tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38362858549271313732024-03-19T03:02:23.364-07:00Digital MaterialWriting and SoundNeale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-41036254302106165632023-02-27T10:32:00.001-08:002023-02-27T10:32:54.789-08:00The first winter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4NmeK9NvtBVG9UR_rnZHCNn6h0rcpgjvy76B18xRVKQkGHRj7tNakc9EVwdJylavuuqqpabWfO6diwtzSyax-FYpEzwqrS-ihIdeunqB1nfpwlb_AO_Hx7_oPqckSYBrTtVeVSqyeil2J9MIFXeMP3i14U0eKwG6HEGzZB38LhcgPAlTqKzPGRaRLSA/s4032/IMG_4315.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4NmeK9NvtBVG9UR_rnZHCNn6h0rcpgjvy76B18xRVKQkGHRj7tNakc9EVwdJylavuuqqpabWfO6diwtzSyax-FYpEzwqrS-ihIdeunqB1nfpwlb_AO_Hx7_oPqckSYBrTtVeVSqyeil2J9MIFXeMP3i14U0eKwG6HEGzZB38LhcgPAlTqKzPGRaRLSA/w640-h480/IMG_4315.HEIC" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>For two days the temperature dropped to twenty below. Wind thrashed the trees. The sky was blown clear except for the merest whisp of cloud.</p><p>We covered the windows with blankets and batting of wool. The cabin shaded dark even at midday. The woodstove brimmed with glowing coals.</p><p>Outside the snow was blinding white and scalloped by the wind, dusted with frozen needles blown out of the conifers. </p><p>The children stayed in the loft for two days. We didn’t force them outside or even downstairs. Food stored on the floor froze solid, as did the buckets of dishwater under the sink.</p><p>On the second day the full moon rose clear and bright and cold. The world sat still and serene in a perfect stunned silence. The animals hid away, the trees long enduring.</p><p>Yesterday, in warmer weather, I cut and bucked and split a small birch. A few nights fuel wood, prepared for next winter.</p><p><br /></p>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-91488907403752459542021-08-31T10:20:00.003-07:002021-09-01T13:37:21.463-07:00Grand Canyon<span style="font-family: times;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMMnKjHMpOT-FM42-VFdbiB31IZL_B-FpVOKhzO6GfxvDxHu4Iu7gXMlEWWv-ay5v0FhuGrTC4_fRK0XUHngUKVipFtnVDqbNA1D7sSRjibd7EP0z_X6VTkNoE7fJYsqKSrrP9ku5-zakF/s4032/IMG_1813.HEIC"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMMnKjHMpOT-FM42-VFdbiB31IZL_B-FpVOKhzO6GfxvDxHu4Iu7gXMlEWWv-ay5v0FhuGrTC4_fRK0XUHngUKVipFtnVDqbNA1D7sSRjibd7EP0z_X6VTkNoE7fJYsqKSrrP9ku5-zakF/w640-h480/IMG_1813.HEIC" /></a><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times;">We leave the canyon Zion through a tunnel in the very stone, bored through the body of the mountain. We emerge from this worm hole in the earth into wide vistas, bare desert, mesas eroding to tumbles of rock. Wind in the low brush at the roadside, movement in the corner of the eye. <br /><br />Isolated storm clouds stand upon pillars of rain. We drive through them, the droplets darkening the roadway, drunk up by the thirsty sand. <br /><br />Long descent from a mesa toward Lake Powell in the afternoon. Boats are mere chalk-mark wakes on the vast mirror of the water. We cross the canyon on an impossible bridge, suspended above the abyss. Upstream, the dam is a massive block of constructed stone choking the throat of the canyon. Downstream the walls drop below seeing, as if descending into the guts of the earth. <br /><br />On the lands of Diné, Hopi, and Paiute people. Single-wide trailer outposts, empty paddocks, a few trees stationed around, or none. Still pickups. Crumbling mesas like theater scrim. <br /><br />In failing light we turn toward the rim. Out of rolling sagebrush hills into scrub pines, low and dense. An elk waves his wide rack in the headlights as he rips grass from the roadside. <br /><br />The immensity of the canyon shows briefly through the trees under a fiery sunset. We make camp in the dark. Pinyon pines gray scrawls in the shadows. Thunder again, close by. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"></div></span><div><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: center;">&</div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">In the morning the kids are edgy and easily upset. Nothing seems right to them. At last we leave camp by bicycle, take the paved pathways through the woods. We are immediately breathless with the altitude. Scent of last night’s rain in the pine needle beds, the only sign that it was here. The sky perfectly empty, the sun unsheathed. <br /><br />We pause for water and the obligatory map at the visitors’ center. The kids are happier here where they can clamber over the rocks, arranged in a semi-natural state. All the staff are masked against contagion. The banality of tourism is a thin scum laid over the surface here, something more intense and serious beneath. The children feel it in their bodies, don’t have our adult ways of suppressing this disturbance to their senses. We load them back in the bike trailer and blithely ride toward the edge of oblivion. <br /><br />Because that is what it is, this canyon, this great cleft in the earth, this yawning chasm that all these people have come to peer into. We are not prepared for its power. We ride away from the crowds, along a paved trail that lopes over hillocks and around Utah juniper. The trail makes a sudden turn as if veering to save itself, and here is the drop-off, protected by ragged chain-link fence. We are arrested, breath stolen by more than the thin air. The cliff is sheer and goes down thousands of feet – it might as well have no floor, one would fall forever. <br /><br />The children are restless when we pause, straining against their straps and the sides of the bike trailer like the feral animals they are. We keep moving, riding along the edge of the precipice, not too fast, no sudden movements, a hush in our nerves. To the side, the chasm stretches wide, mile upon mile, its distant edges mountains and mesas unto themselves, built of layer upon layer of ancient history compressed into stone. <br /><br />At last we find a wide place in the trail to pause, release the children from their confinement. They run pell-mell to crash into the flimsy fence and to try to climb its short leaning height. They are afraid in other moments of barking dogs and men who are new to the room – of this they seem unperturbed, this promise of certain death right at their feet. We, their parents, can hardly take in this massive sight for the anxiety that clutches our chests. This is parenthood condensed to a moment, all our fears for our children distilled to the now, this sudden drop, the vast emptiness where vultures wheel a thousand feet below us. <br /><br />Finally we fight the children back into the trailer, take them to a more-peopled point, with firmer fences. The risk of disease feels less threatening than the drop. The kids hop about on the rocks like goats; we never let them out of arm’s reach. The spit of rock we stand on extends out into open space. The tourists take selfies and walk around as though a gap to the earth’s heart did not yawn beneath them, as though this outcrop could hang here forever. They try to feed the chipmunks who skitter under our feet. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">&</div></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br />We sleep another night in the pine scrub. I wake early to the ravens’ quarks. Ash and the kids sleeping soundly, I head out on my bike alone, take the cracked trail empty of tourists at this hour. In a few minutes I am alone beside the abyss. The air is still and silent. The canyon is a silent scream in the morning haze. <br /><br />Deep in the belly of the canyon is the silver thread of the great river that has carved this groove in the hide of the planet. Overhanging it is a slate-gray band, the foundation stones of an ancient mountain range that rose up and was eroded away to nothing. Above that rises stratum after stratum of red silt, laid down and compressed under forgotten seas. Exposed by the receding tides, uplifted to this high desert plateau, this stone was riven by water year on year, cut to the heart, to the gut, to the bone, dead mountains revealed, rock steadily sheared down to spear-point peaks rising from within the land. It feels like something to be this stone, and when we admit that we see what it has endured for all this time, its steady destruction for millions of years, an ancient and ongoing ceremony, face up and teeth bared under the sun.<br /><br /></span><div><br /></div></div>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-29073949995189429222021-08-26T09:29:00.002-07:002021-09-01T13:41:09.909-07:00Zion<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi35fM7_TRq10NA2cmELrHMTp9LSU40byV75fUSyJ5TXQpKYhqMTBncZzXMIju_yAqG2VsY3dvIu5shSJubCqM3tejc1maHhRS8pKlH1EvIOrmY-8dWbTZBk6cWcNr181e1Tz-hvKzoiH2Z/s4032/IMG_1679+Copy.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi35fM7_TRq10NA2cmELrHMTp9LSU40byV75fUSyJ5TXQpKYhqMTBncZzXMIju_yAqG2VsY3dvIu5shSJubCqM3tejc1maHhRS8pKlH1EvIOrmY-8dWbTZBk6cWcNr181e1Tz-hvKzoiH2Z/w640-h480/IMG_1679+Copy.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><span style="font-family: times;">A land both ancient and sudden. Out of the desert we enter this slot canyon oasis, cottonwoods lining the silty river, deer browsing the grass in the shade. Above us, pillars and bastions and domes in gray and red and monarch orange, rising three thousand feet as the canyon’s walls. <br /><br />We set camp beside the river in the shade, our eyes burnt by the white heat of the desert. The children are red-cheeked and upset – we draw a bath into a plastic tub and they sit in it cooling, watching the deer come through, eating their evening meal. <br /><br />We raise our small tent and put the kids to bed on their little cots, watch the ruddy sunset withdraw up the canyon walls. Breath the cooling air that settles, listen to the rushing of the river. When full dark falls, we see lightning flashing in the mouth of the canyon, intimations of power held in a dark chalice. The storm wind comes down and stirs the leaves overhead. <br /><br />Flash flood warnings, heavy rain imminent in this wild place. We lift the children still sleeping on the cots and place them outside, as if to let them absorb a little of the wildness of the storm. The wind eddies the sand beneath them. <br /><br />We take down the small tent and begin to erect the canvas bell tent, larger, sturdier and more protective. We pound stakes into the desert hard-pan. The tent up, we lift the children and move them inside. They have not woken through all of it, nor will they when the rain comes drumming on the canvas through the night. <br /><br />The storm yet to descend, but the children protected, we stand with the power humming in the air around us. The spires and pillars, unseen in the night, are imbued with it. They have stood here all these millions of years, endured countless storms and weathers. They loom above us, not malevolent but imposing, not beneficent except their presence makes a haven for life at their feet. Under their shadow, we are both sheltered and cowed. <br /><br />The storm comes over, thunder above us, light filling the tent in flashes. In the night I have to go out and reset the stakes in saturated earth, braving the weather to keep the tent erect. <br /><br />Next day, having drunk up the brief downpour, all the grass and leaves have taken on a bright green glow, lit from within. We walk to a waterfall that pours over a canyon overhang as if from a pitcher mouth. We stand under its cool spray, receiving a tenuous benediction.</span><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-12098296673148161902021-08-22T10:49:00.003-07:002021-09-01T13:40:36.625-07:00Las Vegas<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqJsYqc-jj01JCJ8oLuHJ2035BNeSaea4YFUk3tXWpsCX9tfsYhUk-39rBaeBkQvr__5A5vOYSxOYawBnRrBsHTLhDrZUIHKo0SC3cNHgnjfBivzFc2Cb4f4Yf43854l2NXvjGwTBz75kZ/s4032/IMG_1611.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqJsYqc-jj01JCJ8oLuHJ2035BNeSaea4YFUk3tXWpsCX9tfsYhUk-39rBaeBkQvr__5A5vOYSxOYawBnRrBsHTLhDrZUIHKo0SC3cNHgnjfBivzFc2Cb4f4Yf43854l2NXvjGwTBz75kZ/w640-h480/IMG_1611.HEIC" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<span style="font-family: times;"><br />In a thousand years, perhaps much less, this place will be like Chaco Canyon, megalithic architecture worn to its foundations by relentless wind and gnawing grit. Students of the past may chart its grid of streets, oriented to the cardinal directions, name its fallen bridges and pyramids and great houses. They will unearth and puzzle over its cubic stone living quarters, its catacombs and subterranean kivas with their thousands of pillars, where supplicants once knelt at prayer. They will dust away the sand from the mounds of chits and wonder what religious conviction, what cultural imperative would bring so many from so far, bringing so much, only to leave it behind. <br /><br />Now, even the gold veneer is faded beige by desert dust. Mid-afternoon, 110 degrees. The concrete aqueducts fall behind us and there is only the gray road through gray sand, the gray-green tumbleweeds and the black escarpments, the stone that was hard enough to survive. <br /><br />On the slopes of a wide sand-filled valley stand twin solar collectors, concentric rings of mirrors stretching out for what must be miles, all focused inward on the twin towers, impossibly tall, all out of scale to the humans who have constructed it for their inscrutable purposes. At their heads, brilliances of focused light, two burning white suns, descended upon desert altars.<br /><br /></span><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-85095254848284479192021-08-09T09:00:00.001-07:002021-09-01T13:42:14.331-07:00Sequoia<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfEeWef82gbtcczGc_Wkg0Z0WTgcfsmQNzw3z-eiMUnrIX7mxm4pL3xwqAY-f_dkUR8DIJw-J81ES7qpKtKTx4dFBoFcsfTRusPbLlO3vC9hW1ea0X-b6FgQDUtzEDyuHTkoeMyQYZBmw5/s4032/IMG_1587.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfEeWef82gbtcczGc_Wkg0Z0WTgcfsmQNzw3z-eiMUnrIX7mxm4pL3xwqAY-f_dkUR8DIJw-J81ES7qpKtKTx4dFBoFcsfTRusPbLlO3vC9hW1ea0X-b6FgQDUtzEDyuHTkoeMyQYZBmw5/w640-h480/IMG_1587.HEIC" width="640" /></a><br /><br /></p><p></p><span style="font-family: times;"><br /><br />We walk down the paved trail with a thousand other supplicants, most or all unaware of what we do, thinking it mere tourism. A woman coming up the path: They don’t look any bigger than the rest. <br /><br />The heat is sedentary on the mountain. We peer between younger trees for our first glimpse. The kids show their excitement by leaping along the rocks at the path’s edge. <br /><br />At last out of the forest it appears, so obviously superlative. Many times the size of the ponderosa pines and incense cedars around it. Its trunk knuckles down onto the mountain stone like the foot of a mammoth. Larger than mammoths, or whales. Larger than any other single living thing, and older than all but the oldest trees. Two thousand years and more. <br /><br />Rusty haired bark covers its spreading base, which widens to meet the ground like rolling flesh or cooling lava. Higher up the trunk goes scaled and gray. And then there are its branches, thick and gnarled, hundreds of feet from the ground, larger than trees themselves. The foliage, a burst of gray green, is indistinct at this distance, a cloud halo around the crown. <br /><br />So huge there ought to be but one in the world, yet many stand side by side on this mountain slope. Like columns in a cathedral, whose roof is the sky. Around their bases, we are teeming like ants on our paved paths. Yet unlike the echoing space in a cathedral, the thick forest floor and the warm air and the furred bark of these giants absorb sound, so that our chattering is muted. Our human sounds are made appropriately small, like the speech of squirrels or jays. <br /><br />The trees have stood here silent and enduring since Rome was young. We are brief sparks flickering around their feet. Though their long-term survival is in question, because of us – our climate-warping gases, the crawling pests we bring – their trunks contain the wood of millennia. They are lived time made flesh. <br /><br />Last night we slept in the open on the mountainside. The forest dark was silent as the far stars, so that our steps in the pine needles seemed loud as thunder. In our future lies the desert, wind clawing the sage brush, the road like a streak of ink on the white hard-pan.</span><br /><p></p><p><br /></p>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-58057754500906282702020-10-29T16:47:00.000-07:002020-10-29T16:47:51.978-07:00I lift our child<br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzMNqfo21PP5sK_qU5bALjv0cYT_kSqJWlrIgIUQw-CujkOXCdNXsCp3qusNTj0o-eMEx0AehbW_g8BsLGjei4ZXBnNncQHYUNsqFs1NlEGno8SWaeStM8cU5uH_hn-mQj52a2ldOb3Lk3/s3024/LND_A8D30A1F-DD35-42CD-8D33-44A5A8CDFE53.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzMNqfo21PP5sK_qU5bALjv0cYT_kSqJWlrIgIUQw-CujkOXCdNXsCp3qusNTj0o-eMEx0AehbW_g8BsLGjei4ZXBnNncQHYUNsqFs1NlEGno8SWaeStM8cU5uH_hn-mQj52a2ldOb3Lk3/w400-h400/LND_A8D30A1F-DD35-42CD-8D33-44A5A8CDFE53.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div>I lift our child</div><div>from the couch where she <br />has fallen asleep,<br />my hands warmed<br />with whiskey,<br />and carry her over<br />the smoking threshold<br />to the bed shrouded<br />in sea mist<br />that comes in each night<br />to relieve the heat<br />and inscribe with its<br />taste of salt<br />my small place<br />where I hold all the world’s<br />longing, fear, and care.</div></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-24989198795757253352020-04-30T10:17:00.001-07:002020-10-29T16:50:25.791-07:00Dark Mountain 17 Available Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXEAq9HQANe53lCfjeXgL3Gy6zOBWGcKZ5cdQP5vUjez1KH8Ik0ohV1lgMDrtZHCU3hKODj1OHdT4Uhtu-v9j8b-BZFW1M8PDXmESJGRn9EUVW3Lpj2UvQXx82EcjYYyHTDVWWKdYCxEOu/s1600/Dark+Mountain+17+cover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1391" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXEAq9HQANe53lCfjeXgL3Gy6zOBWGcKZ5cdQP5vUjez1KH8Ik0ohV1lgMDrtZHCU3hKODj1OHdT4Uhtu-v9j8b-BZFW1M8PDXmESJGRn9EUVW3Lpj2UvQXx82EcjYYyHTDVWWKdYCxEOu/s400/Dark+Mountain+17+cover.png" width="347" /></a></div>
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I'm very pleased to announce that <i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-17/" target="_blank">Issue 17</a></i> of <i>Dark Mountain</i> is available now.<br />
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I worked as a prose editor on this issue, as well as contributing a short piece of fiction and an interview with artist and author Obi Kaufmann (<i>The California Field Atlas)</i>. You can read my piece, <i>Inauguration Day,</i> <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/of-fire-and-water/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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May we each find work – real, good, regenerative – to do in these trying times.<br />
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My best always,<br />
<br />Neale<div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-50187616973394547612020-04-29T12:54:00.000-07:002020-04-29T12:54:26.366-07:00Manifesto on Deep Adaptation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4hd1tMD-CxnDJNVl-IKhseVIkApVMRMKvqTMyaqjVnfYkjh8zVO5pmxxFMnLYvNNtQb8e_HfLuUjAh0SBh7Yh09O_koKW3xJNaeRC9asl3RvtSNIdf5NtdYCrxVQZGP6Vdy62gE4TVUSO/s1600/IMG_6030.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1491" data-original-width="1600" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4hd1tMD-CxnDJNVl-IKhseVIkApVMRMKvqTMyaqjVnfYkjh8zVO5pmxxFMnLYvNNtQb8e_HfLuUjAh0SBh7Yh09O_koKW3xJNaeRC9asl3RvtSNIdf5NtdYCrxVQZGP6Vdy62gE4TVUSO/s400/IMG_6030.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The children will play games with balls of tanned hide and sticks they carved themselves, on fields mown with a scythe. They will run along cliffs over ocean coves. Their schooling will be listening to acorns to know when they are ready to fall. Their work will be to pry mussels from the rocks, and to roll up plastic turf to reveal the soil beneath.<br />
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Our work will be breaking up the stone streets with rusted pick-axes. We will build the rubble into dry-stone shrines, beside the oak and laurel saplings we plant. We will imagine the trees aged to one hundred years and more. We will measure our age by the number of times our hearts have been broken.<br />
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When we grow old, our children will feed us boiled weeds and fish stock. Our gnarled hands will slowly form the most delicate arrowheads from broken glass. We will speak to herons as we used to in dreams when we were young.<br />
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Our children will look on us with loving derision. For what we allowed to occur, the things we each did, and because we carry the past into the now and cannot release it. We will carry the solipsism of an earlier age. We will mourn the things we used to hate – boxes of light that told us visions, incandescent sweetness, metal noise, easy power at the slightest touch. Our children will move around us while we sit steeped in memory, our hands working.<br />
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Our children’s children will sing a beautiful song when we die. They will remember the way we scythed in the early morning, mist on the meadow, the shrouded red sun, herons flapping to their hunt. Everywhere they look will be the decaying detritus of a former epoch. Their work will be tending a forest garden.<br />
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Our children’s work will be forgetting. Everything we passed on without knowing, isolation, self-involvement, comfort in captivity. They will recognize our failings, and try to hold them in their bodies like stone accretions, waiting for them to dissolve.<br />
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We will come to them and haunt their dreams, our ghosts hungry to know we did not fail them. They will have to sing quiet songs into the night, that houses the sound of ocean waves muffled by fog and terns startled from sleep. They will have to sing to sleep our moot fears, and their pains in tooth and heart, and the child who has woken, sing her to sleep, sing like wind through the oak, rub her swollen gums with the bark of the willow, and sing, sing her to sleep.<br />
<br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-10427593739700510412020-02-01T11:32:00.000-08:002020-02-01T11:34:39.708-08:00Recent Work<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8-UjcrVBy7xeztzuB4dMb9ftmGrl8eWjjDtkTv1lBvEHTBFnAWLJNSFMYxsFGlv4xKogDwSZsdui_Nb6_B4bF8UY9a953ruv6ADdeRBR9TCHj4IZuj13_LWT1ysonFQD625cHu_IE_NkI/s1600/DM16_jkt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8-UjcrVBy7xeztzuB4dMb9ftmGrl8eWjjDtkTv1lBvEHTBFnAWLJNSFMYxsFGlv4xKogDwSZsdui_Nb6_B4bF8UY9a953ruv6ADdeRBR9TCHj4IZuj13_LWT1ysonFQD625cHu_IE_NkI/s400/DM16_jkt.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I was very happy to be invited to contribute to the tenth anniversary edition of <i>Dark Mountain</i>, <i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-16-refuge/" target="_blank">Issue 16: Refuge</a>.</i><br />
<br />
Also, a collaboration between myself and artist Robin V. Robinson can be found in the online edition of <i>Dark Mountain </i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/our-blood-in-hers/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Many thanks for reading.<br />
<br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-8904720541707732092019-01-28T10:42:00.000-08:002019-01-28T10:42:43.772-08:00The Things You Name<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Es3pyqeuPqBWDUfRjH_u2ORVCtSBRLbwktUDLdh2YcZtf-DJ_lJJ30V8wWkoC1VOPpaDZuXYuD71ERKspGw0vHYOSM66Cf1iPQ09gldSFJhnOKMAII4rnS5xjkMGhAkjQQqoTxlm_2hn/s1600/IMG_5460.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Es3pyqeuPqBWDUfRjH_u2ORVCtSBRLbwktUDLdh2YcZtf-DJ_lJJ30V8wWkoC1VOPpaDZuXYuD71ERKspGw0vHYOSM66Cf1iPQ09gldSFJhnOKMAII4rnS5xjkMGhAkjQQqoTxlm_2hn/s640/IMG_5460.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
You say <i>ocean.
</i><span style="font-style: normal;">You say </span><i>rock</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
and you say</span><i> tree</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. You
point to these things, and the birds flying or diving in the surf;
you make their cries. Your face shows worthy amazement, brilliant
recognition. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">You
are the things you name. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">You
reach your arm, your hand stretching, effort to connect; the rock and
ocean reach out by the reflected rays of the setting winter sun. The
tree reaches out by its branching shadow, the wave by its spume and
thunder. You are breathing them in, speaking the names breathing out.
The waves speak your name as they break apart upon the worn stones of
your coast. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Tonight
the sea mist will come in and blanket you while you sleep.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-43778001381322115812018-09-02T13:16:00.000-07:002018-09-02T13:16:05.959-07:00Letters to California: Holy Fire<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGEHCAgUJ7IFxW40YzlnIrfX0-3KfRkjhFTdjku7inxwllsBEpvuj4OJEVv8xO44CBj19wK0x2kBsZ45RLK25-qQn3KCBh_2doUT3Su69A1IEg62e5dc-tloZhWhimmPNNx-q2bLknt8J/s1600/IMG_4721.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGEHCAgUJ7IFxW40YzlnIrfX0-3KfRkjhFTdjku7inxwllsBEpvuj4OJEVv8xO44CBj19wK0x2kBsZ45RLK25-qQn3KCBh_2doUT3Su69A1IEg62e5dc-tloZhWhimmPNNx-q2bLknt8J/s640/IMG_4721.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My daughter, this
land you were named for is ablaze. The maps on the weather report are
red. The satellite images of the smoke show it blanketing the
continent.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here at the coast we
are somewhat sheltered. The heat inland draws the onshore breeze from
the vast Pacific, her fog muffling us in the damp. It burns away by
midday, and on the horizon I can see the sickly haze.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The heat warbles
above the roofs. I am not in total despair. I vacillate between utter
joy in this beautiful time, when you are one year old, growing well,
full to brimming with love – between that and the fear of losing
you and all this love we have, the fear of you in pain, of dark
times.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Water splashes idly
in the backyard fountains. In the mountains, smoke has blotted out
Half Dome and El Capitan. Mist and smoke obscure, we say, as though
they cover something true. But perhaps they are revealing, of how
ephemeral, how insubstantial the things around us truly are.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We may be protected
from the smoke here, but like the civilized person sitting in the air
conditioned house, our protection is only momentary. The aircon cools
us for now, but warms the climate outside the walls.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
No place is safe.
Fire followed us everywhere. Last year we evacuated from the land
where you were born, leaving the tent behind, as the Coyote Fire
blazed on the ridge across the road, plumes of black smoke where
houses burned, the brilliant torches of the dry pines.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I went to Yosemite
and walked across the dam at Hetch Hetchy. The Ferguson Fire had
started the day before and the great granite domes were inchoate in
the clouds of yellow smog. The leaves of the oaks oppressed and limp
in the attenuated light.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We went to Redding
on a family visit. 110 degrees, one of the hottest places in the
country. We stood in the water at the bank of the Sacramento, cold as
snow melt. Home two days, we saw a picture in the paper of a sign for
Old Shasta, which we had passed, now on fire, a tornado of embers
behind it. Hundreds of thousands of acres still burn, in the Carr
Fire, in the River Fire and Ranch Fire.</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We cannot help
ourselves but name them. Our mythological minds can’t help it.
These great beings devouring forest and chaparral, huge beyond
reckoning, powerful beyond reckoning, standing in columns of smoke
and cinders to thirty thousand feet, raking the continent with their
tendrils. Fire is great and living. So we name them as we would name
gods. Our intercessors pour offerings of retardant to appease the
flames, cut fire breaks around a sacrificial altar of 100,000 acres.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
One fire was even
given the name Holy. Every night, the newscasters speak its name,
intoning <i>Holy Fire, Holy Fire.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
have tried to suppress fire, like a traumatic memory. Now the fuel is
collected, one hundred years of it, and ravenous gods gorge
themselves.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
have invoked these gods of light and heat every time we flick the
light switch or plug in the laptop, every time we turn the key in the
ignition. Always taking for granted that they are in our control. And
each time adding to the gases that warm the climate, bring drought to
kill the trees and make fuel for flame, bring record temperatures and
red flag warnings, drop power lines for their flashing spark.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
On
the news: <i>...the bizarre appearance in court today of the man
accused of starting the Holy Fire...</i></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
are happy to call him insane, shake our heads at his strange gestures
on our bright screens, powered by the burning fuel. We are all
unthinking pyromaniacs, zealots for flame. We are all complicit in
this world-wide sacrifice.</div>
<div align="center" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
~</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In these times, I
turn back to Jeffers:</div>
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<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
… <i>Beautiful country burn again … Burn as before with bitter
wonders … </i>
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
There were the horrors of his time, the nuclear explosions and wars
ravaging millions, all set off by these strange self-conscious apes,
what he called a ‘sick microbe.’ He felt empathy and disgust all
wound up together – a familiar feeling for many now I think. We are
our own torturers, carried along by a great tide of culture and
biology. These things are inextricable. The best we can do is swim a
little sideways on the face of the wave.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Then what is the answer? </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Jeffers
asks, and answers: </span><i>Not to be deluded by dreams.</i></div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It is as if what we call higher consciousness is a mere accretion
upon our brains, designed to rationalize in any way we can the
destruction we sow, as we carry out our urges. You teach me this, you
who are only a year old, you who are merely being, asking that your
needs be met. You depend on us, your parents, for that care, and we
are not much different from you, asking, asking, beseeching the world
to fulfill us. We sacrifice portions of our lives, our daily effort,
on the alter of commerce, and pay to fill the gas tank.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Supposedly self-aware as we are, we might all agree to change course
together. We who think about this conundrum, think: <i>There are many
things to be done, if only, if only...</i> Is this another
self-deception, along with the one that says we can keep burning oil
indefinitely, keep dumping water on the almond groves?</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
… <i>Not to be deluded by dreams … </i>
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I write over and over in my notebook, <i>How will we live, How will
we live …</i></div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Burn sacrifices once a year, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Jeffers
admonishes, </span><i>to magic horror away from the house … </i>
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
He was speaking of portraying ‘<i>pain and terror, the insanities
of desire</i>’ in art, in order to avoid enacting them in life. But
he might well have been gifting us a forest management strategy:
allowing the dead wood to burn, feed the god Fire its due.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sacrifice is anathema to our contemporary culture. It means giving
something up, burning it away, placing it beyond reach. Without the
steady sacrifices made on smaller altars, the gods will take what
they will. They have been hungry too long.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My daughter, I don’t know how we will live. I can only think to
take you to some place wilder, and to follow Jeffers’ advice: <i>Walk
on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and wave are good
prophets; Wise are the wings of the gull, pleasant her song.</i></div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-42774178786867579352018-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:002018-07-30T10:31:56.713-07:00The Peaks of La Sen<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh318cIstLmi7LgOHM4lhpJCuWQ7qdzpCX4w3VNJofUORaoW9nQbP-9kU334y81VZde3_BPjjGp1aqTBefGyW22rOU-O-_Mcp0BSwdEZlTnrvZJLGuvpRU9hR0f8ieMl1zAlfBBeyvXO6Co/s1600/IMG_4722.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh318cIstLmi7LgOHM4lhpJCuWQ7qdzpCX4w3VNJofUORaoW9nQbP-9kU334y81VZde3_BPjjGp1aqTBefGyW22rOU-O-_Mcp0BSwdEZlTnrvZJLGuvpRU9hR0f8ieMl1zAlfBBeyvXO6Co/s640/IMG_4722.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
She stood looking
down into the expanse of the valley, hazed a sick gray by the
sacrificial fires. The mountains on either side blank and flat,
jagged lines against a yellow sky. The pyramids led off until they
disappeared into the smoke, a staggered line, white clouds billowing
from their peaks and trailing west. Stones in a silty pond. She made
the sign <i>safety</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, three times.
</span><i>I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
Then she adjusted the mullein leaf mask around her nose, and started
down.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">In
the valley the air was thick and burnt her eyes. The old road flowed
over the land and among the hills that reared up like the backs of
sleeping animals, an expanse of stone, flat, wide, straight,
unnatural. Pale grass in the cracks. Leafless trees scrawled black
limbs in the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">murk</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Here and there were small square hou</span><span style="font-style: normal;">s</span><span style="font-style: normal;">es
of mud brick, roofed in tile, the plots of grain beside them, yellow
with heavy seed-heads, still in the windless twilight.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
crossed a graystone bridge over a black river. After that there were
no more trees, only stumps in endless rows running off on either
side. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
came to a house and approached. Smoke trailed thick and white from
the chimney. She clapped twice outside the hide door as she might
have done at home. No one came. She waited a long time. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Chickens
appeared around the corner of the house and stepped carefully around
her legs, turning their heads to examine her or peer at the ground
beside her shoes.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
clapped again, and the chickens gabbled and ran a little way, and
eyed her, wary. The door swung back; a gray-faced woman stepped into the frame. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
bowed, signed </span><i>shelter.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
woman simply stood, expression closed. Hair lank. The lines
beside her mouth were deep. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
signed </span><i>pilgrim</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as
though this were not clear enough.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Still
the woman was unmoved. At last she bowed and back away and went back
to the road. When she glanced back at the house, the door was shut.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
crossed another bridge, another bend in the river, silver riffles in
the dark water. The light dying in the west. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">There
were more houses near the road, more square stands of grain.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Full
dark settled down, everything gone to shadow in the blanket of smoke.
She listened for dogs. Before it was too hard to see, she veered from
the road to the edge of a field. She crawled in among the stalks,
righted them after her. She untied her blanket from her shoulder, set
her travel kit beside her, curled into a ball and covered herself.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
woke just before dawn. The air low, chill of autumn. No wind. She
coughed into the blanket until her ribs ached. Drank mullein tea from
her waterskin. Then she wrapped her belongings in the blanket, all
except her fishing tackle, and left the field.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
backtracked to the river, made her way down the bank. Downstream was
the bridge, upstream the stumps of cottonwoods lining the banks. The
river flowed fast, steadily shushing in the dead roots. She heard
thunder and looked to the east. Flame glow flickered in the smog. La
Sen speaking.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
searched the bank for bait, the insects and worms hidden in this
season. The sound of water rushing by, the rumble of the mountain.
After searching the dead brambles she looked up to see two boys
watching her from the bridge. She raised her hand but they didn’t
respond.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
sat on a </span><span style="font-style: normal;">boulder</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
under the bridge. Taste of wet stone and ash. Mist on the skin. She
fashioned a fly out of brown fern fronds and thread from the hem of
her blanket. She cast and recast into the quick river by the roots
and black hollows but nothing came up.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Late
in the morning she decided she had to move on. The land, not her
home, seemed closed to her. She climbed out from under the bridge and
started down the road, chewing a piece of jerky. When she was done
she hummed a song to quiet her aching stomach. The road ran on until
it dissolved in smoke.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> In
a little while she met the boys again. They came out from a house set
back from the road. The smaller one held something wrapped in a rag.
They called to her, and she stopped and waited. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> They
came up and stood armslength away, speaking long chattering strings
of sound like mocking birds. Questions there, but she didn’t
understand. She signed as much. The boys looked at each other and
whispered. Then the smaller one held out his parcel. </span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
took it in both hands and bowed. The boys giggled. They said
something, then waved and turned back to the house. She waited till
one of them turned again so she could raise her hand to him.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> In
the parcel was a bland wheat cake, dry and crumbly. She ate it as she
walked, stowed the rag in her satchel. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">S</span><span style="font-style: normal;">mog
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">in</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
yellow </span><span style="font-style: normal;">opalescence with the
passing day. The hairs of the mullein leaf tufted against her lips.
The voice of the mountain, speech of the very stone.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Their
own mountain was awake. The gouting of smoke, fire glow, boiling
stone. She was with the sheep in the rocks and scrub when it started.
A deep cracking sound. Stones raining down. She dove under an
overhang. The black hail pelting the land. Many of the sheep were
struck and killed. It was worse in the village.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Home,
where the hovels roofed in bark stood hidden among the trees,
on the slopes of Ed Da. Home where the little streams tumbled out of
the rock, where the cedars grew. Home, where the sheep roam</span><span style="font-style: normal;">ed</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
in the rocky plain and </span><span style="font-style: normal;">the
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">buckbrush straggle</span><span style="font-style: normal;">d</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
Home where Shas Ta </span><span style="font-style: normal;">rose</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
higher than anything, icewhite, stoneblack, tusk of the earth,
erupting fire from her peak, her black soot plumage.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> As
the day wore on the houses drew closer together, nothing but
side-yards between, the plots of grain </span><span style="font-style: normal;">in</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
front, often a thin dog roped to a post. The obligatory antenna
stretching from the chimney, waiting for a signal. People passed like
shades in the alleys behind the houses, where the smoke settled and
never moved. Others walked the road cowled against the autumn chill,
faces masked in cloth.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
was hungry, her legs burnt with fatigue, but she went on. Late in the
day, the first of the pyramids emerged from the haze, dun-colored,
squat and stepped. As she approached, the line of supplicants grew
thicker. The pyramid loomed over them. From above they had appeared
small and flat. Now the steps reared steep, the peak invisible.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Around
her the close press of human flesh. Their coughing, their dull fetid
smell. Few spoke, none signed, all seemed alone in this vast
collection of persons. The pyramid grew taller but not closer as they
shuffled forward.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> At
last the base revealed itself between the heads of the swaying
throng. The line curved from the road toward it, flowing onto the
stairs that lead up in precipitous incline. Beside the stairs was a
massive pile of greenwood. Pine, fir, cedar, the needles still
stretching from the branches.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> As
she came up to the pile she saw the priest. Hooded and androgynous
behind a mask, charcoal painted over the eyes. The other supplicants
were picking up wood and carrying it to the stairs. She stopped
before the priest and signed, </span><i>Come from Shas Ta. Foreigner,
pilgrim. Bring an offering.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
priest looked at her with blood-shot eyes, unmoving. Then waved a
hand at the wood, at the pyramid steps.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
chose a branch, still weeping sap at the ends, the grain wet. She put
it across her shoulders and started up. The steps were earthbrick,
close set. Immediately her lungs gripped. The wheezing and coughing
around her intensified. The mullein rasped her chin. S</span><span style="font-style: normal;">igning in her mind, </span><i>I am safe, I am safe.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
smoke lessened as they rose. Here and there pilgrims sat slumped on
the steps, faces in their hands. She dared a glance down – the
road and dark houses and yellow blocks of grain were inchoate and
unreal.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> It
was near dusk when she reached the </span><span style="font-style: normal;">top</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
She emerged from the smoke into clear air. The haze filled the valley
around her like a sea. To the south the islands </span><span style="font-style: normal;">rose</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
from that sea, the peaks of the other pyramids, all with their fires,
their trailing smoke.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
stepped onto the plateau at the apex, and here was the fire, livid
coal glow, tangle of blackened limbs clawing outwards. The smoke
flowed west, away from her. A fan of pine needles crackled as it
kindled. She pulled her mask away and breathed </span><span style="font-style: normal;">and
it felt fresh as a cold stream</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
old woman ahead of her laid a possum on the fire as an offering, then
turned east and held her arms up, eyes closed. The hair sizzled, the
singed smell met her nose. She stepped up to the fire, feeling the
heat harsh against her cheeks, her shins. The possum’s teeth bared.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> She
let her branch fall onto the flames, sending up a splash of sparks.
Then she reached into her blanket and took out the small bag of
herbs, the offering from the village. She caught their sweet tang as
she dropped them into the coals.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> The
sunset was orange over the western mountains. She could see the line
running across, where the forest ended, the point the woodcutters had
reached. She turned east, and there was the peak of La Sen, boiling
fire, streaked in black stone and gray snow. The pyramid
insignificant in comparison. The old woman had gone down.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> Home,
clean winter sky. Home, pitcher plants in the wet meadow. Home, dry
needles, cedar shadows. Home, deer musk, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">tart</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
grapes, stream speech, hearth fire.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>I
am safe, I am safe, I am safe.</i></div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-51317618127596133382018-06-13T12:13:00.000-07:002018-06-15T10:41:33.220-07:00Dandelions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSRPPvpfeziK7k6iAW4DaAWyThQ51CM7qkJt_W88wXwEk5t8feKuYbFN-y51KjyA34D1IZHko_ERJzzLiv-O6ZPfl-zLBwHFYgWzYJta6Du1BmrnSaaodOYnR1GQAVyjsf11nDphaQUZ_f/s1600/IMG_4497.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="1600" height="540" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSRPPvpfeziK7k6iAW4DaAWyThQ51CM7qkJt_W88wXwEk5t8feKuYbFN-y51KjyA34D1IZHko_ERJzzLiv-O6ZPfl-zLBwHFYgWzYJta6Du1BmrnSaaodOYnR1GQAVyjsf11nDphaQUZ_f/s640/IMG_4497.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Write as if you were dying... This is, after all, the case... What
could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its
triviality?</div>
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-Annie Dillard</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I ride through the
coastal morning. The sea mist is in, the palms and hotels inchoate.
This coast encrusted with asphalt and buildings like blocks of
mineral.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I ride the river
path where the mugwort grows, where herons row the air. People lined
up on their cardboard beds under the bridges, colored by shadow and
dust. Three men pass a forty, frothy as urine. The growl of traffic.
Cigarette smoke and sea salt.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Cali is eleven
months old. A few days ago she took eight steps on her own. Of the
light on the walls in the morning, of the nylon straps of her high
chair, of the many blooms of the rose bush, of the ringing wind
chimes, she repeats the phrase again and again, so pretty, so pretty.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At work I prune
plants and pull weeds, but also collect detritus from the parking lot
of a grocery store. It amasses in short order, mounds in the corners
and along the curbs. Cigarette butts, wood shavings, paper receipts,
food wrappers, beach sand, all mired together. Tangles upon tangles
of human hair, as though people idly rip it from their heads as they
pass. I once found a hypodermic needle in a plastic tub of barbecue
sauce, vision of a tragic meal.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The hip coffee shop
chatters, people pass in and out of the lot. Sometimes they slowly
inch their bumpers into the parking space where I am picking up their
garbage. Inching, inching, the engine whining, until I move at last.
Across the train tracks, an electric wheelchair is parked in the
gravel, its owner curled and sleeping in the grass.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Most of my time is
spent caring for plants. Certain plants if I’m honest. I often rip
dandelions from cracks in the sidewalk, that proverbial image of
resistance to the blankness of pavement, the soul-killing industrial
sameness, wildness in the crevasses. Here am I pulling them up,
blithely continuing on. I go by bicycle between paying clients.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At each location I
prune, weed, sweep, prettify. It is good work in the scheme of things,
and I am well suited to it. My face close to the soil, there is the
evidence of human immiseration and the colonization of wild land. I
am of two minds. I wonder what the hell it’s all for, pulling these
weeds, most of which are edible and growing wild like a gift.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dandelions are an
excellent bitter salad green, can be used in place of hops in beer,
feed pollinators, heal the liver. What is the point of asphalt and
store fronts, fences and parking lots, cash registers and pay checks,
endless streets, cramped planter boxes. And
what is the point of these words, these babbled scenes from an
undistinguished life, as meaningless as telling a dream. Annie
Dillard heads a chapter in <i>The Writing Life</i>:
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">SORRY
TO TELL YOU A DREAM!</span></span><br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
‘Why
not shoot yourself,’ she wonders, ‘rather than finish one more
excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?’ But dandelions
grow, where they will, where they can, where their seed has landed,
germinated, taken root. I can’t argue the words away – they press
at the inner border of my skin, would rip me apart to get out. The
dandelion is not for your liver, it’s not for a symbol of the wild
breaking the oppression of concrete, it just is.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Not far away the
untameable Pacific rolls breakers against the cliff, tearing at the
continent. Wildness is always there. A ness is a headland or
promontory, a place around which waters flow. Our cognition is a
little rise, lifting our heads from the water, but it puts us in this
awkward place, wondering and worrying and assigning blame, when we
might otherwise be content in the roll of the wave, not wishing to be
elsewhere.</div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-30126532347860801582018-04-25T11:33:00.000-07:002018-04-25T11:33:29.392-07:00Wild Mountain, Wild Spring<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIt5oljzHPhJXMhiweBAD-eiPrlYhLXxNXcpJWzEUSNB5blOlVhiOT5Gv2dF9HWOGYKnO57-sWICjN1AS3PAst42tQbHQI4WCx99Sw_wN9ApkrcnfphoRf8PRZheOkGwB3-1wmteDr8rPq/s1600/IMG_3937.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIt5oljzHPhJXMhiweBAD-eiPrlYhLXxNXcpJWzEUSNB5blOlVhiOT5Gv2dF9HWOGYKnO57-sWICjN1AS3PAst42tQbHQI4WCx99Sw_wN9ApkrcnfphoRf8PRZheOkGwB3-1wmteDr8rPq/s640/IMG_3937.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Our blood-soul carries animal memory in our spinal column; the dark
hoof and the feathered wing hover in our wild aura.
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.5in; margin-right: 0.94in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.5in; margin-right: 0.94in;">
- Martin Shaw, <i>Snowy Tower</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
High up on the hill,
there is a spring. I climb to it with the dogs. It gurgles out of the
ground just downhill from a large fallen cedar, its trunk decaying
into soil. The water comes out clean and clear, and runs over black
silt, dark algae, tumbles of basalt stone. Down through the steep
mountain meadows, where in this season the grass is flaxen and laid
to the ground and grown over with the night’s crystals of
hoarfrost. The pitcher plants have all turned brown in decay. Where
the water runs wide and thin on the rocks it freezes in warbled
patterns like medieval glass. It is nearing the solstice; the white
sun is in the south.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Around the spring
the tall incense cedars and pines sink their taproots. The cedar bark
is ruddy and striated; brilliant green lichen grows in tufts where
the sun strikes. Their gnarled limbs spiral out, ending in
wide-fingered fans of needles.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nearby where the
spring emerges from the earth, there is a cedar bark tipi. When a
large cedar falls and the sapwood begins to dry, the bark can be
peeled away in long planks of more than an inch thick. This material
is insulative, waterproof, resistant to rot. There are a number of
these structures scattered over this land, their interiors bedded
with a thick layer of pine needles, contained and insular as a den.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Through the trees,
across the valley with its tree-furred ridges and blonde pastures,
rises the mountain, immense, cragged, white with snow, brilliant in
the sun, thick shadows in the ravines. The spring, the trees, the
meadows, the ridges, the mountain, are wild, self-willed. The spring
emerges from the earth where it will, the trees put down their roots
where they will, and the great upwelling of the planet’s
heart-blood, the living stone that thrusts upwards into the realm of
clouds, clothed in glaciers, rimed with spires of ice, this mountain
is self-willed. Measure your own will against its existence and you
will know it’s true. Try as we might we will never civilize them.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I come here for
this: to drink from the cold spring, hear the trees speak in the
wind, watch the dogs run over pine needles furred in frost, sniffing
where the deer have left their sign. To see the winter sun sidelight
the mountain. To be in their presence and cultivate a bodily
relationship with them.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I have spent a lot
of time in these woods at night, passing through opaque shadows and
bone-white moonlight, trying to move silently just by feeling, vision
imperfect. Many of those times were disguised as a game of capture-the-flag. Not to be caught I often went belly to the earth, crawling
through the undergrowth, my face in the dust and fallen cedar
needles.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Other times I built
shelters of the materials at hand – branches and boughs, bark
stripped from fallen trees, needles and duff from the forest floor –
and slept in them with only a thin blanket. These times the other
senses opened, all the scents of the forest coming into me as I moved
through their invisible clouds or breathed the soil where I laid my
cheek. My ears strained to produce the echolocation of the bat. My
feet and hands took me over rocky ground and through running streams,
and I followed my intuition to know where I was, not my sight.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now when I walk here
with the dogs, years later and in a different season, I still feel
the visceral memory of the place – it doesn’t seem to reside in
my head, but in my guts. My body knows these trees, these stones,
this tumbling stream. Around are these self-willed beings, their
complexity, their individuality, my body among theirs.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Merely allowing them
in our minds to be as they are transports us from a dead world to one
living. Acknowledging the world has made itself of its own accord, we
come into accord with it. And recognizing this, we must also
recognize that our own bodies have brought us here, without much of
our conscious involvement.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We are wild inside,
our guts teeming, our skin permeable to the wild air. The things we
make in the woods are wild, the tipi formed from cedar bark and poles
of fir. These kinds of homes sheltered people in this landscape for
ten thousand years before the arrival of Europeans. They are the
outgrowth of wild bodies living in the land.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
If everything is
wild, if everything is self-willed, what are we to make of the
metastasizing cancers of pavement and suburbs, the toxic lakes beside
the electronics factories, the clear-cuts, the forests silent of
birds and frogs, the expanding dead-zones of the oceans, the
subsidence of farmland as it is drained of its ancient waters?
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
These things come
from our appetites, to be clothed, housed, fed, our thirst assuaged.
Most of us were born in the captivity of this mechanical mode and
don’t know another way. It is bad mimicry of the true and real, but
so many of us have nothing to measure it against.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
If we listen to the
body, though, we can feel what is right. The body knows how to
promote life; it’s existence is evidence. The body promotes our
existence every moment, and would do so for the rest of the world if
we were to let go our conscious gripping of the reins, instead of
this odd corner of our brains spurring on the rest of the body to
scrape landscapes bare in service of our strange dreams.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let’s close our
eyes for a time, move through the darkness by feel alone.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My body goes back
again and again to the spring, drinks in the cold clean water that
fell as rain thousands of years ago, and has only now chosen to
emerge from its migration through the earth.</div>
<br /><br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-73879245459358189682018-04-22T10:17:00.000-07:002018-04-22T10:17:49.667-07:00Leave-taking<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2XLroyWxTWpx16FFWlbhutvOMGCpbAyq_E1AGD4MR5F7ctebvXTXGm8uQrvMNvS91dtLIsfa3CLu28YzvCymKTOoYe4X5mBAHe8zLP3-uv_XLA9-2xybsO49ZaydFTSktiNuNI8wJDdgC/s1600/IMG_3254.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2XLroyWxTWpx16FFWlbhutvOMGCpbAyq_E1AGD4MR5F7ctebvXTXGm8uQrvMNvS91dtLIsfa3CLu28YzvCymKTOoYe4X5mBAHe8zLP3-uv_XLA9-2xybsO49ZaydFTSktiNuNI8wJDdgC/s640/IMG_3254.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.44in;">
<i>These are the final entries I put down during our honeymoon. I
feel I have to mention there were weeks of dense experience
surrounding these small notes, at which they only hint, but time and
energy engaged in those experiences precluded capturing them in
words. When I did put pen to paper I found it difficult to
contemplate, there was so much to describe. Those sensations will
come out in writing, someday, somehow. Perhaps here, perhaps in a
letter to you.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
April 18<sup>th</sup>,
2017</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This morning we
departed Scotland, after three weeks in its various landscapes,
ancient and modern compressed together. Who knows when we’ll be
back. We were lifted into the sky by an unseen hand. This kind of
travel doesn’t promote ritual, acknowledgment of leave-taking.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We board a plane and
in less than an hour we arrive in Dublin. The more surreal for how
mundane it has become, launching into the sky, knifing through the
clouds, as commonplace as boarding a bus. To become an expert
traveler is to become jaded, at least in part. To be astonished at
rocketing into the sky, over and over, a matter of course, a matter
of arithmetic if we are to reach our destination in this little
window of time we have – to be astonished at this every time would
mean exhaustion. We both feel it, the fatigue of being uprooted,
un-grounded, shot through time and space almost too quickly to grasp,
to be plucked up and deposited in some distant place. Displacement.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I feel the ties in
memory pulled taught. I feel myself worrying, anxious whether I can
keep the details in memory, whether this whirlwind trip has been a
kind of whimsy without real substance or lasting impact.
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
If I feel into it
further I know this can’t be true. In the Azores, in Devon, in
Sheffield, in Aberdeen, the Orkneys, Tain and Glasgow, I felt so
intensely that it must be in me, it cannot have left. Only anxiety
brought on by this disconcerting mode of travel, and also by feeling
so much at such a duration. Like a rich meal; I feel full to the
brim.</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
April 28<sup>th</sup></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Once again this
surreal space of travel, launching from the ground into inconceivable
heights. This time, heading home.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This afternoon we
left rainy England, her deep green woods and pasture suddenly falling
away beneath us. We landed in Iceland where it snowed all afternoon,
our flight delayed. In a spot of clear weather we took off on the
last leg of the journey. Above white clouds flowing under us. We
slept and woke to see Greenland in sunset light, glaciers like
elephant skin, the perfect planes of frozen lakes, the jagged saw
teeth of the mountains, everything white, opalescent. Now open water
in a fjord, in contrast black as oil, a fissure opening into the dark
heart of the earth.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We sleep as best we
can, shades down against the sun we are chasing. On the trip out the
sunset was sudden, a curtain of black we flew into; now the day has
been elongated to accommodate these detached hours.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At last the sun out
paces us. I wake in the half-light of the cabin, raise the shade.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Below are the cities
of North America shuttling past in a dark land, street lights
splashed like paint on a dark floor, growths of iridescent fungus.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We are nearly home,
the hours passing dreamlike. The flowing of this chapter into
another.</div>
<br /><br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-20366769872674918362018-04-12T14:58:00.000-07:002018-04-12T14:58:57.487-07:00Crofting<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxxZtwdO92U46803lATw6BSfhrjLLEjphZmK32vYt9ReRZuc5UM-sTPLGzlTsgp0N5N29-4hyphenhyphenf9ImaIMZfBLOPLDsn1KiExO8knuyzQmt_nECEpPlrPGtQrVljNAvYxg35p7QzkRXF_D1Z/s1600/IMG_2660.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxxZtwdO92U46803lATw6BSfhrjLLEjphZmK32vYt9ReRZuc5UM-sTPLGzlTsgp0N5N29-4hyphenhyphenf9ImaIMZfBLOPLDsn1KiExO8knuyzQmt_nECEpPlrPGtQrVljNAvYxg35p7QzkRXF_D1Z/s640/IMG_2660.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The woodland and the 'Happy Crapper'</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
April 14<sup>th</sup>,
2017<br />
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
On the train again.
Riding by green pasture, dark woodlands as yet bare of leaves. Snow
on the black lobes of the mountains. Low gray clouds sweeping brooms
of rain. Spring heralded by the eruption of yellow: daffodils, cover
crop over a flat field, thick flowers of gorse in the hedgerows.
Sheep and their lambs stumble slide and run from the carriages
clattering passage. A hundred geese take flight from a bare field,
white-banded tails.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We have spent the
week at a small croft, working in the rain and cold, sunshine, mixed
thick clouds. The small humid poly-tunnel full of plant starts, and
salad greens, beets, cilantro. Outside, the cool spring,
wintered-over kale, garden beds prepared and waiting in the ground. I
built a gate for a net-covered berry patch, and a raised bed out of
junk lumber which we filled with manure.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A lot of our time we
spent shoveling shit in the rain. A large pile of manure (well
composted) was delivered by a farmer neighbor. We loaded it into
wheelbarrows and dispensed it to various vegetable beds and compost
piles around the woodland plot. Mostly light spring rain, sometimes a
little heavier; we wore our raincoats, and worked up a heat in our
muscles.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We shoveled shit in
the rain and ate wild plants off the woodland floor. Ground elder and
wild garlic leaves, miner’s lettuce. These things in the urban mind
are the height of poverty. From that perspective, they sound awful on
their face. But in our days there was only contentment –
gratification of accomplishing work, that goes to food from this
place; contact with the place, the mind of the weather, the sight of
the far water, the lambs asleep in pasture, the bursting yellow
flowers, the smells of the fecund ground and the woodland under rain,
feel of the soil in the hand. Our hobbit-like breaks for tea and
snacks beside the wood stove, in a kitchen redolent with baking
bread, getting warm. Time for good conversation with our hosts who
make their life here, inside an old stone house, that has held how
many years of words. In this kind of life, for us, there are hardly
any costs, almost pure benefit. Living this way, even for a week,
provides the evidence, our feeling of being at home, and the
excitement we feel contemplating a similar relationship to our own
place, wherever we may find it.</div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-8661740199416532052018-04-05T19:20:00.000-07:002018-04-05T19:20:11.566-07:00The Cathedral<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwibl0DfLOGz2DGucV_tRMfqZ2lvYt8v7FXgfcVyBIh3DxRha70WpHId9v5xQ3nrLQ3Nm7LbZ4D5iknMtCsnD4b4Gi_XesaHLw9qoov9qvOPbGJX8gvP3Q0LulARMNorjZR4oWhsvi3igL/s1600/IMG_2312.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwibl0DfLOGz2DGucV_tRMfqZ2lvYt8v7FXgfcVyBIh3DxRha70WpHId9v5xQ3nrLQ3Nm7LbZ4D5iknMtCsnD4b4Gi_XesaHLw9qoov9qvOPbGJX8gvP3Q0LulARMNorjZR4oWhsvi3igL/s640/IMG_2312.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
April 5th, 2017</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Again the
dislocation of travel, inside a bubble with dark windows that only
reflect our faces. Low ceilings, short carpet, seats built to hold
people in transit. Boat, bus or plane. Strange motions caused by the
outside world, the origins we can’t discern.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We disembark from
the ferry late in the night, the bustle of the other passengers
around us, changing mode of transport. Line of taxis by the terminal.
The endless walking down walkways, tubes, stairs, standing in lines,
is almost over. Board a bus into town and the group in back bursts
into a round of song, not something old, might as well be off the
radio.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The town is lit, but
empty. We clamber off the bus near our hotel, but it is still a walk
through narrow streets. The buildings low and dark, mortared stone.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We turn the corner
and here is the cathedral, blood-red sandstone walls and spires in
floodlight, the plane of the roof dark shadow. We stand stunned. Ash
coughs and has to vomit in the gutter. It is early morning, just past
midnight. We are the only people. The air is still, everything is
perfectly silent except for Ash’s retching, the crumple of our
clothes, our rubber soles on the cobbles.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
She is all right,
it’s the baby’s way of making itself known, that and the heels
that bump out of her belly, or kick her in the guts.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Our babe, you are
on the Orkney Islands now. In some way we know that we come from
here, and I think you will too, perhaps twice over, because you will
have been here. I start to say, ‘You won’t know it
consciously...’ but what do we know that way? Not much … What
brought your mother and I here was a feeling. What made you was a
feeling, of connection, a meeting and merging. As we merge with the
places we have been, leave something of ourselves, take them with us.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>There is a baby
across the room as I write, and I am thinking of you, how you’ll be
in the future. On this journey we’ve coalesced into a family –
both your mother and I have felt that. The particularity of us three,
mother, father, our first child.</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
find our way to the hotel, the manager is kind and makes Ash a snack.
We shower, sleep fitfully, wake with the island daylight, gray and
promising. While Ash rests, I go downstairs to eat breakfast. Meat of
all kinds and eggs and bread. Coffee. A stereo plays show tunes into
a dining room out of the year 1800.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
pack and go out, and the first place we go is the cathedral. Drawn as
if by gravity. The rust-red stone in the cloudy light, medieval
ironwork scrolled across the doors.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Inside
it is pillars and arches and high vaults, grave markers from hundreds
of years ago, the stained glass casting its brilliant beams. A space
that aches for song. Every echo calls for it.
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
move through it in the mode of worship, not so much of the changeable
Christian doctrines, but of the thing itself, persisting for eight
hundred years, these beautiful echos, the shining images in glass. It
is a space that holds history like a cistern. Every touch speaks of
someone who has touched here, this stone. Every shuffle of the foot
just like a thousand forebears. We are stunned to whispers in
reverence of that potent silence, the stones reflecting back our
quiet words of awe.</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
* * *</div>
<div align="center" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
After the cathedral we have cream tea in a small tea room, full of
tables of older ladies. Grandma Bobby hangs in the air around us, in
the warm milk and laughter and smell of baking. Outside crows nest
throughout a bare tree.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Next we go to the museum. It is here we catch our first glimpse of
them in the flesh. In glass boxes are the things they made. Fine bone
needles and awls, beads, paint pots. Stone ax heads and maces in
perfect symmetry, smoothed to an impossible polish, made for human
hands.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We like to think of them as so different from ourselves, as to be
non-human. We are our only human referents, everything different
moving further from this central point into obscurity, a fog of the
unknown.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But here are their pottery vessels, decorated with nodes and grooves.
The utility of decoration, of beauty. If you have the time why not?
and further perhaps you should make the time. By this we know they
are human undeniably.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
These people kept animals, made cheese and beer, wore a costume that
can’t be too distinct from ours. They wore jewelry and ornament.
They lived in small, snug homes. They raised grain, ground it with
stone.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I step into the next room and of a sudden, here is one of them, one
of us. A skull, thigh bones, knuckles in a line. My hair stands on
end.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
More than their houses and tools persist. Here are their very bones,
that felt and lived and moved through this landscape, just as I am
moving now. In spite of this repurposed old building, its sterile
white wall and boxes of glass, I feel I am suddenly in a holy place,
a kind of tomb, where I have unwittingly come to commune with an
ancestor.</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
* * *</div>
<div align="center" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
On the bus ride out of town, a large green tractor drags a machine
across a field, casting fertilizer in a mechanical spray. Beyond it,
on the line of the hill against the sky, is a circle of standing
stones. Silhouetted, they are hard, dark, ragged, eternal.</div>
<br /><br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-58803594138088406442018-04-01T12:33:00.000-07:002018-04-01T12:33:14.886-07:00Waystations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CybUp9wYAc3J58gps9e9pzJE8AA71U4txJ5_Wo26Hu6toB6FlHXMi3VGw9yrQdahG7qNEFVZxS886IXsGRvPx9utYMkvmuYppr4XIYVsTnhGsYn12I5iWXKz4nEatHyFHsiY8QH4hIqA/s1600/IMG_2199.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3CybUp9wYAc3J58gps9e9pzJE8AA71U4txJ5_Wo26Hu6toB6FlHXMi3VGw9yrQdahG7qNEFVZxS886IXsGRvPx9utYMkvmuYppr4XIYVsTnhGsYn12I5iWXKz4nEatHyFHsiY8QH4hIqA/s640/IMG_2199.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 29</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We came by train.
The seaside speeding past. Gulls hovering in the onshore wind as
though suspended on strings.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A tiny ruined
church, no roof, tree growing inside its walls. Leaning grave
markers. The low wall about the burial ground right at the edge of
the cliff.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Everywhere it is the
same, Azores, Devon, Aberdeen. This wild coast, titanic ocean beyond
comprehension, gnawing at the ragged cliffs, the great fingers of
rock clawing upwards. The gulls haunting the air. The stone ruins
full of new grown trees. Stone walls, hedgerows, pasture, on every
slope that will bear it. Great industrial constructions, masses of
pipes, blank walls. For who knows what purpose. Windmills that hardly
deserve the name, five hundred feet tall, turning with an even beat.
Expressway or rail line, drawn across the land like a mark on a map,
and on either side the wide fields plowed to broken clay, bare to the
sky, battleground waste.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the towns, roofs
of tile or slate, walls of mortared stone. Old ways, new additions,
little distinction between eras, the unbroken revolutions of living.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Spindly cranes swing
over the city, the rumbling diggers make deep scars in the bedrock.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
* * *</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In
Aberdeen the gulls swing through the gray sea mist, over the roof
peaks, or stand calling from the chimney pots. Rows and rows of
flat-faced houses of the same granite, as though carved from a single
great stone that used to lie here.</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
trees are bare except for crows, the grass green over their roots. In
Devon the daffodils were blooming, but here it doesn’t yet feel
like spring.</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Last
night we walked through the city – the old part with cobbled
streets, the tall gothic edifices seeming to lean over us, edge out
the sky. The train station and the new buildings around with their
improbable glass fa<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">çades.
Motorways full of traffic, walls beside the train tracks topped with
barbed wire or a twisting construction of metal whose spikes looked
like either forks or hands. An old stone retaining wall full of moss,
dark alcoves at its base. Rows of shops, the quotidian type,
trophies, car stereos. A bridge over the river Dee, built in 1830,
now given over to pedestrians. The same granite blocks in the piers
as everywhere in this city, the whole of it joined by this, the
crystalline flesh of the earth.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Before
we crossed the bridge, we heard a mockingbird running through its
raucous songs, battling traffic noise, the melodies new and foreign
to us.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">*
* *</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">March
30</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">On
the ferry. Outside, the gray city, blocks of cement, granite spires
breaking toward the sky, clouds close and folded.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Under
us the rumble of the engines begins. The bar is full, almost nowhere
to sit.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Leaving
is a slow slide away from the dock. Inside, hardly a suggestion of
movement except the vibration of the glasses on the table.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Aberdeen
is behind us. A brief moment on our journey.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
dark sea. The port is white oil tanks streaked in rust and mildew,
the ponderous movements of ships like ours. The blank lines of the
granite houses marching the hill. Waves wash up on the stone beach.
On the headland is the smooth green of a golf course. At its edge a
number of little garden plots, fenced with all manner of materials,
pallets, blue plastic.</span></div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="left" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We
are on the sea. The breakers roll toward shore, ponderous, low and
steady. The green rocky coast falls away. After all these islands,
the planes and trains, it feels right to be on the sea.</span></div>
<br /><br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-65264374860984044582018-04-01T11:41:00.000-07:002018-04-01T11:41:47.409-07:00In A Dark Wood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb8qQ6amD1WPnLphG-vQqs-5HXYi5JtREEQT6_Kady0s6_nzAX4Ltml3PAhp8yjbnsPM5vZt8jFWxwjzipbwU_4Y9WJB9oIiYcLB_r6o5qEU1iHCD4pZY0WrWjL1xZLYES0KP8l9apRrNp/s1600/IMG_2178.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb8qQ6amD1WPnLphG-vQqs-5HXYi5JtREEQT6_Kady0s6_nzAX4Ltml3PAhp8yjbnsPM5vZt8jFWxwjzipbwU_4Y9WJB9oIiYcLB_r6o5qEU1iHCD4pZY0WrWjL1xZLYES0KP8l9apRrNp/s640/IMG_2178.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 23</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 0.94in; page-break-before: auto;">
How do we look at the trans-human perspective, when most of us are in
a more human world than ever before … What happens if we start from
the perspective of speaking with the world?</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.5in; margin-right: 0.94in; page-break-before: auto;">
– Paul Kingsnorth</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 2.5in; margin-right: 0.94in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in; page-break-before: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The dead are below me. I smell them. Acid. Mineral. Crystal flake.
Sliding through the fungal gut.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Green is the scent of my skin. The clouds pass over, thoughts in the
mind of the world, drop rain, water hammer.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I am being eaten alive. I am being eaten away.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My heart is still safe. My heart is grey black. My hard heart is the
smell of a grey cloud made still.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dark in this wood, cool. The cold roots eating the dead beneath me.
Far below, somewhere, is home. Heat. Here, now, only the wan sun.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The clouds pass over and over, their size, expanse. They remind me of
something. A feeling.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
These trees like fruiting fungus furious for the light, these are
small. Small, small, small as the hairs of lichen.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In my gut is the heat of the earth. It smells white. Over me lay the
snows, the pads of glaciers rasp my skin. The waters are tearing me
down. I am the size of clouds, I am above. I am hard. I am being
eaten but only slowly. I am forever.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That was a dream. I am not that. The trees are great, I small. Lying
here. The dead and the muck beneath me. The heat far away. Lichen
blooms over me, inscribes a heartbeat on my pelt. There is the green
of death in my fissures, working toward my heart.</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="background: transparent; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The rain comes, clawing at me. I destroy each drop with hardness,
turn it to a rivulet.</div>
<br /><br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-23026932563359311792018-03-23T11:14:00.000-07:002018-03-23T11:14:06.258-07:00The Spring<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHU4mLddrXsPwtqZC02fX4DhfrW6de3TE4gs6vY_OezDH4lsuQyLrR6i_H_Vflg6MY6Ftr_FwbKomJ6wr3h_g42RQDM6BWdmQ51teEdLWnRha4ldNHmyT-QSsf5xlu4tbaKjFH91T2nFnD/s1600/IMG_1886.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHU4mLddrXsPwtqZC02fX4DhfrW6de3TE4gs6vY_OezDH4lsuQyLrR6i_H_Vflg6MY6Ftr_FwbKomJ6wr3h_g42RQDM6BWdmQ51teEdLWnRha4ldNHmyT-QSsf5xlu4tbaKjFH91T2nFnD/s640/IMG_1886.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 19<sup>th</sup></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Just a few days ago
we were floating in a hot spring, rusty, opaque, iron-rich, tasting
of blood, flowing from deep in the earth. I felt buoyant, safe. I
carried Ash, the baby in the womb between us. We, its parents, curled
around it, felt we were in turn held in a kind of womb, the warm
water sanguine and close, an echo of when we were yet to be born. In
this place where my ancestors were born and were parents and died.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For humanity to
exist there has been our unbroken chain of life, the blending of sex,
sperm and egg, the child growing in the living mother. In our culture
we think of each person as separate and distinct, but there is this
unbreakable link between us and the life we grew from, what created
us, and the future, the life we create. Jeffers’ ever-returning
waves of grass, equaling the life of a mountain. One conscious note
in the sweep of the perdurable. What John Berger calls the dead, not
absent but surrounding everything we do, our most basic context.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
So
on that small wild island,
outcrop of volcanic rock thrusting out of the Atlantic, I felt both
foreign and native. The land I have grown from, that made me, by
food, air, scent and sight, is the California coast, and in my blood,
my genes, this wave of life through time that is my ancestry, is this
volcanic soil, this ocean wind, these island forests thick with bird
song. The blood of beef cattle, the thick pasture grass.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Over
and over the wild diving cliffs and crashing breakers reminded me of
Big Sur, and so I started to see the connection as more than
accidental. With this place in my blood maybe I was ready to love Big
Sur and also made ready to hear Jeffers’ words. Then I was equally
ready to read and write for the Dark Mountain Project, that takes its
name from Jeffers’ poem, thinks with his inhumanist perspective.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ash
and I married, and at the center of the ceremony was that ethos of
integrating us two into one, into our humanity in the fabric of land
and place. Then we conceived a child, further integrating, placing us
in the wave of humanity through time.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And
then we heard of a class through Dark Mountain, on the other side of
the world, and we both thought, <i>It’s time</i>.
And if we were to attend this class, in Europe, then it only made
sense to visit our ancestral homelands.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nothing
overly mystical, no unseen forces acting, merely life feeling itself
moving in its circles, returning to its origins. Feeling again the
safety and buoyancy of the womb, even
while growing a new life. Tasting the basalt, the iron, the sulfur,
the salt spray, the fermenting humid grass. My conscious mind not
very much involved, as though the life in me had made the plan
itself.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now
we have come to England, and this place is in my blood too, though
not so recently. Like a more distant memory, more vague. To compound
this feeling, we are moving through the surreal spaces of aircraft,
terminals, hotels, expressways. As if moving as far and as fast as we
have were not enough, these spaces seem designed to displace. Or
perhaps they merely reflect what is inherent in them, this unrooted
passage of multitudes, shuffling from chair to chair, catapulted
ahead by the flame-out of fossil fuel.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
To
look at us now you’d think we grew from this black muck, that makes
all we have from clothes to walls to vehicles and their energy to
fertilizer for crops. This toxic ooze from deep in the earth that
nevertheless has a rich irresistible flame.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
ride south on the bus, through the Midlands. Not much different in
this careening passage from California’s great valley in winter:
bare oaks, green pasture, wide band of highway full of cars, close
gray clouds. Swallow-tailed hawks, high tension lines bowing over the
trees, the bare trees full of crows and mistletoe. A blue heron
flapping away. Damaged landscapes, digging machines, great mounds of
earth or crumpled metal, great edifices of industry. Also like the
Azores, the hills parceled out by stone walls and hedgerows, spaces
for human use.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We
have not truly landed; we are in another country but we are not here
yet. It requires walking the land, drinking the water. We are still
in that womb-like pool, floating, looking up to see the native hawks
wheel, their white underwings, the birds for which those islands were
named.</div>
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-75814050393289707862018-03-21T14:03:00.000-07:002018-03-21T14:03:58.828-07:00As We Pass<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkU0zgqO8_N5mmhcIpmQyNvai5zqSPPsRydKsRUSLJzLbbjeWRHjAPtekdo9ZSuNVtEMK6BhMRFS_3yoiNSnO1h85FvOW7iS2vNfIvA7Rii5uA99XJYXnHtDFxf7EaJw97Qq3T8sDZPucL/s1600/IMG_1728.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkU0zgqO8_N5mmhcIpmQyNvai5zqSPPsRydKsRUSLJzLbbjeWRHjAPtekdo9ZSuNVtEMK6BhMRFS_3yoiNSnO1h85FvOW7iS2vNfIvA7Rii5uA99XJYXnHtDFxf7EaJw97Qq3T8sDZPucL/s640/IMG_1728.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 13<sup>th</sup></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Even here there is
the frenetic scurry of rush hour, everyone moving somewhere else all
at once. We are in the only metropolis of these islands, if it can
even be called that, a small city of only sixty thousand at its
greater borders. Anywhere else, a quaint little community. Here the
center of all commerce, tourism, government. The greatest
concentration of people, and beyond that, of people with greater
wealth and power. So this ambivalent business, a city of two minds,
both urban and rural, hundreds of miles distant from the mainland on
a rugged island, and also the central point of human exchange.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The entire island
seems to feel this ambivalence, one foot in the place of the peasant,
one in the urban. Internet and smart phones pervade, much food and
clothing and other necessities are imported, to say nothing of all
the vehicles, appliances, vestiges of the industrial. Meanwhile,
farmers ride their horse carts, people work their little potato plots
beside the hand-built lava stone walls, that have probably stood for
generations.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From the bus we
watched a man with sun-oiled skin move his bony milch cows across the
rural highway, their udders swollen and pendulous. He slapped their
rumps to make them go, in that familiar way, caring and utilitarian
at once.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
March 16<sup>th</sup></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The people like the
island are simply here. No pose, no self-conscious fa<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">ç</span>ade.
Our buses careen comically down the narrowest of streets, mere inches
of clearance, as if designed one for the other, not to waste space.
And along the way almost face-to-face with us are old people leaned
from their windows, watching what passes along their road. Shutters
back against the stone walls, lined faces thrust out into the air.
Doing nothing but watching or calling to a neighbor. That particular
light, sun broken by ocean clouds.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
There are also the
teenagers waiting after school at the bus station – they could be
kids from anywhere. But they’re here, in this tiny town built of
lava stone and lime, cinder block and rusty tile, surrounded by
banana groves and thick-carpeted pasture. They sit at the station
which is a modern box of glass, they stop kissing each other to watch
our bus speed by, bearing some news inscrutable to me. Com li<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">ç</span>en<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">ç</span>a,
I think. Pardon me as I pass.</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At the next stop a
man boards who barely rises above the seat-backs. These are the
people that we think of as our grandfathers, grandmothers. Tiny
island folk. His skin has been abraded by outdoor work, his mustache
is bristle thick on his lip, black and silver. He has no money for a
car, or someone else in the family has the one vehicle. His is like
so many working men of middle age I’ve seen from the bus, crowded
into the narrow doorways of the cervejarias, thick hands wrapped
around the stubs of cigarettes. He sits behind us and the tobacco in
his clothes is like the scent of smoked meat.</div>
<br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-39614644528477195322018-03-18T18:44:00.000-07:002018-03-18T18:44:07.210-07:00Nine Views of São Miguel<br />
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March 12<sup>th</sup>,
2017</div>
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We are in Ponta
Delgada, in a guesthouse. A warm, cloudless day. We have the windows
open on our second-story room. An old woman is yelling into her phone
below. Yapping dogs, songbirds, traffic. Buzz of scooters in the
narrow alleys.</div>
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The guesthouse is
old creaky stairs and floors, bright windows, a little courtyard with
laundry on the line. When we go out we sit in small cafes, eat local
beef and fried potatoes, drink strong coffee.</div>
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Today we walked the
city, narrow sidewalks in mosaics of black lava and white lime, moss
in the shade of the walls. Everywhere these tall white walls, or
sometimes a bright yellow or blue. Cobbled streets rubbed dome
smooth. It is a Sunday, and we saw the pilgrims on their walk to
church, heard them singing. They bear staffs and cloaks for their
circumnavigation of the island during Lent.</div>
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This place is a
modern European outpost, has been since its inception, a place on the
way to everywhere. All these tall church towers, the old square
buildings with their green gates and tile roofs and arched windows,
their waving flags, these are remnants of what was once modern, now
interlaced with the contemporary.
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Looking out over the
Avenide Infante Dom Henrique, named for Henry the Navigator, which
runs beside the sea, there you see the marina with aluminum spars
waving and beyond them the great cement sea wall lined with titanic
freighters and cranes. This is also the place of the blank-faced
modern hotel, its thousand rooms, and the cruise liners that dock
here. A place peddling itself to foreigners like us.</div>
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There are these many
views of these islands. A rugged eruption of volcanic stone resisting
the endless battering from the relentless Atlantic, wild as the Big
Sur coast, maybe wilder in its mid-ocean isolation.</div>
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A lush,
semi-tropical woodland, songbird paradise, warm and humid, thick with
lilies and wild ginger.</div>
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A place long
inhabited by people and their endemic culture, their adaptive peasant
ways, still riding horse carts through their little towns, which are
hand-built of stone, or herding their cattle on the headland.</div>
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Or a place inhabited
by people for a mere five hundred years (hardly anything), those
people having partitioned in that time nearly every available acre
for their buildings or pasture or mono-crops. Forests confined to the
steepest ravines, songbirds to the hedgerows of cane between the
fields.</div>
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Or a contemporary
citified place, where the quaint charm of the peasantry and the more
startling natural features are peddled as tourist attractions. Great
honeycomb edifices lining the shore to house the itinerant banknotes.</div>
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Or the helpful man
with the stylish clothes and salt-and-pepper beard and easy English,
who helps us find a pharmacy that’s open and then wishes that we’ll
enjoy our time on these islands, his home.</div>
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Another view: I as
part of the diaspora of this place, my great-grandparents having
departed her as teenagers. Who might well have walked in these very
streets, laid eyes on these old church towers. We, like pilgrims on
our Lenten journey, returning to pay homage to them. And straining
our imagination to think what life must have been like for them, what
they must have felt looking on the church tower, or the breakers
rolling in from the vastness of the sea that separated them from all
other land, or the ship at the pier that would carry them away from
all they’d known. Connected by blood, they are the silent dead that
nevertheless draw us here, exert their pull on us, our empathy
gifting us a ghost of their longing.</div>
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And this: We two, on
our honeymoon, carrying with us a child, twenty weeks in the womb,
already making itself known by its swimming movements.</div>
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<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-4213895619690402532018-03-11T17:29:00.000-07:002018-03-11T17:29:15.576-07:00On A Wild Island<br />
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March 5th,
2017</div>
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The first night we
land in the deep dark, our thinking scraped away, the fortieth hour
of travel. We leave the airport for a pell-mell taxi ride through
cobbled streets, island breeze, falling into two hostel beds pushed
together.</div>
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We wake to birds,
traffic, passersby, light slanting in through broken clouds and the
tall window. Smell of the sea, everything humid and damp to the
touch.</div>
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At last we wrest
ourselves from bed though we want to lie there inert forever. Step
out onto the cobbled alley. Around us the white lime walls,
lichen-eaten terracotta tile. Pigeons ducking and turning on the
sway-back roof ridges. The older buildings have black lava rock for
corners and pillars, porous and rough. This contrast everywhere,
black stone, white lime.</div>
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We find a meal at an
outdoor cafe: steak, egg, fries, coffee. British tourists off the
cruise ship sift around us. Bells clang every half an hour. The
island wind thick and blowing off the harbor, stealing our paper
napkins.</div>
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Still moving as if
in thick grease, not quite feeling the ground, not yet settled.
Spoken language mostly inscrutable, the aftermath of our seemingly
endless ethereal travel, the sense of being upside down on the other
side of the world, all of this makes us feel foreign. At once there
is the disjointed sense of familiarity, some genetic memory, if for
no other reason than knowing my ancestors lived in this place,
perhaps walked where I walk, sat where I now sit. For many people in
the world, this must be a forgone conclusion, but this disjointed
lack of ancestry in our quotidian movements is a condition of
Americans in this age.</div>
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We board a bus and
wend through the city’s thoroughfares. Rectangular modern
architecture blends with the traditional, sometimes in the same
structure. Then of a sudden we leap out into the country, deep green
slopes of pasture segmented by black walls of piled stone or tall tan
stands of cane. Cattle dot the fields.</div>
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We climb up to the
crest of the island, look down the long slope to the north. The west
wind makes white caps on the cobalt ocean. Haze obscures the horizon.
Down by the cliffs is the village of Caledos, red tile roofs, blocky
walls of black and white, clustered around the church tower.</div>
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We drop down, the
bus squeezes through narrow lanes that barely allow it. A sharp turn
at the worn steps of the church, bare pruned sycamores in the paving.
Each town has its old church, the bell tower pillared in black lava,
a plaque with the date carved in porous stone, two or three hundred
years hence.</div>
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We wind through the
seaside villages, surf hidden below the tall cliffs, come at last to
Joao Bom scattered over a rise. Debark and wander down the lane to
the house of our hosts. Bare black stone, blue door that scrapes the
floor, windows with many small panes. Inside is cluttered with their
life. Walls limed in salmon or eggshell, tile floor, bare beam
ceiling, rough table and benches. In back, the wild garden, edible
weeds on the margins and crops still small in this early season.
Chickens in a pen beside an old stone wall cobbled out of cane and
cast-off netting and twine. A small citrus tree. Scattered broken
plastic toys from the boys. A view over pastures to the ocean, misted
and wild.</div>
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In the following
days we wander the garden and the tiny local market, eat beans and a
big rind of cheese and home-baked bread thick with seeds. Try
unsuccessfully to sleep at night and stay awake in the day. We have
not yet acclimated to this new way of the sun, rising and setting
when it does. Something fundamental has been reversed.</div>
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We walk a narrow
trail over the cliffs that dive precipitous to the breakers. Iron-red
lava slopes in sharp, angled flows, seabirds wheeling minuscule
before them. Here on the steep cliffs and in narrow ravines, where
land cannot be cleared for human use, is a jungle of vines and trees
and broad-leaf plants. Songbirds and gulls. The steep track over
vertiginous drops.</div>
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We make our way down
to a flat plane by the surf, the town of Moisteros. Just up the hill
from the pastures and little vineyards and potato fields, we clear a
jungly patch of cane and ferns and four-foot green fronds like a
mutant ginger. We are making space for vegetable beds and a camping
spot, this dark soil.</div>
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When work is done,
we wander the town of Moisteros. The wind is hard and chill from the
west, the sun bright on the white walls with their shutters in green
and blue. We sit by the shore where the waves break over tortured
fingers of lava. The water a cold indigo, ice blue where it crashes
to foam. Off shore, titanic spires jut out of the surf, great sharp
clefts admitting waves that churn and gnaw through their hearts.
Seabirds turn and settle on their heads. Hazed spume in the wind, our
clothes snapping like pennants.</div>
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Tired from work and
dragged down by jet-lag, we fall asleep early. But I wake in the
middle of the night, mind churning with images, like surf on lava
stone.</div>
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We came here by the
most civilized of means, the aircraft. Traversing the world in hours,
the incredible roar of its burning power, its hard metal sealed
against the atmosphere at thousands of feet, flying through mist and
cloud and darkness by glowing electronic instruments. By this we have
deposited ourselves here, the shores of my ancestors. Few options
exist to accomplish this journey. Lengthy time away from home is now
a luxury. We couldn’t afford any sort of ship’s passage.</div>
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And here, on these
islands inhabited for a mere five hundred years, nearly every usable
bit of land has been converted to field or pasture, every slope below
twelve degrees divided by stone walls, furred in grass, cinder cones
incongruously inhabited by herds of milch cows, grazing land right to
the edge of sudden drops to the sea. Human imprint everywhere.</div>
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At once there is
this wildness, irrepressible, of the great Atlantic, her spume-topped
wind waves, and the massive dikes of cold lava thrusting upward,
clawing for life against the destruction of the relentless ocean.
These great cliffs that deny all human purchase. And even these
tumbled field walls made from stone so recently boiled from the
molten heart of the earth, and the surly bulls that watch me as I
pass on the road, and the shivering pelt of the long pasture grass on
the hill, playing in waves under the sea wind. Irrefutable wildness
close at hand, life boiling up and remaking itself and tearing itself
apart. Tenuous human outposts a part of it, amidst it.
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Silver needles of
airlines leaving trails in the sky. The old stolid church with its
bell ringing the hour for hundreds of years.</div>
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<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-87093759305858544932018-03-09T13:18:00.000-08:002018-03-11T16:30:09.938-07:00Across the Earth<br />
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March
2<span style="font-size: 13.3333px;">nd</span>, 2017</div>
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We
sit in chairs among all the other travelers, this long, odd tube.
Waiting to be propelled. The engines power up, the rumble of vast
energy, as if from deep in the earth. Each one of these machines
large as some ancient earthwork, monumental architecture made for
motion, a tomb for the living to flee the sun.</div>
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The
engines rev, we taxi to the runway, the incredible power beneath us.
We are strapped to a rocket. We all sit denying this to some extent,
not to be lost in hysteria. The engines roar, we are pressed back in
our seats, the ground speeds by, the feeling of wheels leaving
tarmac, the rough friction turns to powered glide. We are airborne.</div>
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Almost
immediately the ground is distant, everything becoming miniature as
if seen from a mountaintop. Then the mountains themselves grow small,
the bay is a brown pond with its strings of model ships, its wire
bridges. We are breaking away in some sense, from the gravity that
has held us all our lives in that narrow space, the earth’s surface
no more than a few feet away, at most.</div>
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We
are out of that band, the thin film of life and dense air. Soon
everything is flattened by distance. The steep hills become mere
knolls, the neighborhoods where I used to live are encrustations,
like barnacles on an inverted hull, or aphids hunkered on a kale
leaf.</div>
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Far
to the north, a white ghost in the haze, Mount Shasta. One of the
most prominent features, one of the highest mountains in California,
rising in one great lift, an arrowhead of white ice. Now she is
small, though I can pick out some of her familiar features, as if on
a topographical map. The lower Mount Lassen tracks between us, a
small lump of rock, snow in the crags.<br />
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All
passing, quickly. We are leaving the realm of our common felt
experience. As though peering at the world through a photograph. Once
we stopped beside the highway to look at Shasta, huge beyond
comprehension in her landscape. Totally unmatched in grandeur, a
great crag of black stone and white glacier. The broad tan grassland
at her feet, the other mountains around us minuscule in comparison.
The mountain challenged the sky in scope. Titanic storm clouds flowed
up from the south and broke over her peak and seemed like small
facsimiles of her dense power.</div>
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I
tried to take a picture, centering the mountain in the frame. I
shaded the screen to see what I had captured. In the photo the trucks
on the highway, near at hand, loomed large. The plain seemed to
stretch out and out, then almost disappearing in the haze, a small
white triangle against the sky.</div>
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The
digital translation of light and distance obscures the felt reality,
the mountain’s massive character. So with flight.</div>
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We
close the blinds and rest, leaned on one another, our cramped hard
seats. All around us the rumble and vibration, a continuous cry.</div>
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When
we open the shade again, we are over an unrecognizable land. Before
we could point out the snowy peaks we knew. Now the land is flat, a
pattern of gray mud, and silvery ice or water, which we can’t say.
Dark fingers of land. Are we over Canada? Greenland? Siberia? Utterly
unmoored. We are outside the experience of that place, awash in haze.
On the northern horizon clouds hold a gentle palette, vague orange,
like the reflected light of a fire.</div>
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We
are flying away from the sun. It drops behind us quickly. The earth
is lost in the refraction of the fiery tones through the haze. Ahead
is utter inchoate darkness.
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We
are aloft in the ethereal mind of the world, a small hard dart
hurtling through cloud-space, titanic, mutable, creative, ephemeral
and durable at once. The wild burning blood of the earth propels us.
Higher than any bird. Like ejecta from an asteroid impact. And each
of us sitting calmly in our chairs. Above us, space sits massive and
heavy and empty like the vault of a cave pierced with starry quartz.
Us in our tiny machine, rocketing through the thoughts of the
atmosphere.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The
sudden unnatural onset of night. We sit in our small chairs for ten
hours at a stretch. The surreal impacted tube crammed with silent
people forgetting where they are, merely to endure.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Into
the deep night of the airline, our waking fatigue, the crew speaks
over the intercom, sorry to bother you, we want to tell you, you can
begin to see the northern lights on the left side of the plane.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Everyone
comes awake, crowds toward the windows. We turn out the light, peer
through the double pane. Painted over the polar dark is a shimmering
cloud, algae green, like wet wood afire.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3836285854927131373.post-90772544329373354662018-03-01T15:45:00.000-08:002018-03-01T15:45:17.699-08:00Raised In Captivity<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTskXJAOxWUKQYaXne_WPM8IeF79dqt5xTrj42veYqhivyCl5aY6XxKKRmAbYgny011-l03WnyhPeE6AEb4cUTqIditdSMhltb5V4fVcd75pGjlRmT8QdGugyoVyHa9JgP7nOo3JWPhdz/s1600/EP-140909934.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" data-original-height="1168" data-original-width="1600" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTskXJAOxWUKQYaXne_WPM8IeF79dqt5xTrj42veYqhivyCl5aY6XxKKRmAbYgny011-l03WnyhPeE6AEb4cUTqIditdSMhltb5V4fVcd75pGjlRmT8QdGugyoVyHa9JgP7nOo3JWPhdz/s400/EP-140909934.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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We
turn off the lights. Someone locks the door. We lie down. Everyone is
weeping or stunned white with fear. Through the door we can hear
screaming. The popping coming in bursts. We lie in a prison of
darkness waiting for our lives to end.</div>
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America’s
nightmare, America’s fever dream. America, at war with itself.</div>
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***</div>
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I
feel duty bound to imagine it. Not to turn away. To see the faces in
the paper, know they were real. This is it’s own end: to respect
the suffering, the lost lives, the anguish of the bereaved. That
respect is also the basis from which we can decide what is to be
done.</div>
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The
talking heads and political battle lines parody that respect. The
pro-gun group has an ideology of fear: their own. For all their
machismo and espoused individualism their perspective is of a victim
hiding in the closet, fearing his own death, wishing for some way to
defend himself. This feeling they share with the victims, at least
the fear. An irony: the fear of having one’s defenses stripped away
allows for the killers to be armed thus. The fear begets the
nightmare, a feedback loop.</div>
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It
is right we should seek justice and preventative measures. I am a
parent now; I can barely touch the imagined feeling of the parents of
the dead. Merely to imagine it macerates my guts; it is to imagine
the worst torture devised.</div>
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Gun
control is right; there ought to be no well-what-about-this response.
The arguments against it are fallacious distractions, rhetorical
sleight-of-hand. Rationalizations of a pathological mindset.</div>
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Obsession
with weaponry is an illness. Pro-gun and anti-gun pirouette around
this point now, the anti-gun perspective even trying to disregard
mental illness in order to push gun control. Gun control is right:
the dead and still-living children demand it. All morality demands
it. At once, what is less sane than massacring children?</div>
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There
is something missing in the argument for gun control, something
elided, or compartmentalized. We fear the danger to our children, we
fear they will be hunted by a sick man with a gun. The fear keeps us
from looking for or understanding from where the sickness derives.</div>
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***</div>
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The middle school I attended is around the corner from here. I played
on its fields as a small child; my parents’ back yard shares their
fence. At one time they were a wetland – birds used to land there
when it rained, and I would go out in my raincoat and boots with my
toy boat to sail it through the reedy channels in the uneven
grass. Back then there was only a low fence at the street, as much to
stop wayward soccer balls as anything.</div>
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These days I can stand in the back yard and hear the cries of the
children at play, sometimes indistinguishable from screams of fear.
When we walk by the field with the baby in the stroller there is
ten-foot-high chain-link between us and the kids. Where the
passageways between the buildings were open for me to come and go as
a student, there are now black fences tipped with barbs; teachers
entering jingle their keys as they unlock the gate.</div>
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The fences and security guards are there to protect the students,
ostensibly. From killers with weapons, this climate of fear. But
there is also no way out without keys. A prison in all but name.</div>
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I should try to avoid hyperbole; it is not a prison. But the
mentality, the symbolism and the physical reality are too similar to
ignore. The children trapped there, in the square boxes of
classrooms, or running over the plastic turf during prescribed
breaks, until their daily release. The fences that line this
rectangular plot prove continually they are not free. I remember the
feeling – as a child one has no way to name it, no agency.</div>
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I knew even then that I wanted to be among the non-human. My dream
was a cabin in the woods where I lived alone. This competed with an
overwhelming need for sex and romantic love, my body driving toward
procreation and a fulfilled life. That my urge toward a solitary life
in a cabin was strong enough to compete is telling.</div>
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I felt like I was an outsider, an underdog, bottom of the pecking
order. I only had a few friends. I had no way to cope with the
pervasive bullying of middle school. I sometimes contemplated harming
myself as some kind of retribution, as if this would finally make the
bullies feel some remorse. That I was forced into a cage with those
bullies, who themselves had no choice but to be imprisoned, and who
were almost certainly traumatized and re-traumatized by their family
or culture or both, this should not be underestimated.</div>
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We often shrug and say, <i>teenagers</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
As though this sums up all that we cannot change, without any
examination of the assumptions therein. Without examining that
perhaps these teenagers are contending with their biology run up
against the wire cage of their culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Suppose I had lost my loved ones, or
been abused by them. Suppose I did not even have those few friends.
Suppose I felt even more lonely, even more misunderstood, suppose I
was in even more pain. Suppose I had no way to fight out of the cage,
and no tools to endure it. Suppose I was driven insane through
confinement, along with a crowd of others who were only slightly less
insane. Suppose I could not even identify the source of the insanity
as the cage. Is it so great a leap, then, from thinking of harming
myself, to harming others?</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Perhaps we should try to identify
individuals who feel this way, </span><span style="font-style: normal;">head
them off before their feelings devolve toward heinous acts</span><span style="font-style: normal;">. The signs are always
there in hindsight. This most recent example is perhaps clearer. But
when does it slide into policing our thoughts? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">When
do </span><span style="font-style: normal;">the overarching structures
of our culture, that already force us into classrooms and cubicles,
become the arbiters of who is insane and who is dangerous? Would
they have called me dangerous because I saw school as a prison? Or
because I would rather have lived alone in the woods? Would they have
institutionalized me, forced medication on me, for being a quiet and
angst-ridden teenager, for fear of what I might do?</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">The short-term answer is to remove
the weaponry. The danger being scaled back thus leaves room for
compassion instead of reactive fear. This is right. But the issue is
seeded deeper. It derives from being animals trapped in cages.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Progressives with their good
intentions will not allow themselves to see this, that their cause of
better education plays out as entrapment, and that it is part of a
war against wildness, in people and the greater world. They do not
see it because they, like myself, were raised in captivity. They,
like all of us, are ants in a swarm heading for the river.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">While school shooters wage assaults
on defenseless children, our species has been waging an assault on
land and ocean and non-human life. The seas are being emptied, the
land </span><span style="font-style: normal;">poisoned</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Vast landscapes converted by
machine to blocks of monocrop or feedlot, bleeding their toxic
effluvia. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">Mountains denuded
of trees and strip-mined for metals or coal or rare-earths.
Slag-heaps, tailings, runoff. Under every old gas station the soil is
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">corrupted</span><span style="font-style: normal;">.
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Meanwhile, t</span><span style="font-style: normal;">he
president has his hand poised over the launch button for our nuclear
missiles, the most powerful weapon ever devised, aimed at the heart
of the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">In the debate over gun control, this
will go unacknowledged. The through-line from mass shootings through
mass incarceration to disconnection from our own wildness and that of
the living world will not be exposed. It would indict our iPhones and
solar panels as much as the AR-15s. It would make us wonder if they
are </span><span style="font-style: normal;">all</span><span style="font-style: normal;">
too dangerous to be allowed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Another irony: progress with all of
its short-lived material benefits will lead to the destruction of
those benefits, or many of them at least, as we burn through the
world’s gifts, and spin out in the widening gyre of climate effects
and harmed landscapes that will make progress increasingly untenable.
We will probably not acknowledge it until it has happened – when
the cell networks fall silent, and the factories go dark and no
longer build their guns. </span>
</div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Meanwhile, some of us feel the pain
of what is occurring. We lash out, we take pills, we go live alone
in cabins in the woods. But if an ant were to leave the flood of his
kin surging toward the river, mark out a solitary path, convention
would say he had merely gone astray out of confusion, and, left
behind by his hive, he would have lost all reason to be.</span></div>
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<br />Neale Inglenookhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00541858588849580468noreply@blogger.com1