The Warp and the Woof or Frankenstein's Blog

Lying in bed this morning in the hypnopompic zone, mostly awake. Watching my floaters rising and falling against the backdrop of the venetian blinds. They strum it, tripping over the impediment of the slats—a lazy shuttling; an accidental watery ballet. And an unexpectedly artful collaboration between the optical flaw—the floater swimming in the eye—and the visual field. The warp and the woof.

The other day I emailed my sister: "I am hoping to re-animate my blog this weekend, perhaps with a bolt of lightning and stolen body parts." (My previous metaphor for this task—the quaint-sounding "renascence"—is in an unfinished post that's stuck in draft mode, like the never-hatched eggs of an abandoned house sparrow nest that I saved for a possible show-and-tell for Matthew about a dozen years ago and that sits to this day in a shoebox in my closet. Unhatched metaphors are much more common around these parts than an un-metaphored Hatch. But maybe I'll incubate it yet.)

Anyway, while I lay there watching the floaters strum the blinds, I thought about Frankenstein, both the doctor and the monster who's taken on his name—a cockeyed, run-amok, hairy-palms name, unlike the solemn "Golem," its Czech cousin, who sounds like he could have had a bar mitzvah. (I didn't have one, unlike Matt, who did us all proud, reading in Hebrew abut how God killed Aaron's sons with a zap of divine wrath for daring to make their own unauthorized altar fire [the incense that incensed?], which they were doing for Him! [Look, Lord, I made a ashtray for you... Arrrrrrrrrgh!])

Where was I? Lying in bed thinking about Frankenstein's blog, if he kept one. The doctor would have, and in Mary Shelley's novel, even the monster was eloquent enough to have had one: "Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?"

Well, not that formal for my re-animated blog. Somewhere between Mary Shelley and Puttin' on the Ritz in "Young Frankenstein," before the footlight blows.

It's all about the warp and the woof that I mentioned earlier.
Warp: Ever notice that floaters can interact with venetian blinds in a kind of strumming, shuttling effect? 
Woof: "Woof!"
Warp: Here's the real question: will I devote an hour of my day to writing my warped observations? Will I make this hulk of spare parts and random connections get up and dance?
Woof: "Woof! Woof!" (Translation: We'll see.)

4/4 Time

What if each day were a fatefully mapped series of random encounters arranged according to some rhythm and plot not directed by you but by some auteur like Luis Bunuel who has taken an interest in your life, and may even be the boring genius who's scripting and shooting the cinema of your dreams?

This is not an original idea, but some days do seem to march along in 4/4 time gathering ingredients like a scavenger hunt.  I once promoted March 4th as that sort of march-forth day. Maybe it was always 4/4, a pair of hoofers and a cane dancing offstage in a buck and wing...

Some of today's ingredients:
Listening to half of a James Taylor/Carole King "Live at the Troubadour" CD, and learning that JT wrote "Sweet Baby James"not for himself but as a cowboy lullaby for his infant nephew.

Spending several hours reading and writing about Of Mice and Men and learning that its original title was "Something That Happened."

Taking a late afternoon walk down to Spy Pond, passing a tuning-up mockingbird on a chimney and on the shore of the shining blue waters of the pond, encountering a small box turtle, head and appendages tucked inside.

Taking a second later afternoon walk with Carol to Spy Pond, encountering the same box turtle again and happily--having looked  in vain for them earlier--coming upon my favorite couple: a male wood duck and a female mallard who are inseparable. This is not all that uncommon, according to other citations on the Net, but it's a first for me. And this time we had a little drama. The wood duck was getting very agitated, piping away excitedly about something, which turned out to be an approaching male mallard. However, rather than snatching the hen away from this species robber, the mallard drake got chased away by the smaller wood duck. The two then calmly stepped ashore while the drake sailed bemusedly by.

And finally, after the dishes, Matt and I watching approximately half of Bunuel's "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" with its graceful flow of random events, including a squadron of soldiers delaying their departure in a crisis to allow a young sergeant to tell his dream. That's what I'm talking about.

—Old Hatch

Earthy & Airy

Forget about the lion and the lamb. March comes in like a woodcock and goes out like a woodcock.

I speak of the American Woodcock, a.k.a. the timberdoodle, a gnomish walnut-colored snipe of field and woods and as martian as shorebirds get with its top-heavy toddle, earth-probing bill, and eyes at the top of its head.

If March is a maestro of earth and air—stirring, instigating, exhibiting—then so is the woodcock. In fact, it speaks in two different voices—one terrestrial, the other aerial. The terrestrial note is a surveyor's mark, the aerial one windborne and surprising.

Hearing both of these sounds was a March tradition that fellow birder Ed Hazell and I hewed to on a raw, windy evening last week. We drove out to Belmont's Rock Meadow, a reliable staging area.

On the way, Ed challenged me to identify the vocalist in a CD he had just received. Disc slid in; out poured an ethereal, eerily pitched soprano. I took a guess. Yes, it was Yma Sumac! In concert in Bucharest, Romania, 1957.

Yma Sumac—Peruvian, possibly descended from the Incan emperor Atahualpa; endowed with a range of five octaves, and you could hear the span on the CD, climbing from a throaty, smoky growl to a stratospheric scream. Yma Sumac—a name suspiciously reversible to Amy Camus, rumored to be a Brooklyn housewife, but not so, Boston! Yma Sumac, diva of the exotic, chanteuse of hooded eyes and flared nostrils and dramatic sweep of caftan.

I'd heard of Yma Sumac, often in crossword puzzles, but never had I heard her Goomba Boomba, or her F sharp  above double high C.

We arrived at the juncture of evening and oddsbodkins, the daylight circling the drain. We ventured out into a meltscape of mud and snow, trod the boardwalk, waited in the chill wind. I had my cowl on, so Ed heard it before I did. 

A precise, nasal expostulation, a sharp among flats. Bzeep. Snide, nerdy, essence of mulch and earthworm. Bzeep. Here. There. Tagging the dusk like a random sneep, a game of freeze tag played by an animated bean bag. Bzeep. You can't see me. Bzeep. You're right.

Then, just when it has lulled its audience into a low-watt tango—surprise! It takes off in a kite tail of telltale twitters made by wind in feathers! And around it goes, a few hundred feet up, rarely visible as a chunky silhouette, making a wheel of sound, a geometry of woo. Look what I can do! I've got you surROUNDed, Valentine. And suddenly, most surprising of all, it fakes a fall, expressed in a column of sharp, irregular, to-the-death, kamikaze chirps, wind-made. I would die 4 U, Valentine! Except at the last moment it pulls up, lands in the same spot from which it took off...

...and returns to the terrestrial, extraterrestrial Bzeep. 

This is what we have come for, this performance. Often a sharp eye against the losing light will pick out the movement of the roaming woodcock, or at least the wing-flared return of one a few yards away. But not tonight. They're keeping back in the snowy thicket, so we have only their sonic roundup overhead when there aren't enough pixels around for a decent contrast.

We head back. Too cold. Back to the car and Yma Sumac, queen of the Incas, as earthy and airy as the bird we heard, but much better looking.

Seacat; Mariatta; Choli, Choli, Choli

One grackle does not a spring make. But it's a start.

One grackle, squeezing out a rusty wheeze in a low tree by Spy Pond reminded me that I hadn't been looking for any returning blackbirds, normally a rite of March. Been busy writing passages for high school students. Too busy to explore passages, like winter to spring.

So grackles came looking for me. A few days ago, a tree full of them in a neighbor's backyard. Studding the branches like the fruit of a blackbird tree. Making a plangent din of wheezes and skirls and desultory clacks. Bearing a message: this tree full of grackles is brought to you by / brings you: spring.

March doesn't advertise, but if it did, it would probably be like one of those business cards you find in your mail from a local contractor: Grackle Construction — snow removed — crocuses coaxed — songbirds encouraged.

Cardinals, of course, began whistling their ads in February, but they have their own business, kind of unguarded espionage.

I received an ad, kind of, in a dream. Woke up about a week ago with a chant fading in my mind's ear, and I wrote it down. The voice or voices were chanting:

Seacat; 
Mariatta; 
Choli, choli, choli, choli....

Though I only came away with one iteration, I had a sense of repetition. Something that Polynesian catamaran sailors might intone as they voyage from island to island. And/or something southwestern, partaking of the desert.

Seacat; 

Mariatta; 

Choli, choli, choli, choli....

I assigned it a meaning. Or rather, a thought surfaced alongside it and I bound the two together. "You are more powerful than you know."

To spring awakenings.

One Brilliant Day

The stratus prevailed.

This morning, half the sky was an amazing flying circus of cirrus clouds, swooshing this way and that, combining with altocumulus in a holy mackerel circus, and even jollying a pallet of gray cirrostratus undulatus. It was quite a show at eight a.m., and the sky was a wide-eyed arena of barnum and bailey blue. I was glad I'd given in and driven Matt to school just to see that madcap chalkboard from a stoplight ringside seat.

But now it's three twenty-three and the sky is all pale gray, all stratus, vast as an elephant's backside. Betokening change. The meteorologists can read the signs. The rest of us are dumbfounded gawkers and sky illiterates, except for a field guide knowledge of the basic Latin names paired with a page of photos. Except those don't show the change, and weather is an ocean of change. An ocean of Chang. A sea surface full of changes, like that great poem by Wallace Stevens, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds."

Yesterday's notes:  

The thaw continueth. Must be close to sixty today. We are 

grinning our way into global warming like frogs admiring the roomy quarters of an alligator's maw. 

Me too. I've got my soup and corn muffin outside of Jam 'n 

Java on a picnic table for all to see as an advertisement of the day. Though someone might justly tell me, "Don't encourage it." Like the mother I passed on the bike path who was telling her child: "Old Man Winter says, 'It's not time for spring 

flowers!' "  Which in turn reminds me of a line in a poem by 

Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly. It's the last line:

The Wind, One Brilliant Day     

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

'In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses.'

'I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.'

'Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.'

the wind left.  And I wept.  And I said to myself:
'What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to

you?'



*



Have we woken our garden up when it should be sleeping?

Will the four inches of snow

tomorrow lull it back to sleep? 
      

Nature calls

Maybe I'm ready to visit here again. I'm missing nature. In a dream, a tiny ocelot causes mayhem. In my real day, a goose stumbles. And my friend Marjie sent me a poem by Robert Frost that begins:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

So here are two to slide into the new year.

Dream Menagerie

In my dreams, it’s the fierce hawk in the tree and the lion trying to get in the window. It’s an elusive spring trove of songbirds or migrating flocks like a windstorm of leaves. There are vermin—mice in the kitchen, fearsome insects in terrariums. And wolf packs, large herbivores, even giant yeti-like humanoids. All, I suppose, are my personal fauna: the nature I used to pursue like an ardent suitor, trying to decode its inscrutable messages; the predatory obligations that pursue me through life; the physical world itself of which I am an atomic anatomic reorganization.  

Last night it was a tiny ocelot chasing I’m not sure what, a rodent or a bird, moving unbelievably fast around a wooded backyard similar to the one of my childhood in Connecticut. My sympathies were with the prey, but the little ocelot, no bigger than a finger puppet, matched it twist for twist, turn for turn, finally catching up with it on the branch of a bare tree that came crashing down.

This was deeply upsetting to the hostess of the party and lady of the house. These were her rare and precious trees. Somehow I was to blame; I and others had released the tiny ocelot, had not reckoned on its destructive ferocity. But the dream was also about creating.  In attendance at this party—the guest of honor—was my mentor, Frederick Busch (novelist and former teacher of mine who died seven years ago). We talked. He urged me to become a tavernier, a tavern poet. (This troubadour, never before named—a kind of folk/Beat bard of coffee shops—has been appearing regularly in my dreams for the past year or two.)

Trying to be a tavernier is what I am doing here, I suppose: releasing the little ocelot, to see what happens.

*

The Indecisive Goose

Gray day today. January thaw. Snow shrinking to blebs. I go out on my bike to drop off a bag of bottlecaps (dials for prop washing machines in my son’s play). That done, I ride home along the Mystic River.

15 Canada geese grazing the riverbank between the muddy path I’m on and the roadway. They mainly ignore me, with a few periscope necks popping up now and then: the designated sentinels. One lone goose in the river is coming ashore. I walk my bike ahead to give it room, then look back. It doesn’t join the others but hangs out on the shore. Then I see it stumble and half roll down the stony bank! Never saw a bird lose its balance before. It returns to water, perhaps to restore its dignity. Then it makes for shore again, steps over the small rocks, meaning to join the others, maybe. Who knows? Anyway, thinks better, goes back to water, swims one way, then another, in an indecisive circle. Two geese come flying down to the river with some ado. To help? Harrass? Neither. Splashing down, one of the new geese honks repeatedly from further downstream and I turn to see the rest of the gaggle of geese filing down to the river in a line like a disciplined troop. Hard to avoid the interpretation that one bull goose summoned the others. The indecisive goose does not exactly join them, but swims along at a short distance. Very far downriver I see two swans, bright white against the dark water. I mosey along to see if anything will happen when the geese reach them. On the way, I intercept a flock of probable goldfinches but they are awfully small. Kinglets? No. Redpolls? Wishful thinking. Whichever, a nice convivial flock on a drab day. I’m just upstream from the swans. The geese seem to give them a respectful berth, but no interaction. “Swan.” “Goose.” Just a quiet afternoon on the river.

 

Post Post

Maybe the world did end, briefly. The way that sentence ended. Would anything follow it? Of course. Haltingly, maybe. But nature abhors a vacuum, and vacuums are not especially fond of nature either. For the past year the doorbell has been ringing and it's always the same old Mayan salesman attired in a homespun breechclout, demonstrating his end-of-the-world blowout sale vacuum "with not just one u, but two." You get tired of slamming the door in his face—he's just Mayan his own business, if you will—so eventually you wave him inside, offer him a joint, put on an old jazz CD called "whether the storm?" and hear what the dude's got to say. Turns out not much. He keeps the vacuum in a bell-jar in his lap and never refers to it, much less demonstrates it. To break the ice you ask him what happened to the Mayans anyway, alluding to the mysterious disappearance of their highly advanced civilization? He shrugs, yawns something about the lousy economy, and stretches out on your sofa.  The next morning, he and the vacuum are gone.

So what do we do now, having woken up on 12/22 to find the world miraculously intact? Do we kiss the old girl, the way George Bailey gratefully kissed the broken newel post in his drafty old barn of a house, having been reunited with his own existence at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life"? Or just pick up where we left off, maybe a tad disappointed to be saddled with the same old burdens that an apocalypse would have taken off our backs, fire and brimstone notwithstanding? Or was it just a formal, culture-wide version of the same old second chance we're presented with every morning when the eyes open to the same old but also new world?

Well, whichever: we're all entitled to a fresh calendar with no mistakes and one unspent ticket for a happy new year. May our civilization thrive a little longer.