jonas's dream

Jonas dreamed it.

A forest of redwoods,

being milled for quick money

guarded by robots      programmed to send

laser beams at anything that moved.

He and new friends dodged the lasers 

and hid in the trees.

Eventually, the corporation responsible for milling

the thousands of years of life the redwoods brought 

as a quick return to the market

set up a compound of concrete to train 

human beings in the skill of killing

and enforcing someone's idea of law and order.

Jonas found the answer in the trees.

There were mushrooms growing in the canopy

that made the remaining trees strong

and could eat through the human walls

the corporation had created,

could eat through the desire to dull human beings

into the likeness of machines.

They dispersed the spores through the fire of robots

through the fire of bullets

and invaded the base.

The spores set to work.

Their escape, in an army transport plane,

was victory, as they watched

the whole place

be reclaimed

by the mushrooms, by the trees.

The Inhabitant

The Inhabitant

-For Tiba

When you look, the silence hardens behind you.
We must accept all we’ve lost as necessary.
Each day the sun calls all creatures to worship.
When a friend places a hand on your blindfolded shoulder
trust the gold flakes they wade through.
Remember the moon holds nothing back
as she twists the stick mask side to side.
We must accept as necessary all that we’ve lost.
Imitate your ears, for evenings do not lay light skin over them to dream.
When a man arrives gloating a well tuned watch
breathe deeply and recall the full moon parties, the solstice bonfires.
When there is silence behind you, look,
a friend wades through flakes of gold to speak with you.
The light shines its afternoons on the graves of the billies,
those of the sands and of the hills and on you.
We must not accept as lost all that is necessary.
When breath is given, the poem becomes a heart one can live and set sail in.
Know that when a man imitates snow he is snow and that is all.
If your heart desires to draw rings of loneliness around it, let it.
Each day the sun calls all creatures to worship.
When mists decorate your room, ask both
names for them, that of the inhabitant and yours too.
Even when dreaming, your eyes are never shut.
When you lay your hand on a friend’s bruised shoulder
trust the flakes of gold you wade through.
Desire sometimes makes ribbons of things with its eager to help hands.
The inhabitant and you decorate your rooms with names, mists to ask eachother.
If rings of loneliness are drawn by your heart,
know you can walk the ground in any direction.
When the seagull prepares to fly it leans forward and leaps.
When your skin needs heat, walk to the nearest fire.

--
a piece from forever ago, reminded of today by a catchy pop song.

Santarém By Elizabeth Bishop

ran across the following as part of my old inbox.  have had many rivers this week flowing alongside oneanother, as the Tapajos & Amazon described below.

Santarém

By Elizabeth Bishop

Of course I may be remembering it all wrong

after, after---how many years?

That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;

more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile

in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,

grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.

Suddenly there'd been houses, people, and lots of mongrel

riverboats skittering back and forth

under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,

with everything gilded, burnished along one side,

and everything bright, cheerful, casual---or so it looked.

I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.

Two rivers.  Hadn't two rivers sprung

from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four

and they'd diverged.  Here only two

and coming together.  Even if one were tempted

to literary interpretations

such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female

---such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off

in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather,

there was a modest promenade and a belvedere

about to fall into the river,

stubby palms, flamboyants like pans of embers,

buildings one story high, stucco, blue or yellow,

and one house faced with azulejos, buttercup yellow.

The street was deep in dark-gold river sand

damp from the ritual afternoon rain,

and teams of zebus plodded, gentle, proud,

and -blue-,with down-curved horns and hanging ears,

pulling carts with solid wheels.

The zebus' hooves, the people's feet

waded in golden sand,

dampened by golden sand,

so that almost the only sounds were creaks and -shush, shush, shush-.

Two rivers full of crazy shipping---people

all apparently changing their minds, embarking,

disembarking, rowing clumsy dories.

(After the Civil War some Southern families

came here; here they could still own slaves.

They left occasional blue eyes, English names,

and -oars-.  No other place, no one

on all the Amazon's four thousand miles

does anything but paddle.)

A dozen or so young nuns, white-habited,

waved gaily from an old stern-wheeler

getting up steam, already hung with hammocks

---off to their mission, days and days away

up God knows what lost tributary.

Side-wheelers, countless wobbling dugouts...

A cow stood up in one, quite calm,

chewing her cut while being ferried,

tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married.

A river schooner with raked masts

and violet-colored sails tacked so close

her bowsprit seemed to touch the church

(Cathedral, rather!).  A week or so before

there'd been a thunderstorm and the Catheral'd

been struck by lightning.  One tower had

a widening zigzag crack all the way down.

It was a miracle.  The priest's house right next door

had been struck, too, and his brass bed

(the only one in town) galvanized black.

-Graças a deus- --- he'd been in Belém.

In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist

had hung an empty wasps' next from a shelf:

small, exquisite, clean matte white,

and hard as stucco.  I admired it

so much he gave it to me.

Then---my ship's whistle blew.  I couldn't stay.

Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan,

Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric,

really a very nice old man,

who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,

asked, "What's that ugly thing?"

from Rikki Ducornet's "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition,"

Following from Rikki Ducornet's priceless work "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition,"  in honor of Bastille Day, and the art of remembering.

In this passage, the Marquis de Sade is recalling the horrors of the French Revolution, and the perplexing fact that he has been imprisoned and is awaiting death, in a cell which is above the guillotine, so that daily he sees 'enemies of the state' being killed in the manner that eventually awaits him, for the crime of words, for the crime of setting an atyplical moral example of personal tastes and individual predilections.
--

Amie--

Up here in my eyrie I consider the facts, those five days in September when Satan, disguised as a citizen, ruled Paris.  And if the bodies of the victims are rotting away in their beds of lime and straw, if the courtyards are washed clean of blood and the gardens weeded of eyes and teeth, if, already, the world--so always eager to forget, is forgetting, I, Donatien de Sade, remember.

I remember how a vinegar-maker named Damiens cut the throat of a general before cutting out his heart, and how he put it to his lips--Ah!  The exemplary Mayan gesture!  how a flower girl was eviscerated and the wound made into the hearth that roasted her alive; how a child was told to bite the lips of corpses; how one Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was given a glass of human blood to drink; how the face of the king's valet was burned with torches; how one Monsieur de Maussabre was smoked in his own chimney; how the children incarcerated in Bicetre were so brutally raped that their corpses were not recognizable; and how the clothes of the victims taken from the corpses were carefully washed, mended, pressed and put up for sale!  The Revolution, ma mie, shall pay for itself.  And I remember, helas, I shall never forget, how my cousin Stanislas, that gentle boy, was thrown from a window the night of August tenth; how his body, broken on the street, was torn apart by the crowd.  All night the bells sounded--I hear them even now.  The bells of massacre.  The bells of rage.  "What do you expect?" Danton--all howl and black bile--said to the Comte de Segur. "We are dogs, dogs born in the gutter."

Already, although blood continues to spill and the trees of Paris are daily watered with tears, there are those who would say all this never happened, that the trials and executions are orderly, silent, and fair; that such stories--the head of Madame de Lamballe exhibited on a pike, of Monsieur de Montmorin impaled and carried to the National Assembly for display--are false, the fables so dear to the "popular imagination."  Well, then, I ask you:  If this is so, why am I, whose imagination is clearly as "popular" as the next man's, why am I still locked away?

...Which reminds me, I ate all the pastilles.  I shall lose my teeth; no matter.  Like Danton, "I don't give a fuck."  What will be left to bite into?  Without its kings, France will be as unsavory as America.  France, too, is to be run by merchants.  Merchants!  I have met some--a good number--in jail.  Their notion of beauty is forgery, their idea of virtue, counterfeit; their hearts are in deficit; their interests simple; their pricks as dog-eared and limp as old banknotes.  Welcome to the New Century!  We shall tumble into it as frightened rats tumble into a sewer. And the horrors that will be done in the name of Prosperity will make all the corrupt castles of my mind look like little more than the idle thoughts of a cloistered priest--and the excesses of Landa among the Maya of the Yucatan, a mere drop of oil in a forest on fire.

Speaking of fire:  Today in my idleness I imagined a fan that could be ignited by a tear.  Can such a thing be?

Ragnarök - Thoughts of Myths by AS Byatt

"for everything hangs together, and the world may be destroyed by too much attention, or too little care, towards a sand-eel, for example."
~from the principal text of AS Byatt's Ragnarök


After reading AS Byatt's Ragnarök twice, I read the essay which appears afterwards, and was stunned by the presence of the following passage, ideas of which are woven both throughout the novella, and my own thinking.  'The thin child' described is the person encountering the myths for the first time, during wartime in her own world, when the myths make more sense than the day to day, benign seeming reality. ~david

The death of the gods is a linear tale, with a beginning, a middle and an end.  A human life is a linear tale.  Myths proceed to disaster and maybe to resurrection.  The thin child believed in the eternal recurrence of growing things, and in weather.

But if you write a version of Ragnarök in the twenty-first century, it is haunted by the imagining of a different end of things.   We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into.  Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.  Every day I read of a new extinction, of the bleaching of the coral, and the disappearance of the codfish the thin child caught in the North Sea with a hook and line, when there were always more where those came from.  I read of human projects that destroy the world they are in, ingeniously, ambitiously engineered oil wells in deep water, a road across the migration paths of the beasts in the Serengeti park, farming of asparagus in Peru, helium balloons to transport the crops more cheaply, emitting less carbon whilst the farms themselves are dangerously depleting the water that the vegetables, and the humans and other creatures depend on.  I wanted to write the end of our Midgard - but not to write an allegory or a sermon.  Almost all the scientists I know think we are bringing about our own extinction, more and more rapidly.  The weeds in the fields the thin child sees and thinks of as eternal are many of them already made extinct by modern farming methods.  Clouds of plovers do not rise. Thrushes no longer break snails on stones, and the house sparrow has vanished from our gardens.  In a way the Midgard Serpent is the central character in my story.  She loves to see the fish she kills and consumes, or indeed kills for fun, the coral she crushes and bleaches.  She poisons the earth because it is her nature.  When I began working on this story I had a metaphor in mind - I saw the death-ship, Naglfar, made of dead men's nails, as an image for what is now known as the trash vortex, the wheeling collection of indestructible plastic in the Pacific, larger than Texas.  I thought how it had grown from the plastic beakers Thor Heyerdahl was distressed to find floating in the empty ocean, on his Kon-Tiki voyage in 1947.  But I wanted to tell the myth in its own terms, as the thin child discovered it. 

I have said I did not want to humanise the gods.  But I always had in mind the wisdom of that most intelligent thinker about gods, humans and mortality, Ludwig Feuerbach.  'Homo homini deus est', he wrote, describing how our gods of Love, Wrath, Courage, Charity were in fact projections of human qualities we constructed from our sense of ourselves.   He was talking about the incarnate god of Christianity,  a God in man who to Feuerbach was a man made god.  George Eliot translated The Essence of Christianity fluently and flexibly, and its influence is strong in her work.  But there is a sense in which the Norse Gods are peculiarly human in a different way.  They are human because they are limited and stupid.  They are greedy and enjoy fighting and playing games.  They are cruel and enjoy hunting and jokes.  They know Ragnarök is coming, but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story.  They know how to die gallantly, but not how to make a better world.  Homo homini lupus est, wrote Hobbes, man is a wolf to man, describing the wolf inside, Hobbes who had a grim vision of the life of men as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.  Loki is the only one who is clever and Loki is irresponsible and wayward and mocking.

...As a child I had always sympathised with Loki, because he was a clever outsider.  When I came to write this tale I realised that Loki was interested in Chaos - his stories contain flames and waterfalls, the formless things inside which chaos theorists perceive order inside disorder.  He is interested in the order in destruction and the destruction in order.  If I were writing an allegory he would be a detached scientific intelligence which could either save the earth or contribute to its rapid disintegration.  As it is, the world ends because neither the all too human gods, with their arms and quarrels, nor the fiery thinker know how to save it.

Spring Drawing 2, Robert Hass

A man says lilacs against white houses, two sparrows, one streaked, in a
thinning birch, and can't find his way to a sentence.

In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen said, desperate in Palo
Alto, a thing must be wasteful, i.e., "a selective adaptation of forms to
the end of conspicuous waste."

So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us as his
grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing; the kitchen was as clean
at the end as when he started; even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds
were part of the process,

and he said, when we tried to admire him, "Listen, I should send you
into the chickenyard to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron."

The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to
fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy.

Because I have pruned it badly in successive years, the climbing rose
has sent out, among the pale pink floribunda, a few wild white roses
from the rootstalk.

Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet
had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on
earth,

because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if
there was anything left over,

you had to carry it. The wild rose looks weightless, the floribunda are
heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe

as they imitate the dying, petal by petal, of the people who bred them.

You hear pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song.

The gazelle's head turned; three jackals are eating his entrails and he
is watching.

from 'Tending the Wild', Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources - by M. Kat Anderson

from the Introduction

California is a land of superlatives. It has the highest mountain peaks, the largest, oldest and tallest trees, the rivers of the greatest variety, and the most diverse Indian tribes found in the coterminous United States. California arbors the smallest bird on the continent north of Mexico, the calliope hummingbird (Stella calliope), and the largest bird, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus). From the summit of Telescope Peak in the Panamint Range, one can face east to see the lowest point on the American continent, in Death Valley, and then turn around to gaze at the highest point of land in the United States outside Alaska, the summit of Mount Whitney, 14,501 feet above sea level.

Not unlike that of an isolated island, the plants, animals, landscapes and native peoples of California have a distinctness and unusual diversity that casts them apart from the rest of the mainland. This is apparent to every European visitor during the period of early exploration. One-third of the state's 6300 native plant species are endemics and grow nowhere else on earth. It has nineteen of the ninety oak (Quercus) species that grow in the United States. And it contains nearly all the world's approximately sixty species of manzanitas (Arctostaphylos spp.) and three-forths of the forty-five species of California-lilacs (Ceanothus spp).

In 1542 one hundred languages resonated across California's myriad landscapes - one quarter of the 418 native languages that existed within the borders of the present-day United States. Alfred Kroeber, the father of California anthropology, split the state into six major Native American culture areas, which reflect the state's tremendous variety of lifestyles. The archeologist Michael Moratto states, "Such cultural, linguistic, and biological variations bespeak a long and rich prehistory in this part of the Far West."

California poppies set a tilted mesa north of Pasadena aglow with their blooms in spring, serving as a beacon to ships more than twenty-five miles away. Seeing hillsides covered with these flowers, early Spanish explorers named the coast "the Land of Fire," appropriate in a literal as well as a figurative sense because of the hot, arid summers and the frequency of fires ignited by lightning strikes.

The Role of Natural Disturbance

According to the plant ecologist Michael Barbour, "Late summer and early fall fires were an expected natural event in many California vegetation types below six thousand feet elevation. The same acre of ground could be expected to burn every ten to fifty years. Fire was uncommon only in deserts at high elevations. California plants evolved with fire as a natural environmental factor over millions of years. As a result, not only do many California species survive fires, but some require fire in order to complete their life cycle or to remain vigorous" The ecologist Richard Vogl has postulated that fire helped to shape three-fourths of California's vegetation.

Fire was not the only occurrence shaping the landscape. Spring floods scoured watercourses and deposited silt, small and large mammals dug in the soil, storms felled trees, and torrential rains caused landslides. Each of these common events is known by plant ecologists as a natural disturbance, defined as 'any relatively discrete event in time that disrupts ecosystem, community, or population structures and changes resources, substrate availability, or the physical environment." Having evolved with these erratic or episodic perturbations, many plant species not only tolerate them, but require them to complete their life cycles or to maintain dominance.

Ecological studies from all over the world, in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, bear out the ecological role of disturbance in the development and maintenance of forest, shrubland, grassland, and wetland habitats. In many instances, moderate to medium disturbance promotes habitat heterogeneity and allows for greater diversity of plants and animals. For example, small mammal activity increases the abundance and diversity of geophytes (Perennials with bulbs, corms, or tubers); wave action contributes to biodiversity in the rocky intertidal zone; fires maintain biologically rich grasslands; and the alternate filling and draining of lakes, marshes and estuaries supports vast populations of aquatic life and waterfowl. Some scientists suggest that pyrodiversity (the diversity in frequency, scale, season, and type of fire) leads to great biodiversity of plant species and vegetation types.

Disturbance is a recurrent feature of virtually every vegetation type in California. In fact, it is now accepted that perturbations are -required- for the rejuvenation of many plant populations and ecosystems. According to a hypothesis put forth by the ecologist Joseph Connell, disturbances that occur at intermediate intensities and frequencies promote the greatest biological diversity.

Mariposa

Mariposa

"In some counties, laws legalizing the murder and scalping of Indians were passed. In the Mariposa region, for example, miners drew up a petition demanding that Indians be outlawed; then the sheriff, sole civil and judiciary authority in Mariposa, rendered his decree: "I pronounce the Indian outlawed. Consequently, everyone is permitted to kill the Indians he encounters anywhere in the county of Mariposa, on the sole condition of burying them and of letting the sheriff know where and how many of them he has killed." Even in California counties where homicide was illegal, few whites were brought to court to answer for killing Indians." ~M Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild

Mariposa is the name of a grove of sequoia trees in an area where humans and animals native to there are not seen. The name is a Spanish butterfly and arrived when the Missions moved inland and set up ranching and agriculture on a scale that pushed native populations to the fringes. The name stayed after America fought a war to take California, a struggle which culminated in a treaty that would cede California from Mexican rule, which had been after Spanish rule, and to what would now be under American rule, each group doing a better job than their predecessors in thrashing the land with cattle and sheep, while starving and brutalizing the initial inhabitants. If this confuses you, you are not alone. The name stayed when, a fortnight before the signing of this particular treaty, gold was discovered in the hills, which led émigrés from as far as New Zealand to fell the massive trees of the hillsides and to sluice the major rivers, the Klammath, Sacramento & Toulomne, perhaps permanently wrecking some of the most fertile feeding grounds on the planet, and to enact a curse from a chief of the Yalesummy tribe, who considered themselves part of the Nisenan tribe, concerning the ownership of the shiny flakes in the river. Their peoples had been pushed around for 9 generations or more by that point. The chief's curse was that the gold, 'belonged to a demon who devoured all who search for it.'

Wisława Szymborska - A Speech at the Lost-And-Found

A Speech at the Lost-And-Found

I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north,
and also some gods while moving east to west.
I let several stars go out for good, they can't be traced.
An island or two sank on me, they're lost at sea.
I'm not even sure exactly where I left my claws,
who's got my fur coat, who's living in my shell.
My sibings died the day I left for dry land
and only one small bone recalls that anniversary in me.
I've shed my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
taken leave of my sense time and again.
I've long since closed my third eye to all that,
washed my fins of it and shrugged my branches.

Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily
declined in human form, just now making such a fuss
about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.

--
In memoriam Wisława Szymborska
2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012