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Poetry

Small Scale

The neighborhood where I have now lived for 35 years is utterly familiar, yet also undergoing constant change. On a larger scale, there are endless trees cut for sub-divisions or single housing, people leaving, people moving in. Families with young children are a welcome addition, and you now hear other languages than plain English on your walks. On a smaller scale, my garden surprises me every year with unpredictable change. This year there’s nary a blueberry on the bush that bent over with them last year, tons of foxgloves have self-seeded, brought in by the wind or the deer, attracting a plethora of bees. The daisies have finally outnumbered the buttercups in the lawn, which took only about 5 years, and the fuchsias have decided to become trees, in full bloom already. It all provides a sense of place.

Italy

It is much harder to get a true sense of place if you only visit, and that for short amounts of time. What will define it when you travel? Your visual impressions? Your interaction with the locals? The landscape that defines the surrounds or the climate? The history that you read up on, maybe? Are you a better able to “get” a place, if you have widely traveled and so can make comparisons? If you go in utterly naive or geared by expectations based on external introductions? Will coincidences play a role, an aversive experience at the hotel, or an unanticipated encounter with the nicest people? These latter events might shape, perhaps, whether you like a place or not, which is different from having a sense of place.

Belgium
Holland

Here is the cause for these musings: Anastasia Savinova, a Ukrainian artist based in Sweden, has generated some creative photo collages, trying to extract a sense of place – Genius Loci – from a large scale entity, a city or rural area, and then injecting it into a small scale object, a building. Guided by architectural cues, visual details, a good sense for local prevalence of certain colors, she constructed these buildings into formations that capture the shapes or ornamentation or idiosyncrasies of places like Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, and cities in Italy and Holland. I had immediate recognition, before reading the labels for most cities, from my own travels which are guided by visual exploration more than anything else, which meant she really captured something that is specific to each place. Pretty nifty.

Paris
Berlin

The most successful montages, less compressed and calmer, are, in my opinion, the ones that depict places in her geographic vicinity, the Scandinavian countries she lives in or has often visited. Perhaps longstanding exposure. living in a place, leads to true familiarity. This in turn allows you to distill an essence after all, not just a jumbling of multitudinous elements that caught your attention on the road, no matter how much they are part of the reality of those cities. Whatever one thinks of the printed works – they might speak more to those who have the lovely jolt of recognition – the idea itself is creative.

Will I ever travel again? Will the experience change after this eternal time of confinement? Why can my desire to roam not be stilled, even when I have the perfect model right in front of me, a wonderfully snippy ode to small scale familiarity by Billy Collins?

                                            
                 A Sense of Place


If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place–

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York’s Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing a chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape–
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird–
little courier with someplace to go–

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

by       Billy Collins

Photographs were chosen to add life to the depicted places – people I photographed in the cities captured in the collages.

Music will stretch our brain a bit, a beautiful performance by the Kronos Quartett. I figured a focus on the planet is needed to balance out a focus on an armchair….

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Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

I am generally not a fan of Charles Bukowski’s writings. A thought-provoking essay on the man, his life and his work, some years back in the New Yorker, pretty much summed it up for me: “Bukowski’s poetry,… is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive.”  The underground poet was born in 1920 in Germany and moved as a three-year old to Los Angeles where he died of leukemia in 1994. He has one of the largest following of readers in contemporary American poetry although he was never accepted into the official canon. He lived a rags-to-riches life, fueled by drugs, alcohol, and general defiance of societal restrictions, prison stints included. “The secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.“

However, the poem I would like to introduce today is one I rather like: The Man with the Beautiful Eyes is from the poem collection, The Last Night on Earth. It raises questions that are important, and points to facts that are rarely openly discussed.

The poem is read in the short film clip below, the latter itself a work of art by Jonathan Hodgson and Johnny Hannah. They adopted the style of revered socialist-realist painter Ben Shahn, creating the film with paint, ink and collage rather than digital means and providing visual details that reinforce the ideas – both the direct expressions and the subtle implications – of the poem.

View it here – and then I’ll share my observations.

The poem introduces a group of young boys, told by their parents to stay away from a house with shuttered windows and a gold fish pond hidden behind a bamboo hedge. The film starts out with a view of a poster of a missing child – clearly there is danger in the world and kids do better to listen to their parents. Kids, of course, are drawn to the opposite of what they’re told to do: and so these boys regularly play in the forbidden territory, imbuing it with exotic ambience, Tarzan around the corner. No, they are Tarzan! Unrestrained rulers of the jungle!

One day, and only once, a man appears from the house, with foul mouthed, misogynistic swearing, a bottle of whiskey in hand, a cigar in his mouth, looking completely disheveled. Not only is he friendly, he addresses them in respectful, if mocking (?) terms “little gentlemen,” and hopes they enjoy playing in his run-down realm. They are in awe. They think him, his wildness, enticing. They adore everything they are forbidden to see much less to emulate. In their eyes, he is beautiful.

One day they find the house burnt to the ground, the fish dead in an empty pond, the bamboo scorched. They decide it must have been their parents who killed the man and all that was his. They fear that the future will replicate this assault on beauty, that they will never be allowed to hold it in whatever form.

The film accompanies the narration with images of a suburban father killing every weed threatening his lawn with poison. It ends depicting a storefront with a sign Chinaski‘s – the name for Bukowski’s alter ego in his writings – and a homeless man either dead or sleeping in a dark alley next to the store, people indifferently rushing by.

Do we believe the parents capable of such a crime? They surely didn’t kill a man and left but smoldering foundations? Or did they? Do parents have a right to be afraid for their kids in a dangerous world? Of course they do. Do kids intuit, even if it doesn’t reach the level of an actual crime, that parents want to kill off the other, even if the threat is not directed at their kids, but at the parents’ own well-being? To extinguish all forms of wildness that threatens to throw your own tightly held, and dearly paid-for conformity out of balance?

One of the ways that the beauty of something unruly, unruled, will indeed be taken from you is by making sure that you never trust your own perceptions. Kids intuit what is going on, but are told they are mistaken. Kids, of course, can misinterpret what is in front of their eyes, but their gut interpretation often points to a deeper truth. They, too, must conform and obey the rules (“It is for your own good!”) in preparation for their social acceptance, and if that means to discard subjective assessment of what could be beautiful, so be it.

Deviance, it is taught, is bad, might get you ultimately killed. If you violate established cultural, contextual or social norms, never mind legal ones, there will be consequences. There is not a single culture that does not have negative connotations regarding deviance (although what counts as deviance is malleable, across cultures, or across time within a single culture.) Social control ropes deviants in, maintaining social order with a system of rewards and punishments, some formal, many informal. Children don’t want to be forced into the straight jacket of societal norms, they still crave freedom, but it is a losing battle. Those, like the man with the beautiful eyes, who have not given up on a similar desire, must be wildly strong, but they will also pay a price (if only an accidental house fire caused in a drunken stupor, or the revenge of an abused and mistreated lover, that costs him a roof over his head.)

Rarely mentioned is the fact that deviance can also be positive. It has been a motor for social change through the ages, from behaviors questioning gender hierarchies (think Suffragettes, women’s liberation) to racial injustice (think norm refusals during the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks) to the fight for LGTBQ rights or the protests around fossil fuel extraction. In fact there is a whole area of study in health psychology these days, centered on Positive Deviance, on how to employ it to produce positive change.

Bukowski might have pleaded for acceptance of a self-destructive life style, not exactly an example of constructive change to society’s norms. But the larger truth, that deviance can contain beauty and is a threat to imperative conformity, was clearly understood by the kids in the poem, and feared by their parents. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Music has had its own encounters with the label “deviance.”  Norm promotion has led to labeling certain composers or styles of music as negatively deviant, not worthy of being considered the future of music, a threat to culture, to religion, politically unacceptable, or evil. This has, of course been particularly true if the music was associated with other categories that threatened the status quo, race being among the strongest. The Blues comes to mind. Here are some favorites.

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Beauty as a form of care

Today is all about music, a new album that I find singularly graceful, or, more precisely, full of grace.

The real thing, in all of the word’s connotations: smooth, elegant movement, thoughtfulness, and the favor extended from up high. Not that I know much about Sufism’s relationship to Allah, beyond the definition that “it is a mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God.”

Vulture Prince was released a month ago by singer, composer and producer Arooj Aftab and has been finding its way into my soul. Labeled as neo-sufism, it creates modern versions of age-old Pakistani music – classical or semi classical ghazal, thumri and qawwali music – none of which I am familiar with. Of course I do not understand the language either, some of which uses words from 18th century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib and 11th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī. It speaks to the universal power of music, and the gift of this particular artist, that it is nonetheless impossible not to get what is expressed: longing, seeking, devotion, grief and love.

Aftab has Pakistani roots and came to the US to study music and engineering at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. She now lives in New York City, having published her first album in 2015, and since also recorded together with brilliant jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily in a jazz trio called Love in Exile. Here is how Iyer describes their working relationship:

“Music can be a way of holding and being held by other people, and that’s how it feels like when we play together,” he says. “She has this deep reservoir of emotion that’s coming from a haunted place. She makes something beautiful, but it’s not just beauty for its own sake. It’s actually beauty as a form of care.”

I wish I had thought of that sentiment, that formulation, it is perfection.

In her mid-30s Aftab has already experienced the recent death of her younger brother and a close friend. That grief permeates some of the music, but the best analogy for the experience of listening to her that I can come up with can be found in the translation of the artist’s name: Rising Sun. Shrouded in lingering darkness, feeling swallowed by these hard, dark times, we nonetheless are gifted light, inevitably, every morning, the first rays bringing a semblance of hope. Color unfolding. Restoring a waning belief in grace.

I have tried to find a collection of samples of the variety of her music, and the growth curve from her Bird under Water album all the way to Vulture Prince. I can even tolerate the use of harp, an instrument I do not particularly like.I hope this unfamiliar beauty eases your way into the new week.

Lullaby

Photographs of vultures from Sauvie Island some years back. And here is a poem by Mirza Ghalib, one of the great poets of the Mughal empire. His ghazals, many set to music and sung by the most popular South Asian vocalists, were part of Aftab’s childhood – and used on her new album as well. This was one of the few I could find in English translation.

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Early Visions

When I did my reading last week for Earth Day it struck me how the topic of environmental harm can be traced back across centuries. Poets as diverse as William Blake, Wordsworth, Larkin, to name just a few Brits, wrote about the dangers of industrialization and the destruction of the English countryside – man-made dangers, just as climate change is a result of man-made fossil uses on a larger scale.

Going back in time even further, Ovid told the tale of Phaeton, retold below by one of our own outstanding poets, Eliza Griswold.

The power of this poem, for me, lies in the fact that it manages to outline the psychological mechanisms that can lead to destructiveness, a destructiveness that ultimately affects so many more than the individuals involved, changing the course of the world.

The original myth had Phaeton, mobbed for being fatherless, seek out his father Apollo, the sun god. His father feels guilty for having abandoned him and wants to prove his love by granting him a wish, any wish. Kid asks for the most powerful thing to make up for his feeling of being an outsider (or maybe the potentially most destructive one to exert his revenge?), to drive his father’s chariot of the sun. Catastrophe ensues when Phaeton, as was predicted, cannot control the powerful horses, freezing the earth when he veers from the path, then scorching it when he comes too close, making peoples’ blood boil through their skin which turns them Black, a race created. Zeus intervenes, seeing the havoc reeked, and kills Phaeton by throwing him off the chariot. Apollo’s mourning throws the world into darkness for days on end.

Ovid on Climate Change

BY ELIZA GRISWOLD

Bastard, the other boys teased him,
till Phaethon unleashed the steeds 
of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold 
their reins. Driving the sun too close 
to earth, the boy withered rivers, 
torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills 
burst into flame, and the people’s blood 
boiled through the skin. Ethiopia,
land of   burnt faces. In a boy’s rage 
for a name, the myth of race begins.

A boy’s rage for a name? Or an ancient example of what maligning implies – the polarization of in-group to out-group that leads to both, hate and power grabs. The poem perfectly closes the circle by starting with one divisiveness (social ostracism) and ending with another (racial disparity.) Contained within: catastrophe.

It is a reminder that crises, be they global warming, pandemics, homelessness, wars are not some outside events that happen and have to be dealt with. They are created in the ways we manage our desires, our hurts, our greed, our guilt (Apollo knew of the impending doom but could not renege on a guilt-driven promise.) That is true for both, individuals and societies at large.

Our inability to see the urgency of needed action or hesitancy to commit to it, given the frightening implications, are perhaps the result of paralyzing anxiety, as discussed a few days ago. But they might also be partially driven by our reliance on all the myths forever told – there will be a Zeus who last minute comes to the rescue, or science or any other God resigned to saving humanity, the planet. Wishful thinking, if you ask me…..

Here are some Greek dances that will liven up this Monday morning …..

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Shift in Perceptions

Over the last 2 weeks or so I have occasionally photographed the buds that were sprouting on the pear tree in front of my window. Growing at record speed they finally opened into the most luminous blossoms when the weather turned warm this weekend. Photographs today are in order of dates taken.

When searching for an appropriate poem to go with the images, I came across the words below, by a poet who, I admit, I’d never heard of. Before you yell at me how I dare to offer something that contains an offensive term for the deaf and hard of hearing community in the title, bear with me. The words used have a rhetorical purpose – they activate commonly held negative stereotypes before the poem forces us to completely shift perceptions.

Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

BY P. K. PAGE (1916 – 2010)

His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall
                            soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
                            soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s
quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay

From The Glass Air: Selected Poems.– 1985

Deaf and dumb used to be one of the earliest of all the negative associations with those who cannot hear or use spoken language. It was coined by Aristotles, who believed that the absence of hearing implied the absence of learning, leaving the person unable to reason, thus dumb. The phrase was later intended to describe not hearing and not speaking, eventually changed to deaf mute, with identical definition – much to the justified ire of the deaf and hard of hearing community who points out how many ways of communication their members have, including their very own language. The horrid associations for those who live with deafness as being not quite right can be found across cultures and religions – an informative source for historical tidbits can be accessed here, famous rabbis and Martin Luther among the more rabid lunatics when it came to stigmatizing the other.

The poet obviously moves from the introduction in the title to further negative descriptions of the man in the pear tree. His body is slightly misshapen, his fingers stubby, his head massive, his utterances the mewing of a kitten and his movement of the slowness of oxen in the barn – suggesting some chromosomal mishap, if not proximity to animals more than humans.

But then something shifts. He does delicate work with the secateurs, and even though a stone clogs his ears and weighs down his tongue, he has other modes of perceptions, highly sensitive. He feels spring’s life pulse through the tree with his touch, he smells the future in whiffs of sap, and he sees a world of sunlight and blue sky translated into summery panoramas, freely sailing off.

The joy is multiplied when his wife on the ground tilts her face at him, and his love for her enables an articulated response, pure happiness. He is loving and beloved, the healthiest, most human state of all. How many readers can remember a time at all where we screamed with joy at the closeness of a loved one? What is wrong with US?

There remains one riddle: (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) What does that line seek in the poem?

Ivan Generalic was Page’s contemporary, a Croatian farmer and autodidactic painter, among the most famous in the European Primitivist movements. Page was a painter herself, and I wondered if she was drawn to one or another of his paintings that would deliver the template for the imagery. All I could find was a couple underneath a pear tree. Maybe the poetic imagination described what unfolded before that reunion.

Or, alternatively, she is using the coinage of primitivism to have us look at something that is not primitive at all. Generalic’s work was suffused with critical political commentary of farmers’ and workers’ lots, superstitions in rural areas, the burdens of religion and so much more. The analogy of taking a second look behind what is perceived as primitive at first glance, and correcting our assumptions, is a tempting interpretation of the poem as well.

Music from Croatia, across a century.

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Dreams (3)

I thought we’d exit the week with a different variety of dreams: the daylight version, not nocturnal ones.

Dreams

Langston Hughes – 1902-1967

Hold fast to dreams 
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Holding on to our visions, hopes and aspirations for what could be is important. Goals help to resist the multitudinous influences that try to deprive people of hope in order to keep them in “their place,” an antidote to stasis and death. This is as much the case in 2021 as it was when Langston Hughes first published the poem in 1922. It is of course particularly true for those who are the victims of ingrained racism, but also true for other populations – women, people living with disabilities, people outside of binary gender categories, to name just a few – that threaten the power status and comfort zones of those at the top of the societal ladder.

The function of these diurnal dreams is to motivate resistance and action, to acknowledge one’s own right to a just future.

What is the function of nocturnal dreams? There is, wouldn’t you know it, no consensus on the answer to that question. And more suggestions than I care to count, varying across cultures and eras. For the curious, here are a few of the models that you find discussed in the psych literature.

The Freudian model of dreams revealing latent content of your emotional landscape, or the Jungian one relating them to gateways to archetypal knowledge are no longer receiving much attention. These days researchers focus on the role of dreams in processing information and consolidating memory, in reflecting emotions, and contributing to creative problem solving. Some researchers are also pursuing the idea that dreams help to prepare and protect us from dangerous situations in waking life. All of this is open to debate with lots of scientific disagreement.

Here is what we do know for certain: dreams are reported by the dreamer – as with all self-reports, it is hard to discern what was actually dreamt and what is interpreted through the understanding of the dreamer. That said, dreams often seem to reflect what is prominent in the waking thoughts of the dreamer, things they deal with in their present life. A typical example: Chinese and German students report most frequent dreams around stressors of education, Canadians, on the other hand, do not.

General themes emerge, though, across cultures: fear of violence or running away, fear of falling, fear of public embarrassment are prevalent.

During dreaming the amygdala is active, the brain site associated with emotions. This is particularly true for people living with PTSD, anxiety or depressive disorders, which are reflected in their frequency of anxious dreams. The visual cortex is active as well, not surprising given the visual nature of dreams. On the other hand, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for pursuing goals, structuring our thoughts, inhibiting impulses, is less active during dream states, which explains the jumbled, incoherent nature of dreams.

Then how do we solve problems in dreams as so much famous anecdotal evidence suggests? It is likely than random combinations in dreams offer solutions because they allow us to veer away from the path we pursued that got us stuck in the first place. For all the reported “AHA!” moments in dreams there are probably millions that didn’t lead to anything because of their indecipherable jumbling.

Photographs today, a rare exception, are by the brilliant Margaret Bourke-White, whose dreams as photojournalist were put on hold by early onset Parkinson Disease which she fought tooth and nail for 18 years. The images are a good reminder of the relevance of Hughes’ poem.

And here is a bonus. Hughes’ poetry read aloud by himself.

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Dreams (2)

“Years ago, a poet friend showed me a photo of her cat, taken on the spur of the moment, with a cigarette in her furry chops. The cat was walking across a thick springy lawn. If I hadn’t trusted my friend, I would have shrugged and said, ‘I don’t believe it for one second—get me another beer, please.’ This poem of mine is all about the unbelievable, which visits me in dreams, with the help of godsend Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.”
—Gary Soto

Two days ago I shared Szymborska’s 1996 poem In Praise of Dreams. It was picked up last year, almost a quarter century later, by a poet of Mexican-American descent who grew up in the barrios of Fresno, CA, doing child labor in the fields and vineyards of California. When he was 5 years old, his father was killed in a work accident at the Sunmaid Raisin factory and the family faced extreme poverty.

Gary Soto has become a major voice for describing the experience and plight of Mexican American communities, both as a poet and a children’s author. His accomplishments as both author and educator have led to numerous awards, including a nomination for the Pulitzer prize.

He is, true to his roots, also an ambassador of the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA), which means that during his visits to libraries and schools, he introduces kids to the legacy of the United Farm Workers organization. The UFWA is the largest organization of farm workers in the United States.



Here is his version of the dreamscape.

In Praise of Dreams

By Gary Soto 

after Wisława Szymborska

In my dreams,
I lasso a wild steer on the first try.

I chauffeur Picasso
To meet up with Dali—
None of us is happy about this summit.

After licking my fingertips,
I play guitar masterfully.

I use index cards to make sense
Of the universe.

I discover my childhood cat in the neighbor’s tree—
So that’s where you’ve been, you little rascal.

I beg the alligator, por favor,
To make a snap judgement,
Will it be my leg or my arm?

Picture me swimming with dolphins.
Picture me with these dolphins
Sitting in lawn chairs.

I’m full of gratitude—
The lightbulb comes on
When the refrigerator door is opened.

Yes, I’m the scientist who solved laryngitis—
Now all of us howl at our own pleasure.

I get to throw a trophy from a moving car.
When I park my car,
I’m awarded another trophy—
Someone above is giving me a second chance.

Going out on a limb here, figuring these words are not all about the unbelievable, but a reflection of lived experience. None of the omnipotence of its Polish counterpart – none of the rigid structure either, stanzas varying in length, statements diverting from the “I can do this or that” on multiple occasions, making it somehow more conversational.

Here is the longing of a kid, stuck scraping beets in the fields, to work with cowboys, a moot desire.

Here is the servant to the narcissistic master painter(s), not a genius himself, just a chauffeur, as would be likely.

Protecting roughed up fingertips to play guitar, not unbelievable.

Using index cards to make sense of the world – show me an English as a Second Language speaker, I’ll show you the cards.

Time travel back to childhood, not ancient Greece, remembering the cat.

No invincibility when facing harm – just hoping it’s going to be an arm or a leg, not and arm and a leg as the loan sharks would extract.

The dolphins? No clue. Yes, unbelievable, unless they are fat tourists at the Gulf of Mexico.

Now gratitude for a working fridge, a sentiment never expressed or even hinted at in the preceding poem by Szymborska. Acknowledgment of plain necessities.

Solving a medical condition, a feat enabling universal howling: the state of the world that causes grief remains untouched.

But there are second chances – and explicit reference to a power above rather than the mastery of one’s own fate.

Belief in that is up to the beholder.

These remind me so much more of real dreams, allow for feeling closer to the dreamer, convey a modesty and realism that make this poem speak to the heart, where the original one spoke to the head. Both have their role, of course. But even poems deserve their second chance!

On days like this I go for the humanity rather than intellect. No trophies needed.

Photographs today are from Chicano Park at the Barrio Logan in San Diego.

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Dreams (1)

Admittedly it’s not a random sample, but many of those who I talk to or correspond with these days relate how much they are inundated with bad dreams. Personally, I’ve had dates with full-blown nightmares way too often in the last year, but that could be explained by illness. The general increase in harsh nocturnal screenplays is surely related to the state of the world, the state of our lives in these strange times.

The poem I am introducing below struck me as all the more remarkable when read against this backdrop.

In Praise of Dreams

In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not only with the living.

I drive a car
which obeys me.

I am talented,
I write long, great poems.

I hear voices
no less than the major saints.

You would be amazed
at my virtuosity on the piano.

I float through the air as is proper,
that is, all by myself.

Falling from the roof
I can softly land on green grass.

I don’t find it hard
to breathe under water.

I can’t complain:
I’ve succeeded in discovering Atlantis.

I’m delighted that just before dying
I always manage to wake.

Right after the outbreak of war
I turn over on my favorite side.

I am but I need not
be a child of my time.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the day before yesterday a penguin.
With the utmost clarity.

– Wislawa Szymborska

So is this poem from View with a Grain of Sand (1996) a description of a person who comes into her own in her nightly dreams? More than that, really – is it a boast that she excels, displays mastery, is in full control over life and death and obviously dreams, can decide when and where to focus attention, to partake, to belong?

But for a few stanzas, everything starts with “I” – the narcissistic focus of an imagined parallel life? Or the determination to have some agency in dreams, when deprived of it in real life? Is it an invitation to focus on the positive, as exaggerated as can be, to set lofty goals instead of enduring what’s on offer here and now?

The poet is a real magician in how she draws us in – starting with a painter’s name that triggers something visual, just like in a dream, perhaps a painting that most people have a vague memory of – didn’t the girl with the pearl earring or something related pop up just now? Progressing to some auditory bits (speaking Greek, hearing Saints,) with a side dish of time travel, just like in dreams that move so fluently between the past and present, the worldly and the otherworldly realms. She’s in control – of cars, of flying, of outcomes – no broken bones from falls, no drowning episodes, no futile pursuits – hey, there’s Atlantis after all! She’s no less than a master in everything she touches, from visual art, to music, to writing, and you would be amazed – calling in the recognition that’s deserved by addressing us directly. The prevalence of falling in dreams is acknowledged, a stanza that does not begin with “I”, though it, as well, ends up with dreamt invincibility.

So what happens in the end? A clear memory of a real dream which contains nothing of the professed wizardry, but instead simply two suns. A double dose of light to illuminate the futility of wishful thinking? A symbol for another universe, one where the gap between reality and wishful thinking can be bridged?

A penguin dream, the other day. Getting cold feet, waddling on thin ice? Or the ability to perceive possibilities, strange creatures, with clarity, even if they exist as far removed from us as they currently do? Your guess is as good as mine.

The whole thing requires some serious thinking. Turns out that’s just the thing that will defeat bad dreams.

I am not just saying that. Scientific data are truly reassuring: we can influence our dreams with thinking, even post-traumatic nightmares. Here is a good, easily read introduction to the findings and methods.) Go ahead, practice!

Sweet dreams.

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First Signs of Spring

Spring is officially on the calendar and sure enough, the first messengers, trilliums, are popping up left and right in the woods. These wondrous little sentinels from the Lily family grow from rhysomes, have three furled leaves, a short stalk and, in these parts, mostly white flowers.

Before the flowers unfold, the shoots are easily overlooked, and I worry when Hundchen does his exuberant run in the woods that things get trampled – just like the damage done to the wildflowers by the tree cutter in Frost’s poem below.

Frost’s protagonist goes to the woods to collect birch boughs for a trellis for his peas.

As much as he is in favor of utilizing what nature has to offer, he also cares about the damage done – the axed stumps are bleeding and the wildflowers might be crushed by all the debris on top of them – go, clean up the mess! In fact, it might be too late for the trilliums, having been “crooked” by man’s arboreal harvest. I assume that means sort of crushed.

Somehow, though, nature seems to prevail. That last line reminds of the inevitability of growth, even if damage awaits. They just push through, next after next.

That certainly seems to be the case in the woods here, still bruised from the recent storms, windfall wherever you look. The little stars dot the landscape – affirmation of resilience, or nature doing its thing, unperturbed, you choose.

Pea Brush 

Robert Frost – 1874-1963

I walked down alone Sunday after church
   To the place where John has been cutting trees
To see for myself about the birch
   He said I could have to bush my peas.

The sun in the new-cut narrow gap
   Was hot enough for the first of May,
And stifling hot with the odor of sap
   From stumps still bleeding their life away.

The frogs that were peeping a thousand shrill
   Wherever the ground was low and wet,
The minute they heard my step went still
   To watch me and see what I came to get.

Birch boughs enough piled everywhere!—
   All fresh and sound from the recent axe.
Time someone came with cart and pair
   And got them off the wild flower’s backs.

They might be good for garden things
   To curl a little finger round,
The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings,
   And lift themselves up off the ground.

Small good to anything growing wild,
   They were crooking many a trillium
That had budded before the boughs were piled
   And since it was coming up had to come.
 

Here is some music that captures the sparseness of the woods and the still cool light in March, reflected off the white petals of the Trillium.

Photographs mostly from archives, a few from this week, 4 legged creature included.

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Squirrels on Ice

Kissed by privilege. Not only do I live in a place surrounded by old-growth trees, but from my bed I look directly onto a balcony that has become a cafeteria for all kinds of creatures during the cold months. The crows visit, as do the thrush and the nuthatches, the juncos and the towhees, some sparrows and the occasional shy chickadee. And then there are the squirrels, scrambling up the side of the house.

We had put seeds and nuts out onto the railing before the snow hit. The squirrels lost no time to dig them all up and either eat them right there or abscond with them to refill empty caches. It brought nature as close to me as possible, a source of considerable joy and distraction. Photographing with my small digital camera – I am not allowed to lift or hold the large one until the incisions are healed – through the window yielded some fun images.

It also made me think about the double-edged sword of the fragmentation of boundaries between human and animal territory with our human incursions into nature’s spaces. On the one hand, you gain so much knowledge if you can observe and research animal behavior of populations close to you. On the other hand, we all know how pandemics are generated if territorial lines are crossed. I feel like Cassandra just mentioning the fact that 7 Russians were the first humans found to be infected with the H5N8 bird flu last week.

Let’s start the week on a more optimistic footing, though. Here are two amazing things about squirrels.

They have not only the capability to listen for and identify predators’ calls, like owls and hawks, predators that could become dangerous to them. They also eavesdrop on the general bird population around them. If other birds continue to chatter unperturbed, the squirrels relax.

“Eavesdropping on alarm calls or eavesdropping on chatter is a cheap and easy way to supplement the information they have access to. Because it’s free. It’s produced by other individuals in the environment. It’s publicly available to any organism that has the cognitive ability to recognize and interpret that information.”

Nifty, but nothing in comparison to what other squirrels’ brains have to offer in the fight against human disease, Alzheimers in particular. Recent research of the brain of arctic ground squirrels revealed some facts that no one ever anticipated.

These critters, at home in Siberia, Alaska and Canada, burrow about a meter under the tundra surface to hibernate for 7 months. During that process, their body temperature plummets, below the freezing point of water!, and their brains stop producing a lot of neural activity. Structurally their neurons shrink and the connections between neurons shrivel away. Think of it as if a tree crown sheds all of its twigs and branches, just leaving a few big limbs intact.

But here comes the amazing part.  When the squirrels wake up, they grow back, within only two hours, not just all the synapses lost during hibernation— their brain cells now boast many more links than those of an active squirrel in the spring or summertime. A day later, their brains prune many of these ties, probably recognizing them as superfluous, and so end up in exactly the state before they started hibernation. The details of this process can be found here. The implications for brain plasticity and potential application to brains that have lost a lot of their dendritic connections (dementias) are now explored by scientists around the world.

Maybe my own synapses start firing again, one of these days, emerging from this semi-hibernating interlude. And I will walk in nature again. Which reminds me of one of my favorite poems about walking while stewarding nature’s cycles or mythology, your pick. It was written by former Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen. The story of Demeter and Persephone really focusses on the eternal cycle of sowing, growth, harvest, withering and dying back, questions as to the nature of human life and death, including the possibility of resurrection from Hades. A mother, Goddess of the harvest, Demeter, carries her tears with her grains, missing her abducted daughter. The pomegranate seeds, mentioned late in the poem, hold life but also the banishment to the underworld, if you remember Persephone’s fate. A temporary excursion into the realm of the dead, just like squirrels in hibernation….

Music by Stravinsky, I’m indulging in the incomparable German version with Fritz Wunderlich.

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