the back garden contained only one place worthy of being a portal into the place I sought. And digging, digging the three of us without technique or intention, just digging and digging into the loamy layers of all that we could not know. Past the roots of bulbs, past grubs and earthworms, past the runners of Johnson grass, past mysterious beetles in color combinations we had never seen.

We thought there might be a skeleton or two down there, but we weren't actually certain what the results of our efforts would be, a well, maybe, or simply some token left by someone from long ago, an Indian arrowhead or a penny turned vivid green with age. What we found was simply a rusty house key that didn't fit any of the locks we tried it in. We were too well behaved to go about trying it in the front doors of our neighbor's houses, and knew that they might have dogs or burglar alarms or could call the police. I kept the key, just in case, wore it on a shoelace tied around my neck, but I never found a lock that it would open. I never filled in the excavated hole in the back yard, either, and wonder now who did.

The next expedition to find out the great secret was a journey, part exploration, part running away, for in those days I kept a packed satchel in the closet, just in case. One never knew, although I find myself wondering now just what was in the satchel, what would have become of me if the great catastrophe on the edge of my imagination had come to pass, would the satchel have been my parachute into a new reality? It wasn't running away for real that day, just running away for practice, going in a new direction and home before dark.

We followed the railroad tracks, and the railroad tracks followed the creek. Mostly we stayed on the tracks like a balance beam, raised up above the weeds and the grass snakes and the dandelions turned from yellow to white with the high suns of summer. When the railroad tracks turned into bridges my bravado turned and looked the other way as I scrambled down the bank, amidst the aluminum cans, glass bottles, orphaned tennis shoes, and hopped and scrambled over the creek on irregular stones, meeting the railroad tracks on the other side and continuing along them. When it was hot, deep dog days hot, wading through the river tempting water moccasins and quicksand, chasing tadpoles out of shadowed shallows, we would allow the water to swallow our footsteps, but we preferred the railroad tracks, their sense of engineered purpose, the continuity of past and future destinations linked by daily schedules in steel.

It was easy to become diverted from the mission of finding the key to the secret, there was so much visible from the rail lines that was hidden to the world of asphalt streets and front doors. There were the backs of houses, their unkempt clutter viewed with disinterest, their stories of hard lives, lawn mowers, old cars not readily understood as a people hanging on to the edges of civilization. These were not part of the secret I sought to understand, they were only a colorful scenery to the more important work of looking for lost treasure to appropriate into my own life story. The railroad tracks never ran out, but as the afternoon wore thin, we crossed through yards and apartment complexes to beat the sun sinking in the sky. We looked towards the no trespassing signs, saw the barbed wire and the unmowed field, and as citizens of no-man's-land, as every child is, we dashed over, under, and through, delirious with excitement and fear, wondering if there really was an old man with a shotgun, and what would happen if we were caught, running rabid at dusk.

My pockets were heavy with the stones I picked up on the walk, pieces of granite glittering with quartz fragments, pieces of coal that I would try to burn, smooth pebbles shiny and black in the stream to fade to grey obscurity once no longer fresh from the water. These rocks would somehow fit into the secret world, provide some clue to understanding the mysterious incongruities of reality, where what I was told to expect and what happened were so very different, although perhaps they were just baubles from a magpie collection in the hot sun, not evidence of some deeper order in reality.

As we walked the rails and the streams, so too did we apply the search to the alleyways, having seen the sleeping backs of houses from the tracks, wondering what other undiscovered leftovers might be hidden where no one thought to look. The alleyways, for some reason, didn't parallel the streets, although they should have adhered to efficiency and been a perfect reflection of the streetscape. Instead, they meandered in directions of their own, veering away from approaching intersections and turning to weave instead in an intricate pattern of disorder, so the streets I thought I knew so very well were lost to the grid like world whose boundary I had crossed behind, to follow circuitous twistings that would end up somewhere not quite where I expected to be.

Amongst the fences and swimming pools and dogs were lives whose parameters must have closely resembled my own, although they felt distantly foreign, intensely alive and fraught with dangers and people who bore no resemblance to the cacophony of my own home. When did I realize that the world of other people's houses was a world I would never visit, even with a well-stamped passport and an eagerness for the journey? We gazed at the backs, the forlorn sides of these homes, and knew that their secrets would remain impenetrable, even after we had been inducted to the secrets and mysteries of adulthood. For all this was, and remains, foreign, the passionate desires of unfocused ambition, the bitter loneliness of divorce, the struggle of the widow left bereft at the empty house which once offered so many small daily joys.

Crimes of passion, endless telephone calls, television screens glowing blue seen through living room curtains after sunset, were as distant to me as the Inca or the Egyptians, and were not the secret I sought to understand. The pieces I picked up, the grocery lists, the old telephone books, once, a syringe which had a bent sharp needle and I knew must be dangerous, the tackle box emptied of all the lures except three gummy worms in red and yellow with green feathers, these I picked up and carried back, to study in the shadow of the brick wall by the side garden, to find the missing decoded secret to the evidence that somewhere, there was more.

As a child nothing could be as simple as we were taught to believe, it was impossible that closets did not hold something more frightening than dust in their corners, there was a quick hurried scuttling when the door drew open that made the noise of crabs walking on a boardwalk. I knew there was something in the closet, something that was part of the adults' conspiracy of knowledge, that I was being intentionally held in ignorance, while the rummaging skittering thing could steal my dreams.

I knew that skeletons were not devoid or absent of life, but were merely something more than sleeping, for around the corpse of any animal recently died or at any cemetery the air was heavy with souls waiting to repossess their bodies. I knew that Leap Day was just hiding in the cusp of midnight on the years when it didn't happen, and I knew those missing days were waiting for me, making plans of their own. I knew the shadows of buildings could move, that walls were flexible and not solid, but I didn't know that I knew any of these things, until so very many years later, so many keys gathered and lost in the twilight of childhood.

reading
The other city : a novel / Michal Ajvaz

weather
walks through woods, the crunch of ice underfoot

moments of significance

2012-01-05T09:17:00.001-05:00

{this is from the same prompt as this essay from April, 2009}

Nothing significant was supposed to happen that day. The calendar, when consulted, was a blank space bracketed by good intentions: there are so many hopes and expectations and plans that are never written down, for to do so would indicate a slippery slope to the pit of obsessive compulsive. Shower. Floss teeth, wash dishes, walk dog, fall in love. Having a to-do list of occasional chores: mopping, say, or lawn mowing, is perhaps tedious but harmless, and so this day in particular had all of the daily things to do without any particular flourishes. The alarm went off, the coffee was made, the day commenced.

Mornings are not the optimal indicators of normalcy, what with traffic and trying to remember the necessary tasks of the workday, but it is fair to say that by ten a.m., I knew my day was turning from one of routine non-significance bordering on insignificance and becoming something entirely different. The smell of the air, for instance. There was, hovering on the edges of the day, the smell of spring, the freshness of the thaw, rising sap, early blossoms. None of these were actually in evidence; the day was cold, deep midwinter cold, but the smell was of growth, movement, life, and put a bounce in everyone's step. Traffic seemed erratic, there had been no rush hour, but the roads gradually continued to fill with cars, until it seemed that everyone was in transit to somewhere else.

The birds, too, were out in numbers, not the birds of winter, nor the masses of birds mid-migration, but something both greater and essentially un-normal. Every tree was full of unexpected species of bird, but not so ostentatiously that one noticed at first; there was nothing like a parrot among the pine trees, but more a mass of starlings circling the grocery store, a line of small sparrows along a fence, a row of neatly arranged blackbirds on the electrical lines. And in their abundance, everywhere, every surface, they became significant, although their colors were muted and they did not sing.

I noticed these details, making mid-morning coffee and looking out the window, but thought nothing of it. There is chaos in the universe, and underpinning that chaos there is an ordered pattern in the universe, and I believe neither in fat nor in free will, I am neither a neuroscientist nor a Freudian. Things happen which cannot be explained to anyone's satisfaction, and then the rest of life continues without reason. So I inhaled deeply the heaviness of spring upon the winter air, I watched the birds careen across the sky, I noticed the roads grew slow and heavy with traffic, and I returned to my morning's work.

When the mailroom clerk brought around that day's deliveries, in amongst the bills and magazines was an altogether different sort of envelope. It was a shiny, shiny emerald green, and when it was tilted this way and that in the light, it turned to silver and to deep blue. My name was scrawled across it, not the crabbed scrawl of a ball point pen nor the calligraphic scrawl of a wedding invitation, but something resembling the feather-nib scrawl of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was ink, and it was both formally scripted and somehow imperfectly written. There was no return address.

Inside the envelope was a white card, the size of a business card, and written on it in that same spidery handwriting was a very simple, very ambiguous message. "Everything will be fine." And that was all it said. I couldn't tell if it was meant to be a joke or one of those vaguely inspirational quotes that appear on hippie herbal tea bags and in women's magazines, and while it wasn't really reassuring, it wasn't threatening, either. I placed it in the center of my bulletin board, then returned to the task at hand, only to be interrupted by a fire drill.

Thus, coat in hand, I turned to obediently file out of the building to my assigned meeting location, and decided to pick the card back up, slip it into my pocket, before slowly and carefully (as instructed) making my way to the stairs. After checking in with the fire safety inspector and verifying my continued existence, rather than wait with the mass of staff hovering by the doorway, I kept walking. The air was so very ripe, and the birds, once you started looking, were everywhere.

A lone bluebird perched on the back of a bench, and as I looked at it, it looked back, intently, at me. There was a searing moment when I felt bared to the soul, all my sins of omission and intention exposed in the unforgiving brightness of the day, and then the bird hopped, two steps left, one step right, two steps left, a foxtrot on the back of the bench. I'm no Fred Astaire, but if he can tap dance with his shadow, I can foxtrot with a bluebird, and so, emboldened by the air, the birds, I stepped left cross right cross sway left left, and the bird, looking somewhat sternly in my direction, flew to the next bench, and repeated its hop, two steps left, one step right, two steps left. I felt both ridiculous and as if I was awakening from a long hibernation, and continued my rusty foxtrot across across back sway in the direction of the bluebird.

It looked at me again, straight into my eyes, but instead of that flaying of the soul, it was more of a retina scan, an identity verification, than a judgement. And with that, it flew to the next bench, left out the special hops, and waited to make sure that I was following it. There was something queer about following a bluebird on a winter day, but there wasn't any compelling reason not to, and in my pocket was the card, "Everything will be fine." So why not follow the bird, follow the approach of spring, and discover what hole has opened in the sky and let in both air and the birds, that has played such havoc with human traffic?

For, walking, there were no people, no businessmen or strollers or teenagers on bicycles, although the roads were teeming with traffic caught between destinations. We continued playing follow the leader for the better part of an hour, until we were in a neighborhood that was unfamiliar, near to the river that curved through the center of the city, leading a meandering path our beyond the suburbs and into the countryside before arriving at the sea. This part of town was empty, a few warehouses that served some mostly legitimate purpose and not much else, not yet touched by the glossy gentrification that has altered so much else of the streetscape across the city.

It was entirely unclear why I had followed a bluebird to the abandoned banks of the river, but there, on the banks, was a rather battered and rusty motorboat, and sitting in the motorboat were two men, who obviously expected me, from the way they glanced at their watches and then towards the bird. I refused to feel bullied, to get on the boat powered by hooligans headed who knows where, but looking more closely I realized they were boys just reaching adolescence, no more than ten or eleven, and that I had been misled by the uniforms they wore, which were quite official and militaristic.

They saluted when they saw I was examining them, and the taller of the boys rushed forward, another of the luminescent green-silver-blue envelopes in his hand, my name upon it in the same old-fashioned writing, another small card upon which was written "Admit One." When I looked up, the bird was nowhere to be seen, and the boys had boarded the motorboat again, leaving the center bench clear, with a blanket indicating where I was to sit. It had been years since I had been on the river, distracted away from it by the demands of daily life, and here, with the air heavy with spring, I felt youth flowing into my veins, and my body becoming younger and younger with each town that we passed on our way into the countryside, towards the sea.

Darkness came early, as it does at those latitudes in winter, and I saw, as the boys lit the lanterns fore and aft on the motorboat, that while I was shedding years, my hands losing their wrinkles and the twinges of arthritis that surfaced with changes of weather, the boys captaining the boat were gaining years. In fact, they could hardly be described as boys at all, for their faces were chapped and sunburned from years of exposure to the elements, though they still wore the same uniforms, and carried themselves with the same respectful diffidence. Above, through the deepening twilight, I realized that the air was alive, filled with the swooping and flying of hundreds of birds, all different species flying at different speeds, in different formations, but in the same direction, following the river to the sea, as we sped along on the surface.

It is not possible to sleep on a motorboat in the best of circumstances, and when one is being possibly kidnapped and pursued by all the angels or demons of the sky, sleep is not any type of option at all, but as the night lengthened and I grew ever younger, I napped, and then slept, wrapped in a blanket on the center bench. When morning came, the first tendrils of light streaking across the sky, the air cold and filled with winter frost, I awoke to the smell of early summer, scents of June, of grass and dew and soil, the air still filled with birds.

My chaperones, my chauffeurs, my kidnappers had continued to age through the night, and were now crusty old sea captains, white, grizzled hair and sideburns, gnarled hands and ruddy noses, but they still wore their crisp uniforms and treated me with deference. Glancing at my hands, my body, feeling my face to tell my fortune, I gasped as the years had abandoned me back to the late days of youth, the approach of adulthood still safely some years ahead, in my future, and then gasped again, rendered speechless by the ship that awaited us at anchor.

It was part schooner, part Chinese junk, part rowboat, part Nordic longboat, with blue and silver and green striped sails. I clutched my Admit One card in my hand, and prepared to embark on a future quite different from the life I had already lived.

reading
The toaster project : or A heroic attempt to build a simple electric appliance from scratch / Thomas Thwaites.
The night circus / Erin Morgenstern.

weather
those deep cold days of the young year

year of fog

2011-12-29T20:55:00.001-05:00

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

fog: Easthampton, MA to Grand Teton National Park, WY

testing materials: onion skin options, glue options

printing materials: traditional paper, or transparency mylar

folding template

testing the glues wasn't so helpful; secondary attachment (sewing) still required to attach onion skin covers to transparency text

all wrapped up and ready for post

silver stamped covers (onion skin)

(transparency text, accordion book format)

images against white background; when viewed aerially they resemble old film negatives

so brief, so fleeting

2011-12-21T22:55:00.002-05:00

(quote from Issa, Japanese poet)

The snows began early, far earlier than they had been wont to in recent years. We were caught unprepared, our summer windows and white linen suits no match for the blanket that surrounded and engulfed us. The end of summer, suddenly, desperately, upon us, barbecues canceled and baseball tournaments declared no winners at all. As the days passed, meteorologists made promises of respite, reassured us that the abrupt change in seasons would only be temporary, but we could each feel it, deep in our souls, the entrance of winter.

Rallies on the ice were declared, community figure skating and warming huts, competitive tobogganing races to make up for the soccer and football we were denied. Miles of city streets remained unplowed in the ever-thickening blanket of snow; residents banded together in the early weeks, using shovels to laboriously clear paths for cars and buses, but as the snows continued, and continued, and continued, our energy for communal manual labor faded, withered away.

Those people for whom car access was a necessity parked in the city center, near major arteries that the city focused on keeping clear, but the rest of us resigned ourselves to skiing around town, snow-shoeing to the market for meat and bread, using sledges and sleds to transport children and shopping. The city buses were filled with riders whose cars lay buried under six, ten, eighteen feet of snow, and still it was just midwinter, we wondered when the deep freeze would begin and the snowfall would diminish.

For that is what we all began to hope for: not a thaw, not the return of seasonal temperatures, but a change to the deepest of the frosts, where it was too prohibitively cold for the snows to fall. We waited, waited for this, but it was not forthcoming. What had begun as an unseasonable descent into winter remained in stasis, never deepening into the coldest freezes, and more snows continued to fall.

While we had been unable to continue our citizen shoveling brigade, other communal projects besides the sports teams were undertaken and adopted with gusto. Entire playgrounds were sculpted out of snow, with twisting slides, tunnels, playhouses built in vast stretches of parks and parking lots. Without our cars, we joined efforts in transporting firewood, Christmas trees, any other bulky or heavy acquisitions for neighbors, operating as a human team of mules.

The schools had had emergency meetings, desperately trying to work out a school schedule when the entire academic term would have been forfeit to snow days. Administrators, teachers, parents all had different solutions; the children had strong opinions of their own, filled entire schoolyards with snowmen built in protest, had vast armories filled with snowballs to defend their descent into a winter of anarchy. Shorter school days were proposed, as the teachers and students were utterly reliant upon overcrowded city buses and skis; the school buses, still sleeping unused in the summer vacation parking lot, had never been unearthed from the snow.

Finally, a four hour school day was reached as a compromise, and school districts shuffled and changed classes and curricula to make up for the teachers who lived too far away to be able to commute to the schools. The children, who would have preferred the complete cancellation of classes until the weather stabilized, were despondent, but did eventually put away their objections and returned to multiplication tables, Euclidean geometry, international geography in classrooms whose windows were entirely covered in snow.

As the Christmas holidays drew near and passed into January, and the snows continued to accumulate, the joy and sense of wonder at the changed landscape began to turn into a quiet desperation. Alcoholism increased, couples argued more bitterly, brothers and sisters were unable to find common ground even against shared enemies. Preachers and therapists counseled patience, recommended meditation or joining Bridge groups, churches began hosting ever more regular pot roast dinners and bingo events. Community centers held film festivals on almost every evening, and enterprising citizens began creating community theater and choir groups, filled with the desperation of performers exhausted by the snows, presenting revues of South Pacific, The King and I, The Little Mermaid, anything, as long as it was an escape.

Our houses were insulated on all sides, a constant struggle to keep doorways clear enough for use, our front doors leading either into tunnels or to carefully built staircases of snow to the top of the accumulation in our yards. Some residents took to using upstairs windows, or those with balconies and porches on upper floors reoriented away from buried front doors entirely. For the infirm and elderly, dependent upon the efforts of others just to not become house bound, a charitable barter system was agreed to, wherein high school students could receive school class credit for freeing the doorways, for either delivering groceries by skis or for pulling sleds with those not well enough to ski to the market or the closest bus stop.

We persevered, but the exhaustion continued to beset us, as the days began to lengthen into spring but still the snows continued. We were not a people of the tundra, we were neither Inuits nor Russians; we wanted maple syrup and the early blooms of crocus bright against the snow; yet the trees were encased up into their canopies, the crocuses under so much snow that a thaw would take years before allowing their blooms to shine forth. Kindergarten classes made hundreds of origami flowers, entire grade schools cut and folded construction paper into brights beacons of spring, and the fields and yards around the city were soon littered with these paper offerings to Demeter, or these colored flashes of hope, winking where we desired to see blooms before being blown away or buried in the next storm.

And there was a next storm, and a next, and then we began noticing something odd. There were strangers among us: they looked somewhat as we appeared, but their skin glowed with the same white sheen as the gloss of fresh snow. Their hair was white, or the palest blonde, or a shining silver, it was hard to pinpoint which. They moved through the snow more gracefully, as if their feet were gliding upon skates, balancing where we would trip on rough patches or sudden cracks in the surface. They did not seem to congregate together in groups or to seek each other out, at least not in public, so it was some weeks before we noticed how many of the new arrivals there really were. When two would pass on the street they gave no sign of recognition, but we wondered, amongst ourselves, who they were, what was their intention.

They did not have children in the schools, they did not attend our churches or our amateur theatricals, they rarely shopped at the market and almost never rode the bus, moving along at their eery unearthly glide over the snow. Oh, yes, we thought they were aliens, come through some vortex from Neptune or some even more frozen distant galaxy. We thought they were ghosts, images only now able to be seen because the amount of snow shifted the visible spectrum and caused invisibles to materialize. We thought they were foreign invaders, come to take over a city which they had immobilized not with bullets but with weather. We thought they would colonize, enslave, or kill us, for they did not seek to become our friends, and we were afraid.

The religious thought that they might be angels, that the end times might be arriving in ice and not in fire, and yet still, these whitest of beings did not respond to either the offerings in their honor nor to the aggressions enacted against them; they would gaze, detached and serene, at whomever they encountered, and continue on. Whenever someone would attempt to follow one, to a home, a nest, a hive, a foreign ship, they were never successful, always became disoriented, separated from their quarry after a block or two, lost among other people or the trees.

And still the snows continued, until one morning when we suddenly awoke to clear skies, the first we had seen upon leaving our houses, as the snows covered the windows all around. Clear skies, cold, cold air, so cold our breath turned into icicles, but a wavering yellow sun over it all. And in the square in the center of the city, erected overnight: a carnival tent, as large as the high school gymnasium, constructed of shell-pink silk that we couldn't quite see through. Bustling about the carnival tent were all of the white, white visitors, meeting our eyes, smiling, inviting us inside. We were uncertain if it was safe, if it was wise, but the clear skies and wan sun inspired us with hope and confidence, and we entered into the mystery at the heart of our town.

weather
will flights be delayed: that is the question

reading
an astounding assortment of the avant-garde:
Reader's block / by David Markson
The curfew / Jesse Ball

carpenter's rule

2011-12-15T08:43:00.004-05:00

Pause a moment. The nights grow long, stars fall to the earth, quickly, quickly, one after another bursting into flame in the unending evening of midwinter. Overnight the pond grows a skin of ice, frozen into the eddies and ripples of movement instantly seized, a photographic layer of film capturing the movement of just a moment before. Watch, watch, the sun glint on the new surface, becoming acquainted with contours grown rigid, surveyed by ducks who are nonplussed at the loss of territory. Pause, and in the moment of stepping out into the night sky to survey the approaching storm, be baptized by the shower of falling stars, and make a wish, make another wish, and again, and again, wishes grown countless as the days grow short.

The land bears no resemblance to its depictions in maps and fables. Before our journey ended, before our journey began, this was not what we believed in, not what we sought. There were to be endless fig trees, honey rich as summer wildflowers, cows with heavily lidded eyes giving milk overwhelmed by cream. We would learn a new language, a language with all the words and phrases that we had never learnt to speak in our native tongue, for we spoke with the heavy hesitations of unfulfilled promises and unrealized hopes.

The map had so many errors and ommissions, lines for routes that were dreamt of but previously untraveled, cities designed by rulers and builders and architects of great vision, but empty of bricks, stones, wells, cottages, railways, and settlers. We would plan our itineraries to arrive at an oasis, to discover the founders surveyed the location, looked to the horizon, took their compasses and rulers and spades elsewhere, although where elsewhere was, we never knew. We never found the promised moments of respite, the communities giving succour to the weary, for while they were implied by the map, they never materialized from intention and destination to reality. Still we clung to our Atlas, patched, faded, and misleading though it was, for there was no other path open before us, no other guiding hand shaping our destiny.

Our supplies ran low; we learnt to make flour from the seeds of foreign plants, eating those crops preferred by birds and squirrels, trusting that our desperation would not lead to sickness and poisoning before we reached the place we were destined to find. We drank water from foreign rivers, water from the melting glaciers, water from the hearts of cacti, and would have drank water from the rocks, but when we hit the boulders with our sticks there was no water for our efforts; in this, too, had we been misled.

Where there were no settlements, no towns, what we found instead was not the vast vacuum of wilderness but a great wild chaos of peoples, a landscape littered with towns which once existed many generations ago. Some of the wanderers we met avoided our gazes, retreated from our advances, although we meant no harm; we sought only information, stories about this land that was not as it appeared. Other groups were less defensive, met our eyes, and, although their language and our language were filled with dissonance and confusion, they showed us how the old old trees grew in the direction of streams and pointed the way towards water, they showed us how to break open a cactus as easily as a melon and drink its juices, they allowed us to rest under their wide white tents in the heat of the day.

To each of them we showed our map, we pointed to the stars and to our compass, but they all shook their heads. We were in a land that did not exist, and as it did not exist, no cartographer's trick could depict its contours and geographies, but it was many months before we understood this. Our bicycles, our horses, our carts gave out, for we were unable to maintain and care for them through the high mountain passes and during the summer rains, and in the end all we carried was our ruck sacks, our canteens for water, our grinders for flour, the leather of our shoes grown thin, so very thin, and cracked from the miles of wear.

Early in our journey we had tried to hunt, had sought to butcher and roast whatever we could catch or trap, but we soon learned that we were not hunters, that our ears did not hear the preternatural movement of hooves the moment before they moved, that our eyes were not quick enough for the shifting shadows before only emptiness remained. This we grew to accept, although we grew hungry as the land grew forbidding. The animals accepted the truce of our presence as we no longer attempted our clumsy stalking; with their acceptance we saw more creatures than had ever been reported by explorers. At dawn, feeding quietly, families of deer, deer of all sizes, mixed in with the trees of the forest, the smallest the size of a small terrier, the largest that of Hannibal's elephants.

On the plains were flocks of birds migrating away and towards, and we watched and listened, entranced, to their songs and movements across the sky, for hours. We wanted to remain with those birds, certain that among the hundreds of species there was room for us to fit in, that after months or years of careful study we would awaken one day, able to fly as easily as they took to the skies. After weeks spent camping under their migration, we learned how to decode their messages, and, with them, we turned to the South, away from the direction indicated on our map.

There was some hesitation about this change, for the map, flawed though it was, was all we had, and, once altered, finding our place again would be all but impossible. We were growing impatient with our journey, however; we wanted an end of it, to no longer be wandering in a place that didn't exist, and we believed the birds could be our saviors, could lead the way to our destination. We followed their course as the days shortened, their flights to a winter homeland, but on the third day we came to a river, a river swift, deep, and wide, much too large for us to forge or float across it with the tools at our disposal. Disheartened, we retraced our steps, back to where we had diverged from the map, and there, resigned, continued our journey deep into winter.

Not all of us survived; we did not know how to send one of our own on to the afterlife from a land that didn't exist; we feared their souls would be endlessly lost between worlds, and so we did all we could. We chanted and prayed, we sang and we cried, we left a coin in their mouth for Charon, and on ground that was frozen too hard for their burial, we scattered the ashen remains of a life lost before the destination was reached. There were days when I longed to be scattered in the winter winds, for it was a long winter, a cold winter, and we were unprepared; to have been a lost, wandering soul caught between worlds seemed a better fate than a lost, wandering person between worlds. And still, still we persevered, for there was nothing else for us to do but to continue to travel on, as our numbers and our hopes dwindled in the cruel winds of winter.

We lost so very many, and those of us who survived the ice and the storms were not who we had been when our journey began. I cannot say how we changed, for we could not fly with the birds; we could not speak with the other wanderers; we were of the same physicality as before; but the winter had permanently moulded the shape of our soul, fashioned us into a new people. We no longer relied upon our compass for navigation, we no longer consulted the lines on our map, for deep within, each of us knew the direction of our travels, and in one accord, with a renewed and unspoken sense of purpose, we continued to our destination.

We had stopped speaking, for we knew there would be a new language to speak upon our arrival, and with each footfall, with each lengthening day, our bodies absorbed the conjugations and declinations of a new vocabulary, until our very bone marrow was steeped in the language of our new life. And there, there, as the days began to grow longer and the ice melted into rains, and we knew that we had arrived, at last, into the land that was to become our reality.

It was not as had been foretold, it was not where the map indicated we would find it, but it was home, and we stayed. Here under the rain of a thousand falling stars we built our life, amid a chorus of snowmen we constructed our houses, deep in the heart of the stillness of the universe.

reading
Italo Calvino, Città invisibili

weather
Geminids showers meet sleet storms

up / away

2011-12-08T07:25:00.001-05:00

The space was not quite large enough, the tree branches grown so closely together without the guiding hand of an arborist to shape the limbs into graceful balance and poise, and so what had been a cozy reading nook in the perch of a tree for a ten year old was uncomfortable in the extreme for one many decades older. Or perhaps it is the innate flexibility of children, composed of tendons and elasticity, able to adopt to the shape of a tree with no adjustment; whereas adults, calcified into their shapes as grown-ups, do not as easily become tree forms and eschew their humanity.

The leaves were the deepest green of late summer, not yet turned with the shortening of the days, but full of the imminent sense of loss that autumn would bring, the sap beginning to condense deep in the roots, allowing the leaves to suffer their fate, drying in the wind. Now, though, at this very moment of a late afternoon in the precious final hours of August, now the leaves are thick, glossy, an umbrella shielding the sun from the ground below, a curtain hiding those who seek refuge in the branches.

Climbing into the embrace of the tree had been fraught enough, no longer recognizing the footholds, no longer intuitively knowing the proper grip to pull away from gravity and into the shadow above, the instincts of youth having faded into sepia memories of the ease of movement. Perhaps trees assist children in their efforts, the branches and limbs making miniscule changes in shape and location to fit the palm of a six year old, the reach of an eight year old; but, horrified by the approach of an adult into these consecrated hiding spots of childhood, the limbs quietly, imperceptibly, change into unapproachable smooth planes, gracefully ducking out of the grasp of elders.

I had not intended to climb into a tree that afternoon, as no one of certain years has the intention to clamber upwards, for such behavior is viewed skeptically by general consensus. The lure of nostalgia excuses college students for exhibiting tendencies towards this juvenilia, yet past that point, opportunities and excuses grow thin. Desire wanes, as well, for the lures of the civilized world are strong, and the arms of an old oak tree cannot hope to compare with opportunities elsewhere. I could not remember my last experiment in clambering up to find a space of quiet amongst the birds and the squirrels, and in all honesty, it was not a space of quiet that I was seeking now.

The fastest way for an adult to disappear is to become that is others do not expect to see; for while any child is constantly scanning trees for potential climbing spots and hiding spots, no one past their early years spares a second thought for what might lie in wait within a leafy canopy, with the exception of momentary seekers of bird songs. And so, while the tree physically fought my attempts to rest, quiet and unseen, within its branches, I had in the end been able to wedge myself somewhat securely in a join of branches.

Come nightfall, it would be safe to climb down from the haven, to disappear into the disguise of dark roads and the shadows around street lamps; with the arrival of nightfall it would be presumed that my destination would lie quite elsewhere, and all searching eyes would be successfully diverted. I had worked out a careful contingency plan for just such potential situations as this one, but I feared that my planning would amount to little more than a decoy, for there had not been time to take advantage of any of its benefits. Every undertaking has risk built into it, and every planned back-up scenario has behind it several emergency exits for cases such as the present. If the safe house was already occupied or if the car had been discovered, there are always, in any city, hotel rooms left vacant or houses empty to vacations or real estate agents. Into these pockets the transient can disappear for a day or two at a time, careful to stay away from the most orderly neighborhoods, watching the domestic patterns in pockets of movement, amongst students or immigrants, people with professional apathy to the presence of outsiders.

There are cities which are full of the ghosts of memory, places where the years of childhood have imprinted a street map and a geography that appears in no published source, and this was a city where I had spent long hours wandering in the shadows of commuters and homeowners, watching the school children released into the streets by the final bell and the shops change ownership and material offerings. I was back in home territory, if there is, anymore, a home territory, even though I had not set foot here in twenty years and was continually coming up against new buildings and disappeared roads. The skeleton of the town I once knew, the houses placed carefully back from the street, the trees planted at discrete intervals, the grid system, was still present: but over it had amassed the musculature and skin of strip malls, new schools, parking garages; disappeared from it were apartment buildings and small commercial outposts of sole proprietors seeking a foothold in the entrepreneurial dream.

Just enough of the old trees remained in parks and by rivers for me to have made one my priest's hole, but my choreographed dance out of the danger of the failed situation would depend on recognizing the landscape of the corners of a city hibernating from human attention. The sun began to set; my back ached in places where it had rested against foreign shapes, the discomfort of nature to a body evolved to an armchair and car. I slowly lowered to the ground, an exercise not in gracefulness but in fighting the increasing pull of gravity towards the outcome of a broken leg. All seemed quiet; no one was inconveniently walking a dog or looking up at stars, and I walked with the gait of one who passes unseen, a steady pace neither hurried nor slow, without limp or hop, keeping towards gathered crowds heading from work, to dinner, drinks.

It was towards midnight when I found the neighborhood I wanted, a conglomeration of apartments and small houses all jumbled in together, not yet gentrified into single family homes, but not so decrepit that even students stayed away. From a staircase between storefronts I found some of the vacant apartments over the main street, following the darkened hallways towards one near the back of the building, which would face the relative safety of a parking lot. The city was beginning to quiet down; there were fewer cars and fewer groups, and it would have been unsafe to be out alone, too visible and too exposed. The apartment doors were locked, doorknobs covered in enough dust to indicate disuse but not so much as to raise suspicion of one wiped clean by a handkerchief held loosely as I worked the deadbolt back and opened what would become my temporary refuge while waiting for the air to clear.

There was no established routine for contacting central operations for support; if anything went off, we had been trained for establishing ourselves in a pocket of safety and then quietly disappearing from the world. I had never needed to disappear before, and I feared that in this case it might be many years before I could slowly emerge back into reality. Each job is preceded by basic preparations that are, in themselves, not suspicious, and if someone must disappear, there is a clean-up crew that tidies up loose ends. I knew what that looked like; I had been part of the clean-up crew for an agent when things hadn't gone down at all well, and I regretted so many loose ends that I had no right to have expected in the first place.

It wouldn't matter; there would be a reinvention of myself within a matter of months, in Palm Beach or Santiago or Mumbai, and perhaps in ten or fifteen years I would have forgotten the city that I had first known, I would have forgotten the shapes of the trees I had climbed as a child, I would be another self, taking up a life as if it were all I had ever known.

reading
There but for the / Ali Smith

weather
skis! down coat! fuzzy boots! let the sun keep shining as long as it will!

30 Poems! chapbook

2011-12-04T18:02:00.001-05:00

Now available: 30 Poems!, the chapbook, with any and all proceeds going to literacy education, through the work of the Center for New Americans. Lots of pretty pictures and a how-to description after the text.

There was a challenge in the month of November to write a poem-a-day -- which, with certain misgivings, I did. At the end of the month, the resulting [*] poems were formatted for a two-signature pamphlet, and digitally printed onto Bugra paper, with British Kraft paper covers. (My twin obsessions are onion skin and the lovely British Kraft paper. Both are crackly and shiny and splendid to work with.)

The poems were formatted to fit onto 2 sheets of 11"x17" paper, which were printed double sided, folded and sewn. The final size is 5.5" high by 4.25" wide.

Other details: really, send money to the Center for New Americans, or the literacy organization of your choice, and I'll send you a chapbook. Postage, materials and labor donated to the cause. Some exceptions apply[‡].

[*maudlin and sentimental]
[‡ exes are not eligible to participate]

repetition + silence

2011-11-30T21:45:00.001-05:00

This is how it was, no detail omitted, nothing added for literary effect. It would be more efficient to tell the story as a fiction, where characters could be combined or compressed for individual constancy, acting as archetypes instead of the unknowable puzzles that even one's closest intimates fracture into when viewed at close range. In fairness to the story, though, there can be no wicked uncles or selfish stepmothers, no lunatics in the attic or absent patriarchs. That isn't how things were, though no doubt it would have been easier to live in a story, even a gothic melodrama, full of lightning bolts and scenes of anger and passion. This is not that story.

Here there was a field of endless wildflowers, the clover with its white blooms, the bluebells in spring, dandelions with their wishes in the heart of summer. The field was everything: the site of excavations for dinosaur bones and buried treasure, the savannah where lions and zebras were hunted with rifles made from fallen tree branches, the wide wide sea where the Spanish Armada was conquered and pirates walked the plank.

In the field were the usual assortment of natural residents, the shy brown rabbits fearful of the unexpected, darting away from one danger and into another before scurrying into bushes or burrens; the squirrels hovering around the perimeter, never too far from the safe canopy of the trees; frogs in the marshy corner where, we believed, the ghosts of the unhappy dead rose and walked on nights when fog obscured all but the outline of the moon. It is hard to place the appearance of the ghosts, if we knew instinctively that that was where spirits lurked or if it was an accidental discovery one winter evening, darkness descending before dinner-time in the nursery, the surprising discovery of something other than bullfrogs in the corner of the field.

There were the usual domestic animals in the field as well, for the fences had been strengthened and it was returned to pasture, full of lambs in early spring, then left relatively empty except for a few milk goats by the long days of August, when the mature sheep were rotated to pasture elsewhere. Rarely we encountered and avoided raccoons, skunks; and although we were warned against the bites of weasels, and so we searched earnestly for their nests, we never saw one. Instead we drowned in seas of butterflies, lady bugs, dragonflies who made the meadow their feasting ground.

It was late summer, the skies turning towards sunset far too early, yet the air still warm with the memory of heat, not yet blown away in the winds of autumn. We were playing tag by starlight, our shadows darting imperceptibly by the wavering light of the moon. Starlight tag is a game with its own rules and logic, as each childhood game is imbued with rigid regulations and penalties. There are two great secrets to tag in dusk: being able to become a shadow of a tree, all but invisible in a patch of darkness; and being able to camouflage sound, to move steadily and stealthily while throwing one's voice or echo in a completely different direction.

I found the shadows of trees to be too crowded, for it is after dark that the wood nymphs awaken, loosen from the anchoring roots of the tree, and they are prone to playing tricks and teasing human children. Perhaps they wished to join our game of tag, or were envious of our untethered existence, bound as we are by emotion and sentiment to home and hearth, but not physically locked into place. Those who understood the demands of the wood nymphs sought their company and protection under the tree limbs, but I perfected throwing sounds, sending the echo of my footfalls fifty feet to the left or right, to have by voice bound off a rock in a corner in the other direction. Undisturbed, I was free to dance in the shadows of the field, unseen by the light of the moon.

It had been summer for so long, a dry summer, that we had forgotten about the fog on nights when the air is dark and rain hovers over the horizon; we had not seen a ghost at all that year, or not since Midsummer's Eve, which is obligatory and so hardy counts. The gossip of the bullfrogs was hiding the squelch of the bog as my footsteps sank into the mud, and suddenly I was no longer alone in the dark. None of the ghosts had names; none of the ghosts had genders; we knew they were unhappy dead because the contented would be unlikely to live in a damp corner of a field and appear on foggy nights. The happy dead would be much more likely to haunt clearings in the woods by the light of a full moon. The logic of childhood permitted no other explanation; all was self-evident, just as it was obvious when I was no longer alone amongst the bullfrogs.

There wasn't wailing or crying, there wasn't really even a voice, just the echoing whisper of the sounds of the night, the songs of the moon, shortened and elongated for emphasis and meaning where before there was the steady refrain of the nightly symphony. The air was thicker, shadows took on forms of their own, separate from the primary entity that cast them. That was the first night my shadow detached itself from me, and in the twin outlines of the evening I saw myself and the ghosts. There were many ghosts out that night, they were consoling one another or sharing misery, it was unclear precisely how they engaged, but my shadow was drawn deeply into the rising and falling murmur of the spirits.

I was not unwilling to be one of their number, although I worried about being caught unawares in the ongoing game of starlight tag and therefore caught out by the finder; but over the summer my age had begun to catch up with me, and the voices of the spirits were both more clear and less comprehensible. In the past it was quite clear when they appeared, what they requested, how to fulfill their requests, but never before had there been so many, had the cacophony of their voices obscured the meaning of the words.

The commotion of the ghosts must have acted as a magnet for the others, drawing them away from the jealous intentions of the tree nymphs and pausing the olly olly oxen free cries as children dashed to the safety of home base behind the eyes of the finder, the truce of a time out prevailed as we gathered between the calls of the bullfrogs and the sounds of the spirits. The shadows of the other children joined my shadow among the ghosts, and we all listened intently to the murmuring ghost songs. They were not trying to claim us, they were not asking favors of us, but none of us were quite certain what to do next.

We took hands and began to snake chains through the marsh, then broke into teams and darted across and through the opposite chain of children, following the directions of the ghosts. Their song took on definite harmonies, vocalizations, as our movements formed new patterns, and we began using our spinning and skipping to influence the notes of the music, creating a song out of the incomprehensible singing. We spiraled, hands clasped, into a tighter and tighter circle, then broke open and spooled off in a chain, a thread of children running madly through the field. As we spooled out of the marsh and onto the drier lands of the meadow, our shadows followed, cartwheeling and somersaulting behind us. The ghosts, whose songs had grown entwined with our movements, followed up into the heart of the field, and when the wind picked up and blew the fog off the moon, there we were, fully exposed in the field: our shadows detached, the ghosts illuminated in the full face of the moon, the night alive as it never had been before.

We did not sleep that night, as no child can sleep after gazing directly into the face of a spirit, and something changed, forever, in the field that night. Our homes became empty; we spent more time straying into the world, looking for the corners where shadows hid spirits hovering just out of sight. Our game of starlight tag expanded to incorporate everyone else, everywhere, and our shadows took on a purpose of their own, sometimes parallel with our own person and sometimes incalculably distant. As I aged the songs of the ghosts continued to become both louder and less understandable, but we had learned the secret symphony of the night world, and we became its conductors.

reading
the completion of 30 Poems in 30 Days!

weather
so long November!

memory of

2011-11-23T11:18:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving: all of that, and then much more.

This week is an memoriam to a mentor: the gifts of compassion and calm beauty; the smoke of Hu-Kwa Tea; the perfect soufflé.

Soufflé

melt 6 T butter, whisk in 6 T flour
cook until thickened (~10 seconds)

whisk in 2 c milk, salt & pepper
stir until thickened (~2 minutes)
remove from heat, let cool

beat well 5 whole eggs (unseparated)
add to eggs 2.5 c (6 oz) grated Swiss cheese, chives

bake at 400 F for 30-40 minutes in a buttered 6 c gratin dish

the little dog laughed

2011-11-16T22:21:00.001-05:00

Watch, watch closely and carefully, and I will show you magic. Not a magic trick, those cheap flashes of smoke and mirrors propagated by the men who prey on society's gullibility and desire to be deceived. No, this is real, the coercion of matter into substance of a radically different type, the bending of the laws of physics into new shapes and dimensions. This is not alchemy, it is neither chemistry nor biology, those fields beloved by technicians in pristine lab coats with official clipboards for tabulations and recordings of precision and hypothesis. Nor is this the gypsy trickery, the carnival games of fortunes, crystals, messages from the dead. You have grown cynical and disbelieving after watching the dazzle and color of the Houdini's of the world, but the magic I produce and promise is richer, deeper, than any of these sleights of hand.

This comes down through a line, generations of masters who could massage the perception of reality to take another shape, another form, until it could be created or destroyed at their touch. Years of careful preparation, a calm hand, taught and distilled, father to son, grandmother to granddaughter. It was never cheapened by stage performances, never watered down to be served to a public spending their beer money at the show; it was never coerced into governmental service, to battle foes real or imagined. There were moments, small glitches in history, when the protection of the magic was not enough to avoid prosecution, but even in the dark, unending nights of the Inquisition, we survived, and it survived, unharmed, unweakened by boiling or rending of body or spirit. There is no age, no gender, that is more or less gifted, as with all attributes some show more promise or more interest, but, like arithmetic and grammar, all are taught to manage and balance the talent. So watch, watch closely and carefully, and I will show you magic.

On the night of the thinnest crescent moon, the smallest white sliver in the sky, focus on the point where the sharp horn of the moon pierces the night sky. It is a small rend, so small telescopes cannot focus their mighty mirrors upon it, but through this piercing every month is birthed the moon, emerging full, glorious, and white into the sky. And as the moon escapes from her confines behind the curtain of the heavens, watch, watch and see what else is drawn out from that tear.

There are all the goblins of history, the elves, the trolls, the fairies, each slipping through the break in the sky to make their way to their adopted lands, islands and forests in the darkness of the night sky. Some, more reticent, keep to the shadows, can only be seen as reflections on the surfaces of lakes or glimpsed in peripheral vision through fog, but among them are all the spirits of the other worlds. There are no demarcations between good and bad, kind and cruel; these are human values, assigned by the superstitious who fear or desire the presence of the otherworldly.

As the moon waxes large more and more of the spirits gather, joining their celestial brethren under the illumination of the night sky. Not always, not often, but when the moon is full and ringed with fog as the seasons shift and turn against each other, on the nights when the air is perfectly still but the ghost of the wind moves the clouds, on these nights all the creatures from behind the curtain gather together, in our lands, and tell stories, sing, dance, as the night grows long. Humans, lost in the woods or on quests or with broken souls or vulnerable hearts can hear the songs, feel the rhythm of the dances, and those who hear the stories of the heavens become marked with the tattoo of the night world, a star upon their forehead that glows with a steady invisible light, drawing towards them others who have ventured into the world that is both ours and theirs.

Watch, watch carefully as the moon begins her retreat behind the night sky and, like children, the spirits slowly make their way home, across vast differences to other lands, with other stories and other songs. There are some, a very few, who do not heed the hurry up please it's time of the waning moon, who hide in the hollows of oak trees and the shallows of tidal ponds so as to remain behind in the unchaperoned darkness of the new moon.

These, the mischief makers, sneak, tease, twist reality when all lies still in the darkness of the empty night sky; they hide reading glasses in the empty cavities of bookcases, empty bottles of reserve Burgundy, misdeliver love letters, nibble holes in the hearts of sweaters. They wear the masks of men into the world to tell stories which are, in their world, true and sincere stories, but in the darkness of the new moon are confidence tricks of easily won affections and misplaced faith. They intend no harm, but their world, where all these lies are truths, is more real to them than their adopted lands, where hearts are broken and fortunes squandered in pursuit of the promised rewards.

As easily as they evade the policing of the moon as the opening in the sky closes the gate between here and there, so, too, are there those eager to latch on to the horn of the moon and slip away. Usually it is those already marked with the sign of the heavens upon their forehead, but there is an affinity amongst the very young, awake past their bedtime rituals of Ovaltine and a picture book and now I lay me down to sleep.

Standing up in bed, they grip the windowsill, reach through the glass towards the rattle shaped handle of the moon. The very young know instinctively that glass is both a solid and a liquid, that the human heart and body can pass through it as easily as wading through the sandy lake shore on a summer afternoon, and their hand is exactly the right size, exactly the right shape, to grip and clasp the waning crescent moon. When they are just at the tipping point of infancy and childhood, their buoyancy lifts them up, up into the cradle of the moon, and not often, but sometimes, they reach their fingers into the closing gap of the sky, and hold tight to the heavens as to a security blanket.

There, all the fairies, ghosts, trolls, spirits, tricksters, and gnomes become visible int their true form, and speak the babbling language of infancy; or, the infant's babblings become focused and directed into form, taking the shape of the effervescent beings of the sky. Some of the goddesses, sentimental for their own long lost children, the heroes of myth and folktale, teach the infants the secrets of the gods, sending them back to their cribs with access to the mind and power of Olympus and the oracles.

Some of the creatures, the unicorns and flying zebras and fish with fur instead of scales and birds that are balls of perpetual flame, some of these creatures bring the children into their meadows and nests, and feed them with the charged cosmic honey which their own young are weaned upon. These children return with a touch for the language of all animals, become the guiding spirits for gerbils, cockatiels, Guinea pigs, and golden retrievers, as well as the greater and lesser beasts, the plankton, moths, and grizzly bears.

There are infants who find themselves among the spirits of the wood nymphs, the haunted elms, the bodies of heavenly trees whose roots extend deep into the constellations of the sky. They swing easily from limb to limb, wrestling with the grandfather maples and the great great aunt pines and are coddled by the snow white arms of the young birches, rocked-a-bye in the treetops until gently lowered into their own cradles.

When the older visitors behind the curtain of the night cross over, they are not greeted with the coddling warmth of the infants, but are instead handed steaming mugs of starry mead, mulled cosmic cider, and accepted into the circle of storytellers around the crackling fire of the sun, spirits amongst their kin, slipping between the gap in the night to the land in the shadow of the moon. Watch, watch closely and carefully, and feel the shape of the night sky stretch and tear at the tip of the moon, the momentary magic of worlds changing places and telling stories.

reading
The sense of an ending / Julian Barnes

weather
this rain rain rain could be snow snow snow: tires in place! shovel in place! ice scraper in places!

one potato, two potato

2011-11-09T22:47:00.002-05:00

We were to go to the fair that day, as we went to the fair every autumn, the corn as big as watermelon, the pumpkins orange and just coming in for harvest. The previous year -- last year -- I had been too short for the midway rides, not allowed on the roller coaster with a loop de loop or on the giant spider machine with little airborne cars that spun and swooped. I wasn't allowed on the Ferris wheel, the biggest in the nation, or the merry-go-round, with its fancy tigers chasing beautiful horses and sparkling zebras to ride, even though I'm sure that I wasn't too little for a trip on the Ferris wheel so high that the moon is bigger than the earth or to sit upon the gorgeous rearing black stallion under the calliope organ pipes.

The reason was just that I was too little, and instead of the bouncy castle or the fun house with the scary twisty mirrors that make little kids twist and turn into funny shaped grown-ups, instead of the arcade games and bumper cars that were almost just like driving real cars, only with floppy wheels that don't go straight, instead of any of the fun and a little bit scary stuff, we just looked at the grown up things.

We watched the big kids from high school walk their pet cows in a circle, and some of them got ribbons and some of them didn't. We looked at super-furry bunny rabbits with long hair and floppy ears, and some of them had ribbons, but not the one that I liked best, that was all black with one white ear. Then we looked at all the fruits and vegetables, but even if I like eating corn with lots of butter and maybe a tiny little bit of salt it was boring to just look at all those vegetables sitting in a big barn. There were flies starting to make homes on the vegetables, so they were getting smelly and gross, and then we went to see the baking competition.

They were still judging the baking, lots of old people wearing glasses taking tiny bites of pie and writing something down on a clipboard, then taking a tiny bite of another piece of pie and writing on the clipboard again. All that pie, I thought we would at least get a piece, since the judges weren't having any fun eating it, but apparently they don't let people eat the pies, just look at them. Looking at pies is a lot less nice than eating them, and I don't mean those tiny bites like the old people took.

The best part was after we left the pie barn and went into a big ring, where people were racing horse drawn carriages around and around, then they just used one horse and ran circles around barrels. It was like being at a wild west rodeo, but without the bucking broncos. Then we went on a hay ride, pulled by a tractor, not a horse, which was the only ride I was allowed to go on.

This year, though, I knew I had grown big enough to ride on all of the fair rides, and I had saved my allowance to buy a ticket for the fun house and maybe some cotton candy after the roller coaster and before the Ferris wheel, and so I wouldn't have to spend the day watching old men eat pie while I could hear the organ for the carousel. We packed our picnic lunch and all loaded into the car, and were assigned fair buddies to not get lost. There was a new baby sister that Mother would be showing the bunnies and cows and goats and vegetables, so my fair buddy was big brother, and he loved roller coasters and fast go karts and haunted houses, even. I didn't like haunted houses, but as long as I didn't have to go in alone, it would be okay.

When we arrived at the fair, big brother asked if I was tall enough for all the rides I wanted to go on, so I said yes; and if I knew where to meet Mother when they played the loud whistle at lunchtime, by the big statue of the Indian wearing a feather headdress, and I said yes; and then his best friend from school met us by the haunted house and he asked me if I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel while they went into the haunted house, and I said yes to that, too. After all, haunted houses are scary and loud and its easy to get lost and they sometimes kidnap little kids although I don't know why, but the Ferris wheel is like flying, higher and higher, above the church and the town hall, even higher than skyscrapers.

The man putting people in their cars for the Ferris wheel didn't see anything weird about a kid riding it alone, and up, up, up we went, if it had been dark I could have winked at the man in the moon. Around and around, up and down, we went, and it was like being in a tree house higher than any tree house in the world. When my turn was over, I didn't see big brother, but knew to meet Mother at the statue of the Indian chief when the whistle blew, and went to ride the merry go round, where there was a unicorn with a blue saddle, and then the twisting twirling spider ride where our cars went up and around and down and around and upside down, and one boy threw up he was so dizzy.

After that I didn't want to go on the loop de loop roller coaster, but I still had my money in my pocket for a ticket to the fun house. I didn't know where big brother was, but it wasn't hard to find where I wanted to go. When there were too many people in front of me I looked up to see where the tall space needle was, then for the Ferris wheel, and then looked at the tops of the rides for the ones that were the most twisty and turny.

On my way to the fun house I bought cotton candy, blue and pink swirled together on one stick, and it stuck to my nose and to my fingers and turned from fluff to nothing but sparkle as I ate it. When I finished I was still a little hungry, but Mother had brought a picnic lunch for us and it would be lunchtime when the whistle told us so, tuna fish sandwiches and peanut butter crackers and crispy apples and maybe some of the toffee candy that we were allowed a piece of on special occasions. Going to the fair was definitely a special occasion.

Before I reached the fun house there was a puppet show, the type where the puppets all have strings and you can see the people up above twisting the strings to make the puppets move. They might have been playing Robin Hood, but it might have been something different, it wasn't very funny so I got up from my seat and left. There were clowns riding around on motorcycles, with curly wigs and big red noses and floppy shoes, but they all had shiny police badges, too, so I wondered if they were clowns pretending to be police or police pretending to be clowns. I didn't ask, because then they would have thrown me into jail, even if they were just pretend policemen, and even jail at a fair isn't a fun place to go. Then people would laugh at me and I wouldn't get to eat lunch.

There was a place where there was supposed to be a ride or a game, but there was a padlock on the entrance, and no one at the front. I wondered what it was supposed to be, if it would open later or if I would have to come back next year to find out. When I went up closer to look more carefully, there were all sorts of funny animals painted on the sides, horses with wings, lions with human heads, dragons with shiny purple scales, and lots of other things, that weren't scary monsters and weren't zoo animals. There were lots of words written in a curly alphabet, but I hadn't learned cursive and it may not have been cursive, it may have been a special language spoken from where those animals came from.

There was music coming from inside, even though the ride was all closed up and padlocked. It wasn't the fun music of the merry go round or the fast dance music of the spider ride, it was more like grown up's music, it was kind of quiet and just played by one instrument, maybe a flute. When I was right by the locked entrance I saw the guard's entry booth, all striped in green and pink, but it wasn't closed up and locked like the rest of the ride. There was a little girl in it, littler than I had been last year or the year before, and she was wearing a frilly dress with lots of bows. She asked if I wanted to go in, and when I nodded, she pointed to the back of the guard's booth, where there was a special door.

It was impossible to see through the door, there was a lot of smoke, the cold magic type, not the type from fires, and the music was louder. I wanted to see if it was more like a fun house or a carousel before going inside, but the girl took my arm and dragged me into the mist. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, people on trapezes and dancing on barrels, and lots of little animals, not dogs and cats, but the ones painted on the outside of the ride, with wings and horns and special shapes. It was amazing, and I knew I would never want to leave, I would stay until I was a grown-up, or maybe even longer.

reading
Transgressions : stories / Sallie Bingham

weather
late-summer-sneaks-into-November

knights of malta

2011-11-02T22:21:00.003-04:00

The forecast was for rain, rains so torrential and unceasing that the autumn harvest would be lost to mold and rot, rains that filled basements and began to creep up staircases, rains that, it was foretold, would float parked city buses out of their stations and into entirely new towns. Given the forecast, repeated with such solemnity by every reporter and news anchor, it seemed only right and proper to make preparations; or, barring actually making preparations, to at least carry an umbrella.

The stores had taken advantage of the prognostications for flooding and unceasing precipitation to raise the prices of standard issue black umbrellas to luxury item status: only those of means would be protected from the elements, others forced to make do with jury-rigged contraptions of trash bags and old newspapers. In the recesses of the hall closet I found an old umbrella, which must have been a parasol in its day, of rumpled pink silk with an ivory handle and a tassel hanging down for very little purpose. The parasol had not aged well over the years; it smelled of mothballs and Sunday school picnics and rat poison, and the silk had weakened over the skeleton of the frame. The entire idea of carrying a pink parasol into the heart of a storm was ludicrous; but it was what I had. Not being a person of means, it was impossible to waste money on something so unnecessary as a black umbrella, when there was a serviceable pink one to hand.

Next to the umbrella in the hall closet was a leather ammunition case, that seemed to have seen active duty during the First World War, guessing from the language phrase cards and emergency aid kit that was stuffed in a side pocket. There was also a compass and a somewhat tarnished pocket knife, and with these in hand there seemed no reason to delay the journey. The storms had not arrived, they were due to begin today or tomorrow or yesterday or sometime next week, depending on the forecaster, and the more headway I could make before the rain, the better.

This expedition was different from the others: there was no back-up in place, no communication with the home office, no one else in the field to whom I could turn. Whether a successful completion would allow contact with any of my colleagues ever again was even in some question. If I survived, success; but if I survived and was never heard from again, that was to be expected. The remit didn't say so in quite as many words, it was full of references to a reconnaissance mission and contact with person or groups unknown and bold explorations of future possibilities, but after a lifetime in the service, I knew what the terse memo meant between the stock phrases of patriotism and duty.

Technically I wasn't even employed by the Department any more. Technically the Department no longer existed. A lifetime of habit is hard to step away from, though, and when the recognizable blue envelope was delivered by courier, there was no question about accepting or declining. To serve in whatever form requested had been standard operating procedure, and the semantics of military coups and heads of state changing over meant very little as far as duty and responsibility to the call.

The first day was spent getting beyond the city center, a scramble between bus lines and trains whose routes and schedules had been altered by the new regime and no longer followed any published maps or timetables. There were rumors of where buses could be caught, of when trains might appear, but the rumors were only as accurate as the intentions of the speaker. The system could change from day to day, depending on the particular favorites chosen by the transport operators. By dusk on the first day, I was approximately three miles from where I had begun, having taken a series of increasingly contorted buses and trams down streets which had previously been little more than unmarked alleyways.

It would have been faster and less exhausting to walk the three miles, but the public transportation served well a function otherwise inaccessible. With all forms of mass communication jammed with news only of the impending flooding and political upheaval, it was only on the streets that information gathering could occur with any accuracy. There were riders on the buses whose trade was accurate information; they didn't have any type of uniform or identifying badge, but it was always possible to make them out. One had a gold earring in the shape of a feather, another a feather tucked into tied shoelaces. On a train was a man playing harmonica, singing old songs from the player piano days, A Bicycle Built for Two, with a black boa wrapped around his neck. One woman wore a fringed suede jacket with long braids and a feather attached to just one braid, the others anchored by beads.

Find the feather, find the bird who will sing sweetly into your ear, for the price of gold or a favor. I didn't have much gold, and fewer favors, but for old times sake they were willing to share nuggets of information. Compiled over miles of bumpy bus rides, the smell of diesel fumes, the wheezing of trains running on unmaintained tracks, over the course of my travels to the outskirts a picture began to emerge, a map of my itinerary. East south east, avoid the lake, avoid the shore, the water is toxic, contaminated. At any crossroads, first go south, then at the next, go east, and the path would avoid the most dangerous zones. The rains, the floods, were imminent, would be full not only of water but of the same chemicals that had dyed the lake a deep deep red, and my silk parasol would be scanty protection indeed.

The final informant I spoke with, a lad of six or seven selling newspapers in a subway station, looked at me as if he knew me, recognized me, before blinking away his vision of someone else, and shoving a bundle in my hands. It was an old army blanket, and must have been serving as his bedroll for some months, but it had been treated in the War to withstand the toxicity of poison gas, and would help with the rains. I gave him my umbrella, my bedraggled pink parasol, and the emergency aid kit from the ammunition bag. He might not be able to use them, but he could sell them, even though they were far less valuable than the blanket. With this knowledge I left a token at the bus stop on the edge of town, before passing out of the city limits and beyond the help of my colleagues, or the reach of the government.

That night the fog grew thicker and thicker, gathering and condensing into a frozen dense mist at morning, and I came to the first crossroads at daybreak. South, then east I was supposed to travel, and pulled out the compass to confirm what information the shrouded sun could not supply. The compass spun, wildly, back and forth, caught in a magnetic zone of its own making, unable to settle at any point before swinging wildly and randomly in another direction. It was possible that in the years since learning how to use a compass my skills, a steady hand, a calm mind, had deteriorated. It was possible that sun spots or a geologic magnetic zone could be spinning the needle. It was possible a meteor had fallen nearby or the poles were switching. It was possible the compass had lost its calibration from unused years in the hall closet or from action in the war.

Regardless, I placed the compass back in the bag, closed my eyes, and turned right. Perhaps the route would be more dangerous or toxic, or perhaps the sun would appear and I could correct course, but for the morning I would continue walking into the slight and biting rain, looking for the pockets of safety hidden in the countryside.

reading
Mr Fox / Helen Oyeyemi

weather
how nice, how nice, to have light and heat after extended dark and cold

30 Poems in November

2011-11-01T18:49:00.001-04:00

There's a benefit going on this month for the Center for New Americans, in Northampton, MA: write a poem a day. Get people to underwrite your poem a day. Donate to help literacy.

Poetry isn't something I write. Not even in the deepest darkest recesses of an unlit New England night by flashlight under the duvet. How does one know when a poem is done? A story finishes (even if others don't like the ending). But a poem . . . every comma matters. Every verb matters. Is that the definite article where the indefinite article would be more appropriate? How does one avoid the maudlin, the confessional? What's up with the line breaks?

How could I subject a reading public to a poem a day -- given its unfinished and maudlin appearance -- in the deep dark recesses of November? Even to benefit something so lovely as literacy? It's like exposing a marsupial mammal to the ravages of the environment when it should be warm and snug in a pouch.

Here's the compromise. I'll write a check to the Center. You can write a check to the Center. Mail it to them. I'll write poems, given the above caveats and disclaimers. They'll be compiled and uploaded here to a pdf or something at the end of the month. Maybe. Probably.

ampersands in the air

2011-10-26T17:58:00.001-04:00

from the aviation museum in Ottawa:

onset / continue

2011-10-19T22:49:00.000-04:00

{this is a companion piece to The Wild Lands}

The group by the river moved in tandem, a mass of chaos demonstrating the order of infinite possibility, slowly gathering into distinct subgroups, nothing reminiscent of a line or roll call, but the sense of purposefully being in one place as opposed to another. The strange perspective of looking westward down a hill at dusk obscured the vanishing point, made it difficult to triangulate if there were large people far away or small people quite close by, but something in the restless energy implied the presence of children: the buzzing activity of small bodies enlivened by constant movement.

If they were children, they might be perfectly harmless, a gathering by the river for an afternoon picnic, they might be affiliated with adults who could provide helpful insight into where this place was, and how best to get elsewhere. Yet groups of children may be feral as well as tame: they may be in revolt from the order of the adult universe, and just as eager to send one on a detour through a vast desert, or towards an alligator nesting ground or a military test site. Or they may be cherubic emblems of innocence personified: they may listen quietly while adults confer on directions, only to guilelessly share information about a stranger with their parents at dinnertime.

And there are so many ways to experience the treachery of adults, the unwelcome trespass of strangers upon their lands. One can be escorted out by bullets or dogs, or a particularly vengeful group may decide to hunt for the interlopers under cover of darkness, all inadvertently revealed by a child's tale of a school picnic. For that was what it seemed to be, more than any other potential gathering, and while it would undoubtedly be a safer group than the same number of adults, the chance of misfortune was still too high to risk.

Walking along the ridge of the hill provided light and orientation in the late afternoon, but it was also likely to provide one or two particularly observant children with a story of dark travelers silhouetted on the hilltop; and there was always a dangerous chance that these reports would be believed. So we moved further into the shadow of the far side of the hill, as eager to not be seen as to not become lost, and set to make a fire, make tea while we waited for the group below us to return to their homes.

Our travels had not progressed badly, in that none of our number had become ill, or left us; we had not been attacked by any wild creature, although the questioning suspicion in the eyes of fellow men made us hesitate. Was it always the lot of the pilgrim to be feared, almost despised, by those non-pilgrims encountered upon the way? We had no way of knowing; we had never before been in these lands, we had never undertaken such a journey. We wondered if they feared we brought plague, or war, or coveted their lands for ourselves, and in their eyes we saw the desperate hold of the hopeless upon that which they have been given. None offered us apples from their orchard or lodging in their barns; but we could see their fear and their poverty, and we did not begrudge them this inhospitality.

The days continued to shorten, and if we hoped to arrive as we had planned, then our travel must take place not only under the thin winter skies but also in the embrace of the night, although we had no lanterns and the moon was an unreliable companion. Yet in deference to the fears of the tenant farmers we stayed well clear of their fields, and when we saw the outlines of towns on the horizon, we wound ever more cautiously around the outskirts. The towns were few in number, at unexpected intervals, at least in relation to the path we kept. Without getting dangerously close, it was impossible to tell what manner of establishment lurked beyond the town gates, or over the bridge so proudly graced with statues and carvings.

It was tempting, sorely tempting, to wait until an approaching market day and enter the towns with all of the tradesmen and farmers, but we knew no good could come of such a plan. We were so numerous, so obviously outsiders, clothed all in black robes and possessing none of whatever currency they traded, with nothing to barter in stead. We did not juggle or tumble or perform theatricals or play any type of musical themes that could be considered entertainment: we were only notable as a curiosity, as not being part of them, and without anything to offer in turn we could only inspire fear. To this was added the importance of our pilgrimage, the primacy of continuing on to our destination and our promised future, yet even the constant fire in our souls felt the waverings of curiosity.

For we had seen the animals in this strange land, and the animals welcomed us, guided us with their paths and their footprints, and we could not comprehend the difference of welcome from the human inhabitants, whose lives seemed so desperate. When we looked upon one another, we did not see wild animals, we did not see invaders or pillagers or thieves: we saw sincere and simple travelers, clothed in black, but without weapons or ill-intent. For weeks, thus, we walked on the outskirts of society, following the trail of deer and bears and mountain lions, feasting when we could fish or found crops in the forest, remaining distant from humankind.

It was growing more difficult, though, this aloofness, as the nights lengthened, the towns seemed ever closer together; as we traveled, our purpose and resolve wavered with the curiosity and homesickness when society grew close. The children by the river were a sign of where we could not go: and if this was something which we remained too pious to mention to our fellows, it was still keenly felt in our souls. The magic of the place we had entered was growing thinner, weaker, and while we still felt the expectation of purpose, it was not as strong a pull away from all we had left behind. If spring were to arrive, the warm breezes with the scent of the future, the dandelions in their brightly textured glory, the songs of the butterflies able to be heard in the silence between footfalls: these would have fed our hearts, and our hopes, seduced us into remaining faithful to our journey.

Instead, the nights lengthened, the Milky Way grew brighter, the daytime sun seemed ever dimmer in its efforts, and we wavered, as does every believer who has ever followed the path of righteousness. Yet as we wavered in our belief, the landscape around us grew dimmer, danker, less fertile; the wild animals less populous, the humans ever less welcoming. There were soon two opposing viewpoints where before there had been only camaraderie: that our lack of faith was dimming the landscape, that as we lost our own inherent sense of purpose the land would grow ever more unwelcoming; and that our spirits only reflected the darkness of the geology, that through maintaining our journey, all would be right in the end.

Between the metaphysical creators and the perseverers was a third group, who, as the days wore on, became braver, more vocal, in seeking to escape from the pilgrimage. If going home was truly impossible, the least we could do to save our health and sanity was to establish a new home, here. As these arguments grew more heated, I began to look in the eyes of the settlers we encountered, to see if in each suspicious and closed gaze was the broken spirit of a failed pilgrim, and if it was not that they feared we would harm them, but that they feared becoming wanderers again, in an unending winter in an inhospitable land.

Where, I wondered, were we to meet the Black Queen who had summoned us here; how, with all the detours and circumnavigations of our travels, was our destination to become apparent? In my faith in the Black Queen to end the waxing winter I did not waver, but I could adopt neither the philosophy nor the fatalism of my fellow travelers. That night, after the final campfire was dampened, I became the first deserter, the first breaker of ranks, determined to meet the dangers of the pilgrimage alone, regardless of threats of death or insanity. That I would now be shunned by both my fellow pilgrims and by the natives did not worry me, nor could I take responsibility for causing a mass desertion amongst the other travelers. Each of us was responsible for our own soul, and as I traveled deeper into the wilderness I felt only the promise of the resumed journey, and none of the fear.

reading
The Big Roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift

weather
yet more and more and more and more and more rain

matter / antimatter

2011-10-13T09:34:00.003-04:00

The bag contained no more than was absolutely necessary.

There was a map, which was unfortunately later determined to be a map of the wrong place and from the wrong time, but it was nice to have the map for reference, regardless.

There was a pen, and the pen almost always wrote, although sometimes to get it to start it had to be scratched quickly back and forth on some rough paper, even though I never really understood why that was.

There was a little notebook with a flexible spine and a nifty elastic band holding it closed, and I had bought the little notebook in a fit of inspirational passion -- here was a place for all of my ideas to go, jotted together at odd moments, jumbled elegantly for future access. The little notebook with its nifty elastic remained stubbornly blank, my name on the flyleaf the only mark, pages cannibalized from it to write out notes to give to strangers, but it was never a repository, only a source for sending things away. My moments of universal insight and truth continued to be recorded at random on the backs of envelopes, electric bills, and documents that I had intended to shred, and then inevitably lost, the universe claiming its truths back to itself.

The bag held currency in small change matching the legal tender of several countries, and even though I never sorted, counted, or organized the money, there always seemed to be just enough of whatever was required to procure an emergency cup of coffee in transit.

There was a driver's license and a passport, neither with flattering photographs and both still valid for the better part of a decade, and there was the in-case-of-emergency-only business card with a special direct line phone number that I had never called, knew I would never call, and yet could not bring myself to throw away.

The other bits of essential elements were neither noteworthy or extraordinary, although the essentials that the bag was somehow missing were just as notable as those it contained. Since they were conspicuous by their absence in the bag, they do not need to be gathered here; suffice to note that a corkscrew, a compass, and a box of Band-Aids should all three belong part and parcel with any collection of necessary items, or all is lost at the start.

When the journey began, we knew none of this. What we knew was that it was not to be a long undertaking, a day-trip at the most, that all details would be attended to and that directions would be provided. This was the usual remit, and after almost five years working for this courier service, there was no need to anticipate any unusual situation. Rule number one was ask no questions. Rule number two was pack light. There were no further rules.

I was happy with this arrangement; we traveled in pairs, but as I never inquired why, I had assumed it was for safety, or high value items requiring additional eyes, but thought no more of it. My regular partner had been with the company from the start, or so he claimed, but I didn't particularly care one way or another and soon he stopped trying to tell me stories of back in the day. None of my business, none of my responsibility. I had taken the job because it left a lot of free time, those millions of moments left idle in transit could be reduced down, compacted, and really mean something, and I valued moments more than any earthly good. My little notebook may have stayed empty and my salvaged envelopes may have disappeared back into the bowels of the universe, but I knew those moments were gathering together in my gut, and that they were coalescing into something astounding.

So this job didn't seem like it would be any different, full of empty moments and missing any further details, except when I showed up to get the directions and find my partner, things weren't as they had been. My partner wasn't there. That was fine; I hadn't liked the guy, but I hadn't needed to like the guy, either. It's easier to do a job and guard empty moments if a partner just takes up physical space, doesn't demand any mental presence. The replacement partner, though, I could tell was going to be a problem. I know rule number one as well as any employee, but it took all my self control not to hurtle into the manager's office and ask some very pointed questions.

My new partner was neither more nor less than a brain in a jar, and at first I thought it was some preserved Victorian relic that belonged on the shelf between the phrenology skull and the pickled cucumbers. Then I realized that it wasn't in formaldehyde, but in some super-brain electrolyte juice, and there was a lithium battery attached to the base of the jar, and it was bubbling away in some type of hyped-up carbonated Gatorade. There are plenty of uses for Mason jars and lithium batteries, but that wasn't one I was particularly keen on, especially if it was to be my partner. Thankfully, I had, as always, obeyed rule number two and packed light, so I stuck the brain out of the way in my bag, picked up the directives for the job, and found the delivery neatly wrapped in brown paper, assuming that the only variation in the routine was the change in partner, to a type of non-partner.

Maybe they were cutting back, times being what they were, and I could just carry on as I always had. Except as I drove, reveling in all the generous empty space of my uninterrupted moments owing to the non-physical presence of my partner, I realized something was happening. It was hard to describe, at first, how it felt like something was knocking on my mind, because there was no actual, external sound. It felt like being poked just above the ears, a tapping, tapping, but there was no real noise to match it. There was no external feeling of being touched, and I had a momentary panic of driving along in a car and having a stroke or seizure and not being able to control the car, losing my life and failing with the delivery, too.

If I had had a real partner with me, we could have pulled over, him taking over the driving while I found some industrial strength pain killers to help out; then suddenly there was a voice. It was in my head, and whether it was loud on purpose to make a point or loud on accident on account of not knowing the acoustics of the mind was of no account, because now to stroke and / or seizure I could add schizophrenia, even though my family had been sound of mind and body for generations, no loonies in our attics.

Then I realized that it was the voice of my old partner; it didn't sound like him, without vocal cords or a chest cavity to sound like anyone, but the words were his words, that was how he was in a conversation. Except now he had invaded my mental moments, and if there was one thing I valued as dearly as life or sanity, it was those idle moments that I was gathering together and were now being taken from me. I thought about what I could do, what management would pass a blind eye over or what they would send me to purgatory for, and then I decided it didn't matter, I didn't care, and I pulled off at one of those roadside scenic vistas and hurled that jar as hard as I could down the hillside. Maybe it would have been kinder to disconnect the lithium battery first, like putting a sick animal to sleep at the vet's, but I didn't want to be kind, I wanted that brain to feel every rock and every bump until the Mason jar cracked and exploded on the rocks below.

A few miles down the road I picked up a hitchhiker, since every courier needs a partner, and he didn't say much and I didn't say much, but when I dropped him off at a bus station two hundred miles further down the road, I realized the neatly wrapped package in brown paper had somehow disappeared, in that space between having a partner and having a hitchhiker and arriving in the city. The directions for the job were still there, printed as they had been before, taped to the dashboard of the car, but the text started to move and change before my eyes, and I didn't like what it was going to tell me.

I left the car, parked illegally by a highway overpass, and ran to catch a bus in this city I had never been in before, know that all I could do was get away, disappear. That my bag contained only what was absolutely necessary made the escape more efficient, but in the labyrinth of my journey away from my fate, I realized just how much I had forgotten to pack.

weather
Indian summer followed by storms

reading
great article on gender expectations and norms in the Atlantic

Valley News

2011-10-06T10:25:00.003-04:00

(1) Currently in debate in the Senate, the casino bill that just won't die. The area senators support it, but perhaps you could let them know their opinions are misguided.

http://gazettenet.com/2011/10/05/casino-in-valley-could-prove-039a-local-disaster039
"It is inconceivable that the short-term tax benefits of making a change on this scale, which would provide a minimum of three destination casinos throughout Massachusetts, can possibly be justified in terms of their much greater social, economic, and environmental costs. That such a creation could happen, quite literally, in our backyard, with no community feedback or input, can only be described as horrifying."
http://www.malegislature.gov/People/CityList

(2) In happier news, I'm in an upcoming group show at Paper City:

all things in time

2011-10-06T10:10:00.001-04:00

The last place I saw him, things weren't going so well. He had had one or five too many and had found an old banjo behind the bar, and next thing you know he's standing on that bar, strumming that banjo with a wail that could skin a cat. You've never seen anything like it, him so obviously out of his mind with drink and at a total separation from every last one of his inhibitions, but there on that bar he's totally unaware that one slip in a puddle of beer and his head could open clean as a ripe cantaloupe.

Now most people were thinking the worst when he went and found that banjo and gave us an impromptu concert there with our beers and whiskey sours, and you'd be thinking that ain't Julliard up there on the bar, but here's the thing: that was Julliard. Sure, he couldn't sing worth a damn, his voice was all scratched and raw and he couldn't match a tune if it sat on his head, but, man, that was some banjo playing like I haven't heard since my grandpa died forty-five years ago now. So if you could just ignore the hideous screeching of his voice and pay attention to what he did with the instrument, your mind reeled. I'd known him for a good twenty years and had never heard him so much as play chopsticks on the piano, but after that event at the bar I got to talking to his old lady and found out that he was conservatory trained with all the performance halls in Europe back in the day, and who would've thought it of him, the guy with the perpetual three day beard and shirts that were missing a few buttons?

Hell, I remember when he brought in a ten dollar roll of quarters and filled up the juke box to the gills and set it to playing nothing but Unchained Melody for the rest of the night, nothing the bartender could do about it, though it round about killed business by nine that evening. There are only so many plucked chords even the ignorant can stomach, and you would think that a real honest to god musician would never bother pulling such a cheap trick. But he stayed there all night, listening to the song loop and loop, and staring down at the condensation rings on the bar. If he ever thought to look for that recording again, he would have had a good long search, because it was thrown out first thing the next morning.

I wasn't sure about the events leading up to the Unchained Melody incident -- some things are best not to ask about -- and the truth is I'm not too sure about the events leading up to the banjo on the bar incident, either. Hell, I've lived here my whole life and I didn't even know there was a banjo behind the bar, so my knowledge of the situation can best be described as unreliable.

He hadn't been looking any worse that usual, lately; his three days of beard didn't seem either more unkempt or more tidy, his shirts didn't seem either more crumpled or less distressed. With a guy like that you can't really tell if you talk to him if he just hasn't had his coffee yet or if his dog just got hit by a truck. The general consensus was that he had been born on a day when the sun didn't rise and he had never learned how to smile. Not anything you could blame him for, him not being a Pollyanna isn't anybody's fault, but it made it right near impossible to puzzle out if he was about to put a pistol to his forehead or if he was reading the Sunday funnies.

That week hadn't been much different, he had just been his usual reliably downtrodden self, and had kept to his usual haunts and destinations. There didn't seem any likelihood of any type of noteworthy event. That night nothing out of the ordinary happened, no weird political or global economic shit, no gossip around town other than the usual two bits about how the editor at the paper was having an affair with the chair of the planning board, some questions about if the new high school was really going to be built on an EPA brownfield site, a possibly wholly fictitious piece of news that involved the mayor and the town auditor in a money laundering scheme, but none of this was the type of stuff that would cause a man to drown his sorrows and then sing as if the hounds of hell were on his tail.

The only thing I heard was that his ex-wife had just got out of maximum security and was hunting him down, and that was just ridiculous. Given his age and his particulars he must have married some rising diva at his own ripe Romeo and Juliet age of sixteen, tops, and she must have been all of nineteen or twenty when they put her away for delusional schizophrenia, and I just don't buy it. Him being a fancy pants musician, sure, we all did stuff back when we were young and didn't know any better. But that batshit crazy ex-wife story is all a little too Victorian Gothic for my taste. It was absolutely absurd with the Brontë sisters and it doesn't make any more sense now that they've got all sorts of pharmaceutical hocus pocus, and what kid gets married these days when it's all fine and dandy to shack up?

But whatever happened it must have been something, because it was just a Tuesday evening and we were waiting for autumn to start and talking about finally putting together a competitive season for darts, given how much practice we were all getting, anyway, we might as well keep official score and maybe pitch in to buy the league winner a drink at the end of three months of something. Next thing you know he's starting off with a bluegrass heavy Amazing Grace, and his voice could crack mirrors but he damn well knew all four verses, there was no humming along to feel out the melody, even though he has never been seen to even attend a roast beef dinner at the church. He just kept going, too, from Gospel spirituals through drinking songs with a couple of labor protest numbers thrown in, in the grand folk tradition, before heading into some of the soggiest ballads that have ever been written.

Round about an hour into this involuntary concert he threw in a few Rogers and Hart numbers, before settling back in for the strangest blend of torch songs and a back catalog of spirituals that would put the combined states of Dixie to shame. His voice kept getting worse and worse, even though he seemed to be trying harder and harder to sing the right notes, but his work on the finger board was nothing short of extraordinary. I've said it as often as anyone, that all it takes to play the banjo is two teeth and a thumb, but this guy could make that thing fly.

We were all entranced, equally pained and astounded by an event that was preposterous, horrifying, and gorgeous; and we must have all been paralyzed or hypnotized or something, because when he all of a sudden threw the banjo back towards the dishwasher and catapulted himself off the bar and out the door, none of us said a word. No one tried to restrain him or follow him, and no one could think of anything to say to break the silence for a long few minutes. Then someone knocked over a glass, and the shattering of it on the floor woke us out of our stupor, but that's the last we've seen of him.

He disappeared without a trace, and even though we found his old beat up car just where he always parked it and we searched the woods near town and we thought about dredging the river but who has the money for that these days, but no footprint or sighting ever came our way. I don't know what happened, if he hitchhiked out on the interstate or if some secret woman was waiting for him with a car or if he's gone into hiding somewhere that we just haven't looked, but there's all sorts of stories about town these days. Myself, well, we haven't seen the last of him, I don't think, but it might be a month of Sundays maybe before he returns.

reading
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children / Ransom Riggs

weather
first frost

the wild lands

2011-09-29T00:33:00.001-04:00

(this is a companion piece to Allowed and In Betweens)

The wild lands were not what we expected, there, as we came out of the forest under a crescent moon, into a landscape white with snow, so carefully curated that each and every tree seemed hand-placed, pruned into shape. We had wandered in the in between lands of the woods for weeks, or for years, it was hard to tell which, for certain, when one is not yet to the wild lands but is well beyond the borders of civilization. When the woods had begun to thin, it was not certain if the instructions had been accurate, the wild lands were not so very different from home at first glance. The differences were slow to appear, then gathered momentum, until a Welcome to the Wild Lands sign would have been wholly redundant.

The crescent moon hung low in the sky, the terracotta of Mediterranean vases, and it stayed, hovering over the horizon, all night long. The next night it neither advanced nor retreated, but kept its exquisite delicate hook, skimming the sky just at the edge of the clouds. And the next night, and the next, until after seven or fourteen such nights, when it remained the most delicate crescent in the heavens, and we realized that the ocher color had gradually shifted through the spectrum, from yellow to green until now it hung, a vibrant turquoise blue, glittering among the silver stars. And the stars were silver, not a twinkling atmospheric trick of white light, but a glowing, dancing, vibrant metallic, that emitted a light as strong as any full moon, so the snow covered hills were illuminated even under a crescent moon which neither waxed nor waned nor rose nor set, just shifted through the color spectrum.

We walked the first day without seeing any inhabitants of the wild lands, but, somehow, our numbers kept increasing. When I had been in the intermediary territories of the woods, I had been certain that I had been alone; yet as the woods thinned, companions had slowly materialized, never as strangers on the path, but simply, suddenly, being there, without explanation, introduction, surprise, or fear. It was not that I went from being alone to having acolytes, but as if components of an entire contingency of pilgrims were suddenly revealed, but as pieces that were unquestionably a part of the whole. We did not speak, or interact, and there was no sense of a leader; we were all wandering, if not aimlessly, then without purpose, but in a definite, and shared, direction.

I could no longer recall what clothing I had been wearing while wandering through the dense undergrowth of the woods, but, without ever changing, I and all of the others wore the black robes of medieval travelers, seeking the sites of miracles. We were not Death; we were not invaders; we were not tourists; and somehow we were not outsiders, even though I did not come from the wild lands, I had become a native, and I recognized my fellow companions as the same.

As the moon cycled through its colors we began to see signs of other life, trails and track marks that had never been identified in the mountain guides of my homeland. Not a dog, not a cat, not a raccoon, fox, or cheetah: but somehow -- there -- finally spotted on the hillside just before dawn, a lion, shaggy brown, the color of autumn, the size of a cocker spaniel, alert and poised for the hunt. We had camped, our tents in a clearing at the base of a hill, and while I do not know where my tent came from, there we were, together, and I was stoking the fire and watching the slow rise of the sun. The lion moved quickly over the crest of the hill and out of sight, pursued by some other animal that moved too quickly for me to see in the weak light, but that day we began to speak as we walked.

There were stories of the spotted fish of the wild lands, brilliant orange creatures who feed on the dreams of their prey, and whose roe are sought after delicacies by the Black Queen. It was said that eating the roe of the dream fish extended the working hours of the night, the Black Queen's domain, and that she feasted heavily on the embryo dreams of her subjects to supply her powers for the solstice. The lions hunted the dream fish not only for their meat, the smokey tang of cured salmon roasted over a pit of eucalyptus leaves, but also to present to the Black Queen as tribute for their home in her lands.

The dream fish, angered at losing their unborn young, resentful at the loss of their fully grown members, were engaged in an eternal embattled war with the Queen's lions, and whether it was the dark, dreamless sleep of midwinter or the brief, disturbed dreams of midsummer reflected the status of the war. The fish knew no ruler, they were the night-time emissaries of the sun itself, who may have been a god or a king or just a glowing rock in the sky, for the dream fish were not believers and acknowledged no mystics. I had awaken in the night to stoke my campfire because a dream fish had gathered the dreams out of my sleep: I had woken in the sudden silence of a confused consciousness, and other pilgrims were only able to continue sleeping as the raids of the lions distracted the dream fish from our seething sleeping minds.

As our journey through the wild lands continued, our numbers grew, our sightings of the dream fish and the lions grew more frequent, and we watched the days shorten and the creatures of the night and the early dawn appear in greater numbers. There were the tiny white owls, hooting so serenely and softly that their calls were masked by the falling snow. There were bears whose fur was not black but the midnight blue of the long, lingering twilight, bears who traveled in groups of pilgrims much like our own, but instead of tents, they had collections of rugs and blankets that they spread under trees at the ridges of mountains. There were red foxes, crimson red, with bushy tails longer than their bodies and bright, inquiring eyes. I did not know what the intentions of the foxes were, but I feared them. And there were deer, always solitary, always large, much larger than any deer I had ever seen before, deer who were able to cause us to halt mid-step, to freeze as they looked deeply into our eyes and read our souls, transcribing our dreams and our intentions into the mind of the Black Queen.

The Black Queen, the night, was the destination of our pilgrimage, and we sought an audience with her in celebration of the winter solstice. Somehow we knew we would meet her on the solstice, or the solstice would happen when we met her, whether one caused the other or the two could only exist as simultaneous events was vague, an explained element of our mythology. The culmination of our pilgrimage was clear, though, that the Black Queen, in grateful acknowledgement of our affections and in return for the efforts of our pilgrimage, would remove her veil and display all of the midnight colors of the crescent moon at once, in the fireworks of the aurora borealis, to light the long nights that marked the reign of the Black Queen.

Whether we to remain as her subjects, were to to work, or worship, or were we to return home, emissaries for the Black Queen to our home lands, was unclear. Perhaps we were to have a choice, to enter a convent or a village or become wandering hermits or adopt a new calling as yet undefined and undetermined. Or perhaps we would be transformed by the Black Queen into her beings, into the lions that gathered the roe of the dream fish for her, or into the flickering white birds whose numbers in her aviaries were as numerous as the stars in the night sky, signing in the pitches of ice forming and floating over a brook, the creaks, cracks, and clarion calls echoing against the smooth bare branches of the frozen trees.

Any of these solutions; all of these solutions; none of these solutions: it was all the same to us; we sought only to serve, to worship, to adore the Black Queen.

reading
1493 : uncovering the new world Columbus created / Charles C. Mann.

weather
autumn, Indian summer monsoons

day-trips

2011-09-25T00:01:00.001-04:00

a trip to the country

grotesques

2011-09-21T22:43:00.001-04:00

I long to hear the cathedral organ playing: deep and hopeful. But it has been many years, so very many years, since those echoing sounds filled these cavernous rooms. When they first closed down the Cathedral, the silence was overbearing, overwhelming, but a beadle was still kept on staff, sweeping the cobwebs from the altar, opening the Chapel to inquiring visitors and scholars. It is true that even in those forlorn early years the silences were greater than the many small noises of the faithful, it is true that the vast majority of the building was closed up, undisturbed. Still, the appearances of these sporadic visitors, the desultory attentions of the beadle, kept alive the belief that one day the vast eerie silence would be filled with the petitions of the devout, the reedy voices of the boy's choir, the impatient shuffles of children ready to resume their daily life outside the confines of the Holy Ghost.

And so, for those first years, we waited, my companions on the parapet and I, keeping the watch over the grounds until they would once more be consecrated and defined through the meaning of use and prayer. Our duty as sentinels was to maintain the vigilant presence when the faith of the parishioners wavered, faltered; to keep a steady eye against the approach of evil and to warn against ill intention. The beadle, our caretaker, grew older, and age was accompanied by arthritis and a growing taste for red wine, and with these things was a corresponding lapse in the number of casual visitors, and a slackness with regards to cobwebs and field mice. The beadle was finally taken away from us, our one remaining human intercessor, whether by relocation to a hospice or to an afterlife, the long-term destination unchanged, dust to dust.

He was not replaced. Canvas wraps were draped hurriedly over what seemed most necessary to protect, and in the remaining naves and chapels of the Cathedral were only the worshipers from nature, as Saint Francis of Assisi claimed, or the naively opportunistic rodents, as Rousseau would have argued. When boys acting under the influence of cheap beer and bad company cracked some of the windows with pieces of the old stone wall, we, the only protectors of the building, let out the only warning of the wrath of the heavens we could summon: we wailed and screamed from our perch on high. They took fright and ran, remembering the stories of their grandmothers, women who had last been in the Cathedral a lifetime ago, as small girls in white dresses taking communion. Even though over sixty years had past, they still shared the warnings and the petitions with their grandchildren, still lit a candle under the Crucifix and made the sign of the Cross at home. Their belief would die with them and not pass on to their grandchildren, on whose behalf they offered intercessions.

When the rocks shattered the stained glass they not only broke the depiction of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, but they also opened a door to the wind. The building had been constructed well and true, over three hundred years of builders and artisans laboring to realize a footprint of heaven on earth: until the window was breached the Cathedral had remained impervious to rain, wind, and ice, succumbing only to the venial sins of trespassing by squirrel, mouse, and spider. The wind found the opening in the window and entered, bringing with it the unholy air of progress, unsanctified pollution, disturbing the residual dust of the memories of the presence of the faithful.

The wind found the altar, the chapels; it swept down the flagged walkways and around the columns. It was not strong enough to disturb the canvas drapes or the spider webs, but the wind tasted the vast, empty, undisturbed space of the Cathedral and began to effect changes in the room: minor, at first, then growing, exponentially, with each small movement and alteration. The window, once loosened, began to splinter, entire colored panes giving way under the assault of the wind, and as other windows now felt the affects of weather on both sides, they, too, began to weaken in their vigilance.

We, the sentries, were powerless against the forces of nature; we were endowed with the powers to battle the evil which lurks in the hearts of man and those demons who were disembodied, had not taken up residence in man or beast. But nature was no man, nor any beast, nor a demon, nor an incarnation of evil. The wind could not feel our protection of the Cathedral, for the wind had existed before the fall of man, and predated both good and evil. The wind just was, a pure being. And as the wind entered and discovered the space that man had abandoned, it brought with it rain and ice and damp. The deep stone walls began to incrementally be transformed back into the dirt from which they were composed, broken down into crumbling silt by mildew and moss. There was a skeleton of carved woodwork forming the infrastructure, the pews, the Bishop's throne, the choir bays; all reacted to the change from still, dry air to the damp air that altered from season to season, shrinking and swelling as the weather arrived inside the building.

We kept to our duties as best we could, in light of the conditions, but none of us were immune to the indignities of the weather, and we all longed for the loving caress of a stone mason to replace missing noses, talons, beards, wings. As sentinels we were being crippled beyond recognition, and our strength against evil spirits and demons was lessened as our features washed away with the years. Inside, the bats, squirrels, mice grew into ever larger colonies, and the canvas sheets wore completely away, broken down at the end of a lifetime battling nature. The statues stained from the damp; the frescoes rotted from their foundations; and even the consecrated bones of the founding saint, which had still retained the sweetness and fluidity of life a hundred years after death, began to succumb to the decay of abandonment.

The city, who had abandoned its Cathedral, was in turn abandoned by the fickle strumpet of progress, and the empty footfalls of the homeless and dispossessed could be heard in the alleys at night. It was not so very long before the vagrants, the forgotten people, discovered the forgotten Cathedral, and even if we had fought to keep them away, we were so weakened as to possess none of our previous powers to protect the consecration of the space. Yet I was not certain that the new residents were evil, that they they had any ill or bad intentions. They were not placing false sacrifices on the altar, or worshiping a dark incarnation of a fallen angel; rather, they were more like the mice and bats, God's forgotten creatures, living as best they could in God's forgotten temple. My ears are almost worn away, a smooth skull taking their place, but at night, when the wind picks up and howls through the broken glass of the windows, it sometimes blows through the bellows and pipes of the organ, playing a mournful echoing shadow of the deep and hopeful melody which once filled this space.

reading
Stories for Nighttime and some for the day / Ben Loory (splendid book!)

weather
countdown to the first day of autumn, red leaves floating on the pond

ALLOWED as DEFINED

2011-09-14T23:20:00.002-04:00

We had been walking in the forest all day. At first there had been a path, wide, free of tree branches and invasive growth, a blue and yellow blaze painted on the trees. When the blue blaze path split from the yellow blaze path, we sat on a log near the fork and ate our apples, content that the better choice would make it self known.

I threw my apple core into the undergrowth, resigned that no signs had appeared indicating the distinction between options: no large shaggy dogs bounding down the trail; no suddenly appearing notice boards referring to natural springs or unusual rock formations; no discovered footprints which were of an unusual and mysterious dimension. There was not even the Robert Frost path-not-taken option; both were of equal gradient, equal geology, equal vegetation.

So we went left, giving a shrug of indifference, for we were in the woods not with any intention of bird watching or going for a swim or finding a rare flower, but just because I had awoken that morning, and realized that even after ten years in this place, I had never entered the forest. When one lives surrounded by trees, it is easy to forget that there are people who drive hours to experience what I effectively ignored for years. Neither of us were experienced hikers, but apples and granola bars and turkey sandwiches from the deli and bottles of lemonade were our sustenance, and we were pleasantly surprised by how accessible, how human scale, the woods were, with their dappled light and smells of mulch and random twitterings of birds and the crunchiness of pine needles beneath our feet.

The left path was not so different than that we had been walking along, and we strolled and exulted at the presence of chipmunks and frogs and tiny bright red mushrooms growing underfoot, until very slowly we realized that we were having to strain to identify the next emblazoned tree, that the path was becoming rougher and less well-groomed. We weren't worried: the sun was high, the forest was open and friendly and smelled of the freshness of new growth, and we could still make out the train in front of and behind us. When we stopped for the turkey sandwiches I realized that there was not a blaze anywhere to be seen, even though the path was still clear; when we later stopped to munch on granola bars, though, the path in either direction had become indistinct from the forest.

We didn't panic. We knew not to panic. We weren't that far from civilization, after all; this wasn't old growth forest in deepest Africa, but had been carefully manicured farmland only a few generations ago. There was sure to be a road, the sound of traffic, a stream we could follow, something, easily located as long as we kept walking and stayed calm.

It is true that it was not my natural inclination to remain calm. It is true that it is my natural inclination to fuss and lose my temper and blame the incompetence of my companion, the government, and god. I knew this as well as my companion did, for when I started to agitate about general inabilities of the wider population, I was treated to the dreariest possible lecture on becoming lost in the woods as a meditation exercise about letting go of the need to control destination, the entirety delivered in a faux-relaxation yoga voice specially calibrated to appeal to my sense of outrage. And thus we kept walking, me grumbling about the inanity of being in the woods in the first place, my companion dropping in nuggets about the ephemeral nature of human existence and how artificial the construct of the self really is, until I became so annoyed with the philosophical bullshit that I forgot to panic about being lost in the woods with a granola bar and an apple remaining as my sole future sustenance.

The afternoon grew longer, and we walked in what we hoped was a straight line, although the sun wasn't visible enough to offer direction and our eye for details of the natural terrain was not well-honed enough to provide clues against traveling in circles or away from sources of water or movement deeper into the woods, so we may have been doing all three of these things in honest ignorance. When it began to become apparent that the evening would soon arrive and we still didn't have any sense of where we were, it grew harder to remain calm, and I looked to my companion for a well-placed comment on the nature of the space time continuum, something along the lines of movement through space affecting the actual experience of time, which would prove it was really still morning and we were drinking strong coffee before going for a hike.

The problem was that my companion wasn't there. Somehow the moment of me walking in the woods with a friend had become a moment of me walking in the woods alone, without myself ever being consciously aware of this significant change of state. I tried to remind myself that someone of some renown had written something along the lines of matter not being able to be created or destroyed, but I wasn't particularly happy with how that left my options. Either there had been an alien abduction, of which my memories had been wiped clean; or perhaps I had been suddenly, remorselessly abandoned in the woods; or perhaps matter had been transmuted into energy as we had walked through a miniature black hole created as a freak side effect of the large Hadron collider.

None of these possibilities appealed to me, nor, in all honesty, was I likely to believe any of them: they were perfectly irrational and absurd to even consider, and the net result was the same. I was alone, in the woods; it was getting dark; I had no intention of remaining calm. Soon there would be mosquitoes and raccoons and bears and mountain lions and escaped crazy lunatic convicted criminals and I couldn't identify poison ivy in daylight much less in the light of a waning moon. I was hungry and I wanted a stiff drink and a taxi and a hot shower and a novel by one of those British writers who goes off to have adventures with a full retinue of staff and native guides and at least two sets of evening wear. I had none of these things.

If I hadn't been so worried about the poison ivy and the potential creepy crawly population I would have settled onto a large rock to have a good think, but even then I recognized that the likelihood of the good think resulting in a reasonable course of action was extremely low, and the likelihood of unfortunate side effects was significantly higher. I cursed, loudly, then worried that my loud cursing would attract whatever predators had somehow remained ignorant of my scent or the hesitancy of my footfalls, then cursed again, under my breath.

So far my entire plan of action consisted of curling up in a ball just exactly where I stood and hope to survive until daybreak, when up ahead there appeared to be some type of lantern hanging in a tree, and an owl hooted. Maybe college kids or hippies were throwing a solstice party in the woods; regardless, a lantern in a tree meant people, and somewhat organized people at that, and perhaps even a road and a ride back to town. It was a perfectly rational assumption, and I started to make my way towards the lantern. It wasn't so much receding from me as further away than I had first thought; but distances are harder to judge at night, and I was walking slowly, carefully feeling out my next steps.

Just when the lantern grew close enough that I expected to see people, I was startled to see that what there was instead was another lantern, further on. So I continued walking, following the lanterns into the forest, another appearing in the distance just as I approached that closest to me. It made no sense, all of these random lanterns lining up in the forest, until I suddenly became aware that my footsteps were not quite so hesitant and careful, for I was actually following a path in the woods. It was not a well maintained trail, more of a track of the sort left by a herd of deer or other regularly moving animal, but it added an element of order to the disorder of the trees at night.

A lit trail in the forest was not an unfamiliar landscape, and I kept walking, looking for evidence of the people responsible for the trail, curious if I was on a town path or some woodland walk in the park. Up ahead, a string quartet was playing, but the music was like no other music I had ever heard, the tuning was off pitch and the tempo felt like a calliope that kept slowing down and speeding up; there was a tinny undertone to the sound. As I drew closer, I realized that the instruments were playing themselves, though there was no visible sign of mechanics or electricity. I wondered what was happening, where I was, if I was awake or asleep; but the one thing I forgot to wonder was if I would ever reach home again, as I was drawn ever more closely into the strains of the music.

reading
thanks to The Ampersand for a shout-out to the Ligature Project!
http://ampersand.gosedesign.net/

weather
join us next June! Gibbs2012 : Dia Lightning Fields, New Mexico

Aerial Theosophy

2011-09-11T00:15:00.000-04:00

Further work on the cosmology project, which even has an official title (see above):

The full-page-spread of the parallel texts can be downloaded
as a gigantic pdf file in ZIP form.
The full suite of accompanying cosmology prints can be downloaded
as an even bigger file.

Final sizes on all of this is about 8"x10". The edition of books (two volumes, 4 inches square) has been fully typeset, and is almost ready for printing.