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March 26, 2003
A Red Spring
Spring is truly here at last.It even feels like it, which is not always the case in March. A week of warming weather has soothed the departing ache of Winter. The ice is gone; the ground is soft and damp, forgetting last year's drought. Soon the public fountains will flow once more. Last year they were restricted: the sort of deprivation one might expect in wartime, but there was no correlation. Then or now. War cannot stop the Spring, nor does it touch us much here, but it taints the heart that seeks to open toward the season. The constant flow of news from abroad is like psychic rennet, curdling a consciousness that should be sweetened by the lyricism of the Land.
Even so, I follow the old pattern, walking to the Meadow slope where the old Red Maple still stands. The species is not particularly long-lived, but this tree has survived many an Oak, or Beech, or Ash that might have thought to outlast it. We lost a lot of fine trees, young and old, this past Winter, the Christmas ice storm being particularly destructive. Plying the dialectic of the forest and the tree, one sees them both diminished, and the sprouts are at best the hope of some future generation.
But the Maple still stands.
Its flowers initiate the Springtide.
I've seen it bloom before the end of February in some of the mild Winters we've had of late, but this year things are on a slower schedule, and the staminate puffs of red and yellow were only full blown upon the Equinox itself. I've tried not to endlessly repeat myself on this page, (though repetition is a major theme here,) but these blossoms are the one thing I've shown each year: an orientation point for the rising life force; impervious to our worries, but reflective nonetheless.
Red in the season of Green.
I show them once again.
March 20, 2003
Spring is a Garden Good Enough for Us
The Vernal Equinox occurs tonight at eight o'clock, so tomorrow, the twenty first, is the first real day of Spring. That's the usual date, but it wanders a bit, because the Earth's orbit is an imprecisely divisible ellipse rather than a circle, and because the planet tilts a bit, and because things in the Heavens are no more perfect than they are in our World.In a perfect world, Spring would bring renewal, rebirth, and hope. We will get green grass, no doubt; the trees will fill with leaves and birds, as they have before, but hope... what hope dare we harbor when Spring comes in on gusts of war?
I cannot bring myself to hope the war goes badly, whatever that might mean. If our war goes well, then it must be going badly for someone else. It's all bad, but even though I toy with the notion of a comeuppance, I still think and speak of this nation as "us" and "we"; "ours" and even "mine". These little words are the largest measure of my support in this endeavor: I cannot wish us ill.
But we defile the season.
The Equinox is balance.
Day and night equally divided.
As the Sun begins to predominate, the weather will grow warmer.
America is shining like the Sun, surging towards an imperial Summer.
If the war goes "well", as I fear it must, then our best hope may be in keeping our own balance, for the World is so unbalanced by our preeminence that equality itself is threatened, even though we may believe that we are its enforcer.
We welcome back the Sun after a bitter Winter, but let us remember last year's drought. Too much Sun will parch and scorch even our own paradisiacal corner of the World, rendering it but the equal of that distant desert which now lies where the first Garden grew.
Spring brings a paradise to us each year, but war is no way to reenter Eden.
March 17, 2003
Go Green
On Saint Patrick's Day I make the effort to wear something green. The hue is a chief symbol of the day, and more than harps or leprechauns, it goes beyond Celticism per se, for who can lay claim to a color? Ireland may call itself the Emerald Isle, but Green, in shades from chartreuse through hunter, is coming soon even to the center of our local island.It can't come soon enough.
Green has always been my favorite color, ever since I was very young and endorsed it because I thought that dinosaurs were green. By now, the idea of one color being better than another seems politically incorrect, but I am convinced that some have greater moment than others...
Musing on it, I ponder how Green is the color of growth, but also of putrid, decaying death. Yet the Green of rot is also the Green of growth, albeit on a smaller scale, as Life recycles itself.
We don't like to think about death and decomposition, whatever the color. It takes the geologic distance of fossilization to make such realities approachable, as in the form of the dinosaurs, beloved of children everywhere. The dinosaurs provide a scientifically sanctioned gateway into the Mysteries, via authorized stories about who-we-are-and-how-we-got-here. Since these fundamental ideas are otherwise ill addressed, it's no wonder that children are drawn to the charismatic figures of the prehistoric giants, who take on the characteristics of initiatory guardians.
The fascination with dinosaurs is one of my earliest memories. Like the gods, they are real-yet-not-real; nowhere to be found in this World, except in artifacts endorsed and explicated by certain guardians of "the truth," who may attest to their reality. I was one of those kids that knows all about dinosaurs, but much of what I knew has now changed, as science updates itself.
For one thing, I knew they were green.
Green is a conventional color for reptiles, in coloring books and cartoons, and in the popular imagination. Greenness marks the dinosaur as the Other, for people, (and mammals in general,) are very much not green, except in metaphorical envy, or physical illness. Science has come to recognize that dinosaurs most likely enjoyed a range of coloration as wide as that of their descendants, the birds, but Green, today's color of nostalgia, is hard to let go of, especially in the case of a class which has only a past, and no future.
It may be that our future depends on a clearer understanding of our relationship to the Other. The issue is reflected in the difficulty we have in reconciling our Humanity with our animal ancestry. Changing the color of the dinosaurs is a way of mediating this relationship; of being more honest about our common ancestry, but as Saint Patrick's Day proves, we will still be left longing for the Green of the Old Country, or the old serpent, so summarily expelled. As anodyne I offer an exotic alternative, in the form of the one green mammal: the Sloth.
The Sloth is not really green in and of itself, but during the rainy season algae grows on its gray-brown coat, providing camouflage, and a virid reminder that the true keepers of the Green Mystery are the Plants. They are the main source of the color, and the foremost embodiment of Otherness among living things; alien to us ambulatory animals, yet intrinsic to our existence. To them Saint Patrick owes his hue: to the old sod, rather than any gemstone. Not the emerald isle, but the kingdom of chlorophyll.
If Saint Patrick's Day is to be a Holiday outside of Ireland, then it should have new symbols. What could be more fitting than a slow-moving, tree-hugging, American mammal, inverted amid the verdure, with plants actually growing on it? Let's welcome Spring with a glass and a Bradypus: the Green Man for the new millennium. Fear not for saurians of the past; the dinosaurs are gone for birds of many colors, but if you can't grow a green coat of your own, at least wear one.
March 5, 2003
Ash Wednesday
Lent seems almost beside the point this year. Or perhaps too pointed for us to readily embrace. Mortification is in the offing, but rather than show a willingness to give anything up, our nation is demanding that the rest of the World surrender everything to us. The actual sacrifice required of America is hardly being discussed. It does not appear that the cost of war will be assumed as a spiritualizing ascesis, rather it will be extracted in the usual way, from those least able (or willing) to pay.Our days are already Lenten, pleasures suspended; rendered unfulfilling. Not by accident the season occupies the livid landscape of the guttering late Winter. And a brutal Winter it has been, but the political gamesmanship is even more agonizing, and one has the awful desire simply to get it all over with. Surely forty days should be enough? Then back to Spring, and business as usual...
But there is no good end that way, no change in humanity's historical habit of self-destruction.
The pale gestures of Lent, if offered sincerely, can change us.
Even the little denials, the cigarette not smoked; the chocolates not indulged in; the unnecessary purchase forgone, even these will make different people of us, if we follow through on the implications of the abnegation. The denial is just a tool, used to effect a greater change. By altering a habit we depend on, we unleash our capacity for transformation; our ability to change into new, and we hope, better, people. Which is to say, we have the chance to be reborn.
Lent is meant as a period of reflection, meditation and self-restraint, which prepares us to face the Mystery of Rebirth. We desecrate the Mystery if we equate it with victory in battle. Fighting a Lenten war seems impropitious to me. If we can just resist for this little while the urge to glut upon our violent strength, (for we have better strengths,) if we can restrain ourselves for the duration, at the end of our ascesis we may find that war is not the necessity we thought, after all.
But if we decided that it is, we can still go ahead and attack, on Easter Sunday, and really show the rest of the World what kind of "Christian nation" they're dealing with.