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The Life of Water, Poetry without Borders

This story will meander in the fashion of the river that provides its background, but it begins with a tableau. Wichita-based poet Albert Goldbarth stands overlooking a waist-high plinth and beyond—to the Arkansas (accent on the second syllable) River toward what used to be New Spain but is now South Wichita. It’s raining on Albert and the plinth and the rest of us. He’s standing under one of those MOMA catalog umbrellas, the one with the image of fluffy white clouds and blue sky on the underside so that he's always in fair weather. As must be the case for anything to be interesting, incoming information here is complex and contradictory. The words cast on the rain-spattered plinth are Albert's. 

Trichloroethene (a.k.a. Tricky) was first produced in the 1920s and used as an invaluable field hospital anesthetic during World War II—invaluable because it didn't seem to attack a patient's liver as chloroform does or tend to blow up like ether. However, as is the case with a lot of things that look good during wars but later on turn out otherwise (DDT is a great example), Tricky revealed its nasty self to be toxic and carcinogenic; its use in the food and pharmaceutical industries has been banned in much of the world since the 1970s. Tricky has persevered, however, as a heavy-duty degreaser.

In 1991, Trichloroethene—along with a carcinogenic and toxic posse including
Tetrachloroethene (dry-cleaning fluid), 1,2-Dichloroethene, and good old vinyl chloride—was found in the groundwater in a 5 ½ square mile area under downtown Wichita, a few blocks north of the Goldbarth/umbrella/Arkansas River scene. Immediately everyone did what good civic and business leaders do—they hastened to assign blame, threaten litigation, and figure out how to avoid a cash hemorrhage.  Eventually the federal government intervened with the threat of a Superfund site and its attendant baggage, and out of desperation—and ten years after the contamination was discovered—Wichita created WATER, the Wichita Area Treatment, Education & Remediation Center, which sounds more like a substance abuse treatment hospital. And of course, in a way, it is.

Contaminated groundwater is gathered through extraction wells and miles of piping, treated and remediated at the WATER site, and released into the Arkansas. The vision for the treatment facility included the city park where it was located and the notion of a social and educational public place. Realizing that a world-class poet lived in town, planners advanced the idea of a rather implausible wedding of poetry and hydrology. As a happy result, paths meander through park landscaping and lead walkers past other plinths, each displaying four Goldbarth lines, expressions of the pervasive interconnection of humans and their environment. On one, the trees remind readers "Like you, we're silos of water," on another, "The life of water never ends / it merely has different bodies." Here’s a third: 

In a second set piece, Goldbarth is standing before one of three observation windows that are built into a wall of the treatment facility and that provide a cloudy view of an aquarium featuring native Kansas fish. Next to the reflection of the poet’s head, a good-sized sunfish floats motionless. Above the window is more Goldbarth language, the first line of a tercet that concludes over the other windows: “Before there were faces . . .  / Before there were mirrors . . . / There was water.” Most likely he’s not looking at the fish or his own reflection, but rather at the letters attached to the concrete wall. The “h” in “there,” the “e” in “faces,” and one of the dots from the ellipses have fallen away.

According to the WATER website, an active water education program with classes and field trips thrives here, tours explain the remediation process, public activities flourish, couples even come here to get married. They’ve got that keeping-busy part covered, but then there’s the issue of those missing letters and what they signify. The general sense of the place suggests someone whispering, “We’ve run out of money” or “We decided to spend our money on something else.” If that’s the case, it’s a damn shame because if it all is allowed to go to seed, something more than an attractive public space will be lost.

Cleaned water flows from the treatment center and is set free—through a series of water features in various attitudes of falling and splashing, into a small creek that passes by the plinths with Goldbarth's words, and then on to the Arkansas River. There it joins water that starts as snowmelt in the heartbreakingly beautiful mountains near Leadville, Colorado, and eventually slows to a meander through the plains. A Goldbarth poem recognizes all the meandering centuries, the river exchanging its water with the clouds, dragging soil from Kansas to Napoleon, Arkansas, and there turning it over to the Mississippi to take it on to the Delta. In a trenchant installation, water falls over letters set into a weathered vertical wall:

Moving from one text to another, one begins to understand what a large thing Goldbarth has managed to accomplish once he was freed from the usual 8 ½ x 11 boundaries to create poetry on a codex without limits. On opposing sides of the building’s frieze:

~The life of water never ends~

~The tear and the ocean are sisters~

Intended to serve as an introduction to the poetic project, the following piece is cast on a plaque set into a native boulder at the park’s entrance:

The geology-water exists among stones.
The mythology-water exists in hearts.
We’re born of them. We’re born
of all of the waters;
the Genesis-water and the Darwin-water,
the water that turns the mill,
as well as the theoretical water in clouds.
It’s 74% of our bodies.
The tear and the ocean are sisters.

In Goldbarth’s hands, a landscape of poetry has become part of the environment it interprets while it asserts, through the endless life of water, a universal interconnecting of all things over all time.

Ephemera in the Woods

In one of Wallace Stevens' best-known poems, the speaker places a jar on a hill in Tennessee. “It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill. // The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.” In Levitated Mass, one of Michael Heizer’s best known art works, he “placed” a 340-ton boulder over a below-ground walkway in Los Angeles. A little closer to Athens, Georgia, over the past several weeks, people walking the trails at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia have noticed long rows of fallen branches running parallel to the paths. At first these seemed to be arbitrary piles of woodsy flotsam perhaps gathered up by some whimsical workers among the many volunteers that help maintain the place. But the number of windrows increased and they acquired the suggestion of order, appearing to run along hillsides like contour lines on a topo map. And then the first structure (a circle about four feet in diameter, two feet high, and constructed from small logs and branches) appeared near one of the trails. Then a second in another section of the grounds.

The structures, I've since discovered, are the work of Athens-based land artist Chris Taylor, who plans at least two dozen. When completed, they will comprise "Garden Nests: An ephemeral and exertive interpretation of home." It's an installation, in the words of the artist, "illustrating Athens as both a permanent home to its residents, and a transient home for students, teachers, artists, musicians, scientists, and the like. Whether temporary or for a lifetime, the home you create is suited to your needs, using what's around you, and moved if necessary. Anyone can create a home with the right opportunity and accessibility."

As does any construct in nature—a jar on a hillside in Tennessee, a suspended boulder outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a spiral jetty extending into Great Salt Lake, six miles of silver fabric hanging over the Arkansas River, or a pyramid near El Giza, Egypt—"Garden Nests" invites a close look at the forms that human culture imposes on the natural world and the artistic statements that result.

In his fine essay in The Georgia Review’s Fall 2008 issue, “Forms and Structures,” Stephen Dunn quotes his own—considerably shorter—“Little Essay on Form” in its entirety: “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” Leave it to a poet to nail a metaphor so well, a metaphor that can withstand being poked and prodded until it reveals its depth and weight.

Among the examples Dunn employs is the work of Scottish sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy, who for the last four decades has created forms from natural objects and enacted moments that for him embody past, present, and future time. Goldsworthy’s work ranges anywhere from small and ephemeral designs of autumn leaves laid out on an open hillside, to lines of connected grasses set adrift in a stream, to near-monumental stone arches—seemingly just about any creation imaginable, idiosyncratic, and innovative.   

Goldsworthy’s goal is to understand the natural world through touch, to work with the qualities of any given material, to understand the material’s place by engaging with its qualities and its history, and ultimately, as an artist, to create a form, to build Dunn’s corral for a new way of seeing: colored leaves as palate, icicles as prisms, fallen branches as walls. Heizer has famously said: “I’m self-entertaining. My dialog is with myself.” Goldsworthy too. Much of what is derived from his art is his own. What he learns of rock from balancing one on another, of cold by crafting shapes from icicles, of gravity by building a doorway of twigs, of snow by throwing it into the wind—all this knowledge is Goldsworthy’s and his alone. For someone seeing images of his work or those lucky enough to visit the more permanent sites, Goldsworthy’s attention to the traditions of art reveal a primarily modernist aesthetic. The nature of his structures provides the connection.

By way of example, consider Goldsworthy’s 1999 construction of a driftwood dome at the mouth of an estuary near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ideally, a place will suggest to him what direction the work will take. So when his introduction to the beach was “a river and a pool that was being turned by the river,” he saw immediately the potential: on a rising tide, a confluence of “two energies at the powerful moment when the sea and river meet.” To understand this moment, he began to replicate what he called the “turning pool” by gathering bleached driftwood to build a dome on the rocky shore beside the pool.  Working from inside, he placed the driftwood in a circular motion until it reached about six feet high, then crawled out the bottom. He left an opening in the top—because looking into a hole makes him “. . . aware of the potent energies within the earth.”  Then he waited for the moment when the energies of the sea, the river, and the earth would come together. Goldsworthy’s work focuses on such moments, but all of his materials—that is, elements of the natural world—will persist in some form and, prior to his intervention, existed in yet another. As he says, “The more I worked, the more aware I became of the powerful sense of time embedded in place. The moment of my working a material and of my being there was bound up with what had gone before.” The future, on the other hand, is a lesson in impermanence.

The moment arrived. When the incoming tide reached the turning pool and the dome, it first pulled the lowest sticks away. Then it lifted the entire structure and began to turn it just as the river is turned twice each day. Finally the tide pulled the dome free of the pool and carried it slowly upstream. Goldsworthy recalled his feelings watching the dome drift away as it foundered gently: “It feels like it’s being taken off into another plane, into another world or another work. It doesn’t feel at all like destruction. It feels as if you’ve touched the heart of the place. That’s the way of understanding, seeing something you never saw before that was always there but you were blind to it. I followed the sticks upstream—darkness was falling—eventually leaving it to drift off into the night towards the town.”   

As Dunn asserts, “Essentially, form’s job is to help reveal content. . . . It guides the eye.” For Goldsworthy, it alters how we understand not only the material but also the space and energy around the material. Form, then, is the principal enabler of transformation in art. The corral is built, the horse is reinvented. Artists build and we stand by; in their process of creating, they give us a vantage point. What we readers and viewers do with the experience is up to us. As I watched film of Goldsworthy’s dome disappearing on the rising tide, I thought about other turning forms: channel whelks, my failing ears, and—about as far away from a cold beach in Nova Scotia as you can get—a cliff at Chaco Canyon where Ancestral Puebloans carved the emblem of their emergence, a spiral on a sandstone wall.

*******

Photo by Chris Taylor. Discover more images of his compelling work at 34 Degrees North -Land Art.

Goldsworthy quotations are from Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers and Tides (Dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2001) and Andy Goldsworthy’s Time (Abrams, 2000).

Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic

This is one possible definition of mental illness: It is the sickness of unborn pain.

Suicide, when it happens, is often, although I think not inevitably, tragic, but the thought of suicide might well be a successful adaptation of the human mind to extreme emotional distress.

It is an odd fact that in the history of humanity that we have been dying for millennia, without exception, and yet we still cannot face the fact that this is not a tragedy.

Sentences like these from Paul Gruchow’s extraordinary memoir (Letters to a Young Madman: A Memoir, Levins Publishing, 2012) have a monumental feel that commands special handling. Writing about big things necessitates urgency—not to hurry the story into print but to get it told right. Sometimes the need is so great that the customary ways just won’t do. Gruchow and Brian Turner (My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir, W.W. Norton, 2013)—as unlikely a pair of authors to appear in the same sentence—shared that literary urgency. Gruchow, essayist lost to suicide, and Turner, poet and Iraq war combat survivor—I bring them together here to look at how they turned from their usual way of doing things to make their stories into powerful memoir.

The author of six acclaimed books of essays, Gruchow suffered through periods of depression and hospitalization that eventually closed down his strong and often lyrical nature-writing voice. Emerging from his protracted dry spell, however, he began work on a book about his disease and treatment. He had accumulated pages of research, recollections of childhood, vivid tales from inside mental institutions, even poems. But how to fit it all into the elegantly structured essay style that had served him over the years had him stymied and frustrated. Enter his friend and literary confidant, Louis Martinelli, who came upon the inspired idea of pointing Gruchow to the fragmented structure of Eduardo Galeano’s books. As Martinelli says, “Paul got it right away.”

On the other hand, with his reputation as a poet (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) firmly in hand, Brian Turner moved to nonfiction in a manner influenced strongly by his poetic aesthetic. In an interview published on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog (23 September 2014), he told how after his military discharge he was experimenting with haibun, a traditional Japanese travel-writing form that combines a brief prose section with a haiku. With no other intent (“I was simply experimenting with form and trying to discover how it shaped my thoughts on memory and travel”), he realized that an essay was emerging, an essay that would later grow into his memoir of war and soldiering. The resulting fragmented work depends, in Turner’s words, on “a reader that enjoys participating in the construction of the work itself.” Discrete sections of narrative from across time, expository historical sections, poetry, even a short screenplay wait to be joined by that reader’s imagination.

Of course the notion of assembling a myriad of referential moments isn’t new. How can any English major forget T.S. Eliot’s “fragments” that he “shored against [his] ruins”? But the notion is modern. Remember Tristram Shandy? Doesn’t it read, diction aside, as though it were written a lot later than the middle of the eighteenth century? It has that turn-of-the-twentieth-century feel to it—the feel of that last, great epochal intellectual shift.

In 1907, Picasso set the foundation for Cubism when he came to Paris with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the portrait of five nude prostitutes, anatomically approximate but distorted beyond any semblance to an impressionist or realist nude. It fell to Georges Braque to show the real meaning of Picasso’s painting, which he did in a series of landscapes that included Houses at l’Estaque (1908). Here he simply took apart a village visually and reassembled it as it might be seen from multiple vantages. How does one look at five nude prostitutes anyway? Well, look at one for a while, then another, look at parts of them that capture your eye, turn away, turn back, left eye only, right eye, notice the setting. Then think about how all these views make you feel. Memory and imagination will do the rest. To paint that canvas would result in something more realistic than any Titian.

Cezanne declared, and Picasso and Braque echoed: Art is not nature and shouldn’t try to imitate it. And just like that they rejected an aesthetic that had dominated visual art since the Renaissance.  After that, there was no turning back. A painting was paint on a surface, nothing more, not a window to the world outside. What freedom.

~

What matters is the connection between fragmentation and memory, narrative and perception. Modernist writing went Cubist in varying ways: Dos Passos’ “newsreels” and “camera eyes,” William Burroughs’ “cutups,” the “things” of Paterson that contain William’s ideas, and of course Eliot’s blend of the common and the obscure. Without the traditional transitions, unconnected text has to be seen in visual terms in order to be understood, must be related in ways that correspond to shape or color or size. In other words, the organization becomes abstract, at which point the correspondence between modern painting and modern writing is quite apparent.

In addition, the fragments can be seen as metaphor, attention given to the tension their various juxtapositions create—space to be filled with something or not filled, just space to define the actual. For what the Cubists found when they dumped 400 years of rules about perspective was a new kind of space—what Braque called “tactile space,” the distance between the viewer and the painting rather than the distance between the painting’s objects. In this way, the viewer gains a new involvement.

Whether in painting or writing, singing or dancing, between the fragments comes space. But there’s so much more—it’s not merely a structural thing, emptiness created by whatever fragments or elements limit it; it is real, and it exists in time as well. As a viewer or reader experiences those surrounding elements, whatever takes place in that person’s imagination becomes the space.

Japanese culture has offered a word for it. Ma. It is said that in nothingness, ma enables. Ma is an interval, the presence of an absence, a void waiting. And from China more than 2500 years ago,

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, Trans. Stephen Mitchell

Testimony to Gruchow’s and Turner’s artful handling of what might at first appear to be a random or self-indulgent structure can be found in the tight control with which each author manages the cohesion of his book. Each fragment has been composed and situated with an eye both to its neighbors and to its overall purpose, and an overall unity derives from continuation—of theme and time in Gruchow’s case and in Turner’s, of poetic and novelistic devices.

Although the overall organization of Letters to a Young Madman—absent the usual chapter or section demarcations—may appear arbitrary, it suggests strongly a chronological reading. A wide range of quotations from Marcus Aurelius to Nietzsche set off apparent section divisions, and each fragment bears its own title. But the quotations are best read alongside Gruchow’s fragments rather than as introductions or summations. I’m examining here a fifteen-page section of eleven fragments located between pieces titled “The Hospital 1” and “A Modest Proposal” that highlight what elevates Letters above mere memoir: Gruchow’s ultimate aim, which is no less than to reform the mental health system. The fragments vary in length from two sentences to two pages, starting with a chilling recounting of the first moments of admission for a new psychiatric hospital patient and ending with a scathing suggestion for hospital reform.

“The Hospital 1” describes the intake process in declarative, simple sentences, most fewer than a dozen words. The effect is haunting.

You are led down a long hallway to your room. The hallway is wide and barren. The room has two beds, a window, and one, hard low-backed chair. The window is covered in thick Plexiglas. The floor is hard and the walls are unornamented. Everything is some shade of gray. The beds are standard hospital issue.  

The voice is deliberately child-like because, as Gruchow says, “The last time you wore pajamas twenty-four hours a day, you were an infant. You have now assumed the appearance of a mental patient.” The point of view throughout is second person, and the direct address is doubled when he has a nurse speak to the patient, “I’m sorry but you’ll have to remove your shorts too.” (You, the reader, suddenly morphs into you, the patient, and when Gruchow tells you the blankets are flimsy and psychiatric wards are chilly, you empathize because you’ve walked a mile in his hospital-issue socks.

“The Hospital 2,” written in the same, flat voice, lays out the routine. And as if Gruchow were unable to break the old transition-sentence habit, the closing sentence—“Three or four days of this routine and you are bored to the bones”—introduces three short “Boredom” chapters.  Here Gruchow drops the insider voice and returns to his familiar rhythms and approach. The comments are trenchant, the sentences exact. The pieces run from three to eight lines each and have the same stabbing effect as short sentences surrounded by longer ones: “Boredom 2,” for example, reads in its entirety: “Babies have pacifiers. Adults have television. The reason the television set is in the center of the psychiatric ward life is that watching it is the only thing in life that requires less effort than sleeping.” He then stops to summarize in “The Hospital 3,” a statement that should be read by anyone connected in any conceivable way to the mental health system in this country. It’s another brief paragraph, and he’s considering what the mental health system calls the “therapeutic milieu.”

Reduce an adult to the status of a child, put him in surroundings that resemble as little as possible a home, deprive him of nearly all intellectual and sensory stimuli, induce nicotine and caffeine withdrawal, and provoke a simultaneous state of insomnia and intense boredom. Perhaps there is something therapeutic in this, but I confess that I cannot see what it is. Of course, I am not a psychiatrist.

What a gem of controlled anger and clear insight.

In a longer narrative that follows, Gruchow is a storyteller; then in a concise look at psychiatric hospital design, he’s a researcher. Finally, two fragments compare and contrast hospital and prison life in traditional rhetorical ways. If read thoughtfully—by Turner’s ideal reader who “enjoys participating in the construction of the work itself”—all this jumping around, changing voices, and coming at an issue from as many angles as possible—creates discrete moments of intense empathy and comprehension broken by intervals inviting imagination and contemplation. To help the reader in synthesizing these fragments, Gruchow closes the section with “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical piece worthy of the Swift tradition. In it, he suggests that before given admission to practice, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses must each be admitted to a psychiatric ward with a “particularly pejorative diagnosis,” be medicated, and be given “two weeks to convince the staff, without reference to their credentials, that they are sane.” Those who fail get another chance in six months. Gruchow’s proposal is a fine piece of wit that gathers and concludes the various fragments of the section in a truly organic way.

In My Life as a Foreign Country, Turner numbers his fragments but otherwise eschews any explicit divisions. He also provides blank pages that serve to separate sections as well as to create silent intervals for taking deeper breaths, waiting for understanding. The gathering of fragments considered here (29-40) focus on and emanate from the recruiter’s office where Turner’s military service began. Thoroughly remembered down to the “warmth of the freshly printed list of options,” the scene ends with the anaphoric sentence that will function like a musical burden—a droning repetition of a refrain: variations on the sentence, “I pointed to the list and said the word Infantry.”

Why would anyone do such a thing? I can give you only an impression of the answer. In fragment 30, an eleven-year-old Turner is digging a foxhole based on specifications from his father’s infantry field manuals. “I signed the paper and joined the infantry for reasons I won’t tell you and for reasons I will.” In fragment 32, Turner’s father, involved in a nearly fatal motorcycle accident, is left with a story and a huge scar. “The scar said—that which is written in the flesh is irrefutable. This is the mark of a man. This is what it takes.” In fragment 33, Turner and his father— “fighting the invisible before us”— train in a backyard dojo.  “I pointed to the list and said Infantry because I wanted the man in the polyester suit to know, at some unconscious level, that I didn’t give a shit what row of ribbons he had pinned to his chest.” In fragment 35, Turner is making homemade napalm with his father following a recipe from The Poor Man’s James Bond. And he’s remembering stories: from his Vietnam Veteran uncle about enemy interrogations, from his father about secret reconnaissance missions.

In the midst of this collage of memory and violence, Turner inserts the screenplay of “The War that Time Forgot,” a Super8 movie written, produced, and acted by him and his middle-school friends. The movie concludes when the star (Sgt. T., played by Turner), to a background of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, blows off an enemy’s head—“a melon filled with sheep’s blood and pig brains.”

Then Turner returns to the stories. His father clinically dead from a heart attack, revives. “So what was it like, dying?” Turner asks. “That,” his father answers, “ that was a trauma-junkie’s delight.”

Fragment 39 describes a chilling moment of epiphany.

When we triggered the device and the napalm exploded, I felt charged and electric. We were surrounded by the cold. Coffee steamed in the cup as the entire world disappeared in fog. And for a moment, I knew—here was the great body of Death. A portion of the inheritance we all share. I wanted to see it break open in fire. I wanted the world to be shaken by it. And, most of all, I wanted to be shaken by it, too.

In the final fragment, Turner introduces even more accounting—to the background of the burden’s drone: “I said Infantry because my great-grandfather Carter was gassed during the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in the fall of 1918.” And “I said Infantry because one of my great-greats enlisted in the Union Army—15 November 1861—at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. . . .” And he signed because his grandfather survived Bougainville and Guam and Iwo Jima. “I signed the paper because I knew that on some deep and immutable level, I would leave and I would never come back.”

Of course, no definitive explanation of Turner’s choices exists, but an empathic reading is possible. It lies in the spaces between the fragments of his recollections, just beyond language but informed by it. In the same way, Paul Gruchow’s accounts of the suffering the mentally ill endure and his rendering of his own struggle with mental illness are so powerful that his words and images remain with us as we pause, engage our own imaginations, and begin to understand during his book’s indwelling silences.

********

This piece appeared first in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (1.2). Check their website to see the good company it's keeping there.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from moma.org.

Turning Fish Eggs into Baseball Uniforms

On 17 January 2015, the Poplar pipeline, which transports 42,000 barrels of crude oil a day under the Yellowstone River, failed, dumping an estimated 50,000 gallons of crude into the river. This is Montana’s second recent pipeline failure; three years ago 63,000 gallons polluted Yellowstone’s water. This last breach occurred seventeen miles upstream from Glendive, Montana, where cancer-causing benzene was detected in the city’s water supply. Another twenty miles or so upriver from the spill is the proposed site where the Keystone XL pipeline will pass under the river.

Major news sources like CNN and Fox weren’t able to see the connection, and neither, obviously, were the politicians who approved funding for the Keystone XL pipeline twelve days after the Glendive accident. A rancher whose land borders the spill site had a closer, better view. Her take is tough and true: “Pipelines leak and pipelines break. We’re never going to get around that. We have to decide if water is more valuable than oil.” The headline for the Associated Press story was probably more hopeful than accurate. “Montana Oil Spill Renews Worries Over Pipeline Safety.”

Another headline from another time comes to mind: the lead story of the 18 May 2000 issue of Glendive’s weekly, the Ranger-Review, “Anglers But No Fish,” and the subhead “Paddlefish wait for river to rise.” This was my first trip to a town where the week’s most important news story was about fish waiting for something to happen. The story clarified things: “Forty percent of the snowpack is left in the mountains, and when that melts and the river swells, there may be one or two good weeks of paddlefishing here.”

As it turns out, I was wondering where the paddlefish were. I had driven to the Intake Diversion Dam about fifteen miles downriver from Glendive because a student had told me about the tradition and spectacle of paddlefishing and had given me a pamphlet from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks about Polyodon spatula that zoomed it to the top of my fish list. “CHARACTERISTICS: Body naked except for scales on upper lobe of tail. Lobes of tail fin unequal in size. Skeleton largely of cartilage. HABITAT: Slow or quiet bars of large rivers during spring high water. STATUS: Native. SIMILAR SPECIES: None.” None indeed.

This is one strange, pre-historic-looking fish. The body is reminiscent of a shark’s, cartilaginous and with a large, lobed tail. The mouth is remarkably cavernous. And then there’s the snout — the rostrum, the spatula, the paddle. It’s huge, up to two feet, sometimes making up about a quarter of the fish’s length. It is thought to contain thousands of receptors for positioning in shifting currents and over varied river-bottom topography. A paddlefish feeds by sucking in water through its mouth and sifting out zooplankton with its gills. Because of this, it rises to no bait; it must be snagged. So the fishing technique is as distinctive as the fish. Anglers line the river, armed with saltwater surfcasting poles with sixty-pound test line. At the end of the line is a six-ounce weight and a treble hook tied about a foot above it. Cast it out and pull it back with a series of hearty yanks. Hope.

The fishing grounds without the paddlefish are without fanfare: a flood plain, a campground with a few trailers and campers scattered among its cottonwoods, a dusty parking lot with a half-dozen pickups. On that day of the disappointing headline, the Yellowstone hurried along, breaking up into rapids at the dam. White pelicans floated there or stood on the rocks. A man and a woman sitting on overturned buckets watched their lines disappear into the café-au-lait water. Robins chirped. Bass notes from a stereo in the campground thumped. At the edge of a dusty bluff that overlooks the scene, is a commemorative plaque. Years ago a young man from out of town, perhaps not river-wise, had waded out too far, slipped on the muddy river bottom, and was carried away downstream. On the plaque was a picture of a boy in a basketball uniform and an inscription that declared he had “lost his beautiful life to the Yellowstone River while paddlefishing.”

What to do when snow won’t melt and fish won’t migrate to fit my schedule? Drive the six hours to Yellowstone Park where the Yellowstone River runs clear and fast and anglers gently drop their feathery lures and pause over the colors of the trout they catch and release. Hike a week in the mountains while the paddlefish wait for the ancient command and people come to the riverbank at Intake, eager, then disappointed.

~

A week gone and the word is out: the paddlefish are running. The Yellowstone at Intake is just as brown but more agitated and higher on its banks. Anglers have replaced the pelicans, lining the shore and milling around the riverbank. A huge fire burns in a firepit to keep away the gnats. Nearby, people crowd a concession stand. Kid in strollers, moms, dogs. Two anglers, call them snaggers: George (his name is on his shirt pocket) and Leroy (a crowd favorite). Both have the gait and legs of men who have spent a good part of their lives on horseback. They cast out as far as they can, turn their poles to 9:00, and begin to retrieve: pull, reel in, pull again. Each pull bends their huge surfcasting poles double, the reeling is frantic.

George snags his fish first. His playing of it is hard and aggressive, much like an ocean surfcaster landing a striped bass. In fifteen minutes the paddlefish tires and lies struggling about ten feet offshore. Someone takes George’s gaff, wades into the river, gaffs the fish, and pulls it ashore. Used up, it lolls among the beached logs and other detritus of the Yellowstone in spring. George untangles his line, attaches a tag, sticks the gaff into the gills, and bends to the difficult job of dragging fifty pounds of fish one-hundred yards up the riverbank to the cleaning trailer. The fish’s body leaves behind a meandering furrow in the mud and silt.

Here at the cleaning trailer is another unique feature of Glendive paddlefishing. If it’s not a catch-and-release day, they clean and dress each fish in exchange for the roe, which is donated to the Glendive Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture. The chamber processes it into caviar to sell worldwide. In the first nine years of the program more than a million dollars were realized. This money is divided roughly in half between the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) and the chamber. FWP money is used for paddlefish research and fishing site improvements. The chamber awards its money in grants to nonprofit organizations for cultural, historical, or recreational projects.

Meanwhile, back on the river, Leroy has begun an adventure with Hemingway overtones. Either because he has snagged a larger fish, or because he has lighter line, or simply because he prefers to, he allows fish and current their way. His technique seems more a river technique: tip up and line taut, walk downstream, and avoid other anglers and a temporary dock. To cheers of “go get ’em Leroy,” he disappears around a bend about 300 yards downstream from where he got his hit.

It’s not a pretty scene. Nobody wears Oakley sunglasses, Patagonia shorts, or Nike water sandals. Those who have waded into a swift and silty stream with their clothes on know what it does to shoes and socks and jeans. And a paddlefish is so unlovely—a gray, scaleless thing that looks a bit like a shark with a canoe paddle rammed down its throat. At the weigh-in area George is having his picture taken with his fish hanging beside him. “Turn it around, George, you’ve got the dirty side toward me.” And from the cleaning trailer, “Hurry up and get that fish in here, George, I haven’t killed a thing all day.” The banter acknowledges, celebrates, the grittiness of what is going on. No one will write a novel about paddlefishing that will be made into a movie.

It’s this simple. Sexually mature paddlefish migrate from Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota — up the Missouri to the Yellowstone to reach the flowing water and clean gravel they need for egg incubation. On the way they confront the Intake Dam, which diverts part of the river’s flow for irrigation; some years they stack up there by the thousands. These ancient fish wait each spring for the snow melt and the river’s renewal to stir a community into action: action of reunion with friends and family, action of stewardship to the river and its inhabitants. And they stir Glendive to memory: of stories of fish caught and lost, of Leroy’s fishing style, of a young basketball player drowned in the river, of a tie between a community and the land it inhabits.

~

Unless another unarmed youth is shot or another school-full of girls is kidnapped, media interest in a story wanes after a week or so. Lacking a second accidental oil release, the Poplar spill is quickly fading into memory. Glendive water has been pronounced safe, the Keystone pipeline “debate” ignored 50,000 gallons of oil in the Yellowstone, and all’s well in the world of Big Oil and politics. Two weeks after the incident, however, damage to the river’s living inhabitants remains unknown.

Given a society with an ephemeral attention span, a grotesquely delusional comprehension of time is to be expected. Paddlefish have changed little in the last 70-75 million years. The approximate age of the Yellowstone River near Glendive is 20,000 years, and during that time it has been alluvial, which means it flows through the sediment that it deposits itself. In other words, it has been constantly shifting, redefining itself over time. In this shifting river bottom, the Poplar pipeline was buried in 1967. The question of how the pipeline’s owners perceive time seems rather important, and, unfortunately, the answer is at hand.

The leaking pipe is owned by the Poplar Pipeline System, which is owned by Bridger Pipeline, a limited liability company that is part of True Companies, a conglomerate of companies that specialize in all things oil: pipeline, transportation, exploration, and oilfield equipment companies. Here’s Henry “Tad” True, Vice President of Bridger Pipeline, speaking at the 2012 Republican National Convention:

“I am part of the third generation of family-owned businesses, and we operate pipelines in the great states of Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. These companies were started by my grandfather, and then run by my father and my uncles. . . . My hope is that my 3 boys — Henry, Sam, and Charlie — will be part of the fourth generation of our family business. And although my kids think pipelines are boring, I know and you know that Mitt Romney knows that pipelines are vital to America’s energy system.”

Okay. Now we know how far ahead Tad (and probably Mitt Romney) is thinking: Just as long as my kids get their share of the wealth. This from the head of a company that is slated to, as he said in that same speech, “build an on-ramp” to the Keystone XL pipeline. This from the leader of a company that, according to its hometown newspaper “. . . has a checkered environmental history, spanning 30 oil spills, multiple federal fines and a warning that the pipeline firm did not learn from past mistakes.”

Only a radical change of perspective can reverse what is clearly a treacherous downward course of wrong-headed thinking. One such worldview — from 500 years ago or more — is provided by the Great Law of Peace, the founding constitution of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Originally an oral tradition codified in wampum belts and then eventually committed to English, it states that all deliberations and decisions must turn from self-interest to that of “the whole people” and “the unborn of the future Nation” — to the community and coming generations. Later interpretations have set the number of generations at seven.

Tad True will spend all he wants to spend of the money he makes building the “on-ramp.” So, doubtless, will his three sons. But sometime within seven generations, the Keystone XL pipeline will surely burst. Just as in other rural locales across North America, an increasingly rare sense of place and community is threatened in Glendive.  A community that could boast they had, as one civic leader put it, “turned fish eggs into baseball uniforms and museum exhibits” will eventually be forced to choose between oil and water. 

*******

*The Yellowstone caviar image is from midrivers.com.

**Casper (WY) Star-Tribune

Seventy Years of Diphthongs and Buttery Long Vowels

Donald Hall’s new collection of essays, Essays After Eighty, came out a couple weeks ago. “Oh frabjous day!” Let’s be honest, we had given the man up for dead more than twenty years past when his colon cancer metastasized to his liver. He survived that to endure the horrendous loss of Jane Kenyon. Then, in his words, poetry abandoned him (Poetry is sex, according to the Donald Hall Lost Muse Theorem; sex requires testosterone; testosterone decreases with age). So he was left to write prose in his celebrated blue chair by the window; then, with one of his stupid cigarettes, he accidentally set fire to the blue chair, which was hauled outside and put to death by axe-wielding firemen. Old age, as he writes, is “a ceremony of losses.”

I admit to a weakness for Hall’s prose, partly because of what he did to mine years ago. He pared and whittled my essays and helped me understand the delights of revision. But he turned me into such a slavish disciple that he finally said, “Don’t let me turn your prose into a telegram.” I think most writers write — whether anything from essay to e-mail — with a couple people looking over their shoulders. I’m no exception, and Don Hall is almost always there. (And I suspect as I get more prolix with age, he gets unhappier with me.) (And he doesn’t like all these parentheses either).

Mostly, my admiration for his work begins in the voice, hence my pleasure at hearing/reading that voice again. I can yoke “hearing” and “reading” because some of the same qualities come through both. These are undefinable, but unmistakable, qualities that define the essence of the man. They emerge from the round tones of the podium — as he likes to say, “We rise to assonance.” They riff off the ground rhythm of the language — he once told me that he and Donald Justice would carry on conversations in iambs. They grow directly from his tone — the Harvard bite of clever, the sly New Hampshire wit, the genuine and naked laugh.

But I should get out of the way and let the words speak for themselves. Here’s a paragraph that talks about the lost muse.

            “Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels. As I grew older — collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five — poetry abandoned me. How could I complain after seventy years of diphthongs? The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual. The shadow mind pours out metaphors — at first poets may not understand what they say — that lead to emotional revelation. For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . .” [Hall’s ellipsis]

I read this paragraph slowly and carefully, and I think it’s maybe only the line break, not the poetry, that has abandoned him. But the metaphors don’t “pour out” anymore; now he writes what he sees, and he tells stories. And if you’re 86 and still writing, the truth is never far away.

“Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing. Exhaustion limits energy. Yesterday my first nap was at nine-thirty a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”

“[A]mbition no longer has plans for the future—except these essays. My goal in life is making it to the bathroom. In the past I was often advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do?”

“In the morning [my companion] stirs quantities of sweet onion and five-year-old cheddar into a four-egg omelet, which is outstanding. She leaves to teach French 4. I pick up my pen.”

Pick it up, again.

But then the guy watching over my shoulder tells me, “Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell . . . . [I]f the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they may be, the essay fails.” Okay.

At eighty, Hall surrendered his license after two minor accidents, giving up what was left of his physical independence. Soon after, he dreamed he was in a frightening house, wanting to escape, searching for a door he couldn’t find. He was in a house without doors. Then, in real life, he unwittingly left a cigarette ember in his blue chair. During the night, he was startled awake by a smoke alarm and saw smoke pouring into his bedroom through the door. The Life Alert he wore around his neck saved him.

Imagine a smoldering and shredded blue chair standing alone in the snow, a chair that hosted decades of writing. Or just imagine being 86 years old. Is that contrary enough?

********

All quotations are from Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

What Are People For?

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:28

“Monks, we who look at the whole and not just the part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected. Investigating in this way, we come to realize that there is no me or mine in any one part, just as a sound does not belong to any one part of the lute.” Samyutta Nikaya, from Buddha Speaks

       

            This is a moral tale about me and an infection: giardiasis, beaver fever.  Giardia lamblia trophozoites live in the small intestine of the host—in this case, me on my third straight day of a hosting that was ruining a visit with my sister in Hampton, Virginia.

           A trophozoite is a parasitic protozoan.  Giardia lamblia is slightly elongated with two nuclei, cartoon-faced, victim of caricature.  When the Giardia protozoa attach themselves in numbers to the small intestine, they promote what any kind of intestinal irritation promotes—but on a scale that seems, at the time, epic.  I think I carried my protozoa to Virginia from a spring pool in the Adirondack State Park.

            Not to put too fine a point on it, but giardiasis leaves a lot of time for sitting around and contemplating, generally about giardiasis. Questions arise: what are humans for anyway? The answers are humbling.

            On that third day of my sitting in, the air temperature had reached 100 degrees, with the heat index over 115.  The local paper explained that the heat index measures apparent temperatures, the combined effects of air temperature and humidity.  At 115 we were to watch out for likely sunstroke, heat cramps, and heat exhaustion—and for possible heat stroke.

            The same paper sent a guy around to take the temperature of various points of human-sun contact:  a parking lot surface was 118, beach sand 120, and leather car seats 131.  A Slurpee was 23 degrees.

            This helped a lot.  We seem to enjoy trying to express natural phenomena as they relate to humans in numbers—the Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornadoes, the Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes.  But the newspaper story went even further, translating numbers into observable truths as well. I itched to try it for myself, and a day later when G. lamblia took a break I did a dumb thing.

~

            My sister and her husband live in a stunning house with an even more stunning view.  Looking east from their second floor balcony you first see White Marsh, a wetland area whose edges are made up mostly of groundsel trees, phragmites, miscellaneous scrub, and some young loblolly pines.  Only an occasional storm tide washes this area.  Through this high marsh runs a tidal creek called Long Creek, with its accompanying mud flats and spartina grass.  Then farther east is White Marsh Beach, a sparsely wooded barrier beach.  Then the Chesapeake Bay.  But from the first floor, the view of the flats was being obscured.  The vegetation in the drier part of the marsh, normally about six feet high, was slowly returning to woods. More and taller trees were growing in, especially one loblolly pine that stood about 100 yards into the marsh: my goal. I got permission, gathered loppers, pruning shears, and a buck saw. I bundled up in gloves, jeans, and an old shirt.  Having decided that alternating between 100-degree natural air and air conditioning at half-hour intervals would satisfy those in the media who said not to go outside no matter what, I began to cut a trail. My work, it turned out, became a drama in three acts.

~

            Act one was mostly expository.  I learned about smilax rotundifolia, commonly known as greenbrier, a member of the lily family that made me rethink all those precious lily images.  My field guide mentioned heart-shaped leaves, stout thorns, and putrid-smelling flowers.  The flowers smell bad in order to attract carrion flies, greenbrier’s chief pollinators.  Whether carrion flies or some other appalling flies, I learned of flies too.  Usually they land on you, begin to bite, and you flick them away.  But in a marsh dominated by “stout thorns,” one more sting goes unnoticed—until it intensifies to a point at which you look down and see a black, triangular fly attached to a spreading blood stain.  And you’ll wonder what species of road kill your fly laid her eggs on that morning.

            I also learned that shedding blood is not an exigency in White Marsh; it’s a way of life.  This is because the other dominant plant beside greenbrier is from the rose family, genus rubus.  These are brambles—no need to get more specific.  They, as everyone knows, have stalks that hurt like hell if you touch them and that eventually bend over to take root a second time, forming a grounded arch of pain waiting to slash at your shins, arms, or face. In White Marsh, greenbrier vines wind themselves around brambles and then tie the prickly bundles to groundsel trees and phragmites.  I had to cut my path one tendril at a time. 

            So I did that because I was too stubborn to quit and because it really wasn’t all that bad.  My clothes were soaked through with sweat; blood was everywhere, bright red and fresh then drying black in the sun.  But I knew I was safe from heat stroke; air conditioning was only a few minutes away.  And then there were all those millions of parasitic protozoa depending on me for their existence.  The truth here, as often happens, was relative.  Compared to giardiasis, this was downright festive.

            Toward the end of act one, I began to notice bird sounds: crows and gulls over Long Creek and purple martins feeding overhead.  I worked on, paying them little notice except to wonder if birds sweat.  And then I remembered that, stretching the term “sweat,” they do—in the sense that they cool themselves by increasing their respiratory rate and, thereby, the amount of moisture evaporated from their respiratory tracts.  It’s called thermal polypnea.  I recalled seeing robins sitting with their mouths open, panting, which is what I went inside and did as well.

~

            I changed my shirt, drank a couple bottles of water, watched the Weather Channel briefly (air temperature—90, heat index—119), then began the second act, which turned out to be more introspective.  I had settled into my environment and my work.  I found that by moving slowly I could keep my panting to a minimum and also reduce the number of the worst and deepest cuts.  Two episodes penetrated my mindless haze and brought me back to my true purpose.

            First, I came upon a deer trail.  One minute I was hacking through a green and brown tangle that limited my visibility to a couple feet, and then I was looking down a clear path of easy, graceful curves that led eastward at least thirty feet before it disappeared.  My first thought was that my job had suddenly become easier.  Then I thought about the poet Gary Snyder because I think of him whenever I see deer trails.  In his poem “Long Hair,” he writes about a world taken over by deer:  deer trails everywhere, deer everywhere.  I said the last line out loud:  “Deer bound through my hair,” and I enjoyed the image as I pruned away the few briers that the deer had stooped under.  But the feeling faded.  Snyder’s peaceable kingdom of hair and grasses and deer and men wasn’t working in the face of all that truth about intestinal parasites and heat indexes and pricker-bushes.  My presence was an intrusion, and a contrived one at that.  If I had come upon a deer sleeping the day away under the cover of phragmites, it would have snorted and crashed away to safety.  I would have yelped and tried not to fall over backward.  The truth was that the deer path was a poem, and when it veered suddenly to the north, I had to leave it to cut my way into the brush again.

            I had penetrated five feet or so when I spotted something white another five feet away.  As I hacked closer, it became a wonderful flower; then a single blossom, trumpet-shaped and the size of my fist; then white petals with a hint of yellow, brilliant yellow stamens, and all set against a background of stippled sunlight and leaves of the deepest green.  I stood, covered with bugs and blood and itches and laughed at such a beautiful thing.  And the purple martins called overhead, insects hummed, and deer slept.  It was time to go inside again.

            I checked the Weather Channel (holding at 98 and 119) and my field guide.  The flower was jimsonweed, named for the nearby, early-Virginia colony of Jamestown.  It is a totally poisonous plant:  touching the leaves and flowers can cause dermatitis; cattle and sheep are killed when they graze on it; children have died after eating the fruit.

~

            Act three, the reversal and denouement, were without incident.  I came first upon a small grove of loblollies: ten of them, ten feet high and about two inches in diameter.  They were spindly things, bare trunk to about five feet where the branches and long, graceful needles appeared.   With the buck saw, I flattened the grove easily and made a brush pile for winter storm tides to pull eventually into Long Creek.

            I reached my target tree in another fifteen minutes.  It was fourteen feet tall and six inches in diameter.  Sawing this one was harder work.  Bending over made me woozy, and the undergrowth made it almost impossible to keep the buck saw from binding. So I decided to cut it at four feet then take the stump separately.  Without remorse, I felled the pine and counted the rings—twelve years.  Bending to finish the job, I felt the first chills of heat exhaustion.  My stomach flipped around a bit like the start of seasickness.  I quickly turned my back to the marsh. A/C, cold shower, curtain.

~

            It had been a good day.  I had learned a little about how I fit in—to White Marsh, Hampton, Virginia, North America, Earth. G. lamblia feasts off my gut; I’m compelled to chop down whatever symbolic tree gets in my symbolic way: how are those two different?  Powerless to resist, I had naively tried to re-establish my dominion. But my good day turned into a long night.  Those Giardia parasites, as they tend to do, had called in reinforcements, and I was awake yet again.  A hint of earliest light over the Atlantic drew me first to the sliding doors, then to the dark outside.  The sounds of cicadas and other night bugs gnawed away at thick and sticky air.  In the marsh, clapper rails yapped at each other like neighborhood dogs.  And far away the surf pulled at White Marsh Beach.  I was imagining the hiding places of rails and thinking about deer making new paths through the marsh when the itching started from the first no-see-um bite.  No-see-ums.  Midges.  Genus culicoides.  Nearly invisible, the females break the skin with small cutting teeth and, at the same time, inject a chemical from their saliva that prevents clotting.  Then, without remorse, they suck up the tiny pools of blood.

********

The image of Giardia lamblia is from paleovegan.blogspot.com

Portions of this piece were published in Ascent

Stumbly, but Not Half-Assed

Writing is my livelihood, I dabble in bonsai, and I recognize a strong kinship between those two things. But the whole vocation v. avocation, work v. dabble, duality doesn't quite convey the way I think about it. I'll circle back.

~

I've noticed some confusion in the gradual and natural winnowing effect of experiences over the decades; to extend the image, what was apparently wheat has turned to chaff or often the other way around. For example, a long time ago I watched my friend Bill, who had been my only real male friend growing up, play the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story. Thinking back on the experience, three impressions return.

Remember the play? Jerry confronts Peter in Central Park and imposes an increasingly disjointed conversation on him that culminates in Jerry's telling THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!, the ongoing struggle between Jerry and his landlady's mongrel. Things get less rational, more physical; Jerry forces a fight and impales himself on a knife Peter is holding. So the first impact on me was the distress of watching your best friend from your high school days turn into a crazy guy in front of you. In public.

Then, with a little distance, I remember Zoo Story's familiar themes. The play is about all those mid-twentieth-century concerns that have faded from favor over the years: the distance between people, the triumph of materialism, the absurd arbitrariness of experience.

I can conjure these when I remember watching the play back then. But what came to mind just recently — spontaneously — was the phrase Jerry uses to describe the dog dedicated to tearing him apart. "He was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run, but I always got away."  Stumbly, but not half-assed. T-shirt, if not actual epitaph material. I guess if one of Albee's themes was about the dislocation of experience, it took.

The phrase came to me when I was thinking about a cotoneaster plant I was pruning. So to be more precise, then, my work with bonsai is stumbly, but not half-assed. I don't dabble, I commit. And it's not always easy.

~

I feel the weight of a history that runs from the Tang Dynasty Chinese practice of what came to be called penjing (or pen ching) through Japanese bonsai and down the centuries to my workbench. I know about how early penjing specimens were oddly shaped trees thought to have magical powers. These were followed by re-created landscapes in trays — plantings of rocks or more complex arrangements of rocks, plants, and decorations — creations that, if not religious, were at least mysterious enough in their ability to miniaturize nature to contain their own sort of power. When the practice of tray planting (pen tsai in Chinese) emerged in Japan as bonsai, its aesthetic was simplified to correspond to Zen beliefs. A bonsai composition came to comprise a single tree, and I try to see each tree as an embodiment of the entire universe.

But I'm defeated. Often it's simple fear at the moment of pruning a branch — gone forever, the harmony destroyed. Or it's the cold reality that true bonsai take many years to become convincing; I might not live to see any project through to completion. And I'm defeated also by my own confusion. I'm not comfortable with the control element of bonsai, which seems to appropriate the Judeo-Christian idea of nature existing in service to humans. In theory, the practice honors the natural world by trying to understand it, but recreating it and controlling it using techniques such as wiring, defoliating, and trunk-chopping feels hubristic.

What I settle for is the Zen truth from that famous Buddhist aphorism: Better to travel well than to arrive. At no point are the plants under my control; they're in charge, and the best I can do is cooperate and sometimes collaborate. And I can just enjoy the process, stumbly as it is, and what the process teaches.

~

Since most dictionaries, if they acknowledge “stumbly” at all, assign a prosaic definition — "given to stumbling" — I feel free to offer my own:  Stumbly adj. 1 something lacking in polish that is produced by an engaged maker;  2 a condition required to produce such a result. To be stumbly is to be enthused, unguarded, honest. It insists on mindful attention to each moment at a task. It cares little for "outcomes," avoids the cheap, the hurried, the vain. And now the topic is shifting here — from bonsai to writing to a way of living. It turns out that stumbly and "not half-assed" are the same thing; work and play can be likewise joined by a dedication to mindful living.

Paul Valery gets translated repeatedly in workshops and writer interviews as saying a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I think closer to what he really said was "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death." Same thing, just more specific: the point is that you can choose to be satisfied or you can die; you may be finished but your work isn't. And note that Valery's list doesn't  include a frantic need to publish as many works as possible that leads to dashing off a poem in one sitting and submitting it, simultaneously, to two dozen journals.

Also in Zoo Story, Albee has Jerry observe “sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” That may be gibberish, or it may be useful — the two are sometimes so close together I have trouble telling them apart. In the context here, though — of bonsai, writing, and editing — Jerry seems to have been given a moment of clarity. At any time on the way to the zoo, you can’t be anywhere else except where you are. Might as well give each stumbly moment its due.

*********

I'm obviously ignoring my own counsel by writing a blog; however, I will take my own advice and not publish a photograph of my own bonsai. The one that precedes this piece was taken in the North Carolina Arboretum's bonsai exhibition garden in Asheville, North Carolina.