Paragraphs – Words

For passages that are a paragraph or two, or a few hundred words….

A dream of floating (in AMS)

I had a peculiar dream. It was a segment in the midst of a long, loosely connected series.

It was just after sun set, or thereabouts. Twilight. The western sky was a deep blue, almost gray. I was at a beach, or perhaps near a beach; I did not see the ocean, but somehow knew it was nearby. I walked inland, moving uphill, following a twisting path through boulders and shrubs, and came to a flattened rise. There were others there. In the twilight I could not make out their features. They were more than shadows, but less than shades from hades. They came together into a crude circle, and I joined them. I don’t know why. I just did. Then they began joining hands. I was a little reluctant, but the person next to me reached out and so I took his hand. Everyone crouched a bit, and so I did too. And then we all jumped, straightening our legs, propelling ourselves into the air. And up we went, slowly, and at the apex we floated for a moment, and then, captured by the faint pull of gravity, we sank back towards the earth, touching down softly. Again we jumped in unison, and floated, and sank. And yet again.

After the third time it was finished. The circle disbanded. People drifted away, moving down the hill. I wanted to ask if this would happen again, and when, but they were gone.

If I inscribed a circle in the sand, and filled it with blood, would they come again? Would they speak, in their high thready voices, of the past, and of the future? What would they say? Would Odysseus join them, imparting advice as Thesius did for him?

I remember Nabokov’s story of his father, tossed into the air by a blanket stretched among a dozen of his serfs. Nabokov saw him floating in the air, outside the second story window, fully at ease, his white suit ruffled by the wind. It seemed a ritual that affirmed trust, in which the powerful put himself into the collective hands of the weak.

Coasting Downhill

It is early evening and I am returning from my Minihaha Park bike ride. It’s become a bit of a ritual, albeit sporadically enacted. I ride down the greenway to the river, ride along west river road to the park, and stop at Sea Salt and have a half-beer. I used to have full beers, but lately a half is enough, especially given that I’ve ten more miles to go, and so I overcome my impulse to consume it all rather than ‘wasting’ half of it and dump it in the trash. I do look around at the crowd, wondering if anyone would like a lightly used half-a-beer, but I don’t know how to distinguish the presumably few from the likely many. Then I mount up on my bike, pedal a few easy stokes to get the kinks out of my muscles, and start towards home along the Minihaha Creek path. It’s a lovely route, and offers differing vistas as the seasons change: crabapple tree blossoms and other flowers in the spring; sweeping vistas of green sparked with dandelions in mid-summer, and a wide pallet of leaf colors in the fall.

One thing that I enjoy, regardless of season, is the downhill section of the path that begins just past <street name staring with A>. I cross <another streetname>, and ride a few tens of feet along the road and then turn onto the bike path that descends to the creek. A few pumps to get up speed, and I am coasting down a long descent, the clicking of my freewheel stitching a seam into the air that flows past me. As I descend the air cools, sometimes gradually, and sometimes abruptly as I seem to enter a cloud-like region of moist cool air. I feel, for a few moments, like a bird gliding through the air.

Walking Barefoot (in Baja)

I like to walk barefoot. I can feel the ground through my feet. I step forward and plant my foot, and the ground speaks back, a slight shock echoing up my leg. Most surfaces give a little, though few are as delicious as pliant elasticity of the forest floor, itself a mélange of the remnants of decayed leaves and trunks.

When I walk barefoot I can hear my steps. On the flagstone patio my heel comes down with a soft thump, more felt than heard as it echoes up my spine; then there is silence as I roll across the ball of my foot to my toes. I feel the grouted divisions between the stones, and the slight changes in height from one stone to the next. My feet sense the warmth as I move from the shadows to the sunlight, as does the rest of my body, passing into the region of warmth a little ahead or behind my feet. A soft breeze cools me, ruffling the hairs on my arms, a caress, a tickle.

Sometimes I walk softly and deliberately, gently rolling from my heel to my toes. As I move forward, tiny muscles in my calves and thighs shift – perhaps, if one could see, one could see gravity’s hand strumming across them in a wave of tautness and reprieve. I didn’t used to notice these muscles, but my increasing experience with physical therapy has taught me to be more aware of my posture and musculature – and my body, of course, has become a more assertive teacher as I’ve aged.

Timing at 501 Groveland

I approach the doors to 501 Groveland and ring the bell and wait. It is a public entrance, but it is secured, and I wait for the buzz that will signify that the door has automatically unlocked. Does someone inspect me from a distance, weighing my dress and visage to see if I am suitable for entry? Or does the person on duty hit a button as reflexively as Pavlov’s dog salivates in response to it bell. I suspect I would only be subject to scrutiny if it were late at night, where I am nothing more than an unknown body emerging from a grey mist of fog.

The buzz comes, I open the door to the alcove, and encounter the inner doors. These doors, too, are locked. Although I have been here many times, it is only recently that I have learned to wait for a second buzz. Something in me feels that having been granted passage through the first set of doors, the second should be open, or at least the buzz should come quickly enough that I need not pause. But that is not the case. It is always a few moments, so that my rhythm of passing from outside to inside is interrupted.

Perhaps, it is not so much a matter of security, but of comportment. I am being slowed down. I am prevented from bringing my sidewalk pace into the building. I am gently reminded that I am entering into a domestic space, although in fact there is a restaurant, currently closed, off to my right. Still, my pace moderated, I now approach the front desk — this place used to be a residential hotel before transmogrifying into condominiums – where I am to state my destination and business. But Andrea is at the front desk. She recognizes me, knows my purpose, and waves me along. I walk through the carpeted space, and pass the floral display in the inner lobby, and approach the elevator. Somewhere someone pushes another button, which will allow the elevator to lift me to my destination on the second floor. Now that I am recognized, now that my business and destination is known, everything flows.

Water in Baja

The water trickles out of the fountain, tumbling over stone in beads and blobs, slow enough that you hear the sound of each fat tear of water.

Last Year’s Leaves in the Spring

The marcescent trees, mostly oaks, have released their hoards of last-year’s leaf-husks. Some, blown onto the remnants of vernal pools, are pressed into the spring mud, a palimpsest ready for spring. Elsewhere, the leaves turn to fragments and dust.

Blasphemy

Blasphemy. That’s what it struck me as. Which is odd, because I am not religious. I am not even a theist. But, whatever the term, it struck me as disturbingly and deeply wrong.

And it’s not something that most people would glance twice at.

Refugia

One is a somewhat upscale restaurant in a western suburb of Phoenix called Vogue. One is the Hilton hotel in the Mexico City airport – unusually, for a hotel, it is within the security cordon. Another is a generic chain restaurant in downtown Chicago: it might be called California Kitchen. One is the Westin hotel in DTW – that’s the Detroit metropolitan airport, for all you non-frequent fliers.

Corks

My friend asked me to save corks for her.

She’s taken up… well, it is something between woodworking and carving. She is beginning to accumulate small, delicate, expensive tools. Tools that will fare best if their tips are protected. Hence corks.

My growing cork collection indicates that I am an eclectic drinker. A smattering of wine corks, some stained red, others not, have been joined by a tequila cork with an ornate top, and most recently by a Grand Marnier bottle stopper. They are aligned in a row along the backsplash of the kitchen counter, side by side, like a row of bar stools. I can picture the tools sidling up to them, their delicate tips trembling as each takes in the provenance of its cork.

We have some things in common, my friend and I. While there is a joy in doing focused, deeply intricate work, there is also the very separate joy of tools. If you don’t know the art, they look like an alien sculptures. Or a poem expressed in a strange three-dimensional script. Or the ancestral totems of a tribe of metal workers. But if you are skilled in the art, you see means to your ends: This will cut across the grain. This, sensitively handled, will carve an angled gouge. This will hollow out a half sphere. All must plunge their delicate heads – carbon steel yet so infinitesimally thin that they are prone to chipping – into the suberous safety of cork.

My cork collection has expanded, the single row now multiplied into staggered ranks. The massed ranks remind me of the Moai that gazed watchfully over Easter Island. Though the corks lack the facial features, they have the same blend of singularity and homogeneity, and like the Moai, they are intended to offer protection.

Dwelling Places

Some places have a magical character for me.

They seem perfect.
They fit together, one part blending into the other, the sum greater than the part.
Often these are natural areas.
But not always.
I am not drawn to the majestic, nor the sublime.
I like places that are smaller scale; sometimes places that are tiny.

I remember, decades ago, driving through the rocky mountains.

This was not vacation, but the final part of a move, bringing my car and last possessions from California to Minnesota.
I had passed through Yellowstone Park without stopping.
Driving east out of Yellowstone the geological features of the mountains were amazing.
But what engaged me was as I was coming out of the central part of the mountains.
It was near a town called Shell.
The landscape had gradually contracted or condensed.
What had been towering mountains became smaller, as did the valleys between them.
I imagined that I could, in an hour’s time, stroll to the base of mountain, and in another hour make my way to its top.

Venice, in Italy, is another example.

It is the opposite of natural; everything is constructed.
It is more like a labyrinthine building than a city.
It is easy to become lost in Venice, but difficult to become completely lost.
The path has twisted and turned, and the sun is lost in the high fog, and you aren’t sure where you are.
But you hear the clatter of pans, the murmur of conversation, something being chopped.
The smell of cooking garlic wafts from a kitchen window.
You pass beneath laundry that hangs from a line that spans the path, almost limp in the barest of breezes
Farther along a small canal, boats knock against tires, and a slight reek of garbage hangs in the air.
How can you be lost in a landscape so familiar, so mundane.You turn a corner and narrowness falls away into a familiar square, stacks of buildings tumbling back from its periphery, and the sun slanting through the sky to illuminate an ancient vine clinging to a decrepit wall.

Social Worlds

We continually spin worlds into existence. We do it in words. We do it in situations.

Last night we had my wife’s second cousin over. We see them once or twice a year. They arrive — the cousin, her husband, and their two now-grown kids, one with his spouse — and there are loud greetings and jokes and jostling hugs. A salad and wine and flowers have arrived with them and we all straggle through the hallway into the kitchen where the various tasks of stowing the salad and pouring the drinks and vasing the flowers serve to impose a momentary order on us.

In a few minutes our tasks are complete, and we gather up the appetizers and sweep them into the living room. We alight on chairs and ottomans in front of the fire. By now the conversation has coalesced from small eddies and side channels into a single unified stream. Amy has moved out of the city north across the Golden Gate into the mild wilds of Marin where she is working on a new type of assistive device. Ryan has parlayed his knowledge of Mandarin into a State department job, and spent Halloween in Beijing translating for the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Kim and Steve, proudly content in the background, say a bit about their new winter abode near Tuscon, and we in turn about our own recent travels and small travails. Together we have woven a coherent little world, encompassing love and hope and goodwill, and turning away, for the moment, from the howling existential terrors of the modern world.

In the Time of the Drunken Robins

I write to you from the time of the drunken robins. It is just after the period of floating seeds, which in turn follows the six weeks of sneezing.

The service berries have ripened, and then ripened still more. The robins, which enjoyed the first course of berries in moderation, now blunder through the canopy in an inebriated frenzy. It is difficult to tell whether their eye-foot coordination is failing, or if they’ve just decided to dispense with perches in favor of a downward diagonal dive through a patch of overripe berries, as if they were wide-mouthed whales diving through schools of krill.

I cannot tell what the birds are saying during this season. Normally, birds talk about sex.

The cherry pit left a bloody contrail of juice as it skittered across the floor.

The funny thing is that I knew it was going awry, even as I was squeezing the pitter. But it was too late.

The body is interesting that way. You think ‘oops,’ even before the error unfolds. Somehow your brain knows that the body is careening down an unfortunate path bound for error, though it has no time – and perhaps no ability – to correct matters.

This is likely true. To understand it, consider that to perform any action, you have to decide what you want to do – psychologists call this forming an “intention” – and then figure out how you are going to do it. The “figuring out” – assuming it’s a routine action like pitting a cherry, or playing a chord on a piano, or typing a word on a computer keyboard –

These à Thses

Freeze! – On the Lava Field

I was gingerly picking my way across the lava field when the peremptory command rang out: ‘Don’t move!’

We were six days into a geological field trip examining the five volcanos of the big island of Hawaii. On this day we exploring the northeastern side of the island where the most recent eruptions have occurred. We had taken a helicopter into the middle of a lava field – formerly a development known as Royal Gardens – and landed to explore. Our guide for the day was Jack, a retired volcanologist. Jack was a tad eccentric, but deeply passionate about volcanology. In fact, after the recent series of eruptions had destroyed Royal Estates, he had purchased an acre there so that he could have access to a ‘fresh’ lava field.

‘Freeze!’ Jack added, in case the ‘Don’t move’ was not clear enough. I did not move.

I was not scared. Although the lava field was recent, as volcanoes reckon such things, it was several years old and quite solid. There were a few tendrils of steam here and there, but it seemed unlikely that I was about to break through a crust into a pool of lava. On the other hand, if you are standing on a fresh lava flow and one of the preeminent authorities on Hawaiian volcanos tells you not to move, it seems like a good idea to obey.

“Click.”

“Okay, you can move now,” Jack said cheerfully. “I just needed you in the picture for scale.”

Jack was working on a new edition of his volcanology textbook, and had noticed an example he wanted to capture.

Scale. That’s one of the cool things about geology. As I had already learned observing from the professional geologists on the trip, they like to include things in their photos that give an idea of the scale: quarters, pens, rock hammers, humans, whatever is handy and the right order of magnitude. Because in geology, forms repeat at different scales. Layers may be millimeters, meters or kilometers thick.

folds, layers, chunks, flows, … lava-lake/tectonics

=====

“Don’t move!”

I froze, as prudence, surprise and curiosity struggled for control of my feet. Cognitive scientists tell us we have two cognitive systems, system 1 and system 2. System 1 is fast but stupid: it spins rapid decisions out of a thin tissue of emotions, impressions and suppositions. System 2 is what we think of as rationality – it trudges along in the wake of system 1, correcting, adjusting, undoing, or occasionally just rationalizing

O-L-D — Mom

‘How are you, Mom?’ I ask.

‘I am old,’ she says, “o, l, d,” spelling it out to emphasize her point. Or perhaps it is an ancient routine, bobbing up to the surface of her consciousness from the days when her little boy needed his spelling reinforced. Whatever its purpose, it is predictable.

As my Mother moved into her later 90’s, her conversation became more circumscribed, and is now confined to a well-worn path: Are you well? Are you happy? Do you have a job? Are you married? And a few more. Each question leads to an answer, and perhaps a subsidiary question or two, before returning to the mainline questions. By the time we’ve covered the full course of questions, the memory of the initial ones has faded, and we cycle back to begin again.

Initially this looping was distressing, but gradually it became a comfortable routine. As people decline you have to meet them where they are, on their terms. I was pleased to discover that within the limited terrain of our conversation lurked the potential for a joke. ‘How old are you?’ she asks. ‘Ninety-five,’ I say. Her jaw drops, just for a moment, and then she bursts into laughter. It is a nice moment. And the joke will be as good as new in 90 seconds, although I don’t like to invoke it more than once a visit. Somehow that doesn’t seem proper.

Acoma

Many years ago I spent an afternoon in Acoma, a Native American village on top of a butte in New Mexico. I took a guided tour that introduced the history and culture of the village. Much of the detail has slipped away from me, but I have a vivid memory of the conclusion of the tour. We ended by strolling around the edge of the butte, looking out over the surrounding landscape. “There are the fields where we grow out food,” said our guide, pointing to a smear of green in the distance. We walked a bit farther. “That is where the wood for the beams of our cathedral comes from.” And farther. “There is our source of water.” It struck me that those who dwelt in Acoma could see their entire world, the sources of all they depended on. How, I wondered, would it change things if we could all see our world in this way?

It was an interesting question to ponder, if entirely impractical. Or so I thought at the time.

What if a place could speak to you? What if it knew how it fit into the larger world? What if it knew its history? What if it knew about the people and animals and plants that inhabited it?

My favorite sign

My favorite sign is in Yosemite National Park. It is next to a waterfall, but not one of the famous ones.

The famous waterfalls have signs too, of course. “Stay on the path,” they warn, directing the tourist bus crowds along boardwalks to viewing platforms. “Many fatalities occur here annually,” they caution. “Unaccompanied children are not recommended,” though one doubts such children will read the signs.

My favorite sign is at a distant waterfall. There are no bus stops, or boardwalks, or viewing platforms. It is a vigorous ten-mile hike in, so its readers are few. My sign is so obscure that not a single person has used it for target practice. The sign is old, battered only by the weather. It has a sketch of a river pouring over a cliff, spreading out into lines of falling water. And immersed in the river on the sign, just before the cliff on the sign, is a stick figure, its stick arms raised in futile appeal. The sign hardly needs words, but it has some: “If you slip into the water and go over the falls, you will die.”

How beautifully direct! No talk of annual fatalities, no warnings, no advice. Just cause and effect.

Imagined Dogs

I wish I had a name of it. For the moment. And for the feeling. The feeling reminds me a bit of the sublime, what Burke characterized as a blend of beauty, awe and terror.

The moment happens like this. I am out running.

wrapping the leash
big dogs and small dogs: K’s story about the big dog and small dog
small dog-owners convinced they can do anything
networked dogs as earthquake warning systems
smart dog collars

Time and Rhythm: Watching Fireworks as a Child

When I was a child, sixty years ago, my family would go to watch fireworks at a nearby park. We would go out into the twilight, seeking a spot on the ground among the scattered crowd. A blanket would be laid down, and I’d sit with my parents and brother.

We are a small island, but part of a vast murmuring archipelago. As the twilight deepens, other groups arrive, seeking space, filling in the gaps. Fewer and fewer come as the earth’s darkening shadow rises like wave. The early stars have morphed from pale trembling gleams to sharp chips of white crystal, and they have been joined by dozens and then hundreds of other stars, and finally the mist of dust cast across the sky shimmers in the background.

I remember waiting and waiting. It seemed forever. My Mom would point to a place, downhill, far away – that was where the fireworks would be launched. I could see figures moving. I could see glimmers of light. My Dad explained that all the rockets were set up in advance, each on its own launching pad. They needed to be arranged, so that they could be set off in the right order. And there needed to be lots of space between them, so that when one launched it would not set off its neighbor. But why did it take so long to start? My Dad said that the Fire Marshal had to make sure everything was safe. That made sense. I knew the Fire Marshal. He sat in the front of church every Christmas, nestled among the pine boughs, during our midnight candle light service. He wore his helmet and his uniform. He could stop the service in its tracks. You didn’t mess with the Fire Marshall.

Time and Rhythm: Slow Email

One of the things I’ve been pondering, which is vaguely in this vein, is the issue of conducting a correspondence by email. I’ve been thinking about it particular with respect to conducting long-term correspondences with my nieces, but I think it’s a more general challenge. How does one coordinate the rapdity of email with the more measured pace of one’s life?

It seems to me that in the days of written missives things were easier. Someone would write a letter to me, mail it, and then days later (or longer if they were overseas [now there’s an old-fashioned word!]) it would arrive. I would read it, start thinking about how to reply, and in the meantime the letter would sit somewhere semi-obvious where it served as a low-key prompt to reply. Since editing was difficult, I imagine (but do not claim to remember) that the process of composition was more deliberate, and perhaps spaced out over time. And of course, over the entire span between X authoring a letter to me, and my authoring a reply, time passed and produced more grist that could be folded into the reply.

But now email takes no time in transit and I can quickly author a stream-of-consciousness reply (relying on editing to make a bit more coherent). Of course, I could wait; but then comes the danger of forgetting: the intangible nature of email does not make it much of prompt for replying once it is pushed out of the ‘above the fold’ view of my email. Of course, one can use calendar reminders, or devise various systems (since retiring I’ve created a keep-in-touch folder with folders for various people), but to me it feels like an artificial replacement for what one used to get for free from the material ecology of correspondence.

…I’ve thought a bit about whether it would be valuable to devise a ’slow email’ system that took time to deliver the mail, but that doesn’t address the intangibility problem…

.. With my nieces, I just email them now and then, without expecting tit-for-tat, and sometimes they reply (I’ll have to ask them how they manage when they do…).

Worlds at Varying Scales — A Mouse’s Eye View

Scale – A Mouse’s Eye View

We live in a world of many scales. The gigantic. The minute. The human. A mouse sees the world differently from us. It notices small cracks, morsels that may be food, escape routes. We exhale a multitude of invisible beings, bacteria, viruses, fungi. We exchange them with one another as we move through a daily choreography. Covid has, temporarily, made us aware of this exchange. It is as though we are always having sex with one another, even random strangers we have fleeting encounters with. Things they carry in their bodies may, without our awareness, lodge in ours, and bring about long term changes in our life and health and happiness. At this level we are all exceedingly promiscuous beings. And as covid abates – though it will never be gone – we resume our more obviously intimate encounters. Gazing at the naked faces of friends and strangers, exchanging air and whatever may drift along for the ride. We touch, hugs feeling sensual and strange. I remember when I was in junior high, and went to my first dance, and – because it is what you were supposed to do – walked up to a random girl, a stranger, and asked her to dance. And I remember being a little surprised when she ascented, and opened her arms, and we slipped into an embrace. For the first time I held the soft warm body of a stranger in my arms, and we moved gently to the music.

This morning I cleaned the kitchen, tidying up in the wake of preparing a meal and sharing appetizers with a friend. The floor and countertops and stove were a mess. The cooking of food – browning of lamb in particular – unleashed a spray of messiness. Spatters, spills, crumbs, and larger things – a bit of wrapper from some cheese, crumbs from crackers, smears of humous. The floor – when looked at from the right angle in the right light is festooned with spatters – drops which have fallen a meter, and splashed with a ring of micro-splatters around their circumference.

I mop. One pass to get the flook a bit wet, so that the drips will soften and perhaps dissolve, another pass to get the more stubborn spatters, and a final one – with the mop squeezed out – to gather up some of the excess moisture with its load of dissolved spatters. After that I dry the floor – it is hardwood and the other member of the household believes that it is better if it is dried. Paper towels do the job, although it seems a bit wasteful. They also give an account – in how rapidly the white paper stains – of how well the mopping has done.

A mouse in the kitchen – horrors, a s my mother would have said – would see a promising landscape of hidden channels with crumbs galore. At least before the mopping. But even afterwards, crumbs have no doubt escaped the mop, underneath the stove, or the deeper indentation below the dishwasher, or underneath the chairs where the floor is mopped and swept less frequently.

It seems that – as living entities – we move through world emitting sprays of material – from the microscopic to the macroscopic – that marks our passage and memorializes our activities. Other creatures – our audience – look on with hungry approval.

Espresso Machine

Karda walked across the living room, past the island into the kitchen. She turned on the machine to warm up, and busied herself – yes, here are the beans, I hope they’re not too old, and here are the cups. She poked among them, looking for birds, and pulled two out. She dumped the beans into the grinder that, according to Theodore, cost as much as the espresso machine. She hit the button, and the whir of the grinder took her back in time to so many mornings where it signaled that Theodore was up and about. She slid the tray out of the grinder and tapped the coffee into the portafilter. She gently tamped it down. She could hear Theodore in her memory: “Don’t use too much pressure when you tamp – you need to get the grind right. Soft is the way to go; brute force doesn’t get good results.”

A soft rising whistle – Theodore said it was a leak in the boiler – alerted her that the machine was almost up to temperature. She twisted in the portafilter, watched for the heating light to go out, and flipped the switch. The pump throbbed, groaning as it forced the water through the puck of grounds, pouring out twin brown streams of espresso into two demitasses. She shut off the pump, and was pleased to see the velvety brown foam – Theodore called it crema – floating atop the espresso, a sign that it was well-brewed. With a small feeling of victory, she carried them back to living room and set a cup in front of Dexter. “Thank you, thank you.” He held it up, eyes closed, inhaling. “Yes, perfect.” He held the cup higher, and opened his eyes. “Ah, the thrush cup. Look at him there. Half hidden among the vines, with a berry in his mouth. You can almost see him move. And you’ve got the goldfinch cup. See, it’s hanging upside down, ready to pluck seeds out of the heart of a sunflower. We’d take espresso in the morning together, sometimes, out on the terrace, with birdsong in the background. Sometimes,” he leaned forwards confidentially, “it seemed like the birds on the cups were singing too.”