Hurt birds (on the politics of blame)

I wake from a dream in which small birds are fluttering into my hands.  They are the size of finches, but coloured in blues and rusts and creams, as if they were swallows. I place each bird on a scarred round wooden table beneath a tall window and they gather in a huddle. It is cold. We seem to be at one end of a large library: musty volumes line the walls and the space is hushed and dark. Outside, it is winter, and bare branches scratch at the window. One detail stays with me as I wake--just before setting down each bird, I pluck a few feathers from its wings.  This seems to frighten them, and hurt them; I do not know why I do it. Waking more fully, I realize that the cat is asleep on my chest. This has happened to me before--am I having her dreams again? She lifts her head and blinks at me.

No, let me own my own cruelty. I should not blame it on the cat.

The whales came again last night

The whales came again last night
bumping up against the hull, gurgling
at the through-holes, rocking gently rocking. Then
they began to sing--sounds of damp fingers
trailing mouths of goblets, slip-stick crystal music,
pure ethereal tones knitting voices in the night.

I dreamed we'd seen them singing, these after-
midnight whales; they were oddly jointed
giants, skins crayon-coloured in aquamarines
and rusty reds. In my dream
in the waking world, no one cared what
we had seen.  They went about their daily
lives, pumping gas and annotating
endnotes. But we had heard the whales sing.

Notes
Several times in the middle of the night, while we were on the boat in northern British Columbia last summer, we were wakened by a peculiar, ethereal singing, vibrating through the hull. It was often accompanied by a gentle rocking or bouncing in the water around us.  What we heard corresponds to no known whale songs, though portions of the pitch approach the songs of Southern Killer Whales, while the slow rhythms of what we heard resemble humpback songs,  albeit at a much higher pitch. I report on a dream I really did have here. We still do not know what creature we were hearing, but are profoundly attached to the idea that we've heard the whales singing. For more on that trip, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/

Images are from Khutze Inlet, where we first heard the singing, and Bolin Bay, where we heard it again. The last image was taken not far from Malcolm Island, looking towards the mainland.

To hear recordings of various whale vocalizations, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whale_vocalizations#Blue_Whale_.28Balaenoptera_musculus.29

Why do crystal glasses give off a sound when you rub them with a wet finger?  It has everything to do with vibration and what is called the "slip-stick" phenomenon. See http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/?quid=1143

Finally, just for the pure pleasure and virtuosity of it, see Brian Engel play Mozart's Adagio in C Major for Glass Armonica: http://vimeo.com/2073455

Always Waiting

Waiting to be let in
waiting to be let out--
what difference does it make?

I am always waiting
(if I feign sleep don't
let that fool you).

I am the watcher
a being-awake
sleepless, standing ground,

so you may dream.     

Notes

The word "wait," as a substantive, first indicated a watchman, a sentinel, someone awake in the night, even a night musician. Traceable to an Old High German word, wahta, or watchman, guard, a "being awake," the word is also related to the Gothic wakan, to be awake.

The first photo is of my cat, Dante, peering through the window at the yard. The second photo was taken last week on Vernon Street in Halifax, a black cat waiting.

Cows With Horns

4 March 2011
Puerto Escondido, Baja California Sur


Two nights ago our friend Dorothy dreams--really it is a nightmare--that she is being gored, cleanly, by a bull.  And that, although many people crowd the street, no one comes to her aid.

Did anyone notice she was being gored? She cannot say.

Then yesterday as we walked up the dusty road to the tienda, a strange lowing animal cry floated out from the bush. We looked, and saw nothing but buzzards circling in the sky, riding the currents up the pink mountainsides of the Sierra de la Giganta.

We entered the tienda--we were back again another year!  The owner greeted us like old friends.  Everyone remembers Marike, la Maria grande who speaks fluent Spanish with an Argentinian accent.  We bought a few supplies: tortillas, a head of cabbage, peppers, yoghurt, onions, some chicken, avocados, some tomatoes, raisins.  No cucumbers--they froze in the last cold snap and aren't available.

Suddenly, outside, a commotion.  Bellowing.  There at the side of the shop is a horned bovine.  Your bull! Marike cries to Dorothy.  And then we notice the hanging udders.

The owner comes out and chases off this skinny desert cow, who clatters up the road to join a lowing companion.

She's a bad one! the owner says.  Bit off the water hose earlier this year--we had water shooting fifteen feet into the air.

You see that green there? She points to a patch of bushy blooming bougainvillea, the only green palm and some grasses.  It's all grown up because of that water, and now she comes to eat it, the wretch!

A smart one, Marike says tapping the side of her head. Inteligente.

As we walk back up the road Dorothy comments, that's not the cow of my dreams.

Because it's had a sex-change operation?

No.  Because it's more white than black.

That sounds like a metaphor or a moral, but its import escapes me.  Was this walk a fable?

Images
Cactus, San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Buzzards, Puerto Escondido, BCS, Mexico
Cattle skull, shadow, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico

Look Forward, Look Back

(A Short Pronouncement that Turns to Dialogue. And Citation.)

Look forward, look back: isn't that what we we do on this day?  But why just this day, or yesterday, or during the intervening week between Christmas and New Year's, when news is on short rations and so simply recycles? Always so many questions we might ask, but don't:

Who knocks as the clock clangs, as the snow piles up, flake by flake?
Will I be the one who must answer?

Our beauty so fleeting it runs out like ice on a hot day.

How far do I have to run to avoid coming back?

--As if you could, you know.

"Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep."

--I know that, that's Heraclitus.  Just so you don't have the last word, here is another of his aphorisms:
"If all things turned to smoke, the nostrils would sort them out."

Or this: "The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings."

--I knew you'd do that, get the last word.

But it wasn't me; it was Heraclitus. 

And now it's you.

No, it's you.  

Notes:
Heraclitis, Fragments LXXXIX, CXII and CXXV from Charles H. Kahn.  The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 

Photo: Old Montreal through the side mirror

The Solace of Colour

Grief. And Grace. II

After Linus died, and the bees came--and the wind, pinning us into one harbour after another--I began to dream in colour.  Marike and I would pack a lunch, bottles of water and gatorade, our swimsuits and snorkeling gear, and paper, brushes and boxes of paint, and head to shore.  We walked, swam, looked out to sea, and painted.  What mattered, to me anyway, was not so much the quality of the final product, but the fact of making something, the layering of colour, like a laying on of hands in our hearts.  Not healing exactly, but solar solace, a bouncing of light beams, a rendering of the world which rent us, at once awful and beautiful and more vast than we could tell.

Broken rocks for broken hearts.

 
Images
Watercolour sketches, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico, 18 March 2010

Infestation

I dream that I've twisted the stem from a newly grown zucchini, revealing a flood of ants.  The image is too silly, too much like Dali to be taken seriously.  Yet it's horrifying.  An infestation in a place I never expected to find it.

Another definition of horror--and of happiness--an unfolding for which one could not have been prepared.

The Menace of Everyday Things

I fall asleep.

I dream.

 
I am driving along a winding country road. 

Very fast.

I can't quite see clearly, and so I drive still faster.

Suddenly the fear of death grips me, a thrill or rumble in my belly, and Bathsheba, who has been snoozing on the couch with me, jumps up to bark at a phantom.

No one is at the door.

Rain rattles against the windows.

I am awake again.

Adrift in Paradise

7 March 2010
Puerto Escondido, Baja California Sur, Mexico


What strange creatures we are: adrift in paradise, and thoroughly squeezed by terrors.

I had a terrible dream last night.  Like a 1940s movie, it unspooled in black and white.  A cityscape.  Long sidewalks, skyscrapers, busy people, cars, and buses that somehow tilted into intersections, their back ends raised over the sidewalks. 

In my dream there had been a warning, a rumour that sometimes these back ends lowered without warning and pedestrians were crushed by them.

I paid no attention to this information really; I thought the tale was a myth meant to scare its listeners. 

And then there I was on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the street.  The back end of a bus hovered over me and I jumped aside, but not quickly enough.  It lowered, lowered onto me.

Help! I cried, help! but the rattle of the bus  and the rest of the traffic made my voice inaudible. 

Slowly slowly--but I could not move quickly enough to extricate myself--my back was crushed by the weight of the bus. 

In the last shot, I'd disappeared.

8 March 2010 Puerto Escondido

This morning I dream some one has handed me two sheets of paper.  They are folded--this is a letter of some sort.

I open it expectantly, eagerly--there is a message here I want to understand.

But before I get to the first word, I awaken.