1.
Walter
Benjamin pointed out that a city is a place where it is difficult
to get lost. Someone is always willing to give directions, usually
incorrect. In wilderness, wisdom
lies in
knowing that
the truth is as forked and as partial as the multiple paths of
a journey, and that like a metaphor a journey is the consequence
of a process of connecting different paths. Journeys with destinies
are journeys for origins, you
need to get it right the first time, or you may perish retracing
your steps. The most reliable, and most misleading, directions
are given by wilderness itself.
| The
notion of a path has interested me most of my life. unpacking the experimental, also through various spiritualities, In the process, I've tried to avoid Oak, or getting stuck in erudition's walks cambered by |
 |
or
a series of connected ways, Off-path, cross-genre travel, along with caught my attention as I sojourned mythologies and aesthetics. tripping on ideologies itchy as Poison tendentious mud, dangerous as side- ancient roots. |
Walk in the woods and not get lost
wherever the woods go
a house in the way
a wall in the way
a stone in the way.
Scant
remembered, but incised in human DNA, is the laughter of smooth stones
resting at the bottom of a creek.
Is it a sign? I think
it’s a light.
We'll know for sure
tonight.
Mediocrity is in
the familiar, in what’s already
known; excellence is in the unknown; and
genius is in the
unknowable.
To
think "God," to belittle the universe, the
apparitions,
visitations and revelations, new and old, the messages and tidings
of strange happenings in other worlds than ours, and in other states
of being, are all, all, all to be found, if properly looked for,
in this same well-nigh, unexplored wilderness
of the mind where
metaphor garbs the apparition of flesh.
"It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us." Reading this, I think, "I’ve already thought about this." Then, "Why shouldn’t I have? I’m as old as Cioran was when he wrote this."
"My
prayers were answered," is a way of saying, "Something
mysterious has happened," which assigns origination as research.
The animals watch from the lips
of their holes.
They’re as good at stillness
as the man is at talking,
and they are not confusedby the little hum of their heart
If you live in a plentitude there is only the plentitude.
|
I used to feel that I must
justify myself. I was given this, now I must earn it. |
A
poet experiences the world as language: there is no separation between
one’s senses and one’s style, like a hermit's cave that
can no longer be distinguished from real
places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding
of society---which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively
enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other real sites that
can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places,
even though it may be possible to indicate their location in the face of a cliff.
Heterotopias: "sites with no real place."
To
learn from wilderness, one needs a therianthropic god to mediate.
Otherwise there is only the buzz we hear in a telephone after the
connection’s been broken.
When we enter the cave we are all Plato.
When we set out on a journey we are all Odysseus.
When we enter the woods we are all "a race of men
that came / From tree trunks, from hard oak."
I
came here to liberate my spirit from flight, to catch it by the heels
and wrest it to the ground. But now that my toes are arthritic, I
can’t grip the earth without pain.
Before
we became human, gravity
was not a force but what if Darwin’s
principle of natural selection were merely a tiny fractal embodiment
of a universal life-giving principle that drives the evolution
of stars, galaxies, and the cosmos itself? What if the universe
were literally in the process of coming to an
emotion, there was no shelter here, but for the roofless, walless,
garbage-strewn ruins of a stone house, and the thick arms of trees.
If I falter in this forest, death will cradle me like an auguring
stone.
When
the Master was asked, "Who are you?" she replied, "Who
am I not?," pointing to a way of being not-being. Which reminds
me of the Zen saying, "Enlightened, but on the wrong path."
The Big Bang created another dimension, what we call the universe, but it is really an epic poem that rhymes: the disaster you prepare for is not the one you get.
In the mountains above Santa Fe, NM, at about 12,000 ft., there’s a lake, more like a large pond.
I tossed a stone that skipped across its placid face, each touch a widening gyre.
That night the stars banded together and threw me into a black hole.
From
nowhere in this forest is the city remote. It surrounds trees,
bushes, creek, defining the wildlife within. Deeper within, the
earth has reabsorbed
the dead into its elements for so many millions of years, who can
any longer tell the difference between receptacle and contents?
Take away the millennial residues that consecrate them, human or
otherwise, and our waters, forests, deserts, mountains, and rocks promise what pavement can’t deliver.
The world’s integument is stretched
over the Void like a drum, while my brain
is wrinkled like a newborn's skin.
I
live in midst a mythology that raises its brow in a constant state
of questioning itself. No need to walk far to enter its domain,
as the
Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the
measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape. The step,
linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante
understands this is
not a place but a sign of its passion.
"Education
is schooling in the swiftest possible associations. You
grasp them on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions—therein
lies Dante's favorite form of praise." Tonight,
in a bed miles from the forest where a tree’s roots let
go, its tired body falling with a heavy thump, it is as if
I have fallen too, and everything everywhere has suddenly let
go of itself.
Is
wilderness an emergent consciousness, a more integrated, compassionate
scheme than ourselves? Are we too far ahead to see what’s
behind?
We
say of the dead that he or she "is survived by…" These
survivors are on a death march.
My
next door neighbor is recently blind. Today, his 72nd birthday,
he asked me if I’d guide him as he learns to negotiate the
streets. Along the way, he said he was born in Illinois during
the Great Depression, and his father, who died young, never let
anything go to waste. For example:
there was a chicken who laid her eggs on the porch. Breakfast delivered.
The family grew fond of her, but when she could no longer produce,
his father went to the tool shed, returned with a long knife, and
picked up the hen by the neck. My neighbor said that the bird sensed
what was to come and stared straight into her executioner's eyes.
Man and Bird stared at each other...until, in a disgusted voice,
his father said to the bird, "You’ll die of old age." "When
he put her down, that chicken took off and was never seen again."
I
have viewed the mountain "from the wilderness as well as
the village," as Thoreau put it, and have finally arrived
at a place where the village, this city will
continue to teem with life, but it will be a peculiarly homogenized
assemblage of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected for
their compatibility with one fundamental force: us. Nothing-not
national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability
schemes, nor even "wildlands" fantasies-can change
the current course. The path for biological evolution which
has a forest in its midst, is preferred, a city in which nature
is host, not guest.
Sometimes I forget that a river gathers the city to its banks, and that here the forest once quenched its thirst. Many hours I’ve spent looking at murky faces mirrored there. Only when we can see to the bottom of our rivers again will we be able to see to the bottom of our expectations.
From age one, mountains were my summer home. Now I walk forest trails and city streets with joints rubbing together as if trying to raise a youthful spark.
Ruction:
Insurrection, disruption of a system. Thalassic: Inland sea as
opposed to an ocean. G.G.
Harpham: "Ethics does not solve problems, it structures
them." I may as well be writing fiction!
Whenever
she loosens her hair, the moon appears.
A thousand strands
of black black hair,
tangled, tangled—tangled too,
my thoughts of love!
Who
crucified Jesus didn’t know he would be a god, as he was only
another rebel threatening their interpretative power. In retrospect, these
are the ghost species--organisms that
cannot or will not be allowed to survive on a planet with billions
of people. Although they may continue to exist for decades, their
extinction is certain. Apart from a few specimens in zoos or a
laboratory-archived DNA sample, anyone
may turn out to be a god in disguise. How many gods have we killed
today?
Steven Katz argues that mystical experience is "shaped by prior linguistic influences such as that the lived experience conforms to a preexistent pattern that has been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality of the mystic." This may be true in a theistic religion. But, for example, learned from (Robert) Smithson that the experience I gained doing earth-moving with heavy equipment, shovels, trucks, loaders, graders and the like at (Miles City) Sand & Gravel (which I loathed and detested and assumed was the polar opposite of ‘art’ which I took as the ideal model of the anti-Montana paradise) could in fact be the brush and canvas of another art; by extension in Buddhism the mystic enters the Void in which there are no experiential attributes, no psychic projection. In how one expresses the Void, not the experience itself, the function as opposed to the principle, Katz is correct. Functionally, the Japanese Zen Master eats rice not matzo.
I relish those portions of myself that are "Jewish," in particular, the scholarly bent, even as my pagan soul is in awe of stately trees, bowing low to wildflowers, and the creek’s mocking voice
In his essay, "No Trees Please, We're Jewish," Andrew Furman quotes from Cynthia Ozick’s story, "The Pagan Rabbi," in which "the brilliant Rabbi Isaac Kornfield" commits suicide by hanging himself from a tree limb by his prayer shawl, after "Pan defeats Moses in his soul." (But Pan is Moses. The horns! The horns!)
Furman goes on to say that there is a Jewish principle of Baal Tashkhit, which is the preservation of nature, and applies "even during times of war," and that "The Talmud even records that scholars were instructed to pray for the health of trees (Shabbat 67a)." But then he points out that there is very little environmental writing in Jewish novels, which are mainly urban.
When
it comes to haiku, can we follow the Japanese model? Is our landscape
also filled with historical, cultural, and spiritual markers? Or
is America’s ethos a relentless cycle of creation/destruction,
a loop, a knot, a neuroses?
The trail is drawn
like a sword
from its dewy sheath.
In Spring, greens deepen, sprouting sprays of various hues which seem as if arranged by an Ikebana master. Here one sees birth as a chaotic collective.
When
I was still living in the desert, a friend told me that in Portland All
things are full of gods’ means there is nowhere a god
can’t be, no feature or aspect of nature that can’t reveal
a god to us; but it doesn’t tell us which gods or goddesses
will reveal themselves or when, or how "moss
grows on the pavement."
The
Buddha was enlightened by the morning star, a light whose beauty
is suffused with darkness.
On
the trail, a dog looked at me with eyes that knew it’s a slave
to its human master. It wanted me to know that it knows.
The body stops perhaps but something travels
out and beyond—
it is the creature's eyes.
Anthropocentrism is an embarrassing problem for nature writers, as very fact that they can write opens a seemingly unbridgeable gap between them and the world they are writing about. We create the Other to validate the fantasy of how occult forces were instinctively driving Neanderthal people to surpass themselves, in their desire to resist the invasion of new methods and peoples who had not yet appeared, but whom they guessed would inevitably supplant ourselves. But only a path that crosses other paths leads to somewhere intrinsically interesting. Each being is a way of walking.
A
long walk
that's
all
it
is
Trapped in civilization, captured animals absorb the violence of the human world. The Stockholm Syndrome: "The captives begin to identify with their captors. At least at first this is a mechanism, based on the (often unconscious) idea that the captor will not hurt the captive if he is cooperative and even positively supportive. The captive seeks to win the favor of the captor in an almost childlike way."
| Recognizing everything as synaptic. So that no matter where in the system you begin, you begin to identify with any part of the glacier and you can see the taint of man-made pollution as clear |  |
as day. Hundreds of meters of crystal-clear ice, going back through time, then you get to these dark rings appearing in an unlimited amount of variance, as no point is the whole system. |
Deep Ecology: Self-realization, identification, a holistic metaphysics. "The success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science, but on ‘a state of mind’: on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives."
A friend tells me of a dream in which he’s talking to some people when the phone rings. He excuses himself, and wakes up to answer it. Something happening outside a dream that perfectly fits into it is very common, as if the dream adjusts itself to the waking world so fast and fluidly that the shift isn’t noticed. Or is it the opposite? The phone rings at the precise moment when the dream’s scenario can accommodate it.
"A
thoroughly cosmological dimension."
-Masao
Abe
 |
 |