Greetings Earthlings, and welcome to earthweal open link weekend #55.
Most of you know the drill: Link to a favorite poem, then visit your fellow linkers and comment.
The open link forum remains open until midnight Sunday EST, when Sarah Connor takes over the reins with a challenge formed around the Celtic lunar festival if Imbolc. You won’t want to miss it!
Happy linking!
Brendan
We live amid aeons. Beneath my house here in Florida is sand from seas a million years old, and sediments washed here as the Appalachian mountains eroded from Alps to rolling headless shoulders. Ninth Avenue was built from crushed limestone, the foundation of this state. The tap water used for the coffee I drink is siphoned from an aquifer of fresh water about 25 thousand years old. I was baptized in the Atlantic ocean at age 14, just when the Now was flooding through me in a torrent; the wave which rolled over me and somehow through me was composed of salt water 3 billion years old. The air I breathe was created 3.5 billion years ago and I have shared it with settlers and squanderers, gators and vultures, pine and camellia and dollarweed.
These hands on the keyboard are 63 years old in this incarnation, but they flourish from a 3- million-year legacy of homonid existence, bound to an apelike mammal existence 11 million years long and mammals dating back 200 million years. I have my mammal ancestors to thank for the womb in which my ideas are conceived, the generating heat of a thought, the convoluted sense of glyphs carved into white space.
And these hands are inheritors of articulation – wings, fins, claws, suckers — means of grasping water and air, love and prey.
And earthweal challenges …
Yes, the moment is all. A few of them ago I had no idea what I was going to write about, now I’m bouncing around in this huge echo chamber homo sapiens calls time. It’s the embryonic fluid washes through all life and reverberates in mineral and other orders of nonlife. And it’s present only for a moment’s notice and then gone into the immense background we take for granted as dailiness.
Like stars. Light from stars arrives from thousands, millions of years ago, even more. The star SMS J031300.670839.3 is 6,000 light-years away from Earth, meaning its flicker tonight is 6,000 years old. That star is also 13.8 billion years old, formed at the beginning of our known universe, so its light is also of the oldest vintage. Another star, Icarus, was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in a spiral galaxy so far from the Earth its light takes nine billion years to reach here. A walk in starlight is an eerie symphony of deep time. Who knew?
Stars also teach us about afterlife, the lingering of the gone in the present. Most visible starlight comes from active stars, though many stars in the most distant galaxies are long gone. And there’s no difference between living light and dead light. It’s all radiance.
Extinct species live on the vast diffusion of the life which evolved from them. In the human temporal bandwidth, there is a narrower resonance of the gone amid the living. We live in an era that witnesses the vanishing of most megafauna; in a few more, giraffes and hippos and whales will only be observable in zoos and videos preserved on eternal servers. Petroglyphs survive from early human history, often glorying in species that vanished thousands of years ago—cave bears and ibexes and woolly mammoths. The petroglyphs will probably outlive electronic media, which means the culture most aware of itself will probably be the most silent in the deep time to come.
In his book Underland, Robert MacFarlane describes the sweep of time in the ground beneath our feet and the crucial lessons we may learn there:
‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.
There is a dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What will our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in a blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human mortality looks absurd — crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet’s cycles of erosion and repair.
We should resist such intertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite —deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time is a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us. (15)
Deep time as a digestor and coagulator of human time: the long view in which plates move, mountains form and erode, plateaus are shaped by rising and falling seas, resting for a moment in this pinprick awareness called human time before moving on: It does something, to posit our work and contributions as part of the starlight.
Let’s see what happens when we focus our poetic eyes on the presence of deep time:
Two poems for kickstarters:
BECOMING A FOREST
Ama Codjoe
Not to feel the grasses brush my knees, as if wading
for the first time into the ocean, but a different prayer —
this was after declaring, These trees are my bones,
and I could feel myself loosed from tendons, muscles,
and sinew, a skeleton knocking, as a chime
against nothing, and in my marrow
the blood of sap, the rungs of pinecones,
and myself, inside myself, telling me this —
to make an alphabet of stammering, a song
of a cry, to be anything buzzing with blood
or wings, anything alive, including grief, because
isn’t that — I aske the trees, my bones forest
framing me — what my long ago dead dreamed,
tossed in their short allowance of night?
originally published in The Adroit Journal
anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2020
edited by Paisley Redkal with series editor David Lehman
FORMAGGIO
Louise Gluck
The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.
It never healed itself.
But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:
it was a good thing that human beings made them;
human beings know what they need,
better than any god.
On Huron Avenue they became
a block of stores; they became
Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever
they were or sold, they were
alike in their function: they were
visions of safety. The salespeople
were like parents; they appeared
to live there. On the whole,
kinder than parents.
Tributaries
feeding into a large river: I had
many lives. In the provisional world,
I stood where the fruit was,
flats of cherries, clementines,
under Hallie’s flowers.
I had many lives. Feeding
into a river, the river
feeding into a great ocean. If the self
becomes invisible has it disappeared?
I thrived. I lived
not completely alone, alone
but not completely, strangers
surging around me.
That’s what the sea is:
we exist in secret.
I had lives before this, stems
of a spray of flowers: they became
one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon
visible under the hand. Above the hand,
the branching future, stems
ending in flowers. And the gripped fist—
that would be the self in the present.
from Vita Nova (1999)
Links for this challenge until Friday afternoon at 5 PM EST, then its open link weekend.
Next Monday Sarah begins a series on calendar festivals with one on the lunar festival of Imbolc.
Let’s have some fun in ye olde sandbox!
Brendan
Greetings and welcome to earthlink open link weekend #54. Here’s your chance to link a favorite poem of yours and exult in the work of your fellow poets.
The open link forum will last until Sunday at midnight EST when the next weekly challenge rolls out.
See you in the fray!
— Brendan
We think we live and think in a free zone, unencumbered by the intrusions of instinct, culture, even the life around us (at least, my suburban home effects this): But we are never alone; our being is entangled with every strand of life, be it coiling in my gut, sprawling in the ground beneath this house or swarming with the buzzards over the treetops.
Migrating birds have been found to use the earth’s magnetic field to chart their courses by. Comes in handy when starlight or sunlight isn’t sufficient due to cloud cover and changing terrain. Apparently they alight with the field through a process of quantum entanglement: A protein their eyes reacts with the blue spectrum of light particles and causes a quantum entanglement sensitive to the location of the earth’s magnetic field.
(Radio waves can wreak havoc on this sensitive ability, much in the same way that sonar confuses the mating calls of whales and heating oceans are tripping vast ecosystems. Our entanglement is less quantum elegance than comic buffoonery—trip wires and banana peels …)
Thom van Dooren entangles us further into the world of birds—present and gone—in Flight Ways: Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law. “Life and death do not take place in isolation from others,” he writes, “they are thoroughly relational affairs for fleshy, mortal creatures.” He continues:
And so it is, in the worlds of birds—woven into relationships with a diverse array of other species, including humans. These are relationships of co-evolution and ecological dependency. But they are also about more than “biology” in any narrow sense. It is inside these multispecies entanglements that learning and development take place, that social practices and cultures are formed. In short, these relationships produce the possibility of both life and any given way of life. And so these relationships matter. This is true at the best of times, but in times like these when so many species are slipping out of the world, these entanglements take on a new significance. (Kindle Edition, p. 4)
A great extinction—some one million species of plant and animal life, a half to two thirds of all late-Holocene life—is massing all around us as greenhouse gases continue to overheat our world and human dominate resources and live large. But if we think we are going grandly into this far emptier future, like Moby-Dick, we are entangled with what we have vanquished. Watching whatever was on TV while I ate lunch yesterday, I caught the beginning of Dazed and Confused, that 1993 coming-of-age flick set in teen-mall America of the mid-70s I grew up through. Cool music, a little sexy as virgin souls in hot bodies lavished their attention on dating, jeans, dope, Led Zeppelin and cars: All of that indulgence taken for granted and without a single wisp of sulfur to belie a burning earth and our complicity burning everything at both ends.
What was extraordinary to me was to see how blithe we all were, culturally back then, about our clueless entanglement with a dying world, its physical disorder spinning in precise alignment to the negative arc of our spirits. How blind we were—and resolutely remain—overwriting the real world with a suburban fantasy which would eventually choke us and the world to death.
I finished my sandwich and turned off the TV.
Van Dooren continues,
Paying attention to avian entanglements unsettles human exceptionalist frameworks, prompting new kinds of questions about what extinction teaches us, how it remakes us, and what it requires of us. … What kinds of human–bird relationships are possible at the edge of extinction? What does it mean to care for a disappearing species? What obligations do we have to hold open space in the world for other living beings? (5)
Seems to me part of that work is learning to detach from the myth of my disentangled existence. Not a word I write is not burdened with the immense shadow of the civilization which enables it. Hard work indeed, but when some of that is dealt with — cleared — a different light, less human, more living, shines through.
Hard it is to get there, but great the reward, as Mary Oliver reports in her poem “Egrets”
Where the path closed
down and over,
through the scumbled leaves,
fallen branches,
through the knotted catbrier,
I kept going. Finally
I could not
save my arms
from the thorns; soon
the mosquitoes
smelled me, hot
and wounded, and came
wheeling and wining.
And that’s how I came
to the edge of the pond:
black and empty
except for a spindle
of bleached reeds
at the far shore
which, as I looked,
wrinkled suddenly
into three egrets—
a shower
of white fire!
Even half-asleep they had
such faith in the world
that had made them—
tilting through the water,
unruffled, sure,
by the laws
of their faith not logic,
they opened their wings
softly and stepped
over every dark thing.
(from American Primitive, 1983)
I’m sure that’s why we gaze upon the animal world with the yearning of the exile. Poetry I think can intensify that gaze, so that it becomes “a form of witnessing that is from the outset already seized, already claimed, by an obligation to those whose stories we are attempting to tell” (van Dooren, ibid. 9). Becoming entangled in the narrative—in rhyme and rhythm, with metaphor and myth—the solo enquiry can flower into “the complicate amassing harmony” which Wallace Stevens characterized the real world.
So: the beam is sighted, the branch alighted: Now that we may have a purchase on a view of the real world, what then? What news can our poems reconnoit? Van Dooren:
… at the same time as they may offer an account of existing relationships, stories can also connect us to others in new ways. Stories are always more than simply descriptive: we live by stories, and so they are inevitably powerful contributors to the shaping of our shared world. This is an understanding that works against any neat or straightforward division between the “real” and the “narrated” world (Kearney 2002:133–34).
Instead, I see storytelling as a dynamic act of “storying” the world, utterly inseparable from lived experience and a vital contributor to the emergence of “what is.” Stories arise from the world, and they are at home in the world. As (Donna) Haraway notes, “‘World’ is a verb,” and so stories are “of the world, not in the world. Worlds are not containers, they’re patternings, risky co-makings, speculative fabulations.” Even a story that aims to be purely mimetic can never simply be a passive mirror held up to “reality.” Stories are a part of the world, and so they participate in its becoming. As a result, telling stories has consequences: one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections, and with them new accountabilities and obligations. (10)
Sounds like a poetic for vibrant entanglement for me. Let’s put it to use.
For this challenge, explore the art and acts of entanglement in a poem. How does one life entangle another? How do the dead remain entangled with the living? Become the thing you see. Reflect on how that seeing changes the world (at least, your view of it). Then (or separately) ask yourself what existence would mean without that entanglement: how much less light and air and beauty. Flip the switch both ways to see how it works. Entangle yourself in the world. Let your witness be our testament.
Some exciting challenges in the coming weeks from Sherry and Sarah. Stay tuned!
We’ll leave via an entangled brake Galway Kinnell discovered for us:
BLACKBERRY PICKING
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
(from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, 1980)
— Brendan
Arboreal-like drainage channels in Lake Cakora, New South Wales.
Here we are again for earthweal’s 53d open link weekend. Link a rave fave and visit your fellow linkers and comment-rave.
Open link weekend lasts until midnight Sunday EST when the next weekly challenge rolls out. By then I should know what it is.
Happy linking!
— Brendan
earthweal 