There’s a swimming hole on my way home from work, so I can stop off and go for a swim before dinner. Yesterday as I was disrobing to get in who swam by me but a beaver, moving slowly but steadily upstream. He didn’t seem to mind my presence until I got in the water, when he slapped the water with his tail and dove under. I never saw him again. I presume he had some important business to attend to upstream. [I should be able to update this with some photos of beaver trees by the swimming hole.]
Swimming in the Creek.
08-Jun-11June.
08-Jun-11How I adore these long days. No need to put the generator on; when it gets dark I go to sleep. Before I turn in I like to sit on the porch in the darkness and watch; the only lights are the stars in the sky and the occasional adventurous firefly, streaking through the woods on his journey between the upper and lower fields by my house. Amazing.
Bad Theology, Bad Art.
05-Jun-11An interesting hypothesis from Tony Woodlief that bad religious art – the sort that cannot stand on its own, but has to have an adjective affixed, like “a Christian novel” – is bad because it is serving a bad (i.e. false) theology. I largely agree with this: religious art used to be better because earlier centuries were far more theologically advanced. It would be shocking now to see a Pope doing what they used to do all the time, quote pagans like Cicero as real moral authorities; and it would be shocking now for a Muslim theologian to do what was almost the whole of Muhammed’s practice, to draw on infidel fables and adapt infidel customs. The pioneers had a freedom which they rob their followers of – or which their followers find too frightening.
Making One’s Own Tea.
05-Jun-11When you grow plants that have names like “Oswego Tea” (Monarda Didyma) or “New Jersey Tea” (Ceanothus Americanus) you start getting curious about what it would be like to replace all store-bought teas with infusions made in your own backyard. So when the a local stream management organization offered a river walk with local herbalist Betty Shaver, who promised to give us expertise in tea-making, I made sure I could be there. I was impressed. Shaver was born in the area and grew up living off the land; and at 73 “and no medications” she was a walking-and-skipping advertisement for country herbalism. She brought a tea brewed of clover, mint, and violet leaves which was delicious – all ingredients very easy to find. And she talked about using strawberry and raspberry leaves for teas as well – again, easily found. Not that I need another task to do every day, but putting out a big jar of sun-tea every morning to bring to work the next day wouldn’t be the worst way to live.
Gold-green of life.
04-Jun-11
Morning on Wildcat Mountain.
Summer, from Staten Island.
04-Jun-11As I have mentioned before, the printed Staten Island book was a selection of the essays I wrote about the Island; there were others which did not make the cut, for various reasons. Of the four essays I wrote about the seasons, the editors wanted to include “Spring” and “Summer,” but I felt that they should all be included or none; and my view prevailed and in the end we left them all out.
“Summer” is one of my favorites, celebrating idleness as always; a friend when reading the book told me that the book was more than anything else a meditation on work. I believe in work, but I believe in idleness too.
The other season essays are here: Autumn, Winter, Spring. The book can be ordered here; I believe a few copies of the first edition are still available. The second edition is being planned. And I think I have a book of essays about the Catskills in me; it’s bouncing around in my head now.
SUMMER
“I maintain that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.” – THOREAU
At the end of my second year we had one of those early-summer days in May, when it is eighty-five degrees and all is absolutely perfect with the world; and since I had no last-period class, I took a stroll through the woods near the Academy; and the day was so perfect that I forgot about my books and papers and jacket which were waiting expectantly for me at school, and walked all the way home in my shirt sleeves, a distance of close to five miles, despite the fact that we had a faculty meeting after school; though I have since been told that I did not miss much. On such days as I pass by all the internal activities of the world, and gawk at the people sitting at their desks, I am inclined to think that there is not much to be missed in all the offices in the world, unless one is particularly interested in the bodily disciplines of all these little devotees of money we call businessmen, sitting in their cells and crawling on their knees to their superiors. I know men who have mocked the Middle Ages’ love of pain, but I imagined I could trace deeper scars in their backs than in any monk’s. If one is going to force the hair from one’s head, why not shave it at once as the monk does, instead of pulling it out one hair at a time as does the businessman?
There are many such ascetics of money who mock the teacher as undisciplined, for while the businessman spends at least fifty weeks a year on his knees in devotion to the golden calf, the teacher idles away at least a third of his time. With all respect, I reply that to pray unceasingly to Mammon is a fine occupation for those with nothing better to do, but we who wish to live in this world cannot spare any more time for such things. And what is idleness? I have walked many a time through the woods. It does not reprove one for being idle, though I have heard a veiled comment or two about being overly engaged. Listen to the cicadas, how they sing. The adult cicada is remarkable in that it has no mouth, and does not eat, its life in the upper world being too short; and though it has no mouth, still it sings through the summer. There is no more philosophic animal than this. Would men fare as wisely, given but two weeks and two wings?
In summer the fields of the mind lay fallow, which they must if they are to sustain a good crop, for we all grow not in the daytime of our activity but the night of our rest. I have seen students arrive in September, having just learned the lessons I taught them in March. They had exercised their bodies, which allowed the thoughts to settle in at last. They had spent some time with nature, and found out something of what the books were about. They had worked, and learned the value of an education, and they had been alone, and learned the true value of society.
The sensuousness of summer is never quite remembered in the colder months. Love seems always at one’s fingertips, or breathing behind one’s neck. Life pulses all around one. The insects fill every gap in the fabric of life, with their immense variety and uncanny beauty. The birds twitter and nest. The trees green the entire island, and the weeds and undergrowth burst out from the ground everywhere. When one may spend these months entirely out of doors, there is probably no greater happiness. The city is lovely in the summer, and the nights are electric, but perhaps it is best to head for the mountains or the shore, to be out of doors as much as possible. It is also beautiful to go to some distant clime, while we have this odd window in history when travel is so easy, for much of the charm of our city is that its denizens have about them the air of the millions of places they have just come from, as a kind of worldwide tribute paid to the spiritual coffers of the city. So we may cultivate our love for the city by loving the other places of the world, and bringing some of their virtue home with us. We wander far and wide in summer, and learn to love our homes.
I have heard the money-men say that they will reform the schools by doing away with this idleness and dissipation, but I assure you, we teachers and lovers of life are planning quite the reverse, and waiting for the day when the businessman will skip out of his building on June Fifteenth, for two and a half months away from dollars, and closer to sense. Diseases are catching, but life is more catching still. Its call will come every year with the solstice, and will not be neglected so long as there as anything in human society worth caring for. We will sing like the cicada in our summer, and have the Julys and Augusts of our mortality for higher business than the type that is accounted for in the ledger-books.
She Who Dwelleth in the Gardens.
04-Jun-11Reading among the Franciscan writings last night I caught the phrase “she who dwelleth in the gardens,” quae habitat in hortis, and I was curious about the phrase and so poked around the Song of Songs a bit. The Latin Vulgate version is at times obviously mistranslated – there is a passage at the very end where the groom says, “I awakened thee under an apple tree; there your mother was corrupted, there the one who bore you was raped.” (Sub arbore malo suscitavi te; ibi corrupta est mater tua, ibi violata est genitrix tua.“) Other translations have something which makes sense: “there your mother was in travail with you; there she who bore you was in labor.” Needless to say, passages like this encourage the allegorical reading, the mother being Eve and the bride the human race in general. That said, I accept that the Hebrew intended something else entirely.
But every now and again the Latin has a reading which is unusual but rather pleasant nonetheless. This one stopped me in my tracks: Mane surgamus ad vineas; videamus si floruit vinea, si flores fructus parturiunt, si floruerunt mala punica; ibi dabo tibi ubera mea (7:12). “In the morning let us go to the vineyards; let us see if the vineyard hath bloomed, if the blossoms are bearing fruit, if the pomegranates have flowered; there I will give you my nipples.”
Of course the modern translations all say, “There I will give you my love.” This is in parallel to the very first verse, “Kiss me with the kiss of your mouth; for your love is better than wine.” In the Latin this is quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino, “for your nipples are better than wine.” I have no idea what the original Hebrew says, but I’m certain that this text, which could have been read in any Catholic Church in the world fifty years ago, nipples and all, would only be read in an expurgated form now.
Digging with Bears.
26-May-11A friend gave me some offsets from her bottlebrush buckeye plant, but not knowing quite where to put it – they get very large – I stashed the plants in my vegetable garden, which had not been planted. The time has come to plant vegetables, so I chose some spots for the buckeyes and transplanted them out of my veggie beds. I put one on the edge of my lawn in front of the house, and after putting it in I wandered off to do other garden tasks. About a half hour later I needed the wheelbarrow, so I went back to where I had planted the buckeye. I was walking without any special awareness, and so was surprised when the little black bear bolted from the base of the buckeye and vanished into the woods. He didn’t do anything to the plant – I guess he was just curious about the freshly turned earth. And all in all, no damage done, but it’s true that I don’t like having bears on my front lawn while I’m tinkering around the house.
He seemed little, but he got out of sight so quickly I wasn’t certain if he was a cub or just the same smallish bear that I see around. I presume the latter. I didn’t track him, for the obvious reasons.
Stabilitas Loci.
08-Jun-11This week marks three complete years in the woods; I moved up to the cabin full-time just as the private school year was coming to a close in 2008. Since that time I have spent ten seasons here; and a season apiece in the two most interesting cities in America, a winter in New Orleans and one in New York.
One of the curious vows of the Benedictines is to promise to maintain stabilitas loci, stability of place, commitment to a spot. This is rarer, I suppose, than merely having an experience of nature, like Kerouac’s summer spent on top of Desolation Peak in the Cascades.
And it has some other lessons; a brief period in a place makes all seem lush and beautiful; the longer you spend the more you see how death is mixed into everything. I noticed a pair of pileated woodpeckers – astonishing, gargantuan woodpeckers the size of crows – shredding some of my dead trees. I recognized one of the logs they had pockmarked as the one where I had watched some ichneumon wasps drilling into the wood and laying eggs one June afternoon. The woodpeckers had ripped the entire log apart to get to the food inside.
I don’t know why I care about whether or not this wasp’s children – or larvae, I suppose – become bird-food or not, but the massacre of young, though one of the more efficient ways to get food (they are so helpless, after all), never seems pleasant to me. Watching sparrows fight desperately – and utterly futilely – to drive a snake off the tree where their young are nested is one of those equal-parts-true-and-horrible images of existence.
But death is shot through it all. The tree in the picture grew on the duff of death, dead leaves and trees and so forth; it itself is but a corpse now, which is to say, food; and the ichneumon wasps themselves are parasitic, and famously gruesome parasites to boot. Their young do not eat wood, but actually eat the borer larvae inside the wood. A nice page on ichneumon wasps contains a quotation from Darwin:
And a good essay, well worth reading, by Stephen Jay Gould on the relations of ichneumon wasps and goody-two-shoes theology. A brief, Christian answer to it is that a theology built on Crucifixion is not goody-two-shoes at all. The generation of life out of death is the Paschal mystery.