Linear Danger Area

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve---
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

---Mary Oliver, "The Black Snake"

A Gallop Down Memory Lane....On a Seahorse

How are memories retrieved?  The part of the brain called the "hippocampus" is believed to be integral in this process.  This region of the cerebrum has a broad S-shaped sweep; its elegant curvature reminded classical anatomists of a seahorse, so it was given the Greek name for that creature.  One type of memory that the hippocampus mediates is "declarative memory," which we experience when we consciously reach back in our minds for previous experiences.  The hippocampus also appears to contribute to the linking of objects and events around us with past experiences. 

---Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness (2004)

Dream House Part I: Nests

"If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility.  A nest--and this we understand right away---is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.  Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind?  The answer to this paradox is simple: when we dream...in a sort of naive way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves.  We definitely saw it, but we say that it is well hidden.  This center of animal life is concealed by the immense volume of vegetable life.  The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves...when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.  Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"

---Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The next few entries will feature utopian homes.  In this entry taken from philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, the nest is not simply a dream home, but a home that catalyzes reveries of security, in spite of its essential insecurity.    The nest of the real world--constructed of natural ephemera---is fragile and vulnerable.  Yet the nest exists not only in the real world but in our imagination as an ideal space that is protective and intimate as well as open and ethereal. 

A few days ago, I saw a broken egg on the cement beneath a tree. But this disturbing sight conjured the nest from which it had came and then, comically, the Swiss Family Robinson (a family in a nest in a tree) and finally a house on a mountain top. To reside on top of the world, surrounded by a "lyrical bouquet of leaves,"  would be the ultimate domesticity. Cosmic....confidence!

Potatoes = Buried Treasure

One good turn deserves another and so today's brief quote will once again showcase Tasha Tudor's Garden, this time in a self-explanatory quote that illustrates the role of the imagination in enlivening daily chores:


" 'I love to dig potatoes.  It's quite satisfying, you know, like searching for buried treasure.  Although it can be irksome when your spade slices a plump, promising potato in two.'  The naughty corgyn, always out for a lark, go running off with potatoes in their mouths and gnaw them ruthlessly to pieces before rushing back to steal more tuberous victims. But there are plenty of potatoes to spare..."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin with Photographs by Richard W. Brown

Boundaries Part I: Hibernation

In this multi-part series, I will feature quotations from works of different eras and genres that share an interest in the blurry boundary between life and death, yet come to radically different conclusions about death's familiarity, permanence, and meaning. The first quote, taken from Anthony Doerr's short story, "The Hunter's Wife" is fairly recent and addresses this subject in the most direct manner. It offers an easy segue into the landscape of these two realms through a discussion of what we might call a death-like state of living....hibernation.

"As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the trees. She felt the soft, silver tips of its fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins. Want to know what he dreams? she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. Summer, her voice echoed. Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

--Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife" in The Shell Collector (2003)

Gone

In Maile Meloy's short story, bodies and hopes fall away. Missing limbs--dismemberment--signify not only crippling loss but impotence. More quotes to come that feature missing limbs, amputation and bodily damage.


       Cort set his water glass down by the sink. "The baby's feet are falling off," he said. "One of them's already gone."
     "The tendon isn't growing back and there's nothing there to hold the feet on," he said. "Perfectly good horse except she's not going to have any feet." His voice cracked on the word "feet." He turned and rummaged through his kitchen drawer, beneath unpaid bills and Kite's registration papers, until he found two small keys on a ring that jangled in his hand. I watched him go into the laundry room, unlock the file cabinet there and bring out a pistol with a revolving chamber. The gun dangled awkwardly in his hand [...]
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn't be; I'd never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort's hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

---Maile Meloy, "Kite Whistler Aquamarine" in Half in Love (2002)

Grief

The Honeybee is fascinated by stories that make reference to sign language. Perhaps this is because sign language is at once very expressive and yet very limited in its pared-down status as an "informational language" that eschews details and  in some sense, defies nuance. But sign language as performance conveys a deeper message than a simple translation will allow. Perhaps we might consider it as a form of dance. Amy Hempel's story makes especially poignant use of sign language in this story, in which the simplicity of this performative language conveys the experience of grief in an understated way:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

---Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2007.

On Creativity

Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive one.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology