Boria Sax's Blog: Told Me by a Butterfly, page 3

Review of Crow, new edition

A nice little review the new edition of my book Crow in Birdwatching, Jan. 2018, p. 90: “One of the great pleasures of garden birdwatching, for me, is seeing the behavior of the highly intelligent corvid family, and here Boria Sax looks at how they have been at the center of myth, culture and religion throughout human history, often as birds of ill omen or at least negative associations. It’s an easy read despite the great wealth of material included, and the author keeps things grounded in accurate observation of the behavior of real-life birds. Enjoyable and educations for birders at all levels.”Crow

Christmas Greeting

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The roots are nourished by the Milky Way.
Like the crack in an egg, one branch extends.
Around it, ice and talons of a crow.

Shaking the snow from his wings,
The crow ascends amid the nebulae.
His call is muffled by the stars.

Boria Sax

The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories

WISHING EVERYONE A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS!

Bigfoot, Deep Nostalgia

My recent guest post on Bigfoot and deep nostalgia for the Oxford University Press blog:
https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/not-find...

Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human

E-Book edition of The Raven and the Sun

I am delighted that The Poet's Press has made my last collection of poetry The Raven and the Sun available as an ebook for just $2. The poems mean a lot to me, which is why this message is probably about as close as I will ever come to promoting them. Poetry is meant to be shared, not marketed. But here is the very first poem in the collection:

WITHIN AN APPLE SEED

"Inside your walls
Are generations of trees,
A vast horizon
And apples enough to last
Until the end of time,
So, surely, there is room
For me as well...

Let me in!"
I call, yet nobody
Answers, for those in the seed
Are resting underneath
A fragrant bough.
One thinks, "Is that a squirrel
In the leaves?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The book can be purchased for two dollars at: https://payhip.com/b/vADc
The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories

An Outsider

Perhaps since the moment that I was born, I have always had the feeling of being something of an outsider, and that is neither a confession nor a boast. I simply did not see the world in the same terms as other people. I missed things that others saw, and saw things that others missed.

When I was coming of age, the beats and hippies proclaimed that outsiders were "in." At times, I thought that I might be one of them, but that never clicked. I decided that they were phony - just insiders who were, temporarily, pretending to be out.
At about the same time, a lot of people were saying that Blacks were the ones who were really alienated. For somebody who had often been the only White boy in all-Black classes, this did not ring very true either. I had trouble even thinking of them as a "minority" (and I still do).

Now, well into my Sixties, I feel myself as much an outsider as ever, but that seems a bit more comfortable. I can claim age as an excuse. I would never trade my 60s for the 60s. When one reaches a certain age, alienation becomes "normal."

But that sense of alienation is a large part of why I write, as well as why I am not always to join writing groups. It is also why I am preoccupied with animals, which can appear strange as I sometimes feel.

Everyday is a gift wrapped in solitude. That is why I write.

Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage

The Raven and the Sun: Poems and Stories

The Death of Castro

A "hero" should be somebody you empathize with, not somebody you follow. The death of Castro takes me back to the early 1980s, when I was very active in Amnesty International and attended a national conference. At the time, Amnesty had a very narrow mandate, working for "the release of prisoners of conscience, provided they have not used or advocated violence, against torture and the death penalty." This effectively depoliticized human rights work, and brought accusations of cowardice from across the political spectrum, but it made possible a very broad coalition of people who might otherwise be enemies. It suited those like me who felt impelled to activism, yet did not have the sense of solidarity that movements seem to require. The speakers included former political prisoners from all over the world - South Africa, Russia, Chile, the United States, and so on. Bob Maurer, then head of Amnesty USA, said to me, "Each half of those people thinks the other half should still be in jail." That was probably not true, but I appreciated his point. But I remember how the former POCs from Cuba stood out for their passion and sense of drama, and one of them ("Huber Matos," I think) was a fantastic speaker. At the time, according to Amnesty, Cuba had one of the highest rates of political imprisonment in the world, some of the longest serving prisoners, and most brutal conditions. On the other hand, if we do not think in terms of the Amnesty mandate, we can consider that Castro overthrew a government dominated by the American Mafia. He had to contend with industrial sabotage, burning of crops, and assassination attempts, and so on. So was the harshness necessary or at least understandable? My view now is that Castro and the American presidents up to Obama were locked in a sort of co-dependency, vehemently opposed yet also needing one another. If good guys didn't have bad guys, they couldn't be "good guys." Very few people transcend their times, and Castro was not one of them. I do not feel like either mourning or celebrating his death. But if it marks the end of an era, to that I say, "good riddance."

City of Ravens, Looking Back

We human beings live at least as much in the past as in the present and the future. I am alternately fascinated and distressed by the ways in which we romanticize the past, which usually have no clear connection to any practical agenda. When I was researching the book City of Ravens, one official at the Tower called me an "ugly American." I had a glimpse of the infighting that was going on within the Tower, which seemed oddly reminiscent of medieval times.

My book showed that the ravens had only been in the Tower since 1883 or slightly earlier. The supposedly ancient legend that Britain will fall if the ravens leave the Tower dates only from July 1944, when ravens were used as an early warning system for enemy bombs and planes. Nothing since the publication of the book has either placed my conclusions in question or significantly added to them.

After a bit of hesitation, the Tower went back to telling tourists the old nonsense about how the ravens having been domesticated by Charles II, because of an "ancient prophesy." As deceptions go, that one is benign, if slightly bland, though the true history has a great deal more drama. History and legend exist on different levels, and need not always interfere with one another. I have been generally content to let the officials at the Tower retain their story.

But lately I have becoming more aware of ways in which institutions from the Tower of London to the FBI constantly try to manage history, not necessarily for any directly pragmatic end but perhaps just to perpetuate a mythology. This is a kind of power, since it enables them to channel the imaginative energies of people in a direction of their choosing. It is related to other kinds of power, and should at least be carefully watched.

What ought to be the relationship between history and myth?

City of Ravens: The Extraordinary History of London, its Tower and Its Famous RavensBoria Sax

The Political is Personal

Back in the 1970s and 80s, it seemed like everyone kept saying, "The personal is political." Kid though I still was in many ways, that definitely did not seem right to me. Personal experience seemed far too quirky, elusive, and just plain strange to be reduced to politico-cultural trends. I still think they were attributing some sort of quasi-magical power to politics. But in the 1990s, I learned about my father being a spy for the Russians, and all sorts of connections started to become apparent. Now, I am reversing the old saying, so it reads, "The political is personal." To me, that makes a lot more sense, and it is really the subject of this essay. Here is a recent article that I have written on the subject, and I hope some people pay attention, for reasons that are no so much political (or professional) as personal.

https://www.academia.edu/28744984/How...

Spies And Their Families: On "The Americans" And In Real Life

As the son of a Russian spy who helped pass secrets from the Manhattan Project, I have more than an academic interest in the critically-acclaimed television show "The Americans" (on the FX network).

A Blacked-Out Space in My Life

My "author's statement for Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage on Amazon:

"There had been a sort of large blank space in my life. I now sometimes imagine my life as a vast FBI file, and that would be a hefty section that had been blacked out. The problem was not that I could not remember things. I remembered plenty. But it all seemed arbitrary, beyond even the possibility of explanation. On learning definitively that my father had been a Soviet spy, I was initially appalled. Later I felt relief, because many circumstances of my life, such as the way my parents moved six times a year, gradually began to make sense. But there is more to this than just my story.

My book Stealing Fire tells of history much as I experienced it, mostly through the eyes of a child. But to write it was more difficult than I had ever anticipated. I had not only to deal with personal ordeals, but, as I eventually came to realize, with a vast number of highly stereotyped images that now pass for history, yet serve mostly to obscure experience. There are so many layers of hero-worship, demonization, nostalgia, inflated rhetoric, theater, and hype that the underlying reality seemed almost completely obscured. My book is a quest to uncover the human reality behind historical events, concealed as this is by inflated rhetoric, arbitrary censorship, and all sorts of half-articulate fears."

http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/09...