Pirouette

Is it what remains
after what sustains
has long since ceased?

That inchoate yearning
spiralled 'round what was;
A suspicion burning:
There is something
More,
though still ineffable,
something sweeter still
to long for?

All those sad stumps, and snags,
and bludgeoned trunks
without dreams:
In your woods is still a dancer
pirouetting,
Loss redeemed.

Analemma Tell Ya...

Speaking of crossword delights, I don't recall the clue per se, but the answer was "ANALEMMA," a word I had never heard before and if asked would have guessed, actually, was some hapless, nineteenth-century heroine's name. More astute observers than I am may have encountered this figure on maps or globes, where it is also known as the "Equation of Time," but a quick Google search (which I highly urge the reader to engage in) yielded miraculously beautiful photographs, as well as everything I ever wanted to know about analemmas but was afraid to ask.

An analemma, as it turns out, is the pattern the sun makes over the course of a year. If one were to photograph the position of the sun at the same time of day from the same location for a year (as the photographer did in the photograph above), the plot of its positions would appear as a figure eight, also known as the infinity sign. Because the earth tilts on its axis (at a serendipitous 23.45 degrees!) and its path around the sun is elliptical, the sun appears to make a path as shown above.

This thrills me no end. I visualize the planet as being ringed with infinity signs, a glowing halo around the earth, and I am reminded of Amira having said in one particularly effusive moment when she was about five, "I love all the people that I see. I have 'a 'finity' of hearts inside me!" Meaning, of course, infinity, the definition for which she overheard me giving Nat earlier.

She remains, at nineteen, full of light and love, as well as full of the less poetic piss and vinegar (a phrase which, to my surprise, originated with John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath)." In any event, she and Nat are the analemmas of my heart.

By the way, this quest for the analemma ended up leading me to an eponymous CD with the sub-title, "There's No Place Like Ohm." I do love a pun. It is a collection of music "composed in the key of Ohm," the measured frequency of the elliptical orbit of the earth. The music includes various animal sounds, obscure instruments (the "duduk"! from Armenia) and is really a trip. I highly recommend it. It is produced by a Seattle-based sound healer, Marjorie de Muynck, and can be found at www.cdbaby.com. Listen, and let the savage beast within be soothed.

Cotopaxi and Good Will to All

I appear to have joined the ranks of those with AADD - Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Maybe it's too much wine, or the wrong hormones, or some problem with the space-time continuum. But the following description increasingly describes my experience to a tee.

"...It's like being super-charged all the time. You get one idea and you have to act on it, and then, what do you know, but you've got another idea before you've finished up with the first one, and so you go for that one, but of course a third idea intercepts the second, and you just have to follow that one, and pretty soon people are calling you disorganized and impulsive and all sorts of impolite words that miss the point completely. Because you're trying really hard. It's just that you have all these invisible vectors pulling you this way and that, which makes it really hard to stay on task."

The one refuge I find, curiously, has been crossword puzzles. I keep telling myself what I need to do is meditate, but that appears to require some commitment to staying in one place. The inestimable Danny Clurman sent along a link to www.just-a-minute.org, which I highly recommend, but my attention span is such that I can't sustain the minute. Not even a minute!

Harrumph.

The occasional crossword puzzle, however, appears to be the antidote. It permits a kind of hyperfocus which is therapy in itself. Plus, what with my bias that the world is offering us clues every minute about its myriad wonders, the puzzles are a kind of bibliomancy, a route to discovering yet some other marvelous, arcane, obscure and usually largely useless bit of information about the world.

Today's discovery is pictured above. The clue was "Cotopaxi's country" (which turns out to be Ecuador). Cotopaxi, as I learned, is a stratovolcano which has erupted 50 times in the last couple of centuries, somewhere near the record for volcanoes. It is over 19,000 feet tall, and was most famously represented by the nineteenth-century painter Frederic Edwin Church, whose home in the Hudson Valley, Olana, I once visited and delighted in. So the crossword clue led me to Cotopaxi which led me to Church which led me back to Olana, a dendritic trail across time and detail. (Dendritic: formed or marked in a branching form, arboreal. There are those trees again.)

At other times a crossword puzzle leads me to rediscover something I knew and had completely forgotten. A "50s TV hero who flew a plane" led me to a children's show called "Sky King" which at the time made the grown-up world seem full to be wise and sane, yet filled with adventure. Most often, however, I learn something new and mainly irrelevant, but which nonetheless tickles my fancy. "Mortise's partner," for instance, led me to mortise and tenon, which is a woodworking joint I have seen countless times but never had a name for. Still other times I am pushed to the frontiers of my intelligence with some clever equivoque, such as a three-letter term for "Inc.'s across-the-pond-counterpart" or a four-letter word for "green party." (Answers below.)

In sum, the occasional crossword puzzle (and the New York Times Sunday puzzle is the piece-de-resistance) offers the perfect validation of Mother Goose: "The world is so full of such wondrous things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Plus, for at least a few minutes, I sit still.

P. S. You'll note, I hope, the macaronic detail in "Cotopaxi and Good Will to All," macaronic referring to the mixture of Latin and non-Latin terms, and "Pax and Good Will" being the operative referents here. I ask you, by the way, how did macaroni and macaronic end up referring to two such diverse things? And why, while I'm at it, did Yankee Doodle call the feather in his hat macaroni? Surely I can't leave this earthly plane not knowing THAT.

P. P. S. The answers to the above two crossword clues are "Ltd." and "tyro." Talk about tickle my fancy! There's nothing like a bit of paronomasia to give this girl a thrill.

P. P. P. S. I found it! The answer to the first P. S. above! It is as follows, from www.worldwidewords.org:

MACARONIC

Of verse consisting of a mixture of languages.

If this sounds as though it is connected with Italian pasta, you’re right. It was coined in the sixteenth century by the Italian poet Teofilo Folengo, in reference to a sort of burlesque verse he invented in which Italian words were mixed in with Latin ones for comic effect. He said that he linked the crude hotch-potch of language in the verse with the homely foodstuff called macaroni, a dish which he described (in Latin, of course) as “pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum” (“a savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic”).

The word first appeared in English a century later and expanded its scope to refer to any form of verse in which two or more languages were mixed together. A once-famous American example was the mixed German-English verses of Hans Breitmann’s Ballads by Charles Leland, in which a German immigrant is overwhelmed by mid-nineteenth-century America and speaks in a mixture of German and heavily accented English.

Macaronic verse has a link to the eighteenth-century London dandies who were called macaronis because they liked foreign food, Italian in particular, as a result of experiencing it on the Grand Tour. A certain famous old song also contains the word: “Yankee Doodle went to town, / Riding on a pony, / Stuck a feather in his hat, / And called it macaroni”, but that is linked to the dandy sense, not the verse one.

Karma, an Anagram of the Photographer

While I'm paying homage, here He is, as photographed by Mark, whose Ur-Dog was Turk, but who's now found the Dog of His Dreams.

The Ur-Tree

Lesson for the day, courtesy of Wikipedia: Ur- is a German prefix meaning "prot(o)-", "first", "oldest", "original" when used with a noun. Thus my "Ur-Tree" photo, since it is the one that first spoke to me, a year or so ago on a walk with Karma to a place we'd never visited before, and before I blog further I must honor its presence on this page.

Here is its wisdom, as translated by me.

The Heart of the Matter: What Falls Away

Unlike the tree, rare the moment when we see
the final severance, note the last fibril of attachment,
tendrils becoming limbs, becoming dust.

Mostly, things end, without our witness.

Even then, Life trucks no lie, and whether
What falls away is remembered, or denied,
we bear the truth, the sharp, bold embryo
of a thing that truly was, however brief,
however known, however core (or not)
to our existence.

Double-Entendre

To cleave means both to split and unite. A paradox within a word, which quite suits my fancy, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction having long ago taken a back seat to my Heraclitean intuition about the nature of truth, where the way up is the way down, and you can’t step into the same river twice (this for those who have forgotten their Philosophy 101).

Of course, reading, “Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned,” gives me pause.

That last, by the way, is from Ibn Sina, an 11th century Persian philosopher. I do see his point, although it's not as if believing in the law of non-contradiction spares one the outcome he describes, and, in fact, that principle may very well be implicated in the social order which gives rise to such action. Poets, and others who live in symbolic and paradoxical consciousness, tend not to indulge in state-sanctioned violence, which is just one of my arguments in support of throwing out the law of non-contradiction.

I can't help but wonder how might the social order be different if it were predicated upon this bold contradiction:

"The correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.”

Admittedly it was Franz Kafka who wrote that, and certainly the ills of nation states are not so easily remedied as I appear to suggest. Although I still contend that if confidence in a diagnosis is needed it's always useful to find... a pair o' docs.

The above photo is of a tree at the top of a path where I sometimes walk Karma. No, actually, he walks me. Does it without a leash, even (and sometime I must write about that). It is thanks to him that I have discovered there is an entire arboreal world of wisdom just waiting to lend itself, if only I would listen. Trees do speak, you know, and each one has a story (although, quite like the human world, with greater or lesser degrees of a compelling narrative). Or perhaps 'tis the translation, the humbled poet allows. Anyhow, here's my “Double-Entendre" of poem and pix (minus the frisky bits usually associated with the term).

Double-Entendre

This green-gloved hand, limbs spread, offering shelter
wherein it was cleaved, wherein I shall cleave
in a languorous stretch, or with solemn arms raised
seek...beleaf?