Ann E. Michael's Blog, page 25

Crickets

Colloquial speech fascinates me, particularly as its particularity evolves and morphs over time and through culture. Phrases, allusions, slang, cultural references…no wonder that one of my favorite screwball comedies of all time is the Barbara Stanwyck/Gary Cooper film Ball of Fire. (Check it out!)

Recently, my sister complained that she sends out brief, concise emails to coworkers and people who report to her–emails that require acknowledgement or response; “and what do I get?” she shrugged in exasperation, “Crickets!” I know the feeling. Try sending emails to dozens of first-year college students…see how well the average 18-year-old answers them.

Online at YourDictionary.com, I found the most concise definition of crickets:

(US slang, humorous or derisive) Absolute silence; no communication. Derived from the cinematic metaphor of chirping crickets at night, signaling (otherwise) complete quiet. May be used alone or in metaphorically descriptive phrases.

I love that this definition suggests the term derives from movies! I love that it’s a metaphor! And, of course, I love that crickets make sounds–so in actuality the analogy stems not from absolute silence but from the absence of, I suppose, a human-language response.

This time of year at my meadow, the crickets still thrive and make noise even as the cooler nights begin to slow their calls. I hear the order Oecanthinae (tree crickets) from on high in the tree canopy and the order Gryllus (field crickets)–slightly lower in pitch–creak-cricking amid the goldenrod and sedge.

Then I stop and consider all the thrumming, crashing, screaming, irritating, beeping, blasting, babbling noise humans make in the world. Even when we feel joyful, words and enough noise to make the head spin. A great din?

I think I choose crickets, for now.

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No better place

In a time of grief and gravity and gratitude for some wonderfully-lived lives, I happen to find myself reading Mark Doty’s book What Is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My Life.

And I find this paragraph; and for now, I need add nothing more.

The dead are not lost, but in circulation; they are involved in the present, in active participation. Bits of them are streaming through your hand and mine, just as language is circulating through us. Lexicon and materiality forever move onward and outward in the continuous wheeling expansion this world is. This is no mere philosophical proposition on Whitman’s part, not an intellectual understanding but a felt actuality. We are alive forever in the endless circulation of matter. Nothing luckier, stranger, or more beautiful could ever happen. There is no better place.

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Hawk. Squirrel.

This morning, my usual Sunday sit-on-the-porch-with-tea erupted into a creaturely moment of predator and prey, split-second decisions of the animal kind.

Generally, the birds at the feeders and the chipmunks and occasional squirrel regard me as potential but not immediate threat. When I get up from my chair, they go into alert mode–the bolder ones stay, the more timid fly or scurry off but return rapidly. They seem to consider me more nuisance than threat; but they do not trust me, either. That suits all of us. I watch them, they half-watch me. I drink my tea, they eat the seeds we put out for them.

Our cats watch eagerly, in predatory stances, from behind a latched screen door. Thwarted, but fascinated. They were not the cause of today’s alarm.

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The feeders have been swarmed for two weeks by legions of adolescent birds as well as adults preparing for migration or just plumping up before the frosts arrive. We’ve hosted flocks of starlings and dozens of finches of several kinds, nuthatches and sparrows and little brown songbirds, wrens, mourning doves, one remaining chipmunk from this summer’s litter, and the occasional bold squirrel–usually gray ones, though I have seen the little red ones once or twice.

At 8 am, I was enjoying a cool morning with my hot cuppa when the day burst into feathers, screams, and the scrabble of claws. A hawk swooped from the magnolia, aiming at a squirrel crouched on the patio under the birdfeeder. Something must have interrupted the hawk’s perception, however–it missed the squirrel, rotated fluidly in mid-air, and somersaulted onto the iron stand of the feeder, sending small birds into a flurry of down and shrieking in all directions.

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A large buddleia bush obscured my view of the raptor, so I could not make out whether it was a young redtail (it was on the small side) or perhaps a Coopers or sharp-shinned. The squirrel’s response intrigued me. In a fraction of a second, it determined that running straight toward me was ever so much wiser than running the opposite direction (braving the open lawn to make for the treeline). I watched, amused, as the squirrel scurried along the porch to within a foot of my chair, where it suddenly scrabbled its legs, slewed sideways, and stared up at me in confused terror. Poor thing.

It climbed down the side of the porch and huddled in the bushes as the hawk shook itself and made for the oak tree and the small birds returned to their interrupted repast. The cats gazed out with renewed interest, having felt a bit flustered themselves, I could tell.

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I don’t blame them. Everything lately seems so unprecedented and apocalyptic.

I feel simpatico with the squirrel.

Turn, turn, turn

As a child, I loved the Pete Seeger song “Turn, Turn, Turn” as sung by The Byrds. My father told me the words came from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (KJV). Ecclesiastes offers some lovely poems, and Seeger’s interpretation is simple and wise:

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

~

Given the time of coronavirus and covid-19, “a time to refrain from embracing” seems apt, and a little painful to contemplate. For me and my beloveds, a time has come in which to mourn and weep, and to embrace, because everything (and every one among us) must reach a time to die. The sweet-natured, intelligent man who took us to a Pete Seeger concert when we were children and told us where to find the lyrics in Ecclesiastes, among many other things, has moved from physical existence to existence in our consciousness–the strange loop of human “being” that none of us understands.

He would have called it soul.

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Break/change

David Bowie famously invites us–or exhorts us–to turn and face the strange. Necessary, especially during times people are wishing things were as they used to be. Change seems a stranger. We don’t want it at our door.

Facing change presents challenges and requires confronting fears. No wonder people resist; yet change is all there is. Without it, not even death (which is all about change). Just stasis. Not-life instead of no-life; un-life.

For now, a break from blogging, from submitting poems to journals, from sending out my latest attempt at a manuscript, from attending readings and conferences and workshops. I might say “it’s all too much” under current circumstances, but the reasons are more complicated and center around transitions of the not-writing kind.

In time, knowing the way my writing process occurs, these transitions will lead to more writing. More poems. Lots of process.

Meanwhile. I’m in the woods. I’m in the garden. I’m even (I think) going to be in the classroom. But it will all look different.

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@, &, etc.

Decades ago, when I worked in the graphics and typography industry, I became fascinated with ligatures * and “special characters” (which sounds like a euphemism of some kind). Some font designers seemed to share my interest and to design particularly elegant or amusing symbol characters and ligatures as options, though the classic ones have long since gone out of style.

The symbol ampersand supposedly evolved out of the Latin word et (as in et cetera), into “and per se and”–but now it simply means “and.”[image error]

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That character-ligature-symbol gets used frequently in logos, headlines, labels, cartoons. I like the over-the-top swash versions of ampersand just for fun, though I would not specify them in a design; they tend to be hard to read.

Several of the special characters find employment in legal documentation or academic writing, the only places you are likely to find  ‡, §, and ¶ . They’re quaintly antique, but useful. The symbol for “at,” however, was underused when I worked in the field in the 1970s and 80s. It seemed to be going the way of the §.

What a difference a world-wide web makes! Now, of course, @ is ubiquitous, instantly recognizable, and used in logos, brand names… etc.!

~

What we might notice here is that symbols change over time; status varies as social requirements vary, and what’s considered relevant or useful in one era or with one technology can fall into disuse or neglect depending upon the times. Do we regret their fall from grace? Perhaps for a generation or so, and then “they’re history.” If we value history, we geek around in scholarly or enthusiastic amateur ways, recovering past usages and the social norms of past eras. But we seldom insist upon a return to most of them. What endures overcomes the norms. I am curious as to what will endure.

Yes, this is another one of my analogies to the present moment.

~

@ 6 am

wren & sparrow chatter

etc.

(Just a lot of twitter noise.)

~~

*The etymology of the word is as follows (thank you Online Etymology Dictionary): c. 1400, “something used in tying or binding,” from Middle French ligature “a binding” (14c.), from Late Latin ligatura “a band,” from Latin ligatus, past participle of ligare “to bind” (from PIE root *leig- “to tie, bind”). In modern musical notation, “group of notes slurred together,” from 1590s; of letters joined in printing or writing from 1690s.

~

cf : The term ligature, when used in medicine, means a thread or cord that ties off a blood vessel. Now you know!

Respite, refuge

Last night, first time I heard the tree crickets’ din blossoming in darkness; cicadas’ daytime clatter began last week, and the lantern fly nymphs are in their last stage before morphing into winged tree-pests. The heat’s oppressive, which seems to suit the general mood. I have not been writing poems, but this morning wakened early to surrounding birdsong and felt a moment of beauty amidst the tension.

As usual, my garden has offered respite. I harvest beans in evening’s humid warmth, pulling pods from the resilient stems. I marvel at the squash blossoms–bright bells amid enormous green leaves–and gather cucumbers and zucchini, and wait for tomatoes to ripen as I tie up the vines heavy with green globes. The scent of lemon basil pervades dusk as the last fireflies start to wink. Yes, there are disappointments and bugs and there will be yet more weeding and work. It is, however, labor of the body for the nurture of the body. A body in the world.

~

Twenty-odd years ago, we planted an American beech and a stellata magnolia 15 feet apart in the yard. For years, the magnolia–an understory tree (more of a shrub)–grew taller than the beech. Beeches are slow growers in their early years, but it caught up. Now the magnolia flourishes happily under the spreading beech, and in the space between them there’s a mossy, shady refuge where I sometimes sit to escape the heat or the stress and worry of life. I’m not the only one who seeks the protective room beneath the spreading trees, as that’s where the snapping turtle buried her eggs, and there’s a sandy spot in the mosses where another creature has made a place to lie.

I sought the place last evening after watering the garden. Wandered there over the brittle grass and spent clover blossoms of our meadowy yard. Felt the things of the earth beneath my feet. Still a barefoot girl. Still in need, now and then, of refuge.

~

Oh yes–my book of poems, Barefoot Girls, is still available. It is a limited run, though. $8.95 from Prolific Press. Reading poetry: another type of refuge.

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Purchase link [here]

 

Foretelling

I have been on a Dickens kick since March, reading his novels and travel writings that I had never gotten around to in the past. He was, in many ways, a journalist: a consummate observer of human behavior, appearance, society. It struck me, reading American Notes for General Circulation (1850), how prescient he was about the USA.

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Dickens, 1843, portrait by by Margaret Gillies

In 1841, Dickens was just 30 years old but well-regarded in England and in “America,” where he traveled with his wife for six months. His observations tend not to demonstrate the best about 1840s Americans, though he also reflects on the “good character and general friendliness” of the people here. He remarks at how free education means that almost everyone is literate–every non-enslaved person, that is.

What amazes me is his wrap up, where he concludes his book with a kind of warning to Americans, a warning about our inclination toward doubt in our fellows–our lack of trust, about hyper-partisan political ideology and its poor results, about the ruin slavery will visit on the nation, and about the sad tendency to reward/admire “smart men” over moral, kind, generous, or intelligent ones. He additionally blasts this infant nation for its insistence that trade (and capitalism) matters more than just about everything else except the vaunted concept of personal freedom, which of course is belied by the existence of slavery.

He expresses alarm at how the average American conducts his day and offers suggestions on how Americans could improve overall public and personal health:

…the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be included also.

About distrust of facts, politicians, and experts:

One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.

Americans maintain too much pride in their shrewdness and distrust, Dickens claims:

…any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed.

So long ago, and yet here is a visible trait of the “American character”:

‘There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.’

Another prominent feature is the love of ‘smart’ dealing: which gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust…and enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter; though it has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could have effected in a century. The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel….are considered with reference to their smartness.

~

I need add nothing here that Mr. Dickens hasn’t said already…170 years ago.

NOTE: Project Gutenberg provides this text, including its 1868 postscript, online here.

Uncertainties

Best Beloveds are again in difficulties. Difficulties abound, it seems.

As do beans. It is that season–the beans have come on mighty sudden. Bounty presents its own challenges, but there’s joy riding along like a kite above it. And when I meditate on things, I realize that all times are “uncertain times,” a phrase bandied about so often these days as to render it a meaningless cliché.[image error]

~

Herewith, a very early draft of a new poem, one on which I will need to work (revising…) for some time to come. But it’s a start.

~

Hypothesis

Garden teaches a comfort with uncertainty,

knowing that I cannot know, each plan a guess.

From a clear day, hail spewing.

Tree fall on a windless afternoon.

Influx of virus or insects, invasion

of the burrowing vole. I’m never sure

what to believe, or whom–

each seed, each season a test of my hypothesis,

the hypothesis of the garden,

on which nothing at present depends.

We won’t starve. I can purchase food, certainly,

although the garden demonstrates

how rapidly such certainties may change.

Maybe tomorrow, no oranges, no flour,

no disinfectant soap. We live without guarantees

despite the product labels’ promises.

This year the pear tree bears no fruit:

few bees? late frost? Does it want a reason?

Yet I quiver with my need to know.

Knowing, old as I am, uncertainty means change.

Comfort? That requires a trust not at odds

with what’s ambiguous. I weave for myself

a hammock of my unanswered questions,

settle into it, become seed pod, chrysalis, womb.

I place my trust in change.

~

Top ten, discourse, power

Last week’s New York Times Book Review listed, as always, the ten best-selling books. It’s rather heartening to note that this past week, in the non-fiction category, nine of the ten top selling books deal with systemic racism, historic racism, personal experiences as a person of color, and anti-racism in the United States. Granted, the NYT Bestsellers list projects the interests of only a small percentage of citizens and reflects the interests of a well-educated readership. These readers, however, tend to be people who have money and influence, who make hiring decisions and corporate policy protocols, and who are responsible for educating Americans. They may not think of themselves as people with power, for many of the Times readers are under 40 and middle-class.* But they seem to be showing an interest in learning more about privilege, power, and racism.

I have never considered myself a person who had any power; and yet I now recognize that just as I have privilege I never earned, I have power I never earned–and that I have indeed been using that power (as I have unwittingly benefited from privilege) and can do more with it. For educators possess power.

So do poets.

The past three months, as spring has bloomed into summer, poems of protest and poems that inform society have likewise bloomed. Poets of color, marginalized poets, poets who are disabled or queer or immigrant or for other reasons yearning to be heard are all over social media–which is not unusual in itself (the voices, the poems, have been online for decades)–but the difference lately comes through retweets and viral videos and shared posts at a higher rate than previously. These poems, and the prose and interviews that often accompany them, create discourse. Badly needed discussions. Confrontations that cannot be shoved away as easily as they were. I’ve been reading and observing, hoping a change is gonna come.

True, maybe change will not come. At any rate, it’s unlikely to come readily or rapidly; we have been at this pass many times before in the USA. One person at a time may make incremental changes, though, as my father did in the 1960s: a tiny addition to the marches, one person speaking to a small and largely indifferent congregation. One person at a time can be me, as I instruct my students in how to discuss and how to write about controversial subjects using genuine evidence while being respectful of other perspectives. Demonstrate to them how to notice that there are other perspectives. Teach them that they can read and listen in order to teach themselves.

That is power, and it is power to change. Incrementally, a drop in the ocean, a butterfly effect…why not? We have a dream.

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* I’ve gleaned demographic information from NYT’s published statistics and those from several media-advertisement websites.