Anatomy of Perception: in one place

O.K., I threw it all into a little chapbook of sorts: it's here (PDF document).

And here, for the sake of future archaeologists, are the links to the original posts, which contain introductory material and links left out of the final redaction - not to mention comments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7.

¶ 10/31/2004 10:37:01 AM   

"Waiting for the North to reach a compass"

This piece by the unofficial Palestinian poet laureate seems especially topical right now - though I'm sure Mr. Darwish would protest that he, for one, would be quite happy if his poems did NOT so precisely satisfy the hoary definition of poetry as "news that stays news"!

WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO LOVE AUTUMN
by Mahmoud Darwish

And we, too, have the right to love the last days of autumn and ask:
Is there room in the field for a new autumn, so we may lie down like coals?
An autumn that blights its leaves with gold.
If only we were leaves on a fig tree, or even neglected meadow plants
that we may observe the seasons change!
If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals
and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife point. May poetry and God's name have mercy on us!
We have the right to warm the nights of beautiful women, and talk about
what might shorten the night of two strangers waiting for the North to reach the compass.
It's autumn. We have the right to smell autumn's fragrances and ask the night for a dream.
Does the dream, like the dreamers themselves, sicken? Autumn. Autumn.
Can a people be born on a guillotine?
We have the right to die any way we wish.
May the earth hide itself away in an ear of wheat!

translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (University of California Press, 2003). Arabic version originally appeared in Darwish's Fewer Roses, 1986

¶ 10/30/2004 03:39:02 PM   

The anatomy of perception (conclusion)



6.

We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting. (Pascal)

But we are all fish
out of water,
giddy with oxygen.
Who can tell
the smell of ozone -
electric & wet - from
the taste of
their own fear
when the storm comes?

     the commercial fisherman:

     we entered the sound on a rough sea
     in pea-soup fog
     cut the motor & listened
     for the buoy clang

     the captain swears he can feel
     the change in the swells
     but that too could be
     a kind of listening

     men don't talk about
     their instincts much
     we're supposed to be impervious
     to gauge to ogle

     but looking makes everything
     smaller than it is
     the world
     recedes

     & if something can kill you
     you need to find it
     magnify it
     keep it close

     every pore in my body listened
     for that buoy its dull echo
     sweeter than a church bell
     over the hiss of the waves

Who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I crave immersion in the medium of grace.

I think of whale song more alluring
than any Lorelei, seals & walruses

whose ancestors heard the surf
pounding in their temples. Otters,

already so much more playful than
their bloodthirsty cousins on dry land.

I think perhaps our destiny is not
to be sucked out among the stars - vacuum

without sound - but back in the water,
sonorous & shining. Like Jesus

inscribed in the cursive alpha:
shoal. Implausible feast.

The storm approaches.
As pressure drops,
the ears fill
& pop & the heart
works harder.
Just like
when kisses land
lightly as
a fisherman's fly
on the skin - creek
or lover -
& the trout in
the bloodstream
rises,
takes the hook.


7.

The least movement affects all nature; the entire sea changes because of a rock. . . . Impenetrability is a quality of bodies. (Pascal)

Yesterday morning, from the trees
up on the ridge, a cacophony of rusty hinges.
Startled by something, it stills, turns
into an immense rustle of wings.
A thousand blackbirds lift, pivot,
drift high across the field like
a cloud of smoke.

This morning, walking through the fog
on top of the same ridge, I am stopped
by a yellow sugar maple leaf
dangling from an invisible strand of silk
six feet off the ground.
The slight breeze is enough to make it
flip, flop, fly. The forest drips.

These are not metaphors for anything.
Science says, a body at rest,
a body in motion. But only
such abstract bodies really make sense.
Ah, unreal body, home to an unreal sense!
Move one finger and the universe shifts: try it.
Let the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

¶ 10/30/2004 08:24:46 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/29/2004 09:35:44 AM   

Blogging color, dreaming blogs

Some of the bloggists I read regularly have been writing about color in pretty striking ways. In a post last Friday - complete with a full-color sketch - Blaugustine described a man and his sons who boarded her car on the London subway:

To say that they were black says nothing. Their skin was African midnight blueblack, the colour of a starry desert sky and polished as the stones in a clear stream. There was not a hair on their heads or brows. Their smooth hairlessness and the extraordinary intensity and innocence of their eyes made them seem like beings from another planet. The man was dressed in a light-coloured tracksuit but the boys, under their black casual jackets, wore formal white shirts and white trousers. My sketch from memory does not do them justice. If I had brought my camera I would have asked permission to photograph them. Sometimes life generously offers you a brief encounter with absolute beauty to remind you that all is not lost and ugliness can never entirely take over the world.

On Tuesday, Fragments from Floyd reported on an encounter with unexpected, otherworldly beauty even closer to home:

A rounded mound that the rake could not clear away proved to be a flat rock under the leaves, thrown beside the shed for no good reason. I harrumphed as I bent over carefully to prize it up on end to lift and toss it to some other pointless place out of the way. And out of that mundane chore of autumn, in this world of orange and ochre, in that cool, safe space under the flat roof of rock where it would have spent its anonymous days fattening on spiders before winter, a newly-hatched Smooth Green Snake lay coiled in an emerald knot.

This time, there is a photo. The green snake against the autumn leaves looks every bit as stunning as Fred says it was.

At Vernacular Body yesterday, I was charmed by

the sight of a pile of yellow leaves on the sidewalk. They are suddenly carried on a gust: it is a precise and unified motion, exactly like that of a school of fish.

And at Ditch the Raft, Andi is in northern India, on the first leg of a Buddhist pilgrimage with her father. Along with vivid descriptions of the people, the temples, the filth and squalor of the cities and the experience of being stared at everywhere she goes - and of learning to return that stare - she writes:

I've never seen such colors. The Rajasthani women wear lime greens, pine greens, saffron and tangerine oranges, lemon yellows and tumeric yellows, pomegranate and blood reds--and these colors mixed in with the incredible array of saris makes my eyes swim. I feel drunk on the color: it's edible, tangible, colors I could walk on. If the colors in Malaysia were like wings, this is like flocks, waves, oceans of color.

In her latest post, she describes a visit to the cloth market at Udaipur:

Sometimes mirrors are sewn in, sometimes sequins, giving the cloth an extra glitter. On the really fine stuff, gold and silver thread is worked in. But what catches me again and again is the unmitigated sensuality of the cloth and the clothing. Colors to make poets die--they cannot be written--and live again--hope springs eternal. Colors to make women want to be beautiful or to feel beautiful, or at least this woman. You start imagining your home decked out in these colors. A room for reds, a room for blues, a room for greens, and a room for whites. Who knew white came in a rainbow of shades, hues, subtleties? A creamy white cotton relaxes next to the sharp shiny silk white; a matte hand-woven white envelopes where a filmy woolen white pulls one along like a breeze.

This is travel blogging at its best. Who needs photos?

*

Reading blogs before bed may or may not be a good idea. In my last dream before waking, I had been invited to a costume party at Elck's flat in New York City, which he jokingly refers to as Long Hall. It was enormous. We sat awkwardly across from each other on overstuffed, Victorian chairs, Elck and I, and realized we had absolutely nothing to say to one another, having long ago exhausted our eloquence in our blogs. Then other people began flowing in. They were all wearing gorgeous saris and matching headscarves, even the men.

Suddenly, I realized I was similarly outfitted, Lord knows how. The six meters of cloth were striking, Andi, but they were suffocating! I stripped back down to my usual jeans and quilted plaid shirt.

Before I knew it, however, I was wrapped in a sari again! How was this happening? Clearly, someone must be slipping something into my drink - or else those two wily magicians Elck wrote about the other day were hiding somewhere about and using me for an impromptu demonstration of their powers. For the second time, I divested myself of the exotic cloth, folded it and placed it on the chair. My usual cocktail party paranoia set in. Why was nobody talking to me? Were they really all snickering at me, or was it just my imagination?

Well, you know how these kinds of insecurity dreams go: once you get into an imaginative rut, it's hard to change course. The third time, I found myself outfitted in a heavy, gray monk's habit. In addition, they had strapped one of those backpacks for carrying small children on my back. What did this mean? I had no idea. But I knew this much: they weren't going to get away with it!

I tore off the backpack and the habit and carried them into an empty storeroom. There was only one thing to do, I realized as I stood there listening to the clinking of wineglasses, high-pitched laughter and fragments of witty repartee. I would take off all my clothes! That'll teach 'em to make fun of the hillbilly!

I remembered the last time I had been naked at a party, a late-night affair with a backyard hot tub on a quiet back street in Tyrone. Everyone else was naked, so I figured it was cool. Only months later did someone leak the truth: they'd all been staring at me! No one had seen that much body hair on a human being before, my friend Chris informed me. "We weren't making fun of you!" he assured me. "We were just, you know, amazed! I mean, you even have hair on your butt!"

So fifteen people - including one fairly attractive, hetero female and a couple bisexuals - had been staring at my naked butt. Great.

But that was years ago - long before I discovered blogging. Now, after ten months on the Via Negativa, I said to myself, being naked at a costume party seems pretty much par for the course. I can do this!

Unfortunately for the sake of this retelling, that's when I woke up. So I guess you'll have to supply your own endings. And I'm afraid that, since I have put the image of my hairy, naked body unbidden into your heads, your dreams too may take a disturbing turn, like a pile of yellow leaves on the sidewalk. They are suddenly carried on a gust . . .

¶ 10/29/2004 09:23:02 AM   

The anatomy of perception (5)

Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders our view. . . . We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are prejudicial to us and not perceptible by the senses; we do not feel but suffer them. . . . Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education. In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, and we them. (Pascal)

In his late eighties, my grandfather's neck bone sprouted a spur that pressed against his throat.

Imagine it, to be slowly choked to death by your own spine!

It got to where he could barely swallow & all his meals had to be pureed - "like baby food," he groused.

He had already lost almost all sense of taste; only very sweet and very salty foods had any appeal.

Eating now became onerous, with only the promise of mealtime sociability with the other residents of the old folks' home to hold his interest.

He grew light as a bird.

Even so, a portion of every mouthful - a drop or two, perhaps - blocked by the bony growth, trickled down his windpipe.

And as Pascal observed, "a drop of water suffices to kill a man."

He contracted pneumonia.

Starved for oxygen, his brain fed him lies.

Fear found expression in hatred.

The coma was a mercy.

Children and grandchildren filled the small hospital room to overflowing.

He lay with eyes shut & mouth agape below the beak of a nose, one tube in his left arm & another in his urethra, his skeletal frame naked under the bed sheet.

As the night wore on, the gaps between the slight movements of his chest grew longer and longer.

Finally, when several minutes had elapsed, someone felt for a pulse: no hint of motion.

Then a great sigh that caught in a dozen throats, a gasping sob.

As vision blurred we embraced & embraced, baffled to find each other so unfamiliar, ourselves so strange.

¶ 10/28/2004 07:25:25 PM   

The anatomy of perception (4)

Barometric pressure was a novel idea in 1647 when the 24-year-old Blaise Pascal published his Nouvelles expériences sur le vide. Toricelli had invented the barometer only four years earlier. Pascal described how he climbed first a tower in Paris and then a mountain in the Auvergne carrying this new instrument, and watched as the column of quicksilver slowly dropped. He deduced that a vacuum must exist above the atmosphere - and thus, in a sense, became the discoverer of outer space.

Pascal recognized - and struggled against - the inadequacy of knowledge to ever encompass the universe. Though the logic of infinity could not be denied, he thought, its existence depressed him. This more than anything testifies to his greatness as a thinker: he was brave enough admit the existence of truths that caused him profound discomfort. While, on the one hand, "It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason," reason still exerts a critical check on human pride: "Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

Late in life, battling illness, Pascal made a study of the cycloid, a curve traced by a point on the circumference of a hoop traveling along a straight line. Using the "method of indivisibles" pioneered by Cavalieri, Pascal managed to solve a series of problems that had defeated Galileo and Descartes. In the process, he came within a hair's breadth of discovering the infinitesimal calculus, decades before Leibnitz and Newton. Unable to sleep for pain, he stared up into the darkness and saw the solutions unfold.

Blaise Pascal was a slight man with a booming voice, and people found him pugnacious, even overbearing. Ill health and crushing headaches were his constant companions since childhood. He died of a malignant growth in his stomach that spread to his other organs. A post-mortem examination also revealed an ugly lesion on the brain - the source of his migraines. Apparently, as an infant his fontanelle had failed to close properly, and the bones in his skull had slipped and ground against each other like the tectonic plates that make up the surface of the earth. He died in great agony and convulsions on August 19, 1662, at the age of 39.

¶ 10/28/2004 10:58:33 AM   

Marbled orbweaver

The clouds came in just as the earth's shadow began its slow crawl across the moon. It was, I think, what they call a mackerel sky: high cumulo-nimbus clouds arranged like the scales on the belly of a fish. Every few minutes the moon would reappear in a crack between the clouds, and each time more of it would be gone.

More and more of the sky became occluded by clouds. By 10:20, when the eclipse reached totality, very few cracks still showed. Rather than abandon hope, though, I left my front porch, where I had been watching the show through the newly bare leaves of an elm, and went up in the field for an unobstructed view. The air was cold, but the ground retained some of the heat of the day; the longer I lay in the grass, the warmer it seemed. I watched as the cracks between the clouds grew larger and larger. Mackerel skies move with excruciating slowness. Above and to the west, the bands of stars grew larger.

At last, around eleven o'clock, the clouds thinned out enough to allow an unobstructed view of the eclipsed moon. Blood moon, some call it, and indeed, one does get the impression that one is seeing somehow inside it, as if with the x-ray vision of an ultrasound machine. What might this view of celestial entrails tell us? I thought of all the people around the hemisphere who must have been watching along with me, the myriad interpretations they would bring to this sight. How many otherwise ordinary life events would gain in significance merely by their conjunction with such an event?

For Red Sox fans, the symbolism of a baseball-white moon approximating their team colors on the very night they stormed to an historic World Series victory couldn't be clearer. For them, the supposed maleficent aspect of the blood moon would seem like a blessing, for it always takes something like a curse to counter a curse. More political minded folks might prefer not to dwell on portents, and just enjoy the show. Who needs another baleful Mars!

Thinking about team colors, though, reminded me of the trite and obnoxious bumper sticker one often sees around Pennsylvania: "If God isn't a Penn State fan, why is the sky blue and white?" It's doubly obnoxious, I thought, because look at what Penn State has done to the dark night skies of my childhood! Due in part to the university's strong, consistent support for I-99 - a highway designed to funnel traffic more quickly to Penn State football games - the sky to the northwest and southeast is ablaze with reflected light from several nearby freeway exits. The northeast portion of the sky harbors a dome of yellow light from the limestone quarry two miles away. This quarry now runs day and night to supply rock for the final sections of I-99, under construction north of here in a series of monstrous gashes along the crest of this same, poor ridge. Now these gashes have begun to bleed acid discharge into two watersheds, poisoning wells and killing wild trout. And last night, as on most other nights, the incessant beeping of quarry trucks marred what would otherwise be an otherworldly stillness. Fuck you, Penn State.

By 11:00, though, the din died down - only to resume again at 5:00 this morning. I sat out on the porch with my coffee a little past six, bathing in the light of the now-recovered moon - so bright it almost hurt to look. My last sight of the lunar eclipse before I went off to bed at 11:11 prompted this memo in my pocket notebook: "It makes me hungry!" I don't believe I was consciously thinking salmon, peach, just feeling an unfocused but powerful longing to reach up and pull this strange circle down to my mouth. Now, as I write, I'm imagining it cold but sweet, and as prone to melt as ice cream in a cone. It's not a bad thing for the pure and the aloof once in a while to take on an earthly stain.

Yesterday morning I found a female marbled orbweaver (Araneus marmoreus) spider dangling in the middle of the old, moss-covered woods road near the top of the field. Unlike many in her species who tend more toward yellow, hers was an abdomen that glowed a fervid orange. She had just completed the first, trail-spanning support strands preparatory to the real spinning, which would take place later in the day, if this source on the World Wide Web is to be believed:

[Marbled orbweaver] spiders build their web at dusk and either wait in the web or in a retreat near the web at night for prey to strike the web. Then the spider runs out and wraps the prey in silk. After the prey is immobilized, the prey is bitten and eventually eaten. Some individuals stay in their webs during the day, but this is not common. They typically rebuild their web each day, or at least the sticky spiral orb part.

Unfortunately, she had picked one of our most well traveled walking trails, used particularly heavily this time of year as the pace of the deer hunt picks up. I thought it would be a good idea to try and move her off the trail - discourage her now, if that were possible, rather than later. I broke the silk and swung her off to the side of the trail. She rappelled to the ground and crouched motionless, head and thorax tucked out of side beneath her huge abdomen. From a couple feet away, the spider looked like some kind of large, exotic seed lying among the equally bright fallen leaves. I crouched down to admire the filigreed pattern, which resembled nothing so much as a five-storied pagoda.

Normally I keep a respectful distance from spiders, but I couldn't resist running one pinky gently over the surface of the abdomen. It felt deliciously smooth, even - what else? - silky.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Dave, you need a woman! But would you say that if I were a Red Sox fan, kneeling in the middle of a street in Boston with tears streaming down my face, thanksgiving on my lips? Satisfaction can take countless forms. Me, all I really want now is a bite of moon. Just one nibble! Then I'll be happy, and the forces of evil can go ahead and swallow the rest of my sky.

¶ 10/28/2004 10:43:00 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/28/2004 08:25:06 AM   

The anatomy of perception (3)

Another blogger to respond to Susan's question about the senses - "Which do you think is the most important?" - was Siona, of Nomen est Numen. She opted for touch. In a subsequent post, she expanded on the theme.

I should make it clear that these poems in the "expected voices" of others are entirely acts of my own imagination. If you want to know what Siona - or Dale, or Susan - really think, read their blogs (all highly recommended, by the way). I hope it's obvious that what I am trying to do here is extract details from various narratives that advance my own argument (such as it is). This very process of selection means that the "I" of these poems is really more me than anyone else.

Once again, the epigraph is from Pascal. (Tomorrow's section should make it clear why I am using his writing in this context.)


3.

We think we are playing on ordinary organs when playing upon man. Men are organs, it is true, but odd, changeable, variable, with pipes not arranged in proper order. Those who know how to play on ordinary organs will not produce harmonies on these.

I am
all mem-
brane
it's true

the brain itself
is an open
wound
folded
into a fist

skinny? but
skin's at
a minimum on
someone
as thin
as me

bony, yes -
except this
skeleton has been
so brutal
bruising
my starved
flesh

back when I was
my own
demon lover
when I wanted
to feel
nothing-
ness

but recovery has
turned me out-
side in
a Möbius strip

I can shut
my eyes
& read the
world's Braille
from within
the world

run your fingers
down along
my spine

do you feel how
my whole
body
blinks?

¶ 10/27/2004 10:24:44 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/27/2004 09:26:30 AM   

The red menace

Overcast at dawn. The backing-up beeping of distant quarry trucks mingles with the cheeps and chirps of finches in the yard. A Carolina wren's inquisitive trill. Qui vive? Not who lives but who goes. Who goes there?

Last night listening to Henry Thomas, strange East Texas bluesman with a penny whistle: "I'm going where I never get hoodooed." Is there really such a place? If someone walks on the site of your future grave, they say, you'll feel the chill regardless of the miles in between.

The aspen leaves have reached their peak of color, that incandescent red-tinged gold. Yesterday afternoon I sat on my porch watching them make conversation with the wind and realized I didn't have any better words for it than that. The aspens shimmered - or shimmied - and dive-bombing ladybugs filled the air.

It was the first day of the annual Asian ladybug invasion. This forced to me to become unusually attentive to my person, brushing the beetles from beard, hair or rim of glasses several times a minute. I was agog - as I always am at first - by the tremendous variation in size, color and number of spots exhibited by this one species. They run the gamut from light orange to deep red, and from no spots to more than twenty. Here's one on my leg that's twice the diameter of a pencil eraser; that one on the porch railing is barely as big as a drop of blood.

But it seems that the price for such variability - surely an index of the species' tremendous adaptability - has been a precipitous drop in native ladybug diversity here in the east. Out-competed by the hordes of aliens, which have been temporarily freed from the checks of their native parasites and diseases, our own ladybug species are disappearing. There are (or were) something like 450 species of ladybug beetles native to the U.S. east of the Mississippi. How many will survive?

I try to recall the last time I saw one of those classic, two-spot ladybugs that used to be so common when I was a kid. Those were the ones we most often sang the morbid little nursery rhyme to: Your house is on fire, your children are gone! They flew away, all right, and they might never come back.

The red maple trees next to the driveway colored up and dropped their leaves in the space of only a few days, all of which were foggy and rainy. This is turning into one of those autumns where the best foliage displays are under one's feet. I find myself craving the glossy sound of a banjo.

Yesterday I was listening to Public Enemy's 1991 album Fear of a Black Planet. Like the Bible, their lyrics admit of multiple readings, and seem eerily prophetic. Brain game, intellectual Vietnam . . . Welcome to the terrordome.

When the temperature drops below 57 degrees F., the ladybugs stop flying. Late in the afternoon, a couple field crickets start up - I had just been wondering if I'd hear any more from their tribe this year. The air is heavy: good for carrying odors, bad for sounds. The train whistle blowing the Plummer's Hollow crossing sounds as if it could be five miles away. The knocking of the rails as the freight cars pass over could be anything, I think - even the mountain's own, faint pulse.

A pileated woodpecker calls from one of the trees in the yard, that mechanical laughter, a prehistoric sound. I catch a glimpse of his flaming crest as he circles a tall locust, probing for ants.

Gray November looms. This could be one of the last warm afternoons of the year. Feeling at peace with myself and the world, whence this sudden urge to get out the rifle and look for something, anything to shoot?

¶ 10/27/2004 08:05:52 AM   

The anatomy of perception (2)

For this section, I borrowed a story from Dale, who was responding in turn to Susan's question about the senses. Once again, the epigraph is from Pascal, and the subject, as in Dale's story, is the late critic Cleanth Brooks.

UPDATE: Lines 5-8 of second stanza rewritten (10/31) in response to an objection from Dale (see comments).


2.

Having assurance only because we see with our whole sight, it puts us into surprise and suspense when another with his whole sight sees the opposite . . . For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and that is bold and difficult.

When the scholar's eyesight fades,
what good are his books?
His library turns as unreadable
as Lascaux: scriptless drama of shapes
on the walls of a cave, the artifice
unglossed within the viscera
where the quarry - tissue
of allusions - still bristles
with bookmarks. That flux of the world
of becoming: to capture is
to kill it. Decipherment leads to loss.
The dance must be primary, he wrote.

I acted briefly as amanuensis,
lent him my eyes for a paper he had to give.
Bending to my task, I felt
of little use, a cheap fiction.
My West Coast accent flattened
the words he loved, robbed them
of shadows - like trading embossed
leather covers for a paperback spine.
Perhaps he sensed, even then, the germ
I carried on my youthful breath,
insidious as any misty paraphrase,
corrosive as hope.

¶ 10/26/2004 06:47:55 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/26/2004 06:45:16 AM   

Hot raccoon sex

Raccoons tend to have either a polygynous or a promiscuous mating system, or some combination of the two. In a polygynous system, a male mates with at least two females. Various forms of polygyny exist, ranging from relatively loose arrangements in which males mate with a number of females seemingly at random, to more organized structures such as those in which a male actively defends a harem within a defined space. Certainly, the raccoon engages in a loose form of this mating system. In fact, its social structure seems so loosely organized in some populations that it has been described as promiscuous. In promiscuous mating, males and females may each couple with various partners throughout the breeding system. This often happens in such a haphazard manner that it is difficult to even characterize this behavior as belonging to a particular system. Again, the raccoon's mating arrangements may vary between the two systems, even concurrently within the same area, depending on the degree to which a male, or perhaps a group of males, has exclusive mating rights to the females in its home range. (Samuel I. Zeveloff, Raccoons: A Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002)

Dontcha just love the way animal behaviorists describe behaviors they don't understand as "haphazard"? And what's up with "mating rights"? One would have thought only humans were so unevolved as to regard females as property!

Though a naturalist should always beware of excessive anthropomorphizing, I think it's worth remembering that, in many ways, raccoons do resemble human beings. They are highly adaptive and omnivorous. They have binocular vision and an exceedingly well-developed sense of touch. Though their forepaws are not quite as sensitive and dexterous as the hands of primates, they do come close - to the consternation of humans who find themselves limited in their ability to lock coons out of something they want access to. They have highly developed vocabularies, as one would expect for creatures with strong social bonds between mothers and offspring. Some researchers feel they are right behind primates in the complexity and flexibility of their associations. They use communal latrines, and they love garbage.

Although some males commonly mate with several females each spring, pair bonds between individuals may still occur in some areas. On the other hand, though a male and female may even den together throughout the winter and bond with one another a month before mating, the female may still breed with several males. (Ibid.)

Bitch.

After the mating period, no associations between males and females are apparent, and the males provide no assistance in rearing the cubs. (Ibid.)

Assholes.

As is true of many carnivores, including canids and pinnipeds, the erectile tissue of the penis is reduced and its function supplanted by a penis bone, the baculum. In the raccoon, the baculum is long and curved, which helps the male maintain vaginal penetration. Mating, which occurs between January and March, immediately after emergence from winter sleep, may last an hour or more. (John O. Whitaker, Jr., and William J. Hamilton, Jr., Mammals of the Eastern United States, Cornell University Press, 1998)

Eyewitness accounts of raccoons fucking are rare, due to their human-like preference for the privacy of a den. Here's one description I found:

A pair of copulating raccoons was observed on February 26, 1954, at the Campbell Farm from 9:05 a.m. to 10:01 a.m. The morning was cloudy (five-tenths [i.e., half?] of sky covered), chilly (estimated to be between 35 and 40 F.), and with a breeze of approximately 15 miles per hour. A young female weighing approximately 10 pounds, and an older male weighing approximately 15 pounds, were in a small grove of saplings on the south bank of the Wakarusa River.

Shrill cries uttered by the female were heard first at 9:05 a.m.; the animals were seen first at 9:09 a.m. when the male, mounted on the female, was tightly holding her in a semi-crouched position with his forelegs immediately in front of her hind legs, and his hind feet were on the ground between hers. He was making rhythmic copulatory movements, consisting of a slow inward motion (requiring three or four seconds) in which he seemed to thrust his penis deeply into the female's vagina, and a faster outward motion (less than one second) as the penis was withdrawn partway and at which time the male's pelvis was elevated and the forepart of his body brought forward and downward. The penis is inserted in the vagina in such a way that the baculum is hooked over the pelvic bone of the female, probably assuring his position on the female [reference omitted]. At each of the quick withdrawing motions the female uttered a sharp rattling cry and often attempted to bite the male by turning her head upward. Her actions frequently caused the pair to lose their footing and fall, the male always holding his position.

At 9:17, the male ceased the thrusting movements, and at 9:19 he began jerking movements, from one side to the other, roughly pulling the hindquarters of the female with him, causing her to utter a short cry. This activity caused the pair to move in a circle with heads toward its center. The vigorous thrusting movements were resumed at 9:29, and at 9:42, the cries of the female diminished except for an occasional whimper. Copulatory movements ceased at 9:46, at which time the pair settled slowly to the ground. The forepart of the male was down with his head over the left side of the female and his hindquarters conspicuously high. Less than two minutes later, the male again was dragging the female in a space approximately ten feet in diameter. At 9:51, thrusting movements, slower than those previously noted, were resumed. The rate of these movements was soon doubled but this time the withdrawing motion of the male was less vigorous and the female was not crying out. These movements were interrupted three times by the male by short circular movements. At 10:01, the male suddenly slipped away from the female and ran rapidly southward. The female hesitated a few seconds, then slowly walked eastward, and entered a ground den. (Howard J. Stains, The Raccoon in Kansas, State Biological Survey [Lawrence, KS], 1956)

Despite the humorously clinical language, in the absence of fuller information on the emotional lives of these animals, it is almost impossible to avoid bias in a description like this. Does the female utter "cries" and "whimpers," or are they really "screams" and "moans"? Stains said the female "often attempted to bite the male," but what did he actually observe? Was this behavior agonistic, as he seems to imply, or playful?

But the observer can hardly help it if he reflects the unconscious biases of his culture. The perception of the male as active, aggressive initiator and female as largely passive responder is built right into the language and mental imagery we use for sex: we tend to picture the vagina as a hole, an empty space waiting to be filled, rather than (for example) a powerful ring of muscles, or a dense matrix (Latin for "womb") of interlocking, life-giving organs and tissues. One can only wonder how a scientifically trained observer from, say, Borneo - where sex practices strongly emphasize female pleasure, and favor plateaus rather than climactic peaks - would have interpreted this same copulation.

Needless to say, the term "promiscuous" is also far from neutral in its connotations. But there's no doubt male raccoons get around. I got this nifty snapshot from my neighbor a while back; I'm not sure where it originated.



This survey wouldn't be complete without a mention of the many cultural uses of raccoon penis bones: as amulets, as jewelry - even as pipe cleaners. This seems to go back to the Indians.

[In 1649, Finnish naturalist Peter Kalm wrote] that the raccoon's oddly curved penis bone - which Linnaeus had noticed while dissecting his pet - was hailed by the Indians as the perfect tool for cleaning their tobacco pipes. (Virginia C. Holmgren, Raccoons: In Folklore, History, and Today's Backyards, Capra Press [Santa Barbara], 1990)

According to my brother Mark, a cultural geographer and Latin Americanist, the use of raccoon baculums as love charms occurs as far south as Central America. The commercial Lucky Mojo website includes a brief essay (or extended catalog copy) on the subject. The author, catherine yronwode, cites her own experience in the Ozarks, and offers a helpful list of vernacular names: love bone, pecker bone, coon dong, possum prick, Texas toothpick and mountain man toothpick. Yronwode stresses their use as love charms and good-luck charms - but of course, part of her aim is to sell the things. To me, the most interesting anecdote was this one:

Early in 1996, my co-worker Susie Bosselmann came into my office and saw my stuff and -- to my surprise, as she is a very "fussy" person who abhors bugs and spiders -- she said, "Ooh, lookie! You've got coon dongs!" She was pointing to the penis bones Larry and Barry had sent to me.

Susie is in her 60s and she grew up in Oklahoma, an area contiguous with Missouri and Texas. I had thought that the wearing of raccoon penis bones was limited to the Midwest, but she expanded my horizons when she said that she and her husband had recently been at a gun show in Kentucky and had seen "a beautiful coon dong necklace, with hundreds of 'em strung together, just like a Cherokee Indian ceremonial necklace." She would have bought it but it was too expensive, she said. I asked her why someone would make a coon dong necklace, and she said, "Well, what ELSE can ya do with 'em?"

I think the raccoons might have a few ideas about that.

¶ 10/25/2004 07:24:27 PM   

The anatomy of perception (1)

This begins a brief series on the anatomy and phenomenology of perception, using quotes from Blaise Pascal, Pensées: Thoughts on Religion and other subjects, translated by William Finlayson Trotter. The original suggestion to discuss the senses (which I refuse to try and enumerate, by the way) came from a post at Susan's blog, so it seems only appropriate that I begin there, with all due apologies for this attempt to speak in her voice. (Susan has shown herself to be a quite competent poet in her own right.)

I expect the series to last the rest of the week. The final sections are at present still in a very rough state.


1.

Let us imagine a body full of thinking members.

The uterus knew what I
& the doctor did not.
It threatened mutiny.

The mind is more than brain,
I'd say, the body's
a net of nerves,

which makes the womb a net
within a net. Mine wasn't
about to let its catch be killed

when the baby still sat
ass-downward & they talked
about turning it. Something,

everything said NO.
I chose the Caesarian.
When they went in, they found me

so deformed, they took
pictures. The baby had sat
the only way she could fit

& turning her would've killed her,
ruptured the uterus. Call it
instinct, sixth sense.

I opted for mild sedation,
& if they'd let me
I would've watched. I was

that detached. Only
the thought of the turning
made my insides flip.

¶ 10/25/2004 02:25:22 PM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/25/2004 02:03:11 PM   

Appalachian ghosts

If I had to choose one word to describe the Appalachian region, it would be haunted. The mountains are full of ghosts. Gone are most of the Indians, their languages and oral literatures with them - unique and irreplaceable ways of looking at the world. Gone from the east are the bison and the wolves, except for a tiny pack of inbred red wolves in North Carolina. Gone forever are the heath hen, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, a single flock of which could once darken the sky for three days with its passage. The mighty American chestnut, source of the strongest timber and some of the best wildlife food in the mountains, has disappeared except for the runty sprouts that live ten or twenty years before succumbing to the blight.

Gone is the great eastern forest, and most of the soil with it. People tend to think of a forest chiefly as a conglomeration of trees, but that's not the half of it. The few remaining tracts of eastern old growth are qualitatively different from the surrounding woods, most noticeably in the depth of the humus, which teems with fungal and microbial life two thirds of which probably belongs on the endangered species list - not that anyone has ever bothered to study and classify it. Only in the last couple of decades have ecologists begun to appreciate the extent to which trees depend upon their fungal associates to perform such basic tasks as nutrient and water uptake. Some of these fungi only produce fruiting bodies underground, depending on animals such red-backed voles and northern flying squirrels to disperse their spores. What happens when one corner of this three-legged stool is removed?

Erosion following repeated clearcutting and associated fires removed 11,000 years' worth of accumulated humus on many steep mountain slopes. Now, non-native, invasive earthworms are rapidly colonizing soils throughout the eastern forest, preventing the formation of new humus and changing the soil chemistry in the process. The Southern Appalachians contain the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world. They are, for example, a major center of terrestrial salamander endemicity; absent a humus layer, it's difficult to believe that very many of these forest floor denizens will survive.

Another familiar and cherished measure of Appalachian biodiversity is the wealth of spring ephemeral wildflowers, slow-growing perennials whose very names are magic: ginseng, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Solomon's seal, wild sarsaparilla, wake robin, may apple, foam-flower, spotted mandarin, trailing arbutus, yellow lady's-slipper, goldenseal . . . These plants are rapidly becoming scarce throughout their ranges, threatened by a seemingly endless litany of threats: acid rain from coal burning power plants; an overabundance of deer; competition with invasive plants better adapted to an earthworm-infested soil; clearcutting; suburban and exurban sprawl; the conversion of hundreds of thousands of acres of rich, moist, mixed-species forests into red pine plantations; and - most horrifying of all - mountaintop removal, a new, more extreme form of strip mining in which vast portions of mountainous West Virginia and Kentucky are being turned into rolling, grassy uplands drained by dead streams and unlikely to support true forests ever again.

The violence of the frontier never really subsided. It merely grew less personal, more institutionalized. While the people who lived here before Europeans came were not exactly peaceful, the idea of conquest was largely unknown to them. Intertribal wars, where children of the enemy were kidnapped and raised as full members of the tribe to replace slain warriors, resembled the low-intensity ground fires the Indians set every few years to promote the growth of deer browse plants and blackberry thickets. The Indians aimed at a rough equilibrium between opposing forces rather than the subjugation or obliteration of a hated foe.

The concept of a nature apart from humanity has no real equivalent in indigenous worldviews. But the essential dignity and integrity of non-human beings - their self-willed quality, their wildness - was respected. Greater-than-human realities were revered, including everything that we understand by the word wilderness and then some. It's all very well to say that our thinking has "advanced" to the point where - perhaps - a bare majority of American citizens might have some appreciation for these perspectives. But until the underlying social and economic structures change, all the sympathetic understanding in the world won't do much good. The very people who claim to care the most about nature are the ones building new homes on lots gouged out of the forest. The conquest continues.

STORIES AT EVENING
(A Suburban Mother Tells Stories to Her Son)
by Louise McNeill

My great great grandpa Jethro walked
The wild savannas deep in grass;
He saw the herds of buffalo
File westward through the mountain pass.

Great grandpa William in his time
Remembered pigeons wild and gray
Whose thousand wings beat out the sun
The morning that they flew away.

My grandpa Frederick could recall
The wild trout flashing in their school;
He set his stick of dynamite
And scooped a hundred from the pool.

My father, Douglas, saw the trees.
Across this bare, eroded land,
He saw the tulip tree and ash,
The spruce and hemlock - virgin stand.

And I myself at morning saw
The chestnut on the ridge - its living green -
The blue-fringed gentian . . .

Listen now, my son -
Stories at evening - wonders I have seen;
And as we sit, look sharp and well remember -
Your son may hear the strangest tale of all:
How little rabbits hopped across our garden,
How grass grew by the wall,
And there, one night, when you were six or seven,
You heard a bobwhite call.

(Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)

Since McNeill wrote that poem, in the late 1960s or early 70s, populations of northern bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) have declined throughout its range. In all my 38 years, I have never heard a bobwhite call.

*

Thus, the ghost stories we love to scare each other with this time of year point to darker realities, for me. Of course, the Appalachian region abounds with stories of witches, haints and other uncanny beings. I say "uncanny" rather than "supernatural" because some, such as the fabled white stag or Will o' the Wisp, have a basis in reality.

When my brothers and I were young, we used to go trick-or-treating over to our only neighbor's house largely for the legends and lies Margaret was all too willing to feed our young imaginations with. One she told might be called . . .

The Headless Hunter

Way back in the late 19th century, two teenage boys were hunting deer on the end of the ridge above the railroad tracks. When darkness came on, they started down the knife-edge toward their homes in Upper Tyrone Forge. Only one boy carried a carbide lamp, but the other walked confidently in front, shotgun slung over his shoulder. When he tripped over a root in the darkness, his gun discharged, blowing the other boy's head off. For ever after, until the last house along the crossing was abandoned in the 1960s, folks in Upper Tyrone Forge said they could look up at the mountain on dark nights in late October and see a light moving through the woods where the dead hunter was still looking for his head.

For another of Margaret's "Legends of Plummer's Hollow," I'm indebted to the superior memory of my brother Steve:

The Phantom Fallen Woman

One summer in the early years of the 20th century, George Plummer brought a mysterious young woman home from Pittsburgh with him, and informed the family of tenant farmers living in what we now call the Guest House that she would be staying in the main house for the rest of the summer. They thought it peculiar that she almost never showed herself outside during daylight hours, spending all her time in the dark, upstairs bedroom at the north end of the house. It seemed that she had musical training of some sort. Mr. Plummer - by this time, a wealthy man - bought a small church organ at auction and installed it there for her, and the tenants told Margaret's mother that they often heard her playing the organ and singing concert music in a fine soprano voice.

Late in the summer, the reason for her visit leaked out: she was unmarried and with child, and as a friend of the family, it was said, she had been invited to spend her period of confinement in the welcome solitude of Plummer's Hollow, far from wagging tongues. She gave birth to a child at the end of the summer and returned to Pittsburgh, where she died shortly thereafter. (My brother says Margaret was fuzzy on the details: how she died, and whether the baby lived.)

In the years following her death, a number of families living in the tenant house reported hearing the sound of an organ coming from that upstairs room, though oddly this never happened during the summer, when people were living there, only in the long months when the house was shuttered up. As late as 1970, someone walking across the back slope claimed she heard the unmistakable sound of a woman's voice singing a very strange-sounding song with words she couldn't make out. She was frightened out of her wits and fled down the hill as fast as she could run.

With the arrival of the Bonta family in 1971, as my brother put it in an e-mail, "the unquiet spirit of the fallen woman seems to have found peace." We have never seen or heard anything uncanny here in all our years of occupancy.

Well, almost nothing. Living in the aforementioned Guest House - also once thought to harbor a ghost - I have grown accustomed to a huge range of noises that might spook a visitor. The house was built in stages in a rather haphazard fashion, which resulted in an unusual number of crawl spaces above, below and between sections. I've gotten used to scraping, sliding, chewing, and tapping noises, things that go bump and things that chatter their teeth, things that wail and whimper and moan. I generally ascribe the uncannier noises to either raccoons or porcupines; the others could be anything from mice to woodchucks, bats, flying squirrels or one of three species of snakes that I know share the house with me. When it gets really cold in January, the plank walls can pop audibly as they contract. And once in a rare while, I do hear a sound I simply can't place. Sometimes, the hair rises on the back of the neck despite my best efforts to laugh it off.

I guess we're a lot less fearful about living way out in a lonely, northeast-facing hollow than a lot of folks might be. One of my cousins from suburban New Jersey won't spend the night in our guest bedroom because, she says, she finds the silence itself unnatural and unsettling. To us, living with an interstate right over the ridge to the west and a noisy quarry to the east, it's never quiet enough. We mourn the fact that generations of fearful white folks with guns have left us such a tamed and diminished land. This mountain probably hasn't had any rattlesnakes in a hundred years. Until the late 1980s, black bears were a rare sight. One of the last wolves in Pennsylvania was shot on this very mountain back in the 1870s or 80s. Coon hunters still scare themselves with tales of coyotes following them and their dogs through the woods at night, their howls growing nearer and nearer . . .

Our own hunter friends are pretty commonsense folks, but they never mind telling a good story on themselves. One of them, Jeff, once told me about an incident that befell him early one morning, well before daylight. He had parked at the bottom and was climbing the side of the hollow, heading for his tree stand, when he heard something rustling close behind him in the dry leaves. As soon as he stopped, the noise stopped. He started up the hill again and there it was, following just as close. He walked faster, but whatever it was kept right up. "Finally I was just running, you know, but I got out of breath and had to stop. That's when I noticed there was a long strap hanging out of the back pocket of my coat!"

His brother Troy told a more spooky, but still believable, tale about a time when he was still-hunting for turkey, leaning up against a tree over in Margaret's Woods, dressed all in camouflage. Suddenly he heard a loud voice: "You can't hide!" He looked all around, but nobody was there. Then he heard it again. "You can't hide!" It was coming from right overhead! He looked up into the branches of the tree, and there was a crow staring back at him. It cawed as if it were laughing at him, then flew away.

Troy is not a man given to wild flights of imagination. "I ran back to the truck," he told us, "and when Paula come down, she seen right away something wasn't right." "He was white as a sheet!" his wife confirmed, adding that she made him tell the tale a number of times before she finally believed him. They both seemed relieved when my dad described a talking crow he had seen as a kid. "It's probably someone's pet that escaped," he said - and thus another potentially supernatural story was brought to earth.

*

Margaret's house has stood empty for over a decade now. We were able to buy the property when the lumberman was done with it, and we maintain trails and a parking lot for our hunter friends over there. Kids from the valley have snuck up and gone through the place at least once; Dad and I boarded up the windows and doors to try and prevent liability in case of an accident. Even before that, it was depressing to go in there, with the moldy flotsam from two generations of lonely and impoverished mountain people scattered all around. Margaret was, in life, a paranoid and suspicious person with a great local reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. According to a now-deceased hunter friend of her brother's, some prostitution went on in the house back during the Depression. (I'm paraphrasing; the exact words were, "They used to run a cathouse up there, you know!") But for all that, as far as I know, no unquiet spirits have been seen or heard there in the thirteen years since Margaret died.

LEAVINGS

1.

Over the years we bought it piece by piece,
this hollow that still bears the name
of its 19th-century homesteader on the topo maps.
Lawyers framed the title transfers in proper terms
& the county courthouse took note,
whiting out the now-redundant property lines
on its own maps that admit no extraneous detail:
no creeks or contours that might signal a watershed,
no shading (say) to plot the alternation
of field & "unimproved woodlot,"
the land parceled out in jagged shards.

But for all that our deeds were driven
by our love for the uncut forest, who are we
to put our name down here as if
it were some magic seed that could set
root overnight? It’ll take us years
to grow out of our wariness,
skulking like feral cats around Margaret’s place.

2.

Twenty years ago, in the flush of first purchase,
in between battles with blizzard, flood & drought
my father followed every lead
through a century of local newspaper files & tax records,
unearthed the barest of clues to the hollow’s history:
Margaret’s artist mother must’ve
married a ne’er-do-well, for she had
half her land lumbered in 1901 to pay
back taxes, & sold the other half for a song
to settle a grocery bill, her own
uncle Jacob calling the tune.

The scarred land healed. By the 1970s
the third-growth woods gave ample cover
to the shadiest of dealings,
bore witness to a separate truth - soon enough
to be violated in turn. While each
of the two elderly cousins - arrogant
nouveau riche and "poor white trash" -
ravaged by alcoholism, however genteel -
strung up for us the other’s skeleton
in a common closet of lies.

3.

One hot June morning I amble over,
shovel in hand. You never know,
treasures of dubious lineage keep turning up.
Like its late occupant the place still holds
a few cards close.

Below the house the huge
catalpa tree’s in bloom, littering the driveway
with pale monkey-faced blossoms,
& the other catalpa up by the outhouse
harbors in its dense shade a weed-free iris bed
& a mob of sweet william gone native
with multihued abandon. At 96 degrees Fahrenheit
the cumulative scent from the yard becomes
an almost visible miasma.

I nose about the grounds, sizing up
the ancient fruit trees:
Keifer pear, a thicket of plum,
Concord grape on a stalwart trellis,
a half-dead quince
& the sprout-clogged branches that already droop
with this year’s apple crop:
Baldwin. Pippin. Winesap. Smokehouse.
The mottled trunks of these last survivors
from an orchard abandoned in the ’40s
could exhaust an artist’s palette.

The house has proved less hardy.
Two winters of heavy snows & a rampant wisteria
have conspired against both porches,
& the whole back half of the house
meanders on a collapsed foundation,
senile with rot.

4.

Fifteen feet away I come to a stop.
Memories of Margaret’s ghost stories
from childhood Halloweens
are summoned up by a multiphonic hum
and an odor overpoweringly sweet.
I look up: honeybees beard the attic gables
crowding the cracks like subway commuters at rush hour.
These are, no doubt, distant descendants
of the bees Margaret kept for decades
in boxes above the orchard - my pets,
she used to laugh. I press my ear
against the faded clapboard
to listen to the roar: no seashell’s
echo of my own bloodsurf, but the actual
pulse of the house, murmuring
like an industrial loom from
the gentle fricative welding of warp to weft.

I step back to watch the bees.
After a while I start to see a pattern
in their lines of flight, spokes
of a spinning wheel drawing in nectar
from every blossoming corner of the yard.
The hive couldn’t have found a fortress
more impregnable to marauding bears
than these catacombed walls.
From every crevice their coffers overflow
& Margaret’s house weeps honey
the way a tree leaks sap.

5.

Groggy from the heat, awash in sweat
I resume my walk, if only for
the illusion of a breeze. A pool of shade
beckons from behind the tumbledown shed
where the steel-ribbed frame of a chaise lounge
flowers orange with rust.

I weave through the trees above the spring,
leap the low mound with its stray runners
of barbed wire marking the old line
& plunge into the field, a cloud of pollen
from the brome as I swing my shovel,
clean blade catching the sun.

¶ 10/23/2004 03:00:02 PM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/23/2004 10:47:48 AM   

After the show

Appalachian Week continues at Via Negativa with a reminiscence from my troubled youth (as opposed to my troubled middle-age).

Naked to his waist, the skinny white kid from Duncansville, Pennylvania doesn't sing, he scream-vomits. His torso contorts in paroxysms of stylized rage as he gasps for air, hurling each phrase at the sweat-drenched audience:

EVERYTHING'S BEEN DONE

EVERYTHING'S BEEN TRIED

NOTHING

WORKS

And with that the band kicks in. In front of the makeshift stage - one end of the basement roped off with yellow CAUTION tape - the human maelstrom resumes. Someone scales the speaker stack and leaps off, trusting in the kindness of strangers to keep him from hitting the glass-strewn floor.

We've reached the bottle-smashing stage of the evening. At these parties, everyone wears boots for a good reason. By the end of the night, my housemates and I will have an inch or two of shattered glass to sweep up. I watch anxiously from the rear as people swing from the exposed pipes like punk Tarzans.

My friend Bill, hanger-on and roadie, stands against the wall to the left of the stage, a big grin on his face and a 12-pack of Milwaukee's Best under one massive arm. This is his second twelve-pack of the evening. He averages seven minutes per can - I've timed him. As he finishes each can, he crumples it and tosses it into the mosh pit. Like tossing a cat into the spin cycle - it's always fun to see what direction it will fly out in.

It's all good, clean, violent fun. In this particular corner of the punk rock underground, hippies, straight-edgers and metal heads are tolerated; only homophobic rednecks and racist skinheads risk getting their asses kicked. There does exist, however, a sharp but unspoken social division between the kids who grew up in the suburban bubble of State College and those from anywhere outside it - self-confessed hicks from bumfuck nowhere. Most of the former come from comfortable backgrounds; their parents are professionals, and most of them can expect to be the same someday. In their politics as in their musical tastes, they are sophisticated purists.

Not so the hicks. For them, the stakes are much higher. The two punk shows I attended in Altoona had a more desperate and dangerous tone than these friendly basement bashes in State College. People entered the mosh pit expecting to get hurt; there wasn't any rasta-style pogoing or ironic variations on the tango. If anyone can be said to have - as the punk anthem puts it - "no future," it would be these kids from the rust belt and the sticks. Good factory jobs are disappearing - not that too many of the folks on stage or in the mosh pit would accept that such a thing could exist in the first place. Meth labs are sprouting up in the more remote hollows where moonshine was once distilled.

These are the rebels, the misfits. Every society has them. The Appalachians, with their history of extreme individualism, seem to have more than their fair share. Contrary to stereotypes, mountain people are among the least likely to attend church of all surveyed groups of Americans. During the Civil War, it was in the mountains that families' loyalties were most sharply divided.

There's little sense of regional identity, no cultural pride. These kids profess nothing but scorn for parents and siblings who listen to Hank Williams Jr. and live for Friday night high school football games. They cultivate an exaggerated mimic of their native accent, to the delight of the State College kids for whom rural white culture is an oxymoron. In a moment of levity between songs, the singer raises his arms in a mock Nazi salute and calls out: "To you'ns I say . . . "

"FUCK YOU'NS!" the locals shout back.

Bill grins at me from the other side of the room, hurls a beer can in my general direction. That means he wants to talk. I elbow my way through the crowd. "Hey, you fucking hippie!" he calls out affectionately. "What's up, faggot?"

I am allowed to say this only because I know him - not that Bill is ever shy about his homosexual tendencies. And we both enjoy the shocked looks this garners from the politically correct State College kids.

"Fuck any sheep lately?"

"Hell no! I'm too busy with my sister!"

Bill hands me a beer, then motions me to lean in closer. "Chris just bought a huge bag of pot. Come on out to the car right after the show!"

"Is it any good?"

He wrinkles his nose. "Nah, not really. It's local - just what some guy grew up on Wopsanonnack. You have to smoke a ton of it before you feel anything. But the price was right!"

*

My housemate Darren comes over, grinning from ear to ear. "Hey, did you see that old guy with the cane? He was great!"

It seems that Darren had been sitting out on the front stoop the other afternoon, enjoying a breakfast beer, when an old fellow walked by and gave him a friendly glance. I guess Darren figures that anyone who can see past the pink mohawk is O.K.

"Hey, where are you going?" he called out.

"Just walkin' home, son, just walkin' home."

"You look like you could use a beer!"

So they sat and talked for an hour or two, Darren said, and the old guy waved his cane about with excitement as he described the fun he used to have when he was Darren's age - the whiskey he drank, the fights he got into, the hearts he broke. So Darren invited him to stop by the next evening. He had never heard of punk rock, but it sounded like a good time, he said.

He showed up around eleven, just as things were getting going. Darren said the guy stood at the bottom of the cellar steps for a few minutes, taking it all in with a gleam in his eye. Then he leaned his cane against the wall and waded into the mosh pit.

"He isn't very big, you know - but then, neither am I. He just did whatever I did, bouncing off people and having a good time. His arms were turning around like windmills!"

"Where is he now?" I ask.

"Oh, he said he had to get home. Said his wife was gonna beat his ass, so he might as well get it over with.

"He broke his glasses, though," Darren adds mournfully. "I offered him some money out of the cover fees, but he wouldn't take it. He said he thought he should pay us - he'd never seen anything like this!"

*

The bowl is basic industrial - the kind made from copper pipe fittings. The cannabis is, as advertised, weak. More drunk than stoned, we pledge eternal friendship. What this means is illustrated by reference to some of the State College kids. "That one guy, K., he acts all friendly 'n 'at, wants to hang out. But every time he gives you a beer, you know he's keeping track."

"Fuck that!" the drummer says. "If you're friends, that means you don't keep track! Right, boys?" A chorus of "Hell yeahs!"

I pipe up with the old saw about how you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose. "We do!" Bill says, and he and the bass player proceed to pull snot from each other's nostrils. I stand corrected.

"Here's what we say," Bill informs me. "'You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, and you can pick your friend's nose. But you can't roll your friends up into little balls and flick them against the wall!'"

"Wow, man," I say, playing the blissed-out stoner for their amusement. "That's so far out!"

*

Five in the morning, and nearly time for bed. I'm sitting at the kitchen table listening to the life story of a 17-year-old girl from Huntingdon. L. has blond hair, a classically thin, Appalachian face, pale blue eyes and a perpetually anxious expression. I know her older brother pretty well, but this is the first I've had much of a conversation with her.

Tonight she seems especially woebegone. I gather that she has been sleeping with Darren, off and on, but tonight he's got someone else in there. "I'm really not looking forward to the drive back home," she says sadly, shooting me a hopeful look.

I know some men find this kind of vulnerability irresistible. Me, I'm fighting the urge to give her a reassuring pat on the head. I murmur something sympathetic, I don't remember what. But it's all she needs. Soon I am hearing more than I really want to know about domestic violence, incest, an abortion last year. Her every sentence ends tentatively, a rising intonation inviting agreement, affirmation. "Oh geez," I say. Or, "Wow." "Damn." "Holy shit." At appropriate junctions I follow up with questions, remembering the lesson my father - a recovered shy person - had taught me: always ask people about themselves.

At six-thirty I walk her to her car; she's good and sober, as am I. We shake hands. "Hang in there," I say. Her eyes are a little damp. Only now, some twelve years later, does it occur to me that she may not ever have been listened to quite that way before.

*

I think she made it. I ran into her once several years later, and she told me she was a sophomore at Penn State, following her brother's lead. She still seemed pretty clueless, but then I'm not one to talk.

As for the other 17-year-old girl I didn't sleep with that night - the one who lay passed out on my bed in a pool of her own urine the whole time I was listening to L.'s life story - she died later that year in a drunken accident. Partying in a strange house, she opened what she thought was the door to the bathroom and tumbled down a steep set of cellar stairs, snapping her neck.

A lot of the people I used to party with have died, for some reason. I can't get over the thought that, in some fundamental way, I failed them. The few people from that scene I still keep up with were all State College kids.

The last I saw Bill, he had grown a mustache and no longer shaved his head. "I hang out at the redneck bars down in 'Toona town now," he said. "There's fights there every night! Bodies go flying, people get knifed - it's great!"

"You're as full of bullshit as ever, I see."

"It's true! I just stand there and watch, you know, and drink my beer. You can get used to anything."

¶ 10/22/2004 03:29:51 PM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/22/2004 01:28:50 PM   

Uncurious George

Tom Montag has just posted a must-read cri de coeur, Dear Friends Who Read, by Wisconsin writer Martha Bergland. This is one of the most powerful indictments of the Bush regime that I've seen.

. . . And then they went back in the house and blew their noses and made a pot of coffee and there was a little smile between them, a quiet moment of domestic happiness that will never come again. The sun will come up again and again and again on days that he will not be in. She will never see him again, feel the comfort of his warm body in the night. Her life in her house is destroyed.

You can imagine this because you read. You feel what other people feel. George Bush can't imagine this. George Bush doesn't read . . .

¶ 10/21/2004 03:18:56 PM   

"Alone in the world": hill country women

I wrote the following poem back in 1992. My mother included it on the dedication page of her book Appalachian Autumn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), a synoptic nature book that included a description of the clearcut logging of a 100-acre portion of Plummer's Hollow that had once belonged to the McHugh family.

PLUMMER'S HOLLOW ELEGY
in memoriam Margaret McHugh

When her mind went they took her away
from the house in the hollow where she’d lived
forty years in combat readiness
with her dog & her shotgun, a color TV
& her dead brother’s artificial legs standing
guard at the top of the stairs.

Her ancestors’ land had been sold out from under her
& clear-cut by the absentee owner
who couldn’t be bothered with a mother’s deathbed
commandment half a century old:
Don’t let anyone lumber the mountain again.
She’ll never survive a third cutting
& neither will you.

*

From the other end of Appalachia, in northern Georgia, here's an excerpt from an interview with Anna Howard, 93 at the time (1973, or a few years before: this was included in Foxfire 2, edited by Eliot Wigginton and published by Anchor/Doubleday). For all you city people, "locust" refers to a very hard wood, black or yellow locust, often used for fence posts because of its resistance to rot. The oldest portion of my house, built right after the Civil War, rests on a sill of locust instead of a rock foundation. The bark is still intact.

"A STAKE THAT WON'T BUDGE": Anna Howard

God can put it on your heart or mine anything he wants you t'do, and I know he can. He has mine. Pray about things you don't know what t'do about. It'll come to you just as plain.

And I try t'be all th'same alike. I don't talk about people. I don't say no harm about nobody and all they do. It says in th'Bible t'do unto others as we wish t'be done by, and I feel that way about that. And I feel like if you're in earnest and got faith in th'Lord and ask him for anything, he'll put it right in your mind. . . .

Kindness and love is th'main thing. Now that's my advice. It's good to know you got a friend. It's love. Just like I made [a friend] out of you. I see people that their looks and their ways just a'gives t'you, and you love 'em. And th'next time you see'em, you love'em better.

I've not had too much of a happy time since my old man died. And after my children left, I just felt alone in th'world. And when all my people died - everyone that passes on out, I just feel like I'm further and further away. Yes, sir.

So now I knit socks a lot. I just love t'do that. If I ain't got anybody t'talk to me, now I'm bound t'have somethin' in my fingers. If I'm able t'hold my head up, I'm bound t'have somethin' in my fingers t'employ my mind. . . .

I've been made fun of for bein' old-fashioned, but it don't matter t'me a bit in th'world. If anyone tries to run over me, they'll find they've run up against a stake that won't budge 'cause it's made out a'locust! I've always done th'work of a man. God's been good t'me. He's given me strength.

*

My grandmother was a far less god-fearing woman. She grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania: still very much in the Appalachians, but culturally closer to New England than Appalachia. This portion of the state was largely settled by pioneers from Connecticut in the 18th century; my grandmother's people were among those settlers.

Although Grandma was a very reticent person, she was always kind toward us kids, teaching us how to draw and helping with other craft projects. She was fairly intellectual, and much more adventuresome and open-minded than her husband, my grandpa. A four-month sojourn in Peru with my parents a few years before her death may have been the high point of her life. I wrote the following poem in her voice shortly after her death; it may or may not accurately represent her view of life. I felt justified in taking the liberty because, of all my immediate relatives, she is the one I most take after - with a little bit of my other grandmother's more acerbic personality thrown in.

DREAMER
in memoriam Margaret Ide Bonta

I spent my tomboy girlhood on horses
rambling through orchards & the molehills
we fancied mountains, just south
of the glacier's plow line. My brothers
taught me all the arcana of knots & hitches
I call to mind now, tied to an oxygen tank,
the transparent umbilicus bridled to my nostrils.

The man I married grew up in town
& loved the country for its range of practical puzzles.
But for my part, I preferred the ocean's
implausible clues: polished stones & glass & wood
on a beach asymptotic to the hyperbole of waves,
tidepool anemones like stars collapsing, turning inward,
conch & clamshell pressing their ears to the sand.

All the men of my family were hardheaded Methodists
for whom speech was more vital than prayer.
But I always found piety jarring—the minister's
baited candy. Like the scent of a bear in the barn
one day as I rode my favorite Clydesdale in,
standing barefoot on his back like a circus performer,
reins in one hand. When that massive
draft horse shied he sent me flying, really flying,
ponytailed hair & calico skirts ballooning.

My sister & I were like that: we smoked,
we drank a little, we rode along behind
on our brothers' motorcycles. But when
it came time to marry, we did. Hank & I settled
in calm suburban waters, had three sons—
if I'd had a daughter, I wouldn't have known
what to do! And when he retired, we bought
a small house on the ocean, 'way down south—
a house built on sand, true,
but protected by seawalls from the storm surge

until these last couple years when everything
got me at once, & the songs my mother
sang to me in the crib
suddenly after all this time pop into my head.
It's as if you were to find a bottle, say,
on the high tide's windrow—& the message inside
were written in your own hand,
in childish shaky letters.
I just lie here humming & wondering where I've been.

I'm in pain, of course, but it's not so bad
that they have to take me out back & shoot me
just yet! The main thing is, my mind's still clear,
neither too fast nor too slow. Makes me think
of my favorite Robert Burns song, do you know it?
"Flow Gently Sweet Afton."

Well, we don't need to sing the whole thing now.
There'll be plenty of time later, when I'm gone.

*

The folklorist James York Glimm has written two books on central and north-central Pennsylvania; the following selection is from his second, Snakebite: Lives and Legends of Central Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Glimm writes, "Storytelling has sometimes been assumed to be a man's province, but I have found that women informants have at least as much to say and can tell stories just as well. . . . As a younger man I was more interested in the frontier hunting and fishing stories that men like to tell. Women don't tell many hunting yarns, but they tell other kinds of stories that give a detailed and personal picture of the world they lived in years ago." One of the exceptions to this rule was 82-year-old Catherine Voce, who reminisced happily about living in a cabin 'way up on a mountainside in the 30s, growing most of their own food and hunting deer with her husband. This is the conclusion of her interview with Glimm.

SHOOTING THE NEIGHBORS: Catherine Voce

If I were young again and had wings to fly, I'd fly back up on the mountain above Rock Run and live in our cabin. When you're young and in love, it makes all the difference. All I heard were the birds, a distant cowbell, and sometimes the S. and N.Y. whistle when the wind was right. I was in love and I was happy.

That's enough talk. Let's go outside and stretch a bit. I'll show you my garden. Maybe I can get that other woodchuck that's been eating me out of house and home. Hand me that four-ten over there, and watch out, 'cause it's loaded.

Now, here's where Mr. Coon comes for his cat food every night. I ought to shoot him, but I can't. He's so big. Sits here outside the screen door and licks his paws and goes, "Mmm yum, yum, yum." Lately he gets here early, or Mr. Possum will beat him out. Quarter to nine. Now this is my sweet apple tree. The porcupines love sweet apples. Two years ago I killed so many I stopped counting. Maybe seventeen. They come off the mountain and wake me up at night with their weird sounds. Did you ever hear them? It's a "Wee-wee-yum-yum-yee-yee-mum-mum" noise, like that, and I don't like it. So I get up in the night with my .410 and my flashlight and shoot them. One night I got six. I buried them behind the barn in the soft soil. No, I don't like porcupines. Come on. Keep low and quiet and maybe we can get a shot at Mr. Woodchuck.

It's so overgrown around my garden, I can't keep up. There are currants, asparagus, potatoes, garlic, and tomatoes. Now, look inside that pen. Just look at that lettuce. Oh! He's eating me out of house and home. I put boards up and he goes right under - look at that. Watch out - I've got a muskrat trap over there. One way or another, I'll get him. That? Oh, that's just a black snake. Leave him. He's OK. Here, take some garlic home with you.

*

Finally, a selection of Appalachian women's voices wouldn't be complete without the West Virginia poet Louise McNeill (1911-1993). In the last years of her life she and editor Maggie Anderson collaborated on a volume of new and selected poems, Hill Daughter, published by (who else?) the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1991.

Anderson notes in her introduction that "The work of many writers from the southern Appalachian Mountains is a record of painful journeyings, away from what Kentucky poet James Still has called 'the earth loved more than any other earth,' off to the bright promise and the brighter economies of the cities. Louise McNeill's life and work reflect those journeyings. The 'paradox,' as she has named it, is, in part, that the very opportunities that call mountain writers away from home also cut them off from the deepest sources of the writing itself, from its original impulses in a beloved place and people."

McNeill's poems are, in a word, devastating.

POET
by Louise McNeill

I am the trajectory and flight -
The archer, arrow, and the bow -
The swift parabola of light -
And I the rising and the flow,
The falling feather of the cock,
The point, propulsion, and the flood
Of blackbirds twanging from the nock,
And I the target and the blood.

*

WARNING
by Louise McNeill

Walk through the fern but do not tear the root.
Rest on the stump but count no ring of age.
In rotting wood see neither hint nor sign,
Nor translate from the oak leaf's fallen page
One mystic line.

Look at the wheat field, see it blade and straw,
But neither bread nor sealed-in germ nor shadowy reaper -
Leave the close ground its anonymity,
Such knowledge to the blind mole and the worm -
The gray night-creeper.

Leave the enigma to the close-lipped dark;
Beyond your fenced-in land do not inquire -
For things there be best hidden:
Light that only the blind should see -
And over the hills in that far country
Truth bare, forbidden.

¶ 10/21/2004 01:11:36 PM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/21/2004 01:09:50 PM   

Get radical

Wendell Berry is pissed.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

Read and act.
¶ 10/20/2004 05:40:50 PM   

Self knowledge

I just found an old notebook from 1998. It contains some quotes from the German film director Werner Herzog, from an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air" (October 27, 1998). I am not absolutely sure that the following quote is verbatim, but the fact that I included ellipses suggests it might be. Probably I taped it and made a transcription.

I'd rather die, I'd rather jump from the Golden Gate Bridge before I would go to an analyst. . . . It's a hysteria, here in America in particular, to "discover your inner self" and talk about "inner growth" and all these stupid things. Once in a while, it is very sane, it is almost clinically sane, to take a certain distance from yourself, and to look at yourself with a certain caution . . . What's wrong with the analysts is that - let me put it in a different way. When you rent an apartment, and you illuminate it with neon lights to its very last corner, and you put lights everywhere, the apartment becomes uninhabitable.

Werner Herzog

This reminds me of several other things.

In Western houses we [Japanese] are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be a fraud. Many a time have we sat a festive board contemplating, with a secret shock to our digestion, the representation of abundance on the dining room walls. Why these pictured victims of the chase and sport, the elaborate carvings of fish and fruit? Why the display of family plates, reminding us of those who have died and are dead?

Kikazu Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906)

*

Without "chaos", no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress. Ideas which today form the very basis of science exist only because there are such things as prejudice, conceit, and passion; because these things opposed reason; and because they were permitted to have their way. We have to conclude, then, that even within science reason cannot and should not be allowed to be comprehensive and that it must often be overruled, or eliminated, in favour of other agencies. There is not a single rule that remains valid under all circumstances and not a single agency to which appeal can always be made.

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge (1975)

*

Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. "Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation - for what? . . . And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," What Are People For? (1990)

*

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and blacktail deer. I breathe the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voice to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms . . .

And like the alder and the spruce, the brown bear and the black oystercatcher, the mink and great horned owl, I bring the earth inside myself as food. . . . The rivers run through my veins, the winds blow in and out with my breath, the soil makes my flesh, the sun's heat smolders inside me. A sickness or injury that befalls the earth befalls me. A fouled molecule that runs through the earth runs through me. When the earth is cleansed and nourished, its purity infuses me. The life of the earth is my own life. My eyes are the earth gazing at itself.

Richard Nelson, The Island Within (1989)

¶ 10/20/2004 01:05:13 PM   

Appalachian fall



1.
Black birch roots above the water.
Witch hazel blooming against the rocks.

2.
Above the water: a spring half covered with birch leaves - yellow - & the red and orange of maples.
Against the rocks: boulders as big as you want.
One in particular that hikers circumambulate, patting its elephant-gray sides.

3.
The stream can't decide whether to flow over or under the ground.
If you put your ear down low, you can hear it trickling through caverns full of salamanders & stolen moonlight.

4.
The birch won't be here long - no more than a single human lifetime.
Its trunk rests on four columns, two tercet arches above the water.
A winter wren darts from grotto to grotto.
When he pauses to sing, you think, this is how rivers get started.

5.
Rain & fog.
Pale yellow rays of witch hazel against the dark rocks, the moss-backed boulders.
What we notice depends on how often we stop, how well we listen.
You don't need to know the names of anything, really.

6.
The birch in all likelihood doesn't care about its reflection.
Witch hazel will scatter its seeds through small explosions; it doesn't need the birds.
Trees die & fall - or vice versa - but are far from dead.
Wren gleans silverfish & millipede, bark beetle, caddis fly: all small things that scuttle, flutter, flow.

7.
The mountain emerges as a series of rests, an improvised pause.
You climb past the boulders in the rain, humming, a shock of white hair under a dark umbrella.

¶ 10/20/2004 08:55:02 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/20/2004 08:53:41 AM   

Ignorant

The more we think we know, the deeper our ignorance. An ignorant person is someone who mistakes his or her habitual views for reality and reacts defensively to new perspectives and ideas. Ignorance partakes of that proverbial contempt - for others, for oneself - bred by a long and uncurious familiarity. I am ignorant when I think this hillside full of rock oaks and mountain laurel has little more to teach me. I only have to go two steps off the trail to remind myself of the limits of my usual perspective.

Intellectuals are among the most ignorant of people, because we tend to have the most highly developed and strenuously defended views. And needless to say, such ignorance becomes deadly when it shapes corporate decision-making and government policy.

Knowing that we know nothing, on the other hand, is the beginning of true awareness. That's why most dogs seem wiser than their masters, and so many truths can be found among the songs and sayings of the so-called common people.

In local parlance, here in central Pennsylvania, ignorant means uncouth, rude, offensive. That's not entirely separate from the kind of ignorance I'm talking about here, as the following example of usage shows.

Some time back in the mid 80s my brother was dating a woman from South Africa of multiracial ("colored") ethnicity. When he took her to meet a few of his friends in Altoona, they were curious about her background, never having heard much about South Africa. My brother explained a little bit about the apartheid system, and one of the women reacted with great indignation: "That's so ignorant!"

Now, I suppose that better-educated folks would say that anyone back in the 80s who didn't already know about apartheid must have been deeply ignorant. But in fact, the woman in question was, my brother said, very curious and open-minded - quite opposite from the learned architects of - and public apologists for - the apartheid system.

You might call such a woman backward, but again you'd be at variance with local usage. Around here, backward means shy - and it isn't such a bad thing to be. It's far better than having a swelled head.

¶ 10/19/2004 10:36:12 AM   

Words on the street


¶ 10/19/2004 10:05:39 AM