Reader’s Corner

Thoughtful people choose their words carefully.  Writers, particularly those engaged in responding as clearly as they can to the natural world, are fated with a privileged obsession: seeking the exact right word to best convey an experience. 
Tom Jay offers a range of observations on attentiveness to words we choose to enliven affinities in our world in his new book, “Blossoms are Ghosts at the Wedding.”     
Jay, also an accomplished sculptor and co-founder of long-lasting salmon habitat restoration projects, juxtaposes poems, essays and commentaries to lead a reader into an understanding that an appreciation for the roots of language leads directly to connecting more fully with the place where you live.  A surprise is that, for all the complexity in his writing there is not a whiff of abstraction in any of it.  This is writing as rich and dense as the soil beneath your feet.
How does a book like this work?  A favorite reference by Wendell Berry quoting one of his neighbors on the problem of being unable to tell anybody how to do anything practical:  “I can’t tell you how to do that, but I can put you where you can learn.”  Jay’s style achieves an unusual intimacy with the reader and you find you are in a place where you are discovering material that matters.  It is very personal storytelling about living in place, about a love of etymology and key ancestor words and expressions of all of this nuanced reflection in luminous poems.
    And, just a mention about the muse for all of you writers who care about that crucial relationship:  Jay provides a definitive commentary on this subject that should be required reading for all introspective people seeking their way home. 
Conventional wisdom, with its shallow roots and pathology for detachment, has utterly failed us.  Robinson Jeffers:  “A little too abstract, a little too wise/It is time for us to kiss the earth again.”  Jay shares some things to consider while deepening that intricate courtship with where you live.

Great book:  “Proust was a Neuroscientist” by Jonah Lehrer, Mariner Books, ISBN 9780547085906, 2008.  short review:  Imbedded deeply in literature and all story telling is the appreciation of how chance and chaos define people and give us our unpredictable freedoms.  The last 200 years of science has tried to explain away why the joys of literature work so well on thoughtful readers—trying to tell us life is predetermined and the brain is a brick operating like a clock and the novel is dead—but now science has gracefully admitted there is a biological reason.  Jonah Lehrer has chapters titled “The Literary Genome” and “The Blessing of Chaos” as well as elegantly weaves Walt Whitman with prions and Proust.  One of many insights I enjoyed:  Neurogenesis, believing the brain is actually a cloud subject to constant changes, was refuted by conventional scientists until it was proven that birds needed new brain cells to sing their complex songs.  Or, even better, the affirmation of that proof was that, yes, monkeys showed no development of new cells when held captive in drab cages, but given a chance to live in more natural habitat, their brain cells underwent radical renovations.  The world is necessary.  Add that now we know that depression is caused by a decrease in the amount of new neurons, not by a lack of serotonin and we realize that active people in fun places have more newborn brain cells.  We are truly biologically free to become, forever, thanks to neverending variations influencing us.  So the best metaphor for our DNA is literature.  Every reader discovers in the same words a different story.  Every individual is responding to his and her influences in a different way.  Interpretation matters.  This book is a celebration of the ability to create change.  And of the mystery.

Check out Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes. It’s an amazing book for EVERYONE. It’s not just for “stay at home Moms”. Mrs. Hayes will challenge your thinking, she will show you how things have to come to be as they are today.

“Just Food” by James E. McWilliams is the kind of book that offends just about everybody and can make you wish you hadn’t read it but, for those among us sincerely wanting to do the right thing, provides unforgettable ideas.  I put it in the uncomfortable spotlight provided by the likes of Stewart Brand and a handful of others:  just because it feels right doesn’t mean it yields long term solutions for the common good. This book won’t prevent me from building and enjoying community gardens, supporting the local farmer’s market and deepening a preference for a sense of place, but now I cannot stay silent when a foodie zealot, and probably somebody I very much like, goes on about his or her privileged world view.  Once again, responsiblity requires sacrifice, it requires more information, it requires hard work. Heard what agricultural economists have learned about the myth of food miles?  You aren’t going to like it, but reality wins.  Regrettably, none of this is ever going to be easy unless you choose the obviously delightful point of view of keeping one’s privilged lifestyle and ignoring the facts.  Lucky for many of us we can continue to do that, but let’s try to be honest about it.

Stop reading this piece if you haven’t been noticing, by chance or intent, writings by a range of people paying attention to problems in the world that appear to reveal a private acceptance, an acknowledgment of news that for some time just could not be faced, and a resolve to redirect creative energies with a new purpose. 

However, you, too, may be privately having similar thoughts about the circumstances of our planet.  It isn’t just the oil spill in the Gulf and it isn’t any one particular event.  It is a feeling settling in.  I feel that there will be more messages of this ilk.  A sense, usually with a long deep sigh, that things really have taken a profound turn. 

Bill McKibben, his antennae always way out there flickering intensely, has written about it in “Eaarth,â€� and Barry Lopez talked about it with Bill Moyers recently.  Wendell Berry’s new book of poems, “Leavingsâ€�, carries the weight he has so generously shared with us throughout his life: 
Let hopelessness
Shrink us to our proper size.
Without it we are half as large
And the world
Is twice as large.  My small
Place grows immense as I walk
Upon it without hope.

In “Eaarth,â€� McKibben suggests that the notion of sustainability fails to resonate anymore. Not because of greenwash or media overuse but simply because the word suggests we can achieve a recognizable level of sustainability in the world.  In his latest book he is attempting to tell us the world simply is no longer what we assume it is.  We are taking for granted something that no longer exists.  Yes, we still live in a world and it is wondrous but it isn’t the same one we have known.  The new earth requires a different way of living.  He says we should rename our world because, well, because it has become a very different place.

This is a grim message and one that we have every right to argue against.  But, maybe it is just the right message for this moment in our lives.  Something is up.  We know it.  One line in the book that really brought it home for me about these incredible times was McKibben asking, who really knew that the ice would melt and who knew that our hearts wouldn’t?

So.  Well.  Now what.  If this truly sinks in, I mean into our culture, and there is every reason to believe it definitely will not, but if it does we all may want to stay put a little while in grief and reverence.  Good idea.  Healthy thing to do.  Take as long as you like. 

But if you are in the mood to explore a bit more, consider this:  What is new is usually hard to take.  It isn’t pretty and it isn’t comforting.  The new provides no solace, only challenges.  Few of us are deliberately seeking more challenges, day to day is tough enough.  But what comes from challenge is a new way of appreciating and understanding ordinary life.  Challenge returns us to ordinary life in a new way with a new sensibility.  Rarely are we seeking that new way, we’d just rather be left alone with the consolations of the routine, thank you very much, but in this era the relentless new eventually finds us.  And then we are changed.  In this instance, there continues to be incredible news about the state of the world coming in constantly, and this is the world speaking and we are listening as best we can. 

Something amazing about the new is that it becomes the new normal relatively quickly.  Pretty soon we cannot conceive of living without it.  The world didn’t need Beethoven or Bach or Picasso or Shakespeare until people got used to what they were saying.  I didn’t have a predilection for the music of Van Morrison, his crazy passion and aesthetic sensibility created it, now I am pretty hooked on his stuff.  Vaccines.  Cell phones.  And things I don’t appreciate: I don’t like the idea I have learned about dying coral reefs and that insane phrase to describe the consequence of the explosion of jellyfish populations, due in part to their ability to accommodate to depleted oxygen levels and rising temperatures in the ocean as well as the disappearance of their natural predators, the “jellifcation of the oceanâ€�.  I hate it.  But I have absorbed the facts and now live with them.

So, here we are.  Thinking about our planet in completely new ways.  And trying to make things work out, getting creative.  Innovations make us see the world differently, and aesthetic aspirations go beyond just survival, they serve more than that.  So, a return to things themselves is a good thing, “No ideas but in thingsâ€� said William Carlos Williams.  Turning away from the insipid pop movies and derivative stories, turning to the everyday responsibilities with more imagination.  Robinson Jeffers’ “Bixby’s Landingâ€�:
Wine-hearted solitude
Our mother the wilderness
Men’s failings are often as beautiful as men’s triumphs,
But your returnings are even more precious than your first presence.

As Wendell Berry also wonderfully says in “Leavingsâ€�, there are possibilities deeply seeded within the world.  He invites us to have faith in that.  We are in this together and can turn to one another for help as we explore our own personal depths.  What are we to do?  Wake up.  Act neighborly.  Take care, of everything.  Jack Gilbert says in his poem “Tear It Downâ€�,
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows.
By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness…
….We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

McKibben has another good twist on an old saying, stating “Think globally, act neighborlyâ€�, which sums up three articulate chapters on what we should begin doing in absolute earnestness.  But, at the same time we are being encouraged by numerous forces, maybe even driven, toward maximum efficiencies, toward the gods of the measurable, especially in our use of energy and our concerns about carbon.  I am not so sure about this emphasis anymore.  For sure measurements matter in the middle, in the obvious pragmatic way we have to track what we are doing so we can do it better, but I think we need to begin and end with immeasurable inspiration and beauty.  We need to exceed need, as least at a starting and end point, we need to fulfill our desires.  Somewhere in the middle, yeh, we need to get real, but let’s go all out for beauty.  And let’s end with beauty.  Beauty defines us better than metrics.

Maybe this whole bleak notion about the status of our planet goes too far.  Maybe a lot of people, including myself, are overreacting to current information.  I’ve been a doomsday person all my life, hiding it best I can behind a variety of user-friendly personas.  But then again, the news and the gut feelings I have inspire an imaginative response and one that feels appropriate to the situation.  There is that new heightened sense of possibility that Berry refers to that happens when you accept what is going on around you.  There is an alignment that generates an energetic functionality. 

Okay.  Okay.  Here we are, the real deal at last.  The tragic losses in our natural world, the irreversible changes taking place, our inexplicable lack of concern darkening our days and nights.  Okay.  This feels real.  I get it.  I am heartbroken but, okay.  I am relearning what the heart knows.  I’m in.
                                                 
A Land Not Mine
A land not mine, still
Forever memorable,
The waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
And the air drunk, like wine,
Late sun lays bare
The rosy limbs of the pine trees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
Is ending, or the world, or if
The secret of secrets is inside me again.
—-Anna Akhmatova

That’s a great long post, and a welcome thing to read work by Berry, Akhmatova, Jeffers, and Jack Gilbert along the way.

Disasters always to bring us to hope, and I have been hearing a lot from folks about this time, after the BP tragedy, that “maybe, this time…”

Wish I could be as hopeful for the all of us as I am for myself on this beautiful day.

Wow, Terry:  You mean an alignment that happens without anyone willing it, like a school of fish, or ladybugs on a warm wall? Could humans still be subservient to such a thing, susceptible to some kind of grace? Please no more religion; but faith in beauty? As you suggest, though, it may be a beauty that nobody would recognize as Beauty in the common current definitions, fixed as they are by our rutted perceptual/conceptual roads. (Yeats:  ” A terrible beauty is born.”) Do those of us who have time to sit here and ponder and write feel the current, the magnetic field realigning, and does our conversation contribute to it? Maybe.  But, as you say too, turn off the lights.

“The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want” by Garret Keizer.  subtitle:  “A Book about Noise”  Noise can be called many other things but not infrequently noise is associated with shrilly triumphant carbon based success.  A great line:  “The equation of sustainability with dullness is our civilization’s tragic lie.”  Keizer is a terrific writer bringing a vast knowledge of many things to bear on a subject that haunts us like a wingnut at a meeting but always is something we are powerless to influence.  Democracy is noisy, economic growth is noisy, and the cultural din just keeps rising.  Again, learned helplessness is such a huge factor about noise.  Side entertainment:  “Noise” is a movie made in 2007.  Good one. Those of us who can try to stay out of the noisy corridors of human habitations, but the “kitchen” is necessarily a loud place and there is a lot to do.  The author’s genius is his friendly, conversational yet wonderfully informed writing style; a lesser writer would fail in writing a linear, technial book about the problem with noise, but Keizer is wonderful. He gives you all the technical reporting you can stand but also provides a time line of noise history beginning 3.5 million years ago, an explanation of common terms used in disucssions of noise, provides practical considerations for noise disputes, includes a Personal Noise Code and quotes Rilke.  I mean, geez. I hope world wide editors of non fiction take note.